The Project Gutenberg EBook of More Pages from a Journal, by Mark Rutherford
(#5 in our series by Mark Rutherford)

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: More Pages from a Journal

Author: Mark Rutherford

Release Date: September, 2004  [EBook #6404]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 6, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MORE PAGES FROM A JOURNAL ***




Transcribed from the 1910 Oxford University Press edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




MORE PAGES FROM A JOURNAL WITH OTHER PAPERS




Contents:

   A Bad Dream
   Esther
   Kate Radcliffe
   Mr. Whittaker's Retirement
   Confessions of a Self-tormentor
   A letter to the 'Rambler'
   A letter from the Authoress of 'Judith Crowhurst'
   Clearing-up after a storm in January
   The end of the North Wind
   Romney Marsh
   Axmouth
   The Preacher and the Sea
   Conversion
   July
   A Sunday morning in November
   Under Beachy Head:  December
   24th December
   Dreaming
   Ourselves
   The Riddle
   An Epoch
   Belief
   Extracts from a diary on the Quantocks
   Godwin and Wordsworth
   Notes
   Shakespeare



A BAD DREAM



Miss Toller, a lady about forty years old, kept a boarding-house,
called Russell House, at Brighton, in a dull but genteel part of the
town--so dull that even those fortunate inhabitants who were reputed
to have resources in themselves were relieved by a walk to the shops
or by a German band.  Miss Toller could not afford to be nearer the
front.  Rents were too high for her, even in the next street, which
claimed a sea-view sideways through the bow-windows.  She was the
daughter of a farmer in Northamptonshire, and till she came to
Brighton had lived at home.  When she was five-and-twenty her mother
died, and in two years her father married again.  The second wife
was a widow, good-looking but hard, and had a temper.  She made
herself very disagreeable to Miss Toller, and the husband took the
wife's part.  Miss Toller therefore left the farm at Barton Sluice,
and with a little money that belonged to her purchased the goodwill
and furniture of Russell House.  She brought with her a
Northamptonshire girl as servant, and the two shared the work
between them.  At the time when this history begins she had five
lodgers, all of whom had been with her six months, and one for more
than a year.

Mrs. Poulter, the senior in residence of the five, was the widow of
a retired paymaster in the Navy.  She was between fifty and sixty, a
big, portly woman.  After her husband was pensioned she lived in
Southsea.  As he belonged to the civilian branch, Mrs. Poulter had
to fight undauntedly in order to maintain a calling acquaintance
with the wives of executive officers, and in fact the highest she
had on her list was a commander's lady.  When Paymaster Poulter
died, and his pension ceased, she gave up the struggle.  She had no
children, and moved to Brighton with an annuity of 150 pounds a year
derived from her husband's insurance of 2000 pounds, and a life
interest in some property left by her mother.

Mr. Goacher was a bachelor clergyman of about forty.  He read
prayers, presided over the book-club, and by a judicious expenditure
of oil prevented friction between the other boarders.  It was
understood that he had been compelled to give up clerical duty by
what is called clergyman's sore-throat.  It was not known whether he
had been vicar, rector, or curate, but he wore the usual white neck-
band and a soft, low felt hat, he was clean-shaven, his letters were
addressed 'Reverend,' he was not bad-looking; and these vouchers
were considered sufficient.

Mrs. Mudge was the widow of a tradesman in London.  She was better
off than any of the other lodgers, and drank claret at twenty
shillings a dozen.

Miss Everard, the youngest of the party, was a French mistress, but
English by birth, and gave lessons in two or three schools.  She was
never at home on weekdays excepting at breakfast and dinner.  After
dinner she generally corrected exercises in her bedroom, but when
she was not busy she sat in the drawing-room to save fire and light.

Miss Taggart was the daughter of a country doctor.  Both her parents
were dead, and she was poor.  She had a reputation for being
enlightened, as she was not regular in her attendance at public
worship on Sunday, and did not always go to the same church.  She
told Mrs. Poulter once that science should tincture theology,
whereupon, appeal being made to Mr. Goacher by that alarmed lady, he
ventured to remark, that with all respect to Miss Taggart, such
observations were perhaps liable to misconstruction in ordinary
society, where they could not be fully explained, and, although she
was doubtless right in a way, the statement needed qualification.
Miss Taggart was not very friendly with Mrs. Poulter and Mr.
Goacher, and despised Mrs. Mudge because she was low-bred.  Miss
Everard Miss Taggart dreaded, and accused her of being vicious and
spiteful.

It was still early in December, but the lodgers in Russell House who
had nothing to do--that is to say all of them excepting Miss
Everard--were making plans for Christmas.  They always thought a
long time beforehand of what was going to happen.  On Tuesday
morning they began to anticipate Sunday, and when the Sunday
afternoon wore away slowly and drearily, they looked forward to the
excitement of omnibuses and butchers' carts on Monday.  A little
more than a fortnight before Christmas, on Sunday at early dinner, a
leg of mutton was provided.  Mrs. Poulter always sat at the head of
the table and carved.  This was the position she occupied when Mr.
Goacher came, and she did not offer to resign it.  Mrs. Mudge was
helped first, but it was towards the knuckle and she had no fat.

'Thank you, Mrs. Poulter, but will you please give me a piece of
fat?'

Mrs. Poulter, scowling, placed a minute portion of hard, half-burnt
skin on Mrs. Mudge's plate.

'Much obliged, Mrs. Poulter, but I want a piece of FAT--white fat--
just there,' pointing to it with her fork.

Mrs. Poulter, as we have said, was at enmity with Mrs. Mudge.  Mrs.
Mudge also was Low Church; and Mrs. Poulter was High.  She had just
returned from a High Church service at St. Paul's, and the demand
for an undue share of fat was particularly irritating.

'Really, Mrs. Mudge, you forget that there is hardly enough to go
round.  For my part, though, I care nothing about it.'

'If I had thought you did, Mrs. Poulter, I am sure I should not have
dared to ask for it.'

'I believe,' said Miss Taggart, 'that the office of fat in diet is
to preserve heat.'

'If fat promotes heat,' said Miss Everard, 'and I have no doubt it
is so, considering Miss Taggart's physiological knowledge, my advice
is that we abstain from it.'

'It is a pity,' said Mr. Goacher, smiling, 'that animals will not
suit our requirements.  But to be practical, Miss Toller might be
instructed to order legs of mutton with more fat.  This reminds me
of beef, and beef reminds me of Christmas.  It is now the second
Sunday in Advent, and there is a subject which you will remember we
had agreed to discuss this week.'

This important subject was a proposal by Mrs. Mudge that Miss Toller
should dine with them on Christmas Day.

'You, Mrs. Poulter,' said Mr. Goacher, 'are of opinion that we
should not invite her?'

'Certainly.  I do not see how she is to send up the dinner properly
if she is to be our guest, and I imagine also she would not be
comfortable with us.'

Mrs. M.  'Why shouldn't she be comfortable?  Of course, if we don't
try to make her so she won't be.  There are ways to make people
comfortable and ways to make them uncomfortable.  Miss Toller is
just as good as any of us.'

Miss T.  'She is not an educated woman, and I am sure she would
rather remain downstairs; our conversation would not interest her.'

Miss E.  'Pray, Miss Taggart, what is an educated woman?'

Miss T.  'What a question, Miss Everard!  By an educated woman is
meant a woman who has been taught the usual curriculum of a lady in
cultivated circles.'

Miss E.  'What is the curriculum of a cultivated lady?'

Miss T.  'Really you are provoking; you understand perfectly as well
as I do.'

Miss E.  'I am still in the dark.  What is the curriculum of a
cultivated lady?'

Mrs. P.  'I much doubt if Miss Toller is acquainted with the
ordinary facts of geography, even those which are familiar to common
seamen in the Navy.  She probably could not tell us the situation of
the Straits of Panama.'

Mrs. Poulter had been reading something in the newspaper the day
before about the Panama Canal.

Miss E.  'Straits of Panama!' but she checked herself when she saw
that not a muscle moved on anybody's face.  'Now, my dear Mrs.
Poulter, I assure you I have friends who dine in the best society,
and I'll be bound they never heard of the Straits of Panama.'

Mrs. P.  'The society in which _I_ was accustomed to mix, Miss
Everard, would have excluded a person who was so grossly ignorant.'

Miss T.  'The possession of scientific truth, in addition to
conferring social advantages, adds so much to our happiness.'

Miss E.  'This also I am inclined to dispute.  Do you really feel
happier, Mrs. Poulter, because you can tell us what continents are
divided by the Straits of Panama?'

Mrs. M.  'I'll lay a wager Miss Toller knows as much as we do, but
the things she knows aren't the things we know.'

Mr. G.  'We are digressing, I am afraid.  I suggest we should have a
ballot.  I will write "Yes" on five little pieces of paper, and "No"
on five, and after distribution we will fold them up, and each of us
shall drop one in the vase on the mantel-shelf.'

This was done, and there were three for the invitation and two
against it.

Mrs. Poulter and Mr. Goacher were left alone after the table was
cleared.

'Permit me to say, dear madam, that I entirely agreed with you.'

'You must have voted with Mrs. Mudge.'

'I did, but not from any sympathy with her views.  I strive to keep
the peace.  In an establishment like this concord is necessary.'

Mr. Goacher, when he dropped his paper in the vase, had not
forgotten that Mrs. Mudge had offered to provide the wine for the
dinner.  If she had been defeated the offer might have been
withdrawn.

'I have fancied before now that I have seen in you a decided
preference for Mrs. Mudge.'

This was true.  He had 'tried it on with her,' to use her own words,
but she was impregnable.  'It was no good with me,' she said to Miss
Everard; 'I saw what he was after.'

'My dear Mrs. Poulter, your supposition is preposterous--forgive me-
-you do not suppose that I am unable to recognise superiority in
birth, in manners, and in intellect.  It was better, on this
particular occasion, to conciliate Mrs. Mudge.  She is not worthy of
serious opposition.  Miss Toller will not sit near you.'

Mrs. Poulter was pacified.

'I am glad to hear this explanation.  I had hoped that one might be
forthcoming.'

'I am truly thankful I am worthy of hope, TRULY thankful.'

Mrs. Poulter dropped Palmer's Ecclesiastical History, which she had
begun to read every Sunday afternoon for three months.  Mr. Goacher
picked it up, and was about to take Mrs. Poulter's hand, but Miss
Taggart entered and the conversation closed just when it was
becoming interesting.

In a day or two Mrs. Poulter informed Miss Toller that the ladies
and Mr. Goacher had been pleased to express a wish that she should
dine with them on Christmas Day.  She consented with becoming
humility, as even Mrs. Poulter confessed, but with many secret
misgivings.  She desired to strengthen herself with her lodgers on
whom her living depended, but Helen was more than a servant.  She
was her friend, and she could not bear the thought of leaving her in
the kitchen.  Helen, too, was passionate and jealous.  Miss Toller
therefore ventured to ask Mrs. Poulter whether, as it was Christmas,
Helen also might be invited.  Mrs. Poulter signified to Miss Toller
her extreme surprise at the suggestion.

'The line, Miss Toller, must be drawn somewhere.  Helen will have
the gratuity usual at this season--she is a well-regulated person
and will see the impropriety of intrusion into a sphere for which
she is unfit.'

Miss Toller withdrew.  She dared not venture to explain or apologise
to Helen, although delay would make matters worse.  She went into
North Street and spent ten shillings which she could ill afford in
buying a locket for her.

Christmas Eve was black and bitter.  After the lodgers had gone to
bed, Miss Toller and Helen sat by the kitchen fire.

'Oh, Miss, I wish we were at Barton Sluice.'

'What makes you wish it, now?'

'I hate this place and everybody in it, excepting you.  I suppose
it's Christmas makes me think of the old farm.'

'I remember you said once that you thought you would like a town.'

'Ah, I said so then.  I should love to see them meadows again.  The
snow when it melts there doesn't go to dirty, filthy slush as it
does in Brighton.  But it's the people here I can't bear.  I could
fly at that Poulter and that Goacher at times, no matter if I was
had up for it.'

'You forget what a hard life you had with Mrs. Wootton at the
Hatch.'

'No, I don't forget.  She had a rough tongue, but she was one of our
set.  She got as good as she gave.  She spoke her mind, and I spoke
mine, and there was an end to it.  But this lot--they are so stuck-
up and stuck-round.  I never saw such folk in our parts--they make
me feel as if I were the dirt under their feet.'

'Never mind them.  I have more to put up with than you have.  You
know all; you may be sure, if I could help it, I shouldn't be here.'

'I do know all.  I shouldn't grieve if that stepmother of yours
drank herself to death.  O Lord, when I see what you have to go
through I am ashamed of myself.  But you were made one way and I
another.  You dear, patient creature!'

'It's half-past eleven.  It is time to go to bed.'

They went to their cold lean-to garrets under the slates.

Miss Toller lay awake for hours.  This, then, was Christmas Eve, one
more Christmas Eve.  She recollected another Christmas Eve twenty
years gone.  She went out to a party, she and her father and mother
and sister; mother and sister now dead.  Somebody walked home with
her that clear, frosty night.  Strange!  Miss Toller, Brighton
lodging-house keeper, always in black gown--no speck of colour even
on Sundays--whose life was spent before sinks and stoves, through
whose barred kitchen windows the sun never shone, had wandered in
the land of romance; in her heart also Juliet's flame had burned.  A
succession of vivid pictures of her girlhood passed before her:  of
the garden, of the farmyard and the cattle in it, of the river, of
the pollard willows sloping over it, of Barton Sluice covered with
snow--how still it was at that moment--the dog has been brought
inside because of the cold, and is asleep in the living-room--her
father, is he awake? the tall clock is ticking by the window, she
could hear its slow beats, and as she listened she fell asleep, but
was presently awakened by the bells proclaiming the birth in a
manger.  She remembered that Mrs. Poulter had to be called at seven
that she might go to an early service.  She hastily put on her
clothes and knocked at the door, but Mrs. Poulter decided that, as
it was freezing, it would not be safe to venture, and having ordered
a cup of tea in her bedroom at half-past eight, turned round and
fell asleep again.

It was a busy day.  The lodgers, excepting Miss Everard, went to
church in the morning, but Miss Toller and Helen had their hands
full.  In the afternoon Miss Toller was obliged to tell Helen the
unpleasant news.

'I don't want to go, but I must not offend them.'

'But you ARE going?'

'I can't get out of it.'

Helen did not speak another word.  About half-past six Miss Toller
put on her best clothes and appeared in the dining-room.  Helen
punctually served the dinner.  A seat was allotted to Miss Toller at
the bottom of the table opposite Miss Everard and next to Mr.
Goacher, who faced Mrs. Poulter.  Mrs. Mudge's wine was produced,
and Mr. Goacher graciously poured out a glass for Miss Toller.

'At this festive season, ma'am.'

A second glass was not offered, although Mrs. Mudge's supply was
liberal.  Mr. Goacher did not stint himself.

'There are beautiful churches in Northamptonshire, I believe, Miss
Toller?' said the reverend gentleman after the third glass.

'Yes, very beautiful.'

'Ah! that is delightful.  To whatever school in the Establishment we
belong, we cannot be insensible to the harmony between it and our
dear old ivy-clad towers and the ancient gravestones.  I love old
country churches.  I often wish my lot had been cast in a simple
rural parish.'

Miss E.  'Why do you not go?'

Mr. G.  'My unfortunate throat; and besides, I believe I am really
better fitted for an urban population.'

Miss E.  'In what way?'

Mr. G.  'Well, you see, Miss Everard, questions present themselves
to our hearers in towns which do not naturally occur to the rustic
mind--questions with which, if I may say so, I am perhaps fitted to
deal.  The rustic mind needs nothing more than a simple presentation
of the Gospel.'

Miss E.  'What kind of questions?'

Mr. G.  'You must be aware that our friend Mrs. Poulter, for
instance, accustomed as she is to the mental stimulus of Southsea
and Brighton, takes an interest in topics unfamiliar to an honest
agriculturist who is immersed all the week in beeves and ploughs and
swine.'

Mr. Goacher had intended that Mrs. Poulter should hear that her name
was mentioned.

Mrs. P.  'What are you saying about me?'

Miss E.  'Nothing to your discredit.  We were talking about town and
country parishes, and Mr. Goacher maintains that in a town parish a
clergyman of superior intellect is indispensable.'

Mrs. P.  'But what has that to do with me?'

Miss E.  'Oh, we merely brought you forward as an example.  You have
moved in cultured society, and he is of opinion that he is better
fitted to preach to people like you than to farmers.'

Mrs. M.  'Culture, fiddle-de-dee!  Afore I was married, I lived in
the country.  Five-and-twenty years I lived in it.  Don't tell me.
A farmer with five hundred acres of land, or even a cowman who has
to keep a dozen cows in order and look after his own garden, wants
more brains than any of your fine town-folk.  Ah, and our old parson
had a good bit more than any one of these half-witted curates such
as you see here in Brighton playing their popish antics in coloured
clothes.'

Mrs. Poulter was very angry.

'Mrs. Mudge,' she said, speaking to nobody in particular, and
looking straight before her, 'has chosen to-day of all days on which
to insult, I will not call it MY faith, but the faith of the
Catholic Church.'

Mr. Goacher at once intervened with his oil-can.

'My leanings, Mrs. Poulter, have latterly at any rate been in your
direction--without excesses, of course; but both you and I admit
that the Church is ample enough to embrace the other great parties
so long as there is agreement in essentials.  Unity, unity!  Mrs.
Mudge's ardour, we must confess, proves her sincerity.'

Mr. Goacher took another glass of Mrs. Mudge's wine.  After the
dessert of almonds and raisins, figs, apples, and oranges--also
supplied by Mrs. Mudge--Miss Toller rose and said she hoped she
might be excused, but Mr. Goacher pressed her to stay.  He had
offered to entertain the company with a trifling humorous
composition of his own.  She consented, and he recited a parody on
'To be or not to be,' descriptive of a young lady's perplexity at
having received an offer of marriage.  When it was over Miss Toller
departed.  It was now nine o'clock, and she found that the dinner
things had been washed up, and that Helen had gone to bed.  The next
morning she went downstairs a little later than usual, but there was
no Helen.  She ran up to her bedroom.  It was empty; she had slept
there that night, but her box was packed and directed, and there was
a paper on it to say that the carrier would call for it.  Miss
Toller was confounded.  She would have rushed to the station, but
the first train had gone.  She was roused by the milkman at the area
door, and hastened down to light the fire.  At first she resolved to
excuse Helen's absence on the ground that it was Boxing Day, but she
would almost certainly not return, and after breakfast Miss Toller
went upstairs and told her lodgers that Helen had left.  Mrs.
Poulter managed to acquaint Mr. Goacher and Miss Taggart that she
desired to speak to them when Mrs. Mudge and Miss Everard were out
of the way, and at midday there was a conference.  Mrs. Poulter
declared that the time had now arrived for decisive action, so far
as she was concerned.  Mrs. Mudge's behaviour could not be endured.
Her insolence in the matter of the newspaper (this will be explained
in a moment), and her contempt for what was sacred, made it
impossible without loss of self-respect to live with her.  The
servant's sudden departure for reasons unknown, had, to use Mrs.
Poulter's words, 'put the coping-stone to the edifice.'  The
newspaper grievance was this.  The Morning Post was provided by Miss
Toller for her boarders.  Mrs. Poulter was always the first to take
it, and her claim as senior resident was not challenged.  One
morning, however, Mrs. Mudge, after fidgeting for a whole hour,
while Mrs. Poulter leisurely scanned every paragraph from the top of
the first page down to the bottom of the last, suggested that the
paper should be divided, as other people might wish to see it.  Mrs.
Poulter dropped her eye-glass and handed Mrs. Mudge the outside
sheet, with the remark that if she would but have intimated politely
that she was in a hurry, she could have had it before.

'I'm in no hurry,' Mrs. Mudge replied, 'and you don't seem to be in
any.  Thank you; this is not the bit I want; you needn't trouble; I
can order a paper myself.'  The next day there was a Standard for
Mrs. Mudge, who with some malice immediately offered it to Mr.
Goacher.  Mrs. Poulter glared at him, and after a little hesitation
he expressed his obligation but preferred to wait, as he had a
letter to write which must be dispatched immediately.  Mrs. Poulter
never forgot Mrs. Mudge's spite, as she called it; the Standard
reminded her of it daily.

Mr. Goacher agreed with Mrs. Poulter that, for the reasons she gave,
it would be desirable to remove from Russell House.  He also felt
that, as a clergyman, he would do wisely in leaving, for he could
not ascribe the disappearance of 'the domestic' to anything but a
consciousness of guilt.

Miss Taggart considered that Mrs. Mudge's conduct was due to
defective training.  As to Helen, Miss Taggart added that 'you never
feel yourself secure against moral delinquency in the classes from
which servants are drawn.  They have no basis.'

'I understand,' said Mrs. Poulter, 'that Helen is a Dissenter.'

Miss Taggart, as the reader has been told, was not particularly fond
of Mrs. Poulter and Mr. Goacher, but to stay with Mrs. Mudge and
Miss Everard was impossible.  She had also once or twice received a
hint from Miss Toller that perhaps she had better suit herself
elsewhere, as the minute attention she demanded to her little needs,
of which there were many, was trying both to mistress and servant.

Miss Toller was promptly informed that three of her lodgers were
going at the end of the month.

'I hope, Mrs. Poulter, that you are not dissatisfied.  I have no
doubt I shall soon be able to obtain assistance.'

Mrs. P.  'Our reasons, Miss Toller, had better not be communicated;
they are sufficient.  Against you personally we have nothing to
object.'

Miss T.  'Have you searched the box which I understand has been
left?'

Miss Toller.  'Have you missed anything, ma'am?'

Miss T.  'Not at present.  I might discover my loss when it was too
late.'

Mr. G.  'It would be better for the protection of all of us.'

Miss Toller.  'I couldn't do it for worlds; you'll pardon me for
saying so.  I'd sooner you left me without paying me a farthing.
Helen may have her faults, but she is as honest as--.'  Miss
Toller's voice trembled and she could not finish the sentence.

Mrs. P.  'Have you any reason to suspect any--any improper
relationship?'

Miss Toller.  'I do not quite understand you.'

Mr. G.  'Pardon me, Mrs. Poulter, it is my duty to relieve you of
that inquiry.  Mrs. Poulter cannot be explicit.  Do you surmise that
Helen is compelled to conceal?--you will comprehend me, I am sure.
I need not add anything more.'

The poor landlady, habitually crushed by the anticipation of
quarter-day into fear of contradiction or offence, flamed up with
sudden passion.  'Sir,' she cried, 'Helen is my friend, my dearest
friend.  How dare you!--you a clergyman!  I let you and Mrs. Poulter
know that she is as pure and good as you are--yes, and a thousand
times better than you are with your hateful insinuations.  I shalt
be thankful to see the last of you!' and she flung herself out of
the room.

'What do you think of that?' said Mrs. Poulter.  'It is beyond
comment.  We cannot remain another night.'  Mr. Goacher and Miss
Taggart agreed, and Miss Taggart was commissioned at once to engage
rooms.  When she had gone Mr. Goacher was compelled to explain that
he was in a difficulty.

'Of course, my dear Mrs. Poulter, after this open insult I must go
at once, but unhappily I am rather behind-hand in my payments to
Miss Toller.  Remittances I expected have been delayed.'

'How much do you owe her?'

'I believe it is now about fifteen pounds.  Her disgraceful conduct
discharges us from any liability beyond to-day.  Might I beg the
loan of twenty pounds from you?--say for a fortnight.  It is a
favour I could not dream of soliciting from anybody but Mrs.
Poulter.'

It was most inconvenient to Mrs. Poulter to advance twenty pounds at
that moment.  But she had her own reasons for not wishing that Mr.
Goacher should imagine she was straitened.

'I believe I can assist you.'

Mr. Goacher dropped on his knees and took the lady's hand, kissing
it fervently.

'My dear madam, may I take this opportunity, in this position, of
declaring what must be obvious to you, that my heart--yes, my heart-
-has been captured and is yours?  Identity of views on almost every
subject, social and religious, personal attachment beyond that felt
to any other woman I ever beheld--have we not sufficient reasons, if
you can but respond to my emotion, to warrant an Eden for us in the
future?'

'Mr. Goacher, you take me by surprise.  I cannot conceal my regard
for you, but you will not expect an answer upon a matter of such
moment until I have given it most mature consideration.  Miss
Taggart will be here directly:  I think I hear the bell.'

Mr. Goacher slowly rose:  Miss Taggart appeared and announced that
the rooms were secured.

To end this part of the story, it may be added that in about a
fortnight Mr. Goacher's throat was quite well, and he announced to
Mrs. Poulter his intention of resuming active work in the Church.
The marriage, therefore, was no longer delayed.

A little while afterwards Mrs. Goacher discovered that her husband
had been a missionary in the service of the Church Missionary
Society and had consequently been Low, that he had been returned a
little damaged in character; and that resumption of active work was
undesirable.

Mrs. Mudge had lunch and tea with a friend.  When she came back Miss
Toller told her what had happened.

'I dare say you'll blame me.  It was wrong to let my temper get the
better of me, but I could not help it.'

'Help it?  The wonder to me is you've stood it so long.  I couldn't
stand them; I should have left if they hadn't.  Have they paid you?'

'Yes.'

'What, that Goacher?  Then he borrowed it!' and Mrs. Mudge laughed
till she cried.

The day wore on and no carrier came for the box.  After dinner Miss
Toller told Mrs. Mudge she must go out for a few minutes to get a
charwoman; that she would take the latch-key, and that nobody would
call.  She had gone about a quarter of an hour when there was a ring
at the bell.  Mrs. Mudge went to the door and, behold, there was
Helen!

'The Lord have mercy on us!  Why did you run away so suddenly?'

'Don't ask me.  Never you say a word about it to me.  I'm a sinner:
where's Miss Toller?'

Helen listened in silence as Mrs. Mudge told her the eventful
history of the last twelve hours.  She went upstairs:  Miss Toller's
bedroom door was open, and on the drawers she saw a little packet
tied up with blue silk.

It was addressed 'for dear Helen.'  She tore it open, and there was
a locket and in it was her beloved mistress's hair--the mistress to
whom she had been so cruel, who had so nobly defended her.  She
threw herself on the bed and her heart almost broke.  Suddenly she
leaped up, flew down into the kitchen, and began washing up the
plates and dishes.  Miss Toller was away for nearly an hour; her
search for a charwoman was unsuccessful, and she came back dejected.
Helen rushed to meet her and they embraced one another.

'O Miss Toller, forgive me!  When I saw you sitting with that
Poulter and that Goacher, the Devil got the better of me, but--'

'Hush, my dear; I oughtn't to have gone, and never any more from
this day call me Miss Toller.  Call me Mary, always from this day--
you promise me?' and Miss Toller kissed Helen's quivering lips.

Miss Toller did all she could to get other boarders, but none came
and she had a hard time.  It was difficult for her sometimes to find
a dinner for herself and Helen.  Good Mrs. Mudge was delicately
considerate and often said, 'that meat need not come up again,' and
purposely ordered more than she and Miss Everard could eat, but the
butcher's bill and the milk bill were not paid so regularly as
heretofore.  Worse than privation, worse than debt, was the vain
watching for inquiries and answers to her advertisement.  What would
become of her?  Where could she go?  Three more boarders she must
have or she could not live, and there was no prospect of one.  If by
great good luck she could obtain three, they might not stay and the
dismal struggle would begin again.  Lodging-house keepers are not
the heroines of novels and poems, but if endurance, wrestling with
adversity, hoping in despair, be virtues, the eternal scales will
drop in favour of many underground basements against battlefields.
At last, after one or two pressing notices from landlord and rate-
collector, Mrs. Mudge and Miss Everard were informed that Russell
House was to be given up.  She and Helen must seek situations as
servants.

Mrs. Mudge and Miss Everard went away at the end of the month.  On
the dining-room table after they had gone Miss Toller found two
envelopes directed to her.  Inside were some receipts.  Mrs. Mudge
had paid all the rent due to the end of Miss Toller's term, and Miss
Everard the taxes.  Next week Miss Toller had the following letter
from her father


'MY DEAR MARY,--This is to tell you that your stepmother departed
this life last Tuesday fortnight.  She was taken with a fit on the
Sunday.  On Tuesday morning she came to herself and wished us to
send for the parson.  He was here in an hour and she made her peace
with God.  I did not ask you to the funeral as you had been so long
away.  My dear Mary, I cannot live alone at my age.  I was sixty-
five last Michaelmas, and I want you back in the old house.  Let
bygones be bygones.  I shall always be, your affectionate father,

'THOMAS TOLLER.

'PS.--You can have the same bedroom you had when your own mother was
alive.'


The furniture, modern stuff, was sold, every stick of it, and Miss
Toller rejoiced when the spring sofa and chairs which had been
devoted to Poulters and Goachers and Taggarts were piled up in the
vans.  The nightmares of fifteen years hid themselves in the mats
and carpets.

Helen and she standing at the dresser ate their last meal in the
dingy kitchen of Russell House.  It was nothing but sandwiches, but
it was the most delicious food they had tasted there.  It is a
mistake if you are old to go back to the village in which you were
born and bred.  Ghosts meet you in every lane and look out from the
windows.  There are new names on the signboard of the inn and over
the grocer's shop.  A steam-engine has been put in the mill, and the
pathway behind to the mill dam and to the river bank has been
closed.  The people you see think you are a visitor.  The church is
restored, and there is a brand new Wesleyan chapel.  Better stay
where you are and amuse yourself by trying to make flowers grow in
your little, smoky, suburban back-garden.  But Miss Toller and Helen
were not too old.  Mr. Toller met them at the station with a four-
wheeled chaise.  Before the train had quite stopped, Helen caught
sight of somebody standing by the cart which was brought for the
luggage.  'It's Tom! it's Tom!' she screamed; and it was Tom
himself, white-headed now and a little bent.  She insisted on
walking with him by the side of his horse the whole four miles to
their journey's end.  He was between forty and fifty when she went
away and had been with Mr. Toller ever since--'tried a bit at
times,' he confessed, 'with the second missus.'  'She's with God,
let us hope,' said Tom, 'and we'll leave her alone.'

They came to Barton Sluice.  Flat and unadorned are the fields
there, and the Nen is slow, but it was their own land, they loved
it, and they were at rest.  They fell into their former habits, and
the talk of crops, of markets, of the weather, and of their
neighbours was sweet.  Mrs. Mudge and Miss Everard came now and then
to see them in summer time, and when Mr. Toller slept with his
fathers, his daughter and Helen remained at the farm and managed it
between them.



ESTHER



BLACKDEEP FEN, 24th November 1838.

My Dear Esther,--This is your birthday and your wedding-day, and I
have sent you a cake and a knitted cross-over, both of which I have
made myself.  I can still knit, although my eyes fail a bit.  I hope
the cross-over will be useful during the winter.  Tell me, my dear,
how you are.  Twenty-eight years ago it is since you came into the
world.  It was a dark day with a cold drizzling rain, but at eleven
o'clock at night you were born, and the next morning was bright with
beautiful sunshine.  Some people think that Blackdeep must always be
dreary at this time of year, but they are wrong.  I love the Fen
country.  It is my own country.  This house, as you know, has
belonged to your father's forefathers for two hundred years or more,
and my father's old house has been in our family nearly as long.  I
could not live in London; but I ought not to talk in this way, for I
hold it to be wrong to set anybody against what he has to do.  Your
brother Jim is the best of sons.  He sits with me in the evening and
reads the paper to me.  He goes over to Ely market every week.  He
has his dinner at the ordinary, where many of the company drink more
than is good for them, but never once has he come home the worse for
liquor.  I had a rare fright a little while ago.  I thought there
was something between him and one of those Stanton girls at Ely.  I
saw she was trying to catch him.  It is all off now.  She is a town
girl, stuck-up, spends a lot of money on her clothes, and would have
been no wife for Jim.  She would not have been able to put her hand
to anything here.  She might have broken my heart, for she would
have tried to draw Jim away from me.  I don't believe, my dearest
child, in wedded love which lessens the love for father and mother.
When you were going to be married what agony I went through!  It was
so wicked of me, for it was jealousy with no cause.  I thank God you
love me as much as ever.  I wish I could see you again at Homerton,
but the journey made me so ill last winter that I dare not venture
just yet.--Your loving mother,

RACHEL SUTTON.


HOMERTON, 27th Nov. 1838.

My Dearest Mother,--The cake was delicious:  it tasted of Blackdeep,
and the cross-over will be most useful.  It will keep me warm on
cold days, and the love that came with it will thicken the wool.
But, mother, it is not a month ago since you sent me the stockings.
You are always at work for me.  You are just like father.  He gave
us things not only on birthdays, but when we never looked out for
them.  Do you remember that week when wheat dropped three shillings
a quarter?  He had two hundred quarters which he might have sold ten
days earlier.  He was obliged to sell them at the next market and
lost thirty pounds, but he had seen at Ely that day a little desk,
and he knew I wanted a desk, and he bought it for me with a fishing-
rod and landing-net for Jim.

My husband said he could not think of anything I needed and wrote me
a cheque for two pounds.

O! that you could come here, and yet I am certain you must not.  My
heart aches to have you.  In my day-dreams I go over the long miles
to Blackdeep, through Ware, through Royston, through Cambridge,
through every village, and then I feel how far away you are.  I
turned out of the room the other day the chair in which you always
sat.  I could not bear to see it empty.  Charles noticed it had gone
and ordered it to be brought back.  He may have suspected the reason
why I put it upstairs.  My dearest, dearest mother, never fear that
my affection for you can become less.  Sometimes after marriage a
woman loves her mother more than she ever loved her before.

It is a black fog here and not a breath of air is stirring.  How
different are our fogs at Blackdeep!  They may be thick, but they
are white and do not make us miserable.  I never shall forget when I
was last in Fortyacres and saw the mist lying near the river, and
the church spire bright in the sunlight.  The churchyard and the
lower part of the church were quite hidden.

What a mercy Jim was not trapped by Dolly, for I suppose it was she.
Jim is not the first she has tried to get.  You are quite right.
She might have broken your heart, and I am sure she would have
broken Jim's, for she is as hard as a millstone.--Your loving child,

ESTHER.


BLACKDEEP FEN, 3rd December 1838.

Your letter made me feel unhappy.  I am afraid something is on your
mind.  What is the matter?  I was not well before I went to Homerton
the last time, but maybe it was not London that upset me.  If you
cannot leave, I shall come.  Let me hear by the next post.


HOMERTON, 5th December 1838.

I told Charles I was expecting you.  He said that your sudden
determination seemed odd.  'Your mother,' he added, 'is a woman who
acts upon impulses.  She ought always to take time for
consideration.  This is hardly the proper season for travelling.'  I
asked him if he would let me go to Blackdeep.  He replied that,
unless there was some particular reason for it, my proposal was as
unwise as yours.  What am I to do?  A particular reason!  It is a
particular reason that I pine for my mother.  Can there be any
reason more particular than a longing for the sight of a dear face,
for kisses and embraces?  You must counsel me.


BLACKDEEP, 15th December 1838.

As Charles imagines I am carried away by what he calls impulses, I
did not answer your letter at once, and I have been thinking as much
as I can.  I am not a good hand at it.  Your dear father had a joke
against me.  'Rachel, you can't think; but never mind, you can do
much better without thinking than other people can with it.'  I wish
I had gone straight to you at once, and yet it was better I did not.
It would have put Charles out, and this would not have been pleasant
for either you or me.  I would not have you at Blackdeep now for
worlds.  The low fever has broken out, and to-day there were two
funerals.  Parson preached a sermon about it; it was a judgment from
God.  Perhaps it is, but why did it take your father three years
ago?  It is all a mystery, and it looks to me sometimes as if here
on earth there were nothing but mystery.  I have just heard that
parson is down with the fever himself.

Do let me have a long letter at once.


HOMERTON, 20th December 1838.

A Mrs. Perkins has been here.  She sat with me for an hour.  She
spends her afternoons in going her rounds among her friends, as she
calls them, but she does not care for them, nor do they care for
her.  She looks and speaks like a woman who could not care for
anybody, and yet perhaps there may be somewhere a person who could
move her.

I am so weary of the talk of my neighbours.  It is so different from
what we used to have at Blackdeep.  Oh me! those evenings when
father came in at dark, and Mr. and Mrs. Thornley came afterwards
and we had supper at eight, and father and Mr. Thornley smoked their
pipes and drank our home-brewed ale and we had all the news--how
much Mr. Thornley had got for his malt, how that pig-headed old
Stubbs wouldn't sell his corn, and how when he began to thresh it
and the ferrets were brought, a hundred rats were killed and bushels
of wheat had been eaten.

You ask me what is the matter.  I do not deny I am not quite happy,
but it would be worse than useless to dwell upon my unhappiness and
try to give you reasons for it.  London, in the winter, most likely
does not suit me.  I shall certainly see you in the spring, and then
I hope I shall be better.


BLACKDEEP FEN, Christmas Day, 1838.

As a rule it is right to hide our troubles, but it is not right that
you should hide yours from me.  You are my firstborn child and my
only daughter.  There are girls who are very good, but between their
mothers and them there is a wall.  They do what they are bid; they
are kind, but that is all.  They live apart from those that bore
them.  I would not give a straw for such duty and love.  I gathered
one of our Christmas roses this morning.  We have taken great care
to keep them from being splashed and spoilt.  There was not a speck
on it.  I put it in water and could not take my eyes off it.  Its
white flower lay spread open and I could look right down into it.  I
thought of you.  When you were a little one--ay, and after you were
out of short frocks--you never feared to show me every thought in
your mind, you always declared that if you had wished to hide
anything from me, it would have been of no use to try.  What a
blessing that was to me!  How dreadful it would be if, now that you
are married, you were to change!  I am sure you will not and cannot.


HOMERTON, 1st January 1839.

The New Year!  What will happen before the end of it?  I feel as if
it must be something strange.  I have just read your last letter
again, and I cannot hold myself in.  My dearest mother, I confess I
am wretched.  It might be supposed that misery like mine would
express itself with no effort, but it is not so:  it would be far
easier to describe ordinary things.  I am afraid also to talk about
it, lest that which is dim and shapeless should become more real.

Since the day we were married Charles and I have never openly
quarrelled.  He is really good:  he spends his evenings at home and
does not seem to desire entertainment elsewhere.  He likes to see me
well-dressed and does not stint in house expenditure, although he
examines it carefully and pays a good many of the bills himself by
cheque.  He has been promoted to be manager of the bank, and takes
up his new duties to-day.  Mrs. Perkins, whose husband is one of the
partners, told me that he had said that there is nobody in the bank
equal to Charles for sound sense and business ability; that
everything with which he has to do goes right; he is always calm,
never in a hurry, and never betrayed into imprudence.  This I can
well believe.  As you know, Jim asked him a month ago in much
excitement for advice about Fordham, who owed him 200 pounds.  Jim
had heard there was something wrong.  Charles put the letter in the
desk and did not mention it to me again till a week afterwards, when
he asked me to tell Jim the next time I wrote to Blackdeep that he
need not worry himself, as Fordham was quite safe.  It is certainly
a comfort to a woman that her husband is a strong man and that he is
much respected by his employers.  Of what have I to complain?  O
mother, life here is so dull!  This is not the right word; it is
common, but if you can fill it up with my meaning, there is no
better.  It will then be terrible.  There is hardly a flower in the
garden, although not a weed is permitted.  The sooty laurels
unchanging through winter and summer I hate.  Some flowers I am sure
would grow, but Charles does not care for them.  Neatness is what he
likes, and if the beds are raked quite smooth, if the grass is
closely shaven and trimmed and not a grain of gravel in the path is
loose, he is content.  He cannot endure the least untidiness in the
house.  If papers are left lying loosely about, he silently puts
them evenly together.  He brings all his office ways into the
dining-room; the pens must never be put aside unwiped and the ink-
bottles must be kept filled to a certain height.  We do not get much
sun at any time of day in Homerton, and we face the west.  Charles
wishes the blinds to be drawn when it shines, so that it may not
fade the curtains.  We have few books excepting Rees's cyclopaedia,
and they are kept in a glazed case.  If I look at one I have to put
it back directly I have done with it.  I saw this place before I was
married, but it did not look then as it looks now, and I did not
comprehend how much Blackdeep was a part of me.  The front door
always open in daytime, the hollyhocks down to the gate, the
strawberry beds, the currant and gooseberry bushes, the lilacs,
roses, the ragged orchard at the back, the going in and out without
'getting ready,' our living-room with Jim's pipes and tobacco on the
mantel-shelf, his gun over it, his fishing-tackle in the corner--I
little understood that such things and the ease which is felt when
our surroundings grow to us make a good part of the joy of life.
When I came to Blackdeep for my holiday and lifted the latch, it was
just as if a stiff, tight band round my chest dropped from me.  I
have nothing to do here.  We keep three servants indoors.  I would
much rather have but two and help a little myself.  They are good
servants, and the work seems to go by mechanism without my
interference.  I suggested to Charles that, as they were not fully
employed, we should get rid of one, but he would not consent.  He
preferred, he said, paid service.  To me the dusting of my room,
paring apples, or the cooking of any little delicacy, is not
service.  The cook asks for orders in the morning; the various
dishes are properly prepared; but if I were Charles, and my wife
understood her business, I should like to taste her hand in them.  I
never venture into the kitchen.  'The advantage of paid service,'
added Charles, 'is that if it is inefficient you can reprimand or
dismiss.'  Nothing in me finds exercise.  I want to work, to laugh,
to expect.  There was always something going on at Blackdeep, no two
days alike.  I never got up in the morning knowing what was before
me till bedtime.  That outlook too from my window, how I miss it!--
the miles and miles of distance, the rainbow arch in summer complete
to the ground, the sunlight, the stormy wind, the stars from the
point overhead to the horizon far away--I hardly ever see them here.

You will exclaim 'Is this all?'  If you were here you would think it
enough, but it-- The clock is striking one.  Charles is to be at
home to lunch.  He is going to buy the house and is to meet the
owner this afternoon, an old man who lives about ten minutes' walk
from us.  Charles thinks the purchase will be a good investment and
that another house might be built on part of the garden.


BLACKDEEP, 15th January 1839.

I am not surprised you find London dull, but I grieve that it has
taken such an effect on you.  I hoped that, as you are young, you
would get used to the bricks and mortar and the smoke.

Jim came in and I had to stop.  The Lynn coach is set fast in the
snow near the turnpike at the top of our lane, and he is going to
help dig it out.  I will take up my pen again.  You are no worse off
than thousands of country girls who are obliged to live in streets
narrower than those in Homerton.  I cannot help boding you are not
quite free with me.  I do beseech you to hide nothing.  There must
even now be something the matter beyond what I have heard.  I cannot
say any more at present.  My head is in a whirl.  May be you will
have a child.  That will make all the difference to you.


HOMERTON, 20th January 1839.

How shall I begin?  I must tell the whole truth.  Mother, mother, I
have made a great mistake, the one great mistake of life.  I have
mistaken the man with whom I am to live.  Charles and I were engaged
for two years.  I have discovered nothing new in him.  I was
familiar with all his ways and thought them all good.  I compared
him with other men who were extravagant and who had vices, and I
considered myself fortunate.  He was cool, but how much better it
was to be so than to have a temper, for I should never hear angry
words from him which cannot be forgotten?  I remembered how measured
my uncle Robert's speech was, how quiet he was, and yet no two human
beings could have been more devoted to one another than uncle and
aunt.  Charles's quietude seemed so like uncle's.  Charles was very
methodical.  He always came to see me on the same days, at the same
hours, and stayed the same time.  It provoked me at first, but I
said to myself that he was not a creature of fits and starts and
that I could always depend on him.

He always kissed me when we met and when we parted.  I do not
remember that he ever had me in his arms, and I never felt he was
warm and eager when we were alone together; but I had heard of men
and women who married for what they called love, and in a
twelvemonth it had vanished and there was nothing left.  Of many
small particulars I took but little notice.  When we chose the
furniture I wanted bright-coloured curtains, but he did not like
them and bought dark red, gloomy stuff.  I tried to think they were
the best because they would not show the London dirt.  I had a
bonnet with scarlet trimmings which suited my black hair, but he
asked me to change them for something more sober, because they made
me conspicuous.  Again I thought he was right, and that what might
do for the country might not be proper in town.  Trifles! and yet to
me now what a meaning they have!  Two years--and everything is
changed, although, as I have just said, I have found out nothing
new!  The quietude is absence of emotion, different in its root from
uncle Robert's serenity.  It is the deadly sameness of a soul to
which nothing is strange and wonderful and a woman's heart is not so
interesting as an advertisement column in the newspaper.  He never
cares to look into mine.  I do not pretend that there is anything
remarkable in it, but if he were to open it he would find something
worth having.  This absence of curiosity to explore what is in me
kills me.  What must the bliss of a wife be when her husband
searches her to her inmost depths, when she sees tender questions in
his eyes, when he asks her DO YOU REALLY FEEL SO? and she looks at
him and replies AND YOU?  I could endure the uneventfulness of
outward life if anything not unpleasant HAPPENED between me and
Charles.  Nothing happens.  Something happens in my relationship to
my dog.  I pat him and he is pleased; he barks for joy when I go
out.  I cannot live with anybody with whom I am always on exactly
the same even terms--no rising, no falling, mere stagnation.  I am
dead, but it is death without its sleep and peace.  Fool, fool that
I was!  I cannot go on.  What shall I do?  If Charles drank I might
cure or tolerate him; if he went after another woman I might win him
back.  I can lay hold of nothing.

A child?  Ah no!  I have longed unspeakably for a child sometimes,
but not for one fathered by him.


BLACKDEEP, 24th January 1839.

I knew it all, but I dared not speak till you had spoken.  Your
letter came when we were at breakfast.  I could not open it, for my
heart told me what was in it.  Jim wondered why I let it lie on the
table, and I made some excuse.  After breakfast I took it upstairs
into my own room and sat down by the bed, your father's bed, and
cried and prayed.  If he were alive he would have helped me, or if
no help could have been found he would have shared my sorrow.  It is
dreadful that, no matter what my distress may be, he cannot speak.
What counsel can I send you?  I have had much to do with affliction,
but not such as yours.  My love for you is of no use.  I will be
still.  I have always found, when I am in great straits and my head
is confused, I must hold my tongue and do nothing.  If I do not
move, a way may open out to me.  Meantime, live in the thought of
Blackdeep and of me.  It will do you no harm and may keep you from
sinking.


HOMERTON, 30th January 1839.

No complaint, no reproof.  You might have told me it was perhaps my
fault.

I always have to reflect on what I am about to say to him.  I go
through my sentences to the end before I open my lips.  He dislikes
exaggeration, and checks me if I use a strong word; but surely life
sometimes needs strong words, and those which are tame may be
further from the truth than those which burn.  When he first began
to think about buying the house, I was surprised and talked with
less restraint than is usual with me.  After a little while he said
that I had not contributed anything definite to a settlement of the
question.  I dare say I had not, but it is natural to me to speak
even when I do not pretend to settle questions.  He seems to think
that speech is useless unless for a distinct, practical purpose.  At
Blackdeep almost everything that comes into my head finds its way to
my tongue.  The repression here is unbearable.

Last night it rained, and Charles's overcoat was a little wet at the
bottom.  He asked that it might be put to the fire.  Directly he
came down in the morning he felt his coat and at breakfast said in
his slow way, 'My coat has not been dried.'  I replied that I was
very sorry, that I had quite forgotten it, and that it should be
dried before he was ready to start.  I jumped up, brought it into
the room and hung it on a chair on the hearth-rug.  He did not thank
me and appeared to take no notice.  'I am indeed very sorry,' I
repeated.  He then spoke.  'I do not care about the damp:  it is the
principle involved.  I have observed that you do not endeavour
systematically to impress my requests on your mind.  If you were to
take due note of them at the time they are made, and say them aloud
two or three times to yourself, they would not escape your memory.
Forgetfulness is never an excuse in business, and I do not see why
it should be at home.'  'O Charles!' I cried, 'do not talk about
principles in such a trifle; I simply forgot.  I should be more
likely to forget my cloak than your coat.'  He did not answer me,
but opened a couple of letters, finished his breakfast, and then
began to write at the desk.  I went upstairs, and when I returned to
the breakfast room he had gone.  In the evening he behaved as if
nothing had passed between us.  He would have thought it ridiculous
if such a reproof had unsettled a clerk at the bank, and why should
it unsettle me?  The clerk expects to be taught his lesson daily.
So does every rational being.

Nothing! nothing!  I can imagine Mrs. Perkins' contempt if I were to
confide in her.  'As good a husband as ever lived.  What do you
want, you silly creature?  I suppose it's what they call passion.
You should have married a poet.  You have made an uncommonly good
match and ought to be thankful.'  A poet!  I know nothing of poets,
but I do know that if marriage for passion be folly, there is no
true marriage without it.


BLACKDEEP, 7th February 1839.

I am no clearer now than I was a fortnight ago.  I wish I could talk
to somebody, and then perhaps my thoughts would settle themselves.
Last Sunday I made up my mind I would come to you at all costs; then
I doubted, and this morning again I was going to start at once.  Now
my doubts have returned.  Jim notices how worried I am, and I make
excuses.

I cannot rest while I am not able to do more than put you off by
praying you to bear your lot patiently.  It is so hard to stand
helpless and counsel patience.  Could you give him up and live here?
I am held back, though, from this at present.  I am not sure what
might happen if you were to leave him.  Perhaps he would be able to
force you to return.  You have no charge to make against him which
anybody but myself would understand.

I must still wait for the light which I trust will be given me.  It
is wonderful how sometimes it strikes down on me suddenly and
sometimes grows by degrees like the day over Ingleby Fen.  I lay in
bed late this morning, for I hadn't slept much, and watched it as it
spread, and I thought of my Esther in London who never sees the
sunrise.


HOMERTON, 14th February 1839.

There is hardly anything to record--no event, that is to say--and
yet I have been swept on at a pace which frightens me.  The least
word or act urges me more than a blow.  Yesterday I made up my
accounts and was ten shillings short.  I went over them again and
again and could not get them right.  I was going to put into the
cash-box ten shillings of my own money, but I thought there might be
some mistake and that Charles, who always examines my books, would
find it out, and that it would be worse for me if he had discovered
what I had done than if I had let them tell their own tale.  After
dinner he asked for them, counted my balance, and at once found out
there was ten shillings too little.  I said I knew it and supposed I
had forgotten to put down something I had spent.  'Forgotten again?'
he replied; 'it is unsatisfactory:  there is evident want of
method.'  He locked the box and book in the desk and read the
newspaper while I sat and worked.  Next day I remembered the servant
had half-a-sovereign to pay the greengrocer, and I had not seen her
since I gave it to her.  When Charles returned from the bank my
first words were, 'O Charles, I know all about the half-sovereign:
I am so glad.'  Would not you have acknowledged you were glad too?
He looked at me just as he did the night before.  I believe he would
rather I had lost the money.  'Your explanation,' was his response,
'makes no difference:  in fact it confirms my charge of lack of
system.  I have brought you some tablets which I wish you to keep in
your pocket, and you must note in them every outgoing at the time it
is made.  These items are then to be regularly adjusted, and
transferred afterwards.'  I could not restrain myself.

'Charles, Charles,' I cried, 'do not CHARGE me, as if I had
committed a crime.  For mercy's sake, soften!  I have confessed I
was careless; can you not forgive?'  'It is much easier,' was the
answer, 'to confess and regret than to amend.  I am not offended,
and as to forgiveness I do not quite comprehend the term.  It is one
I do not often use.  What is done cannot be undone.  If you will
alter your present habit, forgiveness, whatever you may mean by it,
becomes superfluous.'  His lips shut into their usual rigidity.  Not
a muscle in them would have stirred if I had kissed them with tears.
No tears rose; I was struck into hardness equal to his own, and with
something added.  I HATED him.  'Henceforward,' I said to myself, 'I
will not submit or apologise; there shall be war.'

16th February 1839.

I left my letter unfinished.  War?  How can I make war or continue
at war?  I could not keep up the struggle for a week.  I am so
framed that I must make peace with those with whom I have disagreed
or I must fly.  I would take nine steps out of the ten--nay, the
whole ten which divide me from dear friends; I would say that this
or that was not my meaning.  I would abandon all arguing and wash
away differences with sheer affection.  Toward Charles I cannot
stir.  Sometimes, although but seldom, my brother Jim and I have
quarrelled.  Five minutes afterwards we have been in one another's
arms and the angry words were as though they had never been spoken.
Forgiveness is not a remission of consequences on repentance.  It is
simply love, a love so strong that in its heat the offence vanishes.
Without love--and so far Charles is right--forgiveness even of the
smallest mistake is impossible.

It is a thick, dark fog again this morning.  At Blackdeep most
likely it is bright sunlight.

Charles does not seem to suspect that his indifference has any
effect on me.  I suppose he is unable to conceive my world or any
world but his own.  If he were at Blackdeep now and the sun were
shining, would it be to him a glowing, blessed ball of fire?

He may have just as much right to complain of me as I have to
complain of him.  He sets store on the qualities necessary for his
business, and he knows what store the partners set on those
qualities in him.  No doubt they are of great importance to
everybody.  It must be hard for him to live with a woman who takes
so little interest in city affairs and makes so much of what to him
is of no importance.  He looks down upon me as though I were not
able to talk on any subject which, for its comprehension, requires
intelligence.  If he had married Miss Stagg, who has doubled the
drapery business at Ely, they might have agreed together very well.

This is true, but I come back to myself.  The virtues are not enough
for me.  Life with them alone is not worth the trouble of getting up
in the morning.  I thirst for you:  I shall come, whatever may
happen.


BLACKDEEP, 20th February 1839.

I cannot write an answer to your letter.  You must come.  I could
not make up my mind last night, but this morning the light, the
direction, as my mother used to say, was like a star.  How you
remind me of her! not in your lot but in your ways, and she had your
black hair.  She was a stranger to these parts.  Where your
grandfather first saw her I do not know, but she was from the hill
country in the far south-west.  She never would hear anything
against our flats.  When folk asked her if she did not miss the
hills, she turned on them as if she had been born in the Fens and
said she had found something in them better than hills.  But how I
do wander on!  That has nothing to do with you now, although I could
tell you, if it were worth while, how it came into my head.  I shall
look out for you this week.


LOMBARD STREET, 14th March 1839.

Dear Esther,--You have now been away three weeks and I shall be glad
to hear when you intend to return.  Your mother I hope is better,
and if she is not, I trust you will see that your absence cannot be
indefinitely prolonged.  I am writing at the Bank, and your reply
marked 'Private' should be addressed here.  Some changes, now almost
completed, are being made in the lower rooms at Homerton which will
give me one for any business of my own.--Your affectionate husband,

CHARLES CRAGGS.


BLACKDEEP, 17th March 1839.

Dear Charles,--My mother is not well, and I shall be grateful to you
if you will give me another week.  I am sorry you have made
alterations in the house without saying anything to me.  It will be
better now that I should not come back till they are finished.--Your
affectionate wife,

ESTHER CRAGGS.


HOMERTON, 19th March 1839.

The paperhangers and painters have left; the carpets will be laid
and the furniture arranged to-day.  I trust to see you when I come
home on the 22nd instant.  This will nearly give you the week you
desired.  I shall be late at the Bank on the 22nd, but if you are
fatigued with your journey there is no reason why you should not
retire to rest, and we will meet in the morning.


BLACKDEEP, 21st March 1839.

I had hoped for a little delay, for I shrank from the necessity of
announcing my resolve, although it has for some time been fixed.  I
shall not return.  The reason for my refusal shall be given with
perfect sincerity.  I do not love you, and you do not love me.  I
ought not to have married you, and I can but plead the blindness of
youth, which for you is a poor excuse.  I shall be punished for the
remainder of my days, and not the least part of the punishment will
be that I have done you a grievous injury.  Worse, however--ten
thousand times worse--would it be for both of us if we were to
continue chained together in apathy or hatred.  I would die for you
this moment to make good what you have lost through me, but to live
with you as your wife would be a crime of which I dare not be
guilty.  This is all, and this is enough.


HOMERTON, 24th March 1839.

Madam,--I am not surprised at the contents of your letter of the
21st instant, nor am I surprised that your determination should have
been made known to me from your mother's house.  I have no doubt
that she has done her best to inflame you against me.  How she
contrives to reconcile with her religion her advice to her daughter
to break a divine law, I will not inquire.  I am not going to
remonstrate with you; I will not humiliate myself by asking you to
reconsider your resolution.  I will, however, remind you of one or
two facts, and point out to you the consequences of your action, so
that hereafter you may be unable to plead you were not forewarned.

You will please bear in mind that YOU have abandoned ME; I have not
abandoned you.  You disappointed me:  my house was not managed in
accordance with my wishes, but I was prepared to accept the
consequences of what I did deliberately and I desired to avoid open
rupture.  I hoped that in time you would learn by experience that
the maxims which control my conduct rest on a solid basis; that I
was at least to be esteemed, and that we might live together in
harmony.  I repeat, you have cast me off, though I was willing you
should stay.

You confess you have done me a wrong, but have you reflected how
great that wrong is?  I have no legal grounds for divorce, and you
therefore prevent me from marrying again.  You have damaged my
position in the Bank.  Many of my colleagues, envious of my success,
will naturally seize their opportunity and propagate false reports,
and I therefore inform you that I shall require of you a document
which my solicitor will prepare, completely exonerating me.  This
will be necessary for my protection.  A Bank manager's reputation is
extremely sensitive, and a notorious infringement of any article of
the moral code would in many quarters cause his commercial honesty
to be suspected.

You allege that you are sincere, but I can hardly acquit you of
hypocrisy.  Your sentimental excuse for deserting me is suspicious.

When the document just mentioned has been signed, I shall send a
copy of it to the rector of your parish.  Without it he will know
nothing but what you and your mother tell him, and he will be in a
false position.

I hereby caution you that I shall not lose sight of you, and if at
any time proof of improper relationship should be obtained, I shall
take advantage of it.

CHARLES CRAGGS.


BLACKDEEP, 26th March 1839.

Dearest Mother,--This letter came this morning, and I send it at
once to you at Ely.  Am I to answer it?  When I read some parts I
wished he had been near me that I might have caught him by the
throat.  I should have exulted that for once I could move him,
although it should be by terror.  It is strange that not until now
did I know he was so brutal.  Notice that, according to him, if a
wife leaves her husband it must be for a rival.  He does not
understand how much she can hate him, body and soul, and with no
thought of a lover; that her loathing needs no other passion to
inflame it, and that the touch of his clean finger may be worse to
her than a leper's embrace.

When I had written so far I was afraid.  I knelt down and cried to
our Father who is in Heaven.--Your loving daughter,

ESTHER.


ELY, 28th March 1839.

You must not reply.  I have always tried not to answer back if it
will do no good.  In a way, I am not sorry he has written in this
style to you.  It proves that the leading I had was true.  I feared
cruel claws ever since I first set eyes on him notwithstanding he
was so even-tempered, and I am glad he has not shown them till you
are safe in Blackdeep.  I know what you will have to go through in
time to come, but for all that I am sure I am right and that you are
right.  I am more sure than ever.  I am sorry for him, but he will
soon settle down and rejoice that you have gone.  That spiteful word
about my religion does not disturb me.  I have my own religion.  I
have brought up my children in it.  I have taught them to fear God
and to love the Lord Jesus Christ, who has stood by me in all my
troubles and guided me in all my straits whenever I have been
willing to wait His time.  I bless God, my dear child, that you have
not gone away from your mother's faith--ay, and your father's too--
and that you can still pray to your Heavenly Father in your
distress.  Be thankful you have been spared the worst, that you have
not grown hard.

I shall come back this week; your aunt wants you here, and a change
will do you good.


BLACKDEEP, 10th April 1839.

I am glad you went to Ely, for yesterday the parson called to see
you.  He had received a letter from Mr. Craggs, and considered it
his duty as a Christian minister to endeavour to bring about a
reconciliation.  I told him at once he might spare himself the
pains, for they would be useless.  He replied that I ought to think
of the example.  Well, at that I broke out.  I asked him whether
that slut of a Quimby girl wasn't a worse example, who at five-and-
twenty had married Horrocks, the hoary old wretch, for his money,
and leads him a dog's life?  Had he ever warned either of them?
They go to church regular.  I was very free, and I said I thought it
was a bright example that a woman should have given up a fine house
and money in London because there was no love with them, and should
have come back to her mother at Blackdeep.  Besides, I added, why
should my Esther suffer a living death for years for the sake of the
folk hereabouts?  They weren't worth it.  She was too precious for
that.  'Oh!' but he went on again, 'they have souls to be saved.
Husbands and wives may be led to imagine there is no harm in
separating, and may yield to the temptations of unlawful love.'
This made me very hot, and I gave it him back sharp that a sinner
could find in the Bible itself an excuse for his sin.

He said no more except that it would be a nice scandal for the
Dissenters, and that he trusted God would bring me into a better
frame of mind.  He then went away.  His reasoning went in at one ear
and out at the other.  Parsons are bound to preach by rule.  It is
all general:  it doesn't fit the ins and outs.


BLACKDEEP, 1st May 1839.

You had better stop at Ely as long as you can.  Everybody is
gossiping, for parson has told the story as he heard it from your
husband.  It is worse for Jim than for me, as he goes about among
people here, and although they daren't say anything to him about
you, there is no mistake as to what they think.  Mrs. Horrocks
inquired after me, and said she was sorry to hear of my trouble.
Jim told her I was quite well, and that the two cows were now all
right.  He wouldn't let her see he knew what she meant.

Last night, Jim, who has been talking for a twelvemonth past about
going to his cousin in America, asked me whether I would not be
willing to leave.  I have always set my face against it.  To turn my
back on the old house and the Fen, to begin again at my time of life
in a new strange world would be the death of me.  More than ever now
am I determined to end my days here.  They'd say at once we had
fled.  No, here we'll bide and face it out.


They did not fly.  Years went on, and to the astonishment of their
neighbours--perhaps they were a little sorry--there was no sign that
Esther had a lover.  Mrs. Horrocks's eyes were feline, but she was
obliged to admit she was at fault.  Jim married, and an agreeable
opportunity was presented for the expression of amazement that his
wife's father and mother felt safe in allowing their child to enter
such a family--but then she came from Norwich.  The majority of the
poor in Blackdeep Fen sided with the Suttons, and here and there a
pagan farmer boldly declared that old Mrs. Sutton and her daughter
were of a right good sort, and that there was not a
straightforrarder man than Jim in Ely market.  But to respectable
Blackdeep society the Suttons remained a vexatious knot which it
could not unpick and lay straight.  Nobody, as Mrs. Horrocks
observed, knew how to take them.  Mrs. Craggs wore her wedding-ring,
and when she was in Mrs. Jarvis's shop looked her straight in the
face and asked for what she wanted as if she were the parson's wife.
But that, according to Mrs. Horrocks, just showed her impudence.
'What a time that poor Craggs in London must have had of it:' (Mr.
Horrocks was not present).  'Lord! how I do pity the man.'  'And
yet,' added Mrs. Jarvis, 'and YET, you might eat your dinner off
Mrs. Craggs's floor.  I call it hers, for she cleans it.'  Clearly
the living-room ought to have been a pigsty.  It was particularly
annoying that, although Mrs. Sutton and her family by absence from
church had become infidels, they did not go to the devil openly as
they ought to do, and thereby relieve Blackdeep of that pain and
even hatred which are begotten by an obstinate exception to what
would otherwise be a general law.  Parson often preached that
everybody was either a sheep or a goat.  The Suttons were not sheep-
-that was certain; and yet it was difficult to classify them as
ordinary Blackdeep goats, creatures with horns.  Mrs. Jarvis had
heard that there was a peculiar breed of goats with sheep's wool and
without horns.  'Esther Craggs,' she maintained, 'will one day show
us what she's after; mark my word, you'll see.  If that brazen face
means nothing, then I'm stone-blind.'

After Jim's marriage Esther continued to manage the house and the
dairy, leaving the cooking to her sister-in-law and the needlework
to her mother.  Soon after five o'clock on a bright summer morning
the labourer going to his work heard the unbarring of Mrs. Sutton's
shutters and the withdrawal of bolts.  The casement windows and the
door were then flung open, and Esther generally came into the
doorway and for a few minutes faced the sun.  She did not shut
herself up.  She walked the village like a queen, and no Fen farmer
or squireling ventured to jest with her.  Mrs. Jarvis could not be
brought to admit her stone-blindness and clung to the theory of
somebody in London; but as Esther never went to London, and nobody
from London came to her, and the postmistress swore no letters
passed between London and the Sutton family, Mrs. Jarvis became a
little distrusted, although some of her acquaintances believed her
predictions with greater firmness as they remained unfulfilled.  'I
don't care what you may say; don't tell me,' was her reply to
sceptical objections, and it carried great weight.

Esther died of the Blackdeep fever in the fifth year after she came
home.  As soon as he received the news of her death Mr. Craggs
married Mrs. Perkins, who had been twelve months a widow, was
admitted into partnership, and is now one of the most respected men
in the City.



KATE RADCLIFFE



In 1844 there were living between Carlisle and Keswick, Robert
Radcliffe and his only child Kate.  They belonged to an ancient
Roman Catholic family, remotely connected with the Earl of
Derwentwater who was executed in 1716; but Robert Radcliffe's father
had departed from the faith of his ancestors, and his descendants,
excepting one, had remained Protestant.  Robert had inherited a
small estate and had not been brought up to any profession.  He had
been at Cambridge, and at one time it was thought he might become a
clergyman, but he had no call that way, and returned to Cumberland
after his father's death to occupy himself with his garden and
books.  He was a good scholar and had a library of some three
thousand volumes.  He married when he was about eight-and-twenty,
but his wife died two years after Kate was born, and he did not
marry again.  He took no particular pleasure in field sports except
angling, nor in the gaieties of county society, although he was not
a recluse and was on friendly terms with most of his neighbours.  He
was fond of wandering in his own country, and knew every mountain
and every pass for twenty miles round him.  His daughter was
generally his companion, sometimes on her pony and sometimes on
foot.  Neither of them had been abroad, save once to France when she
was about sixteen.  They cared little for travelling in foreign
parts, and he always said he got nothing out of a place in which he
was a lodger.  He went once a Sunday to the village church:  he was
patron of the living.  The sermons were short and simple.
Theological questions did not much concern him, and he found in
Horace, Montaigne, Swift, and the County History whatever mental
exercise he needed.  So far he was the son of his father, but his
mother had her share in him.  She was a strange creature, often
shaken by presentiments.  Years after she was married her husband
had to go to Penrith on some business which she knew would keep him
there for a night.  She got it into her head when she was alone in
the evening that something had happened to him.  She could not go to
bed nor sit still, and at three o'clock in the morning she called up
her servant and bade him saddle his horse and hers.  Off they
started for Penrith, and she appeared before her astonished husband
just as he was leaving his room at the inn for an early breakfast.
She rushed speechless into his arms and sobbed.

'What is the matter?' he cried.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing wrong at home?'

'Nothing.'

She passed her hands slowly over his face as if to reassure herself,
pushed back his hair, looked in his eyes, took both his hands and
said softly, 'Not another word, please.'

He understood her, at least in part.  She remained quietly at the
inn till the afternoon and then went home with him.  She was also
peculiar in her continual reference to first principles.  The
meaningless traditions, which we mistake for things, to her were
nothing.  She constantly asked, 'why not?' and was therefore
dangerous.  'If you go on asking "why not?"' said her aunt to her
once, 'mark me you'll come to some harm.'  She saw realities, and
yet--it was singular--she saw ghosts.  Mr. Radcliffe did not
obviously resemble his mother, nor did Kate, and yet across both of
them there often shot clear, and at times even flashing gleams,
indisputable evidence that in son and granddaughter she still lived.
It was in his relationship to his daughter that Mr. Radcliffe
betrayed his mother's blood.  His reading, as we have said, was in
Horace, Montaigne, and Swift, but if Kate went away for no longer
than a couple of days to her cousins at Penrith, he used to watch
her departure till she was hidden at the first bend of the road
about half a mile distant, and then when he went back to his room
and looked at her empty chair, a half-mad, unconquerable melancholy
overcame him.  It was not to be explained by anxiety.  It was
inexplicable, a revelation of something in him dark and terrible.
In 1844 Kate Radcliffe was twenty-four years old.  She had never
been handsome, and when she was sixteen her pony had missed its
footing on a treacherous mountain track and she narrowly escaped
with her life.  She was thrown on a rock, and her forehead was
crossed henceforth beyond remedy with a long broad mark.  She had
never cared much for company, and her disfigurement made her care
for it less.  She could not help feeling that everybody noticed it,
and most people in truth noticed nothing else.  She was 'the girl
with a scar.'  As time went on, this self-consciousness, or rather
consciousness of herself as the scar, diminished, but her
indifference remained, other reasons for it being added.  She never
had a lover; and, indeed, what man could be expected to take to
himself as wife even the wisest and most affectionate of women whose
brow was indented?  She was advised to wear some kind of head-gear
which would hide her misfortune, but she refused.  'Everybody,' she
said, 'would know what was behind, and I will not be harassed by
concealment.'  To her father her accident did but the more endear
her.  There is no love so wild, no, not even the love of a mistress,
as that which is sometimes found in a father or mother for a child,
and often for one who is physically or even mentally defective.  It
is not subject to satiety and lassitude, and grows with age.  To
Kate also her father was more than the whole world of men and women.
The best of friends weary of one another and large spaces of
separation are necessary, but these two were always happy together.
Theirs was the blessed intimacy which is never unmeaning and yet can
endure silence.  They never felt that unpleasant stricture of the
chest caused by a search for entertainment or for some subject of
conversation.

Nevertheless, although Mr. Radcliffe was so much to Kate, she was
herself, and consequently had wants which were not his.  There had
been born in her before 1844 a passion which could not be satisfied
by any human being, a leaning forward and outward to something she
knew not what.  The sun rose over the fells; they were purple in
sunset; the constellations slowly climbed the eastern sky on a clear
night, and her heart lay bare:  she wondered, she was bowed down
with awe, and she also longed unspeakably.  When she was about
twenty-five years old she accepted an invitation to spend a few
weeks with a friend in London.  She was fond of music, and on her
first Sunday she could not resist the temptation to hear a mass by
Mozart in Saint Mary's, Moorfields.  She was overpowered, and
something moved in her soul which she had never felt in the church
at home.  She worshipped at Saint Mary's several times afterwards,
and her friend rallied her on conversion to Roman Catholicism.

'It is the music, Kate.'

'Well, then, why not?'

'The music is so tender, so overwhelming, that thinking is
impossible.'

'Is thinking the only way to the truth--putting two and two
together?  The noblest truth comes with music.  More solid truth has
been demonstrated by a song, a march, or a hymn, than by famous
political and theological treatises.  But I am not a Roman
Catholic.'

'Oh yes!  I know what you mean:  it is a poetical way of saying that
music stimulates aspiration.'

'No, that is not what I mean.  If there be such a mental operation
as passionless thinking it does not lead to much.  Emotion makes
intellectual discoveries.'

'I do not understand you.  Revealed religion rests on intelligent
conviction.  It is the doctrine of a Creator, of law, of sin, of
redemption, of future happiness and misery.'

'That is to say, your religion stands on authority or logic.  But I
cannot dispute with you.  The beliefs by which some of us live--
"belief" is not the right word--are not begotten or strengthened and
cannot be overthrown by argument.  We dare not expose them, but if
they were to fail, we should welcome death and annihilation.  I
repeat, I am not a Roman Catholic.'

Kate went back to her father and her native hills.  The drama of
Saint Mary Moorfields was continually before her eyes, and Mozart's
music was continually in her ears.  An ideal human being had been
revealed to her who understood her, pitied her, and loved her.  She
was no longer a mere atom of dust, unnoticed amongst millions of
millions.  But the intensity of her faith gave birth to fear and
doubt.  Her own words recurred to her, but she was forced to admit
that she must depend upon evidence.  If Christ were nothing but a
legend, she might as well kneel to a mist.

In those days, within five miles of her father's house was a small
Roman Catholic chapel.  The priest had been well educated, but he
had never questioned any of the dogmas imposed on him as a child.
One Sunday morning, when her father did not go to church, Kate
walked over to the chapel and heard mass.  The contrast with Saint
Mary Moorfields was great.  The sermon disappointed her.  It was
little more than simple insistence on ritual duty.  She reflected,
however, that it was not addressed to her, but to those who had been
brought up to believe.  As she walked home a strange conflict arose
in her.  On the one hand were her imperious needs, which almost
compelled assumption of fact; but the wind blew, and when she looked
up the clouds sailed over the mountains.  She sat on a grey rock to
rest.  It had lain there for thousands of years, and she was
reminded of the Druid circle above the Greta.  She could get no
further with her thinking, and knelt down and prayed for light.  It
is of all prayers the most sincere, but she was not answered--at
least not then.  The next Sunday she went again to mass, and she had
half a mind to signify her wish to confess, but what could she
confess?  She was burdened with no sins, and in confession she could
not fully explain her case.  She determined she would write to the
priest and ask him to grant her an interview.

Her desertion of the parish church was observed, and of course
nobody was surprised that Miss Radcliffe had turned Papist.  The old
Radcliffes were all Papists; there was Popery in the blood, and it
came out like the gout, missing a couple of generations.  Then again
there was the scar, and Miss Radcliffe would never be married.  One
of the neighbours who suggested the scar and maidenhood as a
sufficient reason for apostasy was a retired mill-owner, who was a
Wesleyan Methodist when he was in business in Manchester, but had
become ostentatiously Anglican when he retired into the country.
The village blacksmith, whose ancestors had worked at the same forge
since the days of Queen Elizabeth, was a fearless gentleman, and
hated the mill-owner as an upstart.  He therefore made reply that
'other people changed their religion because they wanted to be
respectable and get folk like the Radcliffes to visit them--which
they won't,' the last words being spoken with emphasis and scorn.

Mr. Radcliffe was much disturbed.  To him Roman Catholicism was
superstition, and he wondered how any rational person could submit
to it.  To be sure he assented every week to supernatural history
and doctrines presented to him in his own parish church, but to
these he was accustomed, and his reason, acute as it was, made no
objection.  There was another cause for his distress.  His only
sister, whom he tenderly loved, had become a foreign nun and was
lost to him for ever.  His life was bound up with his child, and he
dreaded intervention.  It is all very well to say that religious
differences need not be a bar to friendship.  This is one of the
commonplaces of people who understand neither friendship nor
religion.  When Kate and he went for their long walks together, they
would no longer see the same hills; and there would always be
something behind her affection for him and above it.  He was moodily
jealous, and it was unendurable that he should be supplanted by an
intruder who would hear secrets which were not entrusted to a
parent.  There was still some hope.  He did not know how far she had
gone; and he resolved to speak to her.  One morning, as soon as
breakfast was over, he proposed an excursion; he could talk more
freely in the open air.  After a few minutes' indifferent
conversation he asked her abruptly if she was a Roman Catholic.

'I cannot say.'

'Cannot say!  Do you still belong to our church?'

'Father, do not question me.'

'Ah!  I see what has happened; it is lawful to hide from me, to
prevaricate and perhaps'--he checked himself.  'You know that ever
since you have grown up I have hidden nothing from you.  I have told
you everything about my own affairs:  I have asked your counsel, for
I am old, and the wisdom of an old man is often folly.  You have
also told me everything:  you have opened your heart to me.  Think
of what you have said to me:  I have been mother and father to you.
The trouble to me is not merely that you believe in
transubstantiation and I do not, but that there is something in you
which you reserve for a stranger.  What has come to you?--for God's
sake keep close to me for the few remaining years or months of my
life.  Have you reflected on the absurdities of Romanism?  Is it
possible that my Kate should kneel at the feet of an ignorant
priest!'

She was silent.  She knew as little as her father of Roman Catholic
history and creeds.

He went on:

'Your aunt, my dear sister--a more beautiful creature never walked
this earth--I do not know if she is alive or dead.  Can that be true
which kills love?'

'Father, father,' she cried, sobbing, 'nothing can separate us!'

He said no more on that subject, and seemed to recover his peace of
mind, although he was not really at rest.  He was getting into years
and he saw that words were useless and that he must wait the issue
of forces which were beyond his control.  'If she is to go, she must
go:  resistance will make it worse for me:  I must thank God if
anything of her is left for me.  Thus spoke the weary submission of
age, but it was not final, and the half-savage desire for his
child's undivided love awoke in him again, and he prayed that if he
could not have it his end might soon come.

Kate's love for her father was deep, but she could not move a single
step merely to pacify him.  She could have yielded herself entirely
to him in worldly matters; she would have doubted many of her
strongest beliefs if he had contested them; she would have given up
all her happiness for him; she would have died for him; but she
could not let go the faintest of her religious dreams, although it
was impossible to put them into words.

She wrote her letter to the priest.  She found him living in a
cottage and was somewhat taken aback when she entered.

There were hardly any books to be seen, but a crucifix hung on the
wall.

'Miss Radcliffe--an old and honoured name!  What can be the object
of your visit?'

'Father, I am in distress.  I want something which perhaps you can
give.'

'Ah, my child, I understand.  You would like to confess, but you are
Protestant; I cannot absolve you.  Return to the true fold and you
can be released.'

'O Father, I have committed no crime; I come to you because I doubt
and I MUST believe.'

The holy father was unused to such a penitent, and was perplexed and
agitated.

'Doubt, my child--yes, even the faithful are sometimes troubled with
doubt, a temptation from the Enemy of souls.  Were you one of the
flock I could prescribe for you.  But perhaps you mean doubt of the
heresies of your communion.  In that case I can recommend a little
manual.  Take it away with you, study it, and see me again.'

'Father,' said Kate, pointing to the crucifix, 'did He, the Son of
God, Son of the Virgin, really live on this earth? did He break His
heart for me?  If He did, I am saved.'

'Surely your own minister has instructed you on this point; it is
the foundation even of Protestantism.'

'I prefer to seek instruction and guidance from you; answer me this
one question.'

'Satan has never thus assaulted me, and I have never heard of any
such suggestion to one of my people.  I am a poor parish priest.
Take the manual.  It has been compiled by learned men:  read it
carefully with prayer:  I also will pray for you that you may be
gathered into the eternal Church.'

Kate took the manual and went home.  There was but little history in
it, but there was much about the person of Christ.  He was man and
God 'without confusion and without change.'  As man he had to learn
as other men learn, and, as God, he knew everything.  He was
sinless, and the lusts of the flesh had no power over him, but he
had a human body, and was necessarily subject to its infirmities.
His human nature was derived from his mother.  God was not born from
her, and yet she was the mother of God.  Kate was able to see that
some part of what looked like sheer contradiction was the
conjunction of opposites from which it is impossible to escape in
the attempt to express the Infinite, but in the manual this
contradiction was presented with repulsive hardness.  The compiler
desired to subjugate and depose the reason.  This was not the Christ
she wanted.  She hungered for the God, the Man, at whose feet she
could have fallen:  she would have washed them with tears, she would
have wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed them and
anointed them with ointment.  She could have followed Him to the
court of the High Priest and have gloried in discipleship:  she
could have taken the thief's place beside Him on the cross, and she
would not have exchanged those moments of torture in companionship
with Him for a life of earthly bliss.  But--that fatal BUT--did He
ever live, did He still live, did He love her, did He know how much
she loved Him?  Thus it has always been.  There is an impulse in man
which drives him to faith; the commonplace world does not satisfy
him; he is forced to assume a divine object for his homage and love,
and when he goes out into the fields it has vanished.

Kate did not call again upon the priest.  Her father came to the
conclusion that there was nothing in his suspicions, and that she
had been suffering from one of her not uncommon fits of nervous
restlessness and depression.  This was a mercy, for his bodily
health had begun to fail.  The winter was very severe, and in the
dark days just before Christmas he took to his bed and presently
died, having suffered no pain and with no obscuration of his mind
until the last ten minutes.  Kate had nursed him with pious care:
she was alone with him and closed his eyes about four o'clock in the
morning.  At first she was overcome with hysterical passion, and
this was succeeded by shapeless thoughts which streamed up in her
incessantly as the mists stream up from a valley at sunrise.  Not
until day broke did she leave the room and waken the household.

An epoch is created rather by the person than by the event.  The
experience which changes one man is nothing to another.  Some will
pass through life without a mark from anything that happens to them;
others are transformed by a smile or a cloud.  So also the same
experience will turn different men into totally different paths.
Kate had never seen death before.  It smote her with such force that
for months and months her father was before her eyes and she could
not convince herself that he was not with her.  But she went no
further towards Roman Catholicism.  She let the facts stand.  Once
when she was walking on the moors she stretched out her arms again
and was urged to pray, but she felt that her prayer would be loss of
strength and she stood erect.  For nearly a twelvemonth she simply
endured.  She remembered a story in an old Amulet, one of a series
of annuals, bound in crimson cloth and fashionable at that time, of
a sailor stranded on a rock in the sea.  The waves rose to his lips,
but he threw back his head, and at that moment there was a pause and
the tide turned.  It might turn for her or it might not; she must
not move.  She read scarcely any books and lived much in the open
air.  The autumn was one of extraordinary splendour.  September
rains after a dry summer washed the air and filled the tarns and
becks.  Wherever she went she was accompanied by that most delicious
sound of falling waters.  The clouds, which through July and August
had been nothing but undefined, barren vapour, gathered themselves
together and the interspaces of sky were once more brilliantly blue.
Day after day earth and heaven were almost too beautiful, for it was
painful that her finite apprehension should be unequal to such
infinite loveliness.  She received no such answer as that for which
she hoped when she knelt by the grey rock, but that is the way with
the celestial powers; they reply to our passionate demands by
putting them aside and giving us that for which we did not ask.  WE
KNOW NOT HOW TO PRAY AS WE OUGHT.



MR. WHITTAKER'S RETIREMENT



I had been a partner in the house of Whittaker, Johnson, and Marsh,
in the wholesale drug trade, for twenty-five years, and, for the
last ten years, senior partner.  For the first nine years of my
seniority I was not only nominally, but practically, the head of the
firm.  I had ceased to occupy myself with details, but nothing of
importance was concluded without consulting me:  I was the pivot on
which the management turned.  In the tenth year, after a long
illness, my wife died:  I was very ill myself, and for months not a
paper was sent to me.  When I returned to work I found that the
junior partners, who were pushing men, had distributed between them
what I was accustomed to do, and that some changes which they
thought to be indispensable had been made.  I resumed my duties as
well as I could, but it was difficult to pick up the dropped
threads, and I was dependent for explanation upon my subordinates.

Many transactions too, from a desire to avoid worrying me, were
carried through without my knowledge, although formerly, as a matter
of course, they would have been submitted to me.  Strangers, when
they called, asked to see Johnson or Marsh.  I directed the
messenger that they were to be shown into my room if I was
disengaged.  This was a failure, for, when they came, I was obliged
to ask for help, which was not given very generously.  Sometimes I
sent for the papers, but it took a long time to read them, and my
visitors became impatient.  During one of these interviews, I
remember that I was sorely perplexed, but I had managed to say
something loosely with no particular meaning.  Johnson came in and
at once took up the case, argued for ten minutes while I sat silent
and helpless, and an arrangement was concluded in which I really had
no voice whatever.  Now and then I strove to assert myself by
disapproval of suggestions offered to me, but in the end was
generally forced to admit I was wrong.  We had a very large order
for which we were obliged to make special arrangements with
manufacturers.  Both Johnson and Marsh were of opinion that a
particular firm which had often supplied us was not to be trusted,
as our dealings with them during my absence had been unsatisfactory.
I was inclined foolishly but naturally, to attach little importance
to anything which had been done entirely without me, ridiculed their
objections, and forced my decision upon them.  The firm broke down;
our contract with them was cancelled; another had to be made under
pressure, and we lost about five hundred pounds.  Although I was not
reminded of my responsibility in so many words, I knew that I was
solely to blame; I became more than ever convinced I was useless,
and I was much dejected.  At last I made up my mind to retire.  I
was urged to remain, but not, as I imagined, with any great
earnestness, and on the 31st December 1856 I left the office in
Eastcheap never to enter it again.

For the first two or three weeks I enjoyed my freedom, but when they
had passed I had had enough of it.  I HAD NOTHING TO DO!  Every day
at the hours when business was at its height, I thought of the
hurry, of the inquiries, of the people waiting in the anteroom, of
the ringing of bells, of the rapid instructions to clerks, of the
consultations after the letters were opened, of our anxious
deliberations, of the journeys to Scotland at an hour's notice, and
of the interviews with customers.  I pictured to myself that all
this still went on, but went on without me, while I had no better
occupation than to unpack a parcel, pick the knots out of the
string, and put it in a string-box.  I saw my happy neighbours drive
off in the morning and return in the evening.  I envied them the
haste, which I had so often cursed, over breakfast.  I envied them,
while I took an hour over lunch, the chop devoured in ten minutes; I
envied them the weariness with which they dragged themselves along
their gravel-paths, half an hour late for dinner.  I was thrown
almost entirely amongst women.  I had no children, but a niece
thirty-five years old, devoted to evangelical church affairs, kept
house for me, and she had a multitude of female acquaintances, two
or three of whom called every afternoon.  Sometimes, to relieve my
loneliness, I took afternoon tea, and almost invariably saw the
curate.  I was the only man present.  It was just as if, being
strong, healthy, and blessed with a good set of teeth, I were being
fed on water-gruel.  The bird-wittedness, the absence of resistance
and of difficulty, were intolerable.  The curate, and occasionally
the rector, tried to engage me, as I was a good subscriber, in
discussion on church affairs, but there seemed to me to be nothing
in these which required the force which was necessary for the
commonest day in the City.  Mrs. Coleman and the rector were once
talking together most earnestly when I entered the room, and I
instinctively sat down beside them, but I found that the subject of
their eager debate was the allotment of stalls at a bazaar.  They
were really excited--stirred I fully admit to their depths.  I
believe they were more absorbed and anxious than I was on that
never-to-be-forgotten morning when Mortons and Nicholsons both
failed, and for two hours it was just a toss-up whether we should
not go too.

I went with my niece one day to St. Paul's Churchyard to choose a
gown, but it was too much for me to be in a draper's shop when the
brokers' drug sales were just beginning.  I left my niece, walked
round the Churchyard as fast as I could, trying to make people
believe I was busy, and just as I came to Doctors Commons I stumbled
against Larkins, who used to travel for Jackman and Larkins.

'Hullo, Whittaker!' said he, 'haven't seen you since you left.
Lucky dog!  Wish I could do the same.  Ta-ta; can't stop.'

A year ago Mr. Larkins, with the most pressing engagement in front
of him, would have spared me just as much time as I liked to give
him.

Formerly I woke up (sometimes, it is true, after a restless night)
with the feeling that before me lay a day of adventure.  I did not
know what was in my letters, nor what might happen.  Now, when I
rose I had nothing to anticipate but fifteen hours of monotony
varied only by my meals.  My niece proposed that I should belong to
a club, but the members of clubs were not of my caste.  I had taken
a pride in my garden and determined I would attend to it more
myself.  I bought gardening books, but the gardener knew far more
than I could ever hope to know, and I could not displace him.  I had
been in the habit of looking through a microscope in the evening,
although I did not understand any science in which the microscope is
useful, and my slides were bought ready-made.  I brought it out now
in the daytime, but I was soon weary of it and sold it.  We went to
Worthing for a month.  We had what were called comfortable lodgings
and the weather was fine, but if I had been left to myself I should
have gone back to Stockwell directly my boxes were unpacked.  We
drove eastwards as far as we could and then westward, and after that
there was nothing more to be done except to do the same thing over
again.  At the end of the first week I could stand it no longer, and
we returned.  I fancied my liver was out of order and consulted a
physician.  He gave me some medicine and urged me to 'cultivate
cheerful society,' and to take more exercise.  I therefore tried
long walks, and often extended them beyond Croydon, and once as far
as Reigate, but I had never been accustomed to walking by myself,
and as I knew the names of scarcely half-a-dozen birds or trees, my
excursions gave me no pleasure.  I have stood on Banstead Downs in
the blaze of sunlight on a still October morning, and when I saw the
smoke-cloud black as night hang over the horizon northwards, I have
longed with the yearning of an imprisoned convict to be the meanest
of the blessed souls enveloped in it.

I determined at last to break up my household at Stockwell, to move
far away into the country; to breed fowls--an occupation which I was
assured was very profitable and very entertaining; dismiss my niece
and marry again.  I began to consider which lady of those whom I
knew would suit me best, and I found one who was exactly the person
I wanted.  She was about thirty-five years old, was cheerful, fond
of going out (I never was), a good housekeeper, played the piano
fairly well, and, as the daughter of a retired major in the Army,
had a certain air and manner which distinguished her from the wives
and daughters of our set and would secure for me an acquaintance
with the country gentlefolk, from which, without her, I should
probably be debarred.  She had also told me when I mentioned my
project to her, but saying nothing about marriage, that she doted on
fowls--they had such pretty ways.  As it was obviously prudent not
to engage myself until I knew more of her, I instigated my niece in
a careless way to invite her to stay a fortnight with us.  She came,
and once or twice I was on the verge of saying something decisive to
her, but I could not.  A strange terror of change in my way of life
took hold upon me.  I should now have to be more at home, and
although I might occupy myself with the fowls during the morning and
afternoon, the evening must be spent in company, and I could not
endure for more than half an hour a drawing-room after dinner.
There was another reason for hesitation.  I could see the lady would
accept me if I proposed to her, but I was not quite sure why.  She
would in all probability survive me, and I fancied that her hope of
survival might be her main reason for consenting.  I gave her up,
but no sooner had she left us than I found myself impelled to make
an offer to a handsome girl of eight-and-twenty who I was ass enough
to dream might love me.  I was happily saved by an accident not
worth relating, and although I afterwards dwelt much upon the charms
of two or three other ladies and settled with myself I would take
one of them, nothing came of my resolution.  I was greatly
distressed by this growing indecision.  It began to haunt me.  If I
made up my mind to-day that I would do this or that, I always had on
the morrow twenty reasons for not doing it.  I was never troubled
with this malady in Eastcheap.  I was told that decay in the power
of willing was one of the symptoms of softening of the brain, and
this then was what was really the matter with me!  It might last for
years!  Wretched creature! my life was to be nothing better than
that of the horse in Bewick's terrible picture.  I was 'waiting for
death.'

Part of my income was derived from interest on money lent to a
cousin.  Without any warning I had a letter to say that he was
bankrupt, and that his estate would probably not pay eighteenpence
in the pound.  It was quite clear that I must economise, and what to
do and whither to go was an insoluble problem to me.  By chance I
met an old City acquaintance who told me of a 'good thing' in
Spanish bonds which, when information was disclosed which he
possessed, were certain to rise twenty per cent.  If what he said
was true--and I had no reason to doubt him--I could easily get back
without much risk about two-thirds of the money I had lost.  Had I
been in full work, I do not believe I should have wasted a shilling
on the speculation, but the excitement attracted me, and I ventured
a considerable sum.  In about a fortnight there was a sudden jump of
two per cent. in my securities, and I was so much elated that I
determined to go farther.  I doubled my stake; in three weeks
another rise was announced; I again increased the investment, and
now I watched the market with feverish eagerness.  One day I was
downstairs a quarter of an hour earlier than usual waiting for the
boy who brought the paper.

I tore it open and to my horror saw that there was a panic on the
Stock Exchange; my bonds were worthless, and I was ruined.

I had always secretly feared that this would happen, and that I
should be so distracted as to lose my reason.  To my surprise, I was
never more self-possessed, and I was not so miserable as might have
been expected.  I at once gave notice of discharge to my servants,
sold nearly all my furniture and let my house.  I was offered help,
but declined it.  I moved into a little villa in one of the new
roads then being made at Brixton, and found that I possessed a
capital which, placed in Consols--for I would not trust anything but
the public funds--brought me one hundred and twenty-five pounds a
year.  This was not enough for my niece, myself and a maid, and I
was forced to consider whether I could not obtain some employment.
To return to Eastcheap was clearly out of the question, but there
was a possibility, although I was fifty-six, that my experience
might make me useful elsewhere.  I therefore called on Jackman and
Larkins at twelve o'clock, the hour at which I knew there was a
chance of finding them able to see me.  During my prosperity I
always walked straight into their room marked 'private,' but now I
went into the clerks' office, took off my hat and modestly inquired
if either Mr. Jackman or Mr. Larkins could spare me a minute.  I was
not asked to sit down--I, to whom these very clerks a little over a
twelvemonth ago would have risen when I entered; but my message was
taken, and I was told in reply that both Mr. Jackman and Mr. Larkins
were engaged.  I was bold enough to send in another message and was
informed I might call in two hours' time.  I went out, crossed
London Bridge, and seeing the doors of St. Saviour's, Southwark,
open, rested there awhile.  When I returned at the end of two hours,
I had to wait another ten minutes until a luncheon tray came out.  A
bell then rang, which a clerk answered, and in about five minutes,
with a 'come this way' I was ushered into the presence of Jackman,
who was reading the newspaper with a decanter and a glass of sherry
by his side.

'Well, Whittaker, what brings you here?  Ought to be looking after
your grapes at Stockwell--but I forgot; heard you'd given up grape-
growing.  Ah! odd thing, a man never retires, but he gets into some
mess; marries or dabbles on the Stock Exchange.  I've known lots of
cases like yours.  What can we do for you?  Times are horribly bad.'
Jackman evidently thought I was going to borrow some money of him,
and his tone altered when he found I did not come on that errand.

'I was very sorry--really I was, my dear fellow--to hear of your
loss, but it was a damned foolish thing to do, excuse me.'

'Mr. Jackman,' said I, 'I have not lost all my property, but I
cannot quite live on what is left.  Can you give me some work?  My
connection and knowledge of your business may be of some service.'
I had put hundreds of pounds in this man's pocket, but forbore to
urge this claim upon him.

'Delighted, I am sure, if it were possible, but we have no vacancy,
and, to be quite plain with you, you are much too old.  We could get
more out of a boy at ten shillings a week than we could out of you.'

Mr. Jackman drank another glass of sherry.

'But, sir'--(sir! that I should ever call Tom Jackman 'sir,' but I
did)--'as I just said, my experience and connection might be
valuable.'

'Oh, as to experience, me and Larkins supply all that, and the
clerks do as they are told.  Never keep a clerk more than two years:
he then begins to think he knows too much and wants more pay.  As to
connection, pardon me--mean nothing, of course--but your
recommendation now wouldn't bring much.'

At this moment the door opened and Larkins entered in haste.  'I
say, Jackman--' then turning and seeing me,--'Hullo, Whittaker, what
the devil are you doing here?  Jackman, I've just heard--'

'Good-bye, Whittaker,' said Jackman, 'sorry can't help you.'

Neither of them offered to shake hands, and I passed out into the
street.  The chop-houses were crammed; waiters were rushing hither
and thither; I looked up at the first floor of that very superior
house, used solely by principals, where I often had my lunch, and
again crossed London Bridge on my way back.  London Bridge at half-
past one!  I do not suppose I had ever been there at half-past one
in my life.  I saw a crowd still passing both southwards and
northwards.  At half-past nine it all went one way and at half-past
six another.  It was the morning and evening crowd which was the
people to me.  These half-past one o'clock creatures were strange to
me, loafers, nondescripts.  I was faint and sick when I reached
home, for I walked all the way, and after vainly trying to eat
something went straight to bed.  But the next post brought me a note
saying that Jackman and Larkins were willing to engage me at a
salary of 100 pounds a year--much more, it was added, than they
would have paid for more efficient service, but conceded as a
recognition of the past.  The truth was, as I afterwards found out,
that Larkins persuaded Jackman that it would increase their
reputation to take old Whittaker.  Larkins too had become a little
tired of soliciting orders, and I could act as his substitute.  I
was known to nearly all the houses with which they did business and
very likely should gain admittance where a stranger would be denied.
My hours would be long, from nine till seven, and must be observed
rigidly.  Instead of my three-and-sixpenny lunch I should now have
to take in my pocket whatever I wanted in the middle of the day.
For dinner I must substitute a supper--a meal which did not suit me.
I should have to associate with clerks, to meet as a humble
subordinate those with whom I was formerly intimate as an equal; but
all this was overlooked, and I was happy, happy as I had not been
for months.

It was on a Wednesday when I received my appointment, and on Monday
I was to begin.  I said my prayers more fervently that night than I
had said them for years, and determined that, please God, I would
always go to church every Sunday morning no matter how fine it might
be.  There were only three clear week-days, Thursday, Friday, and
Saturday, to be got through.  I imagined them to be holidays,
although I had never before taken three consecutive holidays, save
in those wretched Augusts or Septembers, when pride annually forced
me away to the seaside.  At last Monday came:  our breakfast hour
was henceforth fixed at half-past seven, and at eight o'clock I
started to walk to Kennington, and thence to ride by an omnibus to
King William's statue.  Oh! with what joy did I shut the little
garden gate and march down the road, once more somebody!  I looked
round, saw other little front gates open, each by-street
contributed, so that in the Kennington Road there was almost a
procession moving steadily and uniformly City-wards, and _I_ was in
it.  I was still a part of the great world; something depended on
me.  Fifty-six? yes, but what was that?  Many men are at their best
at fifty-six.  So exhilarated was I, that just before I mounted the
omnibus--it was a cold morning, but I would not ride inside--I
treated myself to a twopenny cigar.  My excitement soon wore off.  I
could not so far forget myself as not to make suggestions now and
then, and Jackman took a delight in snubbing me.  It was a trial to
me also to sit with the clerks.  We had never set ourselves up as
grand people at Stockwell, but I had all my life been accustomed to
delicate food properly cooked, and now that my appetite was
declining with my years, I would almost at any time have gone
without a meal rather than eat anything that was coarse or dirtily
served.  My colleagues ridiculed my 'Stockwell manners,' as they
called them, and were very witty, so they thought, in their
inquiries when I produced my sandwich wrapped up in a clean napkin,
how much it cost me for my washing.  They were a very cheap set, had
black finger-nails, and stuck their pens behind their ears.  One of
them always brought a black-varnished canvas bag with him, not
respectably stiff like leather--a puckered, dejected-looking bag.
It was deposited in the washing place to be out of the way of the
sun.  At one o'clock it was brought out and emptied of its contents,
which were usually a cold chop and a piece of bread.  A plate, knife
and fork, and some pepper and salt were produced from the desk, and
after the meat, which could be cut off from the chop, was devoured,
the bone was gnawed, wrapped up in paper, and put back in the bag.
The plate, knife, and fork were washed in the wash-hand basin and
wiped with the office jack-towel.  It was hard when old business
friends called and I had to knock at the inner door and say, 'Mr. --
- wants to see you, sir,' the object of the visit not being
entrusted to me.  A few of them behaved politely to me, but to
others it seemed to be a pleasure to humble me.  On that very first
Monday, Bullock, the junior in Wiggens, Moggs, and Bullock, burst
into the room.  He knew me very well, but took no notice of me,
although I was alone, except to ask -

'Is Mr. Jackman in?'

'No, sir, can I do anything for you?'

He did not deign to say a word, but went out, slamming the door
behind him.

Nevertheless I kept up my spirits, or rather they kept themselves
up.  At five o'clock, when the scramble to get the letters signed
began, I thought of our street at home, so dull at that hour, of the
milkman, and the muffin-boy, of the curate, and of my niece's
companions, and reflected, thank God, that I was in the City, a man
amongst men.  When seven o'clock came and the gas was put out, there
was the anticipation also of the fight for a place in the omnibus,
especially if it was a wet night, and the certainty that I should
meet with one or two neighbours who would recognise me.  No more
putting up window-blinds, pulling up weeds in the back garden,
sticking in seeds which never grew, or errands to suburban shops at
midday.  How I used in my retirement to detest the sight of those
little shopkeepers when the doors of Glyn's Bank were swinging to
and fro!  I came home dead-beaten now, it is true, but it was a
luxury to be dead-beaten, and I slept more soundly than I had ever
slept in my life.  In about six months my position improved a
little.  Jackman's love for sherry grew upon him, and once or twice,
to Larkins's disgust, his partner was not quite as fit to appear in
public as he ought to have been.  Very often he was absent, sick.
Two of the cheap clerks also left in order to better themselves.  I
never shall forget the afternoon--I felt as if I could have danced
for joy--when Larkins said to me, 'Whittaker, Mr. Jackman hasn't
very good health, and if he's not here when I am out, you must
answer anybody who calls, but don't commit yourself--and--let me
see--I was going to tell you you'll have ten pounds a year more,
beginning next quarter--and there was something else--Oh! I
recollect, if anybody should want to see Mr. Jackman when he happens
to be unwell here, and I am not with him, send for me if you know
where I am.  If you don't know, you must do the best you can.'  My
office coat had hitherto been an old shiny, ragged thing, and I had
always taken off my shirt-cuffs when I began work, because they so
soon became dirty.  I rammed the old coat that night into the fire;
brought my second-best coat in a brown paper parcel the next
morning, and wore my shirt-cuffs all day long.  Continually I had to
think--only fancy, to think--once more; in a very small way, it is
true, but still to think and to act upon my thought, and when
Larkins came in and inquired if anybody had called, he now and then
said 'all right' when I told him what I had done.  A clerk from my
old office swaggered in and did not remove his hat.  I descended
from my stool and put on my own hat.  The next time he came he was
more polite.  I have now had two years of it, and have not been
absent for a day.  I hope I may go on till I drop.  My father died
in a fit; his father died in a fit; and I myself often feel giddy,
and things go round for a few seconds.  I should not care to have a
fit here, because there would be a fuss and a muddle, but I should
like, just when everything was QUITE straight, to be able to get
home safely and then go off.  To lie in bed for weeks and worry
about my work is what I could not endure.



CONFESSIONS OF A SELF-TORMENTOR



My father was a doctor in a country town.  Strictly speaking it was
not a town, and yet it was something more than a village.  His
practice extended over a district with a radius of five or six miles
from his house; he drove a gig and dispensed his own medicines.  My
mother was the youngest daughter of a poor squire who owned two or
three hundred acres and lived at what was called the Park, which was
really nothing more than two or three fields generally laid for hay,
a small enclosure being reserved for a garden.  We were not admitted
into county society, and my mother would not associate with farmers
and tradesfolk.  She was a good woman, affectionate to her children
and husband, but never forgot that--so she thought--she had married
below her station.  She had an uncle who had been in the Indian
Army, and his portrait in full regimentals hung in the dining-room.
How her heart warmed to the person who inquired who that officer
was!  When she went home, it was never to her 'home,' but to the
'Park.'

My father's income was not more than eight or nine hundred a year,
and his expenses were heavy, but nevertheless my mother determined
that I should go to the university, and I was accordingly sent to a
grammar school.  I had not been there more than three years, and was
barely fourteen years old, when my father was pitched out of his gig
and killed.  He had insured his life for two thousand pounds, which
was as much as he could afford, and my mother had another two
thousand pounds of her own.  Her income therefore was less than two
hundred a year.  She could not teach, she would not let lodgings,
nor was she wanted at the Park.  She therefore took a cottage, small
but genteel, at a rental of ten pounds a year, and managed as best
she could.  The furniture was partly sold, but the regimental
portrait was saved.  Unhappily, as the cottage ceilings were very
low, it was not an easy task to hang it.  The only place to be found
for it, out of the way of the chairs, was opposite the window, in a
parlour about twelve feet square, called the drawing-room; but it
was too long even there, and my great-uncle's legs descended behind
the sofa, and could not be seen unless it was moved.  'The cottage
is a shocking come-down,' said my mother to the rector, 'but it is
not vulgar; it is at least a place in which a lady can live.'  Of
course the university was now out of the question, and at fifteen I
left school.  I had read a little Virgil, a little Horace, and a
book or two of Homer.  I had also got through the first six books of
Euclid after a fashion, and had advanced as far as quadratic
equations in algebra, but had no mathematical talent whatever.  My
mother would not hear of trade as an occupation for me, and she
could not afford to make me a soldier, sailor, doctor, lawyer, or
parson.  At last the county member, at the request of her father,
obtained for me a clerkship in the Stamps and Taxes Department.
These were the days before competitive examinations.  She was now
able to say that her son was in H. M. Civil Service.  I had eighty
pounds a year, and lodged at Clapton with an aunt, my father's
sister.

Although I had been only half-educated, I was fond of reading, and I
had plenty of time for it.  I read good books, and read them with
enthusiasm.  I was much taken with the Greek dramatists, especially
with Euripides, but my only means of access to them was through
translations.  My aunt had another nephew who came to see her now
and then.  He had obtained an open exhibition at Oxford, and one day
I found that he had a Greek Euripides in his pocket, and that he
needed little help from a dictionary.  He sometimes brought with him
a college friend, and well do I remember a sneer from this gentleman
about the poor creatures whose acquaintance with AEschylus was
derived from Potter.  I did not look at a translation again for some
time.

The men at my office were a curious set.  The father of one was a
leader of the lowest blackguards in a small borough, who had much to
do with determining elections there; another bore the strongest
resemblance to a well-known peer; and another was the legitimate and
perfectly scoundrel offspring of a newspaper editor.  I formed no
friendships with any of my colleagues, but one of them I greatly
envied.  He was deaf and dumb, the son of a poor clergyman, and had
an extraordinary passion for botany.  Every holiday was devoted to
rambling about the country near London.  He cared little for
anything but his favourite science, but that he understood, and he
never grew tired of it.  I took no account of his deafness and
dumbness; the one thing I saw was his mastership over a single
subject.  Gradually my incompleteness came to weigh on me like a
nightmare.  I imagined that if I had learned any craft which
required skill, I should have been content.  I was depressed when I
looked at the watchmaker examining my watch.  I should have walked
the streets erect if there had been one thing which I could do
better than anybody I met.  There was nothing:  I stood for nothing:
no purpose was intended by God through me.  I was also
constitutionally inaccurate--this was another of my troubles--and
nothing short of the daily use of a fact made me sure of it.  No
matter how zealously I went over and over again a particular
historical period, I always broke down the moment my supposed
acquisitions were tested by questions or conversation.  I have read
a book with the greatest attention I could muster, and have found,
when I have seen a simple examination paper on it, that I could not
have got a dozen marks.  Of what value, then, were my notions on
matters demanding far greater concentration of thought?  Accuracy I
fancied might be acquired, but I was mistaken.  It is a gift as much
as the art of writing sublime poetry.  I struggled and struggled
with pencil and precis, but I did not improve.  My cousin's before-
mentioned friend took delight in checking, like an accountant, what
was said to him, especially by me, and although I saw that this for
the most part was a mere trick, I could not deny that it proved
continually that my so-called opinions were not worth a straw.  The
related virtues of accuracy, strength of memory, and clear
definition, are of great importance, but I over-estimated them.  I
see now that human affairs are so complicated, that had I possessed
the advantages bestowed on my cousin and his companion, they would
not have prevented delusions, all the more perilous, perhaps,
because I should have been more confident.  However, at the time of
which I am speaking, I was wretched, and believed that my
wretchedness was entirely due to deficiencies and weaknesses, from
which my friends were free.  No sorrow of genius is greater than the
daily misery of the man with no gifts, who is not properly equipped,
and has desires out of all proportion to his capacity.

I had no real love of art and did not understand it.  I went to
concerts, but the only part of a sonata or symphony which took hold
of me was that which was melodious.  The long passages with no
striking theme in them conveyed nothing to me, and as to Bach,
excepting now and then, his music was like a skilful recitation of
nonsense verses.  The Marseillaise on a barrel-organ was
intelligible, but gymnastics on strings--what did they represent?
With pictures the case was somewhat different.  I often left Clapton
early in order that I might have half an hour at Christie's in
quiet, and I have spent many pleasant moments in those rooms on
sunny mornings in May and June before De Wint's and Turner's
landscapes.  But I knew nothing about them.  Without previous
instruction I should probably have placed something worthless on the
same level with them, and I could not fix my attention on them long.
A water-colour by Turner, on which all his power had been expended,
an abstract of years and years of toil and observation, was unable
to detain me for more than five minutes, and in those five minutes I
very likely did not detect one of its really distinguishing
qualities.  As to the early religious pictures of the Italian
school, I cared nothing either for subject or treatment, and would
have given a cartload of them for a drawing by Hunt of a bird's
nest.  Wanting an ear for music and an eye for pictorial merit, I
believed, or affected to believe, that the raptures of people who
possessed the ear and eye were a sham.  It irritated me to hear my
aunt play, although she had been well taught in her youth and was a
skilful performer.  I know she would have liked to feel that she
gave me some pleasure, and that her playing was admired, but I was
so openly indifferent to it that at last she always shut the piano
if I happened to come into the room while she was practising.  I
remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of
Mozart's quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral,
inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity.  It is strange
that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I
could not help indulging in it.

My failings gradually wrought in me confirmed bitterness.  I
persuaded myself that the interest which people appeared to take in
me was mere polite pretence.  There may be enough selfishness in the
world to explain misanthropy, but there is never enough to justify
it, and what we imagine to be indifference to us is often merely the
reserve caused by our own refusal to surrender ourselves to
legitimate and generous emotions.  Oddly enough, I frequently made
hasty and spasmodic offers of intimate friendship to people who were
not prepared for them, and the natural absence of immediate response
was a further reason for scepticism.  A man to whom I was suddenly
impelled was in want of money, and I pressed ten pounds upon him.
He could not pay me at the appointed time, whereupon I set him down
as an ungrateful brute, and moralised like Timon.

There was at that time living in London a lady whom I must call Mrs.
A.  She was the widow of a professor at Cambridge who had died
young, and she might have been about five-and-thirty or forty years
old.  My cousin, who had known her husband, introduced me to her.
She was not handsome; the cheek-bones were a little too prominent,
and her face was weather-worn, but not by wind and sun.
Nevertheless it was a quietly victorious face.  Her ways were simple
and refined.  She had travelled much, as far even as Athens, and was
complete mistress of Italian and French.  Her voice struck me--it
was so musical, and adapted itself so delicately to varying shades
of thought and emotion.  I have often reflected how little we get
out of the voice in talking.  How delightful is the natural
modulation which follows the sense, and how much the sense gains if
it is so expressed rather than in half-inarticulate grunts, say,
between the inspirations and expirations of a short pipe!

Mrs. A. took much notice of me, and her attitude towards me was
singular.  She was not quite old enough to be motherly to me, but
she was too old for restrictions on her intercourse with me, and her
wide experience and wisdom well qualified her to be my directress.
Often when I went to her house nobody was there, and she would talk
to me with freedom on all sorts of subjects.  I did not fall in love
with her, but she was still attractive as a woman, and difference of
sex, delightful manners, subtle intellect, expressive grey eyes, and
lovely black hair streaked with white, might have taught me much
which I could have learned from no ordinary friend.  My cousin often
went with me to Mrs. A.'s, but I was never at rest when he was
there.  I fancied then that if I could have rendered a dozen lines
of Gray's Elegy into correct Greek, life would have nothing more to
give me.  Mrs. A. was too well-behaved to encourage conversation in
my cousin's presence which disclosed my inferiority to him, but
without premeditation it sometimes turned where I could not follow.
As I have said, she had travelled in Greece.  She understood
something of modern Greek, and she and my cousin one evening fell to
comparing it with ancient Greek.  I sat sulky and dumb.  At last she
turned to me, and asked me smilingly why I was so quiet.  I replied
that I did not understand a word of what they were saying (which was
untrue), and that if they would talk about Stamps and Taxes I could
join.  She divined in an instant what was the matter with me, and
diverted the discussion so that it might be within my reach.  'I
must confess,' she said, 'that my knowledge of philology is no
better than yours.  Philology demands the labour of a life.  I often
wonder what the teacher, student, and school history of England will
be at the end of another thousand years.  Perhaps, however, in
another thousand years books will no longer be written except on
physics.  Men will say, "What have we to do with the Wars of the
Roses?" and as to general literature, they will become weary of
tossing over and over again the same old ideas and endeavouring to
imagine new variations of passion.  The literary man will cease from
the land.  Something of this sort must come to pass, unless the
human race is to be smothered.'  My cousin said he prayed that her
prophecy might come true, but I remained hard and stockish.  Her
sweet temper, however, could not be disturbed, and she announced
that she was going to see Rachel, the great actress, and invited us
both to accompany her.  I refused, on the ground that I knew nothing
of French (also untrue).  She assured me that if I would read the
play beforehand I should be in no difficulty.  I was really touched
by her kindness, but the devil in me would not let me yield.  I
missed the opportunity of seeing Rachel, just as I missed many other
opportunities of more importance.  Oh! when I look back now over my
life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and
did not take, my heart is like to break.  The curse for me has not
been plucking forbidden fruit, but the refusal of divine fruit
offered me by heavenly angels.

Mrs. A.'s circle of acquaintances widened during the two or three
years of my friendship with her.  She often pressed me to meet them,
but I nearly always held back.  I told her that I did not care for
mere acquaintances, and that certainly not more than one or two of
her visitors would shed a tear if they heard she was dead.  'To
possess one or two friends,' she said, 'who would weep at my
departure would be quite enough.  It is as much as anybody ought to
demand, but you are mistaken in supposing that those who would not
break their hearts for us may not be of value, and even precious.
We are so made that the attraction which unites us to our fellow-
creatures is, and ought to be, of varying intensity, and there is
something to be obtained from a weaker bond which is not to be had
from a stronger.  I like the society of Mrs. Arnold and Madame
Sorel.  I enjoy the courtesy which is not slipper-and-dressing-gown
familiarity, and their way of looking at things, especially Madame
Sorel's, is different from mine and instructs me.  Forgive me for
reminding you that in our Father's house are many mansions, and if
we wish to be admitted to some of them we must wear our best
clothes, and when we are inside we must put on our company manners.'
She was quite right; Mrs. Arnold and Madame Sorel could have given
me just what I needed.

My visits to Mrs. A. became less and less frequent, and at last
altogether ceased.  It was actually painful to me to neglect her,
but I forced myself to it, or to put it more correctly the Demon of
pure Malignity, for there is such a demon in Hell, drove me to it.

Some years afterwards I wrote to her asking her if she could get
work for a starving man whom she had known in other days, and she
helped him to obtain it.  Two years after she had done this kind
office, and had shown she had not forgotten me, she died, and I went
to her funeral in Brompton Cemetery.  It was a cold day, and black
fog hung over London.  When the coffin was lowered into the grave I
wept many tears.  I had been guilty of a neglect which was wicked
injustice, and I could never hear her say she had forgiven me.  I
understood the meaning of atonement, and why it has been felt in all
ages that, by itself, reformation is insufficient.  I attempted an
expiation, which I need not describe.  It is painful, but the
sacrifice which I trust I shall offer to the end of my days brings
me a measure of relief.

About a twelvemonth after Mrs. A.'s death I fell sick with
inflammation of the lungs.  Once before, when I was ill, I declined
my aunt's attendance.  I said that I did not believe it was possible
for mere friendship or affection to hold out against long watching,
and that there must come a time when the watcher would be relieved
by the death of the patient.  I declared that nothing was more
intolerable to me than to know that anybody sacrificed the least
trifle on my behalf, and that if my aunt really wished me to get
better she would at once send for a paid nurse.  I had a paid nurse,
but Alice, our servant, told me afterwards that my poor aunt cried a
good deal when she saw her place taken by a stranger.  She was now
nearly seventy, but she offered herself again, and I thankfully
accepted her, stipulating of course that she should be helped.  I
wondered how she could retain her love for me, how she could kiss me
so tenderly morning and night, and apparently not remember my
unkindness to her.  But therein lies the difference between a man
and a woman.  Woman is Christian.  A woman's love will sweep like a
river in flood over a wrong which has been done to it and bury it
for ever.

I am not regenerate, but who is ever regenerate?  My insignificance
and defects do not worry me as they did:  I do not kick at them, and
I am no longer covetous of other people's talents and virtues.  I am
grateful for affection, for kindness, and even for politeness.  What
a tremendous price do we have to pay for what we so slowly learn,
and learn so late!



A LETTER TO THE 'RAMBLER'



Sent to the Rambler March 1752, but, alas, in that month the Rambler
came to an end.  I am not sorry it was not printed.  On re-reading
it I find passages here and there which are unconscious and
unavoidable imitations of Dr. Johnson.  No use in re-writing them
now.

J. R.
June 1760.


Sir,--I venture to send you a part of the history of my life,
trusting that my example may be a warning against confidence in our
own strength to resist even the meanest temptation.

My father was a prosperous haberdasher in Cheapside, and I was his
eldest son.  My mother was the daughter of the clerk to the
Fellmongers' Company.  She had reached the mature age of nine-and-
twenty when she received an offer of matrimony from my father, and
after much anxious consideration and much consultation with her
parents, prudently decided to accept it, although to the end of her
days she did not scruple openly to declare that she had lowered
herself by marrying a man who was compelled to bow behind a counter
to the wife of a grocer, and stand bareheaded at the carriage door
of an alderman's lady.  My mother, I am sorry to say, abetted my
natural aversion from trade and sent me to Saint Paul's School to
learn Latin, Greek, and the mathematicks that I might be qualified
to separate myself from the class to which unhappily she was
degraded and that she might recover in her child the pride she had
lost in her husband.  My abilities were not despicable, my ambition
was restless, and my progress in my studies was therefore
respectable.  I conceived a genuine admiration for the classick
authors; I was genuinely moved by the majesty of Homer and the
felicity of expression in Horace.  In due time I went to Oxford, and
after the usual course there, in which I was not unsuccessful, I
took Holy Orders and became a curate.  When I was about eight-and-
twenty I was presented with a College living in the village of A.
about four miles from the county town of B. in the West of England.
My parishioners were the squire, a half-pay captain in the army, a
retired custom-house surveyor who was supposed to be the
illegitimate son of a member of parliament, and the surrounding
farmers and labourers.  All were grossly illiterate, but I soon
observed that a common ignorance does not prevent, but rather tends
to establish artificial distinctions.  Inferiority by a single
degree in the social scale becomes not only a barrier to
intercourse, but a sufficient reason for contempt.  The squire and
his lady spent their days in vain attempts to secure invitations to
my Lord's at the Abbey and revenged themselves by patronising the
captain, who in his turn nodded to the surveyor but would on no
account permit intimacy.  The surveyor could not for his life have
condescended to enter a farmhouse, and yet was never weary of
denouncing as intolerably stuck-up the behaviour of those above him.
He consoled himself by the reflection that they were the losers, and
that, poor creatures, their neglect of him was due to a lamentable
misapprehension of the dignity of H. M. Custom-house Service.  I can
assure you I thought the comedy played at A. very ridiculous, and
often laughed at it.

It was soon quite clear to me that if I was to live in peace I must
take to myself a wife.  The squire and the surveyor had daughters.
The squire's would each have a hundred a-year apiece, a welcome
addition to my small income.  They were good-looking, and by repute
were virtuous and easy of temper, but when I became acquainted with
them I found that I must not expect from them any entertainment save
the description of visits to the milliner, or schemes for parties,
or the gossip of the country-side.  I did not demand, Mr. Rambler,
the critical acumen of Mrs. Montagu, or the erudition of Mrs.
Carter, but I believe you will agree with me that a wife, and
especially the wife of a clergyman and a scholar, should be able to
read a page of Dr. Barrow's sermons without yawning, and should not
drop Mr. Pope's Iliad or Odyssey in five minutes unless she happened
to light upon some particularly exciting adventure.  I therefore
dismissed the thought of these young ladies, and the daughters of
the surveyor were for the same reasons ineligible, with the added
objection that if I chose one of them the squire and his family
would never enter the church again.

One day I went over to B. to leave my watch for repairs.  I noticed
a fishing-rod in the shop, and as I was fond of the sport I asked
the watchmaker if it was his.  He said that he generally went
fishing when he could spare himself a holiday, and that he had just
spent two days on the Avon.  I was thinking of the Stratford river
and foolishly inquired which Avon, forgetting the one near us.

'Our Avon,' he replied; 'our Avon, of course, sir; THE Avon.


'"Proud of his adamants with which he shines
And glisters wide, as als of wondrous Bath."'


I did not recollect the lines, but discovered on inquiry that they
were Spenser's, an author, I regret to say, whom I had not read.  I
was astonished that a person with a mechanical occupation who sat in
a window from morning to night dissecting time-pieces should be
acquainted with poetry, and I begged him to tell me something of his
life.  He was the son of a bookseller in Bristol who had been
apprenticed to the celebrated Mr. Bernard Lintot.  The father failed
in business, and soon afterwards died leaving a widow and six
children.  My friend was then about fourteen years old.  He had been
well educated, but his mother was compelled to accept the offer of a
neighbour who took compassion on her, and he was brought up to the
watchmaking trade in Bath.  He had to work long hours and endure
many hardships which it might be supposed would tend to repress the
sallies of the most lively imagination, but some men are so
constituted that adverse circumstances do but stimulate a search for
compensation.  So it was with him.  In his leisure hours he studied
not only horological science but the works of our great English
authors.

I was so much attracted to the watchmaker that I often called on
him, when I had no business with him.  He had a wife and daughter,
both of whom were his companions.  Melissa, the daughter, was about
nineteen.  She was not beautiful according to the Grecian model, but
her figure was elegant, there was depth in her eyes, and she was
always dressed with simplicity and taste.  She spoke correctly, and
surprised me by the justness of her observations, not merely on
local and personal matters, but upon subjects with which women of
more exalted rank are not usually familiar.  Admission had been
refused to her by every school in Bath, but she had been taken in
charge by two elderly gentlewomen, distant relations of her
grandfather, who had instructed her in the usual branches of polite
learning, including French.  I will content myself, Mr. Rambler,
with informing you that I fell in love with Melissa, and that she
did not discourage my attentions.  I had not altogether overlooked
the possibility of embarrassment at A., but my passion prevented the
clear foresight of consequences.  I have often found that evils
which are imaginary will press upon me with singular vivacity, while
those which may with certainty be deduced from any action are but
obscurely apprehended, so that in fact intensity of colour is an
indication of unreality.  I must add that if the future had
presented itself to me with prophetic distinctness, my love for
Melissa was so great that I should not have hesitated.  My frequent
visits to B. had not passed unnoticed at A., and the reason was
suspected.  Hints were not wanting, and the custom-house surveyor
told me a harrowing tale of a fellow-surveyor who had alienated all
his friends and had been obliged to leave his house near Tower Hill
because he had chosen to marry the daughter of a poor author who
lived in Whitefriars.  One day early in the morning I was in B. and
met the squire's young ladies with their mother.  She was a very
proud dame.  Her maiden name was Bone, and her father had been a
sugar-baker in Bristol, but this was not a retail trade, and she had
often told me that she was descended from Geoffrey de Bohun, who was
in the retinue of William the Conqueror and killed five Saxons with
his own hand at the battle of Hastings.  Her children, she bade me
observe, had inherited the true Bohun ears as shown in an engraving
she possessed of a Bohun tomb in Normandy.  I walked with the party
up the High Street, and had not gone far when I saw Melissa coining
towards us.  O, Mr. Rambler, can I utter it!  She approached us, she
knew that I must have recognised her, but I turned my head towards a
shop-window and called my companions' attention to the display of
silks and satins.  After Melissa had passed, my lady asked me if
that was not the watchmaker's daughter and whether I knew anything
about her.  I replied that I believed it was, and that I had heard
she was a respectable young woman.  My lady remarked that she had
understood that she was virtuous, but that she had been unbecomingly
brought up, and considered herself superior to her position.  Her
ladyship confessed that she would not be surprised any day to hear
that Miss -----had been obliged to leave B., for she had noticed
that when a female belonging to the lower orders strove to acquire
knowledge unsuitable to her station, the consequence was often ruin.
It is almost incredible--I was silent!--but when I reached home I
was overcome with shame and despair.  This then was all that my love
was worth; this was my esteem for intelligence and learning; and I
was the man who had thanked God I was not as my neighbours at A.!
If in the beginning I had deliberately resolved that it would be a
mistake to ally myself with Melissa's family because my usefulness
might be diminished, something might have been pleaded on my behalf,
but I was without excuse.  I had sacrificed Melissa to no principle,
but to detestable vulgar cowardice.  It was about two hours after
noon when I returned, and in my confusion a note from Melissa which
lay upon my table was not at once noticed.  It had been written the
day before, and it tenderly upbraided me because I had been absent
for a whole week.  Enclosed was a copy of verses by Sir Philip
Sidney beginning, 'My true love hath my heart.'  I mounted my horse
again, and in less than half an hour was in B.  I flew to Melissa.
She received me in silence, but without rebuke.  Indeed, before she
had time for a word, I had knelt at her feet and had covered my face
with her hands.  On my way through the town I had seen my lady with
her children, and one or two fashionably-dressed women, friends who
lived in B.  My lady was completing her purchases.  I implored
Melissa immediately to come out with me.  She was astonished and
hesitated, but my impetuosity was so urgent that she feared to
refuse, and without any explanation I almost dragged her into the
street.  On the opposite side I descried my lady and her party.  I
crossed over, took Melissa's arm in mine, came close to them face to
face, bowed, and then passed on.  We then recrossed the road and
turned into Melissa's house.  I looked back and saw that they were
standing still, stricken with astonishment.  We went into the little
parlour:  nobody was there.  Melissa threw her arms round my neck,
and happier tears were never shed.  In all the long years which have
now gone by since that memorable day I have never had to endure from
that divine creature a word or a hint which even the suspicion of
wounded self-respect could interpret as a reproach.

We were married at B.  The custom-house surveyor never entered his
parish church again, but went over to B. once every Sunday.  He
wrote me a letter to say that it was with much regret that he left
the church of his own village, but that it was no longer possible to
derive any edification from the services there.  The captain
remained, but discontinued his civilities.  The squire informed me
that as I was still a priest and possessed authority to administer
the holy sacraments he should continue his attendance, but that of
course all personal intercourse must cease.  I expected that the
common people would have been confirmed in their attachment to me,
but the opinion of the little village butcher was that I had
disgraced myself, and the farmers and labourers would not even touch
their hats to my wife when they met her.  However, we did not care,
and in time it was impossible even to the squire not to recognise
her tact, manners, and sense.  Her father had constructed an
ingenious sun-dial which he had placed on the front of his shop.
The great Mr. Halley was staying with Mr. M., who lives about five
miles from B., and seeing the dial when he was in the town, called
on my father-in-law, and was so much struck with him that he
obtained permission to invite him to dinner.  There the squire met
him and was obliged to sit opposite him, amazed to hear him converse
on equal terms with Mr. Halley and his host, and to discover that he
knew how to behave with decency.  Hostility continued to wear away.
Few people are endowed with sufficient perseverance to continue a
quarrel unless the cause is constantly renewed.

My betrayal of Melissa has not been altogether without profit.  I
had imagined myself morally superior to my parishioners, and if I
had put the question to myself I should have said with confidence
that it was impossible that there should exist in me a weakness I
had never suspected, one which every day moved me to laughter or to
scorn.  But, sir, I now feel how true it is that in our immortal
poet's words, 'Man, proud man, is most ignorant of what he's most
assured, his glassy essence.'  I hope you will pardon a reference to
sacred history:  I understand how the Apostle Peter came to deny his
Lord.  A few minutes before the dreadful crime was committed he
would have considered himself as incapable of it as he was of the
sale of his Master for money or of that damning kiss, and a few
minutes afterwards he would have suffered death for His sake.  This,
Mr. Rambler, is the lesson which induced me to write to you.  Let
him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall; and indeed he
may take all heed and yet will fall, unless Divine Providence
mercifully catches him and holds him up.



A LETTER FROM THE AUTHORESS OF 'JUDITH CROWHURST'



You have asked me to tell you all about Judith Crowhurst.  I will
tell you something more and begin at the beginning.  You will
remember that Miss Hardman said to Mrs. Pryor, Mrs. Hardman's
governess:  'WE need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes and
crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE
reap the harvest of governesses.  The daughters of tradespeople,
however well educated, must necessarily be under-bred, and as such
unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children's
minds and persons.  WE shall ever prefer to place those about OUR
offspring, who have been born and bred with somewhat of the same
refinement as OURSELVES.'  I was one of those unhappy women who,
mercifully for the upper classes, inherit manners and misery in
order that the children of these superior creatures may not put an
'r' at the end of 'idea' and may learn how to sit down in a chair
with propriety.  My father was a clergyman holding a small country
living.  He died when I was five-and-twenty, and I had to teach in
order to earn my bread.  I obtained a tolerably good situation, but
at the end of two years I was informed that, although a clergyman's
daughter would 'do very well' so long as her pupils were quite
young, it was now time that they should be handed over to a lady who
had been accustomed to Society.  I had become thoroughly weary of my
work.  I was not enthusiastic to instruct girls for whom I did not
care.  I suppose that if I had been a born teacher, I should have
been as happy with the little Hardmans as I was in the nursery with
my youngest sister now dead.  I should not have said to myself, as I
did every morning, 'What does it matter?'  In my leisure moments and
holidays during those two years I had written a novel.  I could
supply conversation and description, but it was very difficult to
invent a plot, and still more difficult to invent one which of
itself would speak.  I had collected a quantity of matter of all
kinds before I began, and then I cast about for a frame in which to
fit it.  At last I settled that my hero, if hero he could be called,
should fall in love with a poor but intelligent and educated girl.
He had a fortune of about two thousand pounds a year, nearly the
whole of which he lost through the defalcations of a brother, whose
creditors received about five shillings in the pound.  He felt that
the fair name of his family was stained, and he was consumed with a
passion to repay his brother's debts and to recover possession of
the old house and land which had been sold.  He went abroad, worked
hard, and met with a lady who was rich whom he really admired.  His
love for his betrothed had been weakened by absence, the engagement,
for some trifling reason, was broken off, and he married the
heiress.  At the end of five years he returned to England,
discharged every liability, and in two years more was the owner of
his birthplace.  The marriage, alas! was unhappy.  There was no
obtrusive fault in his wife, but he did not love her.  She could not
understand his resolution to take upon himself his brother's debts,
and she thought the price he paid for the house was excessive, as
indeed it was.  She was a good manager, but without imagination.  He
was rejoicing, in her presence, one spring morning that he had been
wakened by the clamour of the rooks with which he had been familiar
ever since he was a boy, and her reply was that an estate equal in
value to his own and possessing a bigger rookery had been offered
him for less money by one-third than he had thrown away.
Unfortunately it is not in management or morality that we crave
companionship.  It is in religion and in the deepest emotions that
we thirst for it.  Gradually he became wretched, and life was almost
unbearable.  She took no pleasure in the ancient place and its
beautiful garden, he never asked her to admire them, and there was
neither son nor daughter to inherit his pious regard.  At this point
I was obliged to introduce the Deus ex machina, and the wife died.
The widower sought out his first love; she had never wavered in her
affection to him; they were married, had children, and were happy.

My tale was a youthful blunder.  It was not really a tale.  I
introduced, in order to provide interest, all sorts of accessories--
aunts, parsons, gamekeepers, nurses, a fire and some hairbreadth
escapes, but they were none of them essential and they were all
manufactured.  The only parts not worthless were those which were
autobiographical.

One of them I remember very well, although my MS. was burnt long
ago.  I believed then that Nature is not merely beautiful, but that
she can speak words which we can hear if we listen devoutly, and
that if personality has any meaning she is personal,


'The guide, the guardian of the heart and soul.'


Towards the end of an autumn afternoon I had rambled up to the
pillar which was a landmark to seven counties.  It was wet during
the morning, but at five o'clock the rain ceased and a long,
irregular line of ragged cloud, dripping here and there, stretched
itself above the opposite hills from east to west.  Underneath it
was a border of pale-golden, open sky, and below was the sea.  The
hills hid it, but I knew it was there.  I was hushed and reassured.
When I got home I transferred my emotion to my deserted heroine, and
tears blotted the paper.  But it was a mere episode, without
connection and, in fact, an obstruction.

I sent my manuscript to a publisher and need hardly say that it was
returned as unsuitable.  I tried two others, but with no success.
The third enclosed a copy of his reader's opinion.  Here it is:-

' . . . is obviously a first attempt.  It evinces some power in
passages, but the characters lack distinction and are limited by
ordinary conventional rules.  I cannot recommend it to you for its
own sake, and there is no prospect in it of anything better.  The
author might be capable of short stories for a religious magazine.
It is singular that Miss C.'s Mariana, which you also sent me,
should be on somewhat the same lines, but Mariana, his first love,
is seduced by the man who forsakes her and, in the end, marries her
as his second wife.  During his first marriage his intimacy with
Mariana continues and Miss C. thereby has an opportunity, which she
used with much power, for realistic scenes, that I believe will
prove attractive.  I had no hesitation therefore in advising you to
purchase Mariana, although the plot is crude.'  I could not take the
publisher's hint.  I put my papers back into my box and obtained
another situation.  In about a twelvemonth, notwithstanding my
disappointment, I was unable to restrain myself from trying again.
I fancied that I might be able to project myself into actual history
and appropriate it.  I had been much attracted to Mary Tudor, and I
had studied everything about her on which I could lay my hands.  I
did not love her, but I pitied her profoundly, and the Holbein
portrait of her seemed to me to indicate a terrible and pathetic
secret.  I cannot, however, give a complete explanation of her
fascination for me.  It is impossible to account for the resistless
magnetism with which one human being draws another.  The elements
are too various and are compounded with too much subtlety.  Bitter
Roman Catholic as Mary was, I wished I could have been one of the
ladies of her court, that I might have offered my heart to her and
might have wept with her in her sorrow.  But my intense feeling for
a picture of the Queen was no qualification to paint the original,
and although I strove to keep close to facts she insensibly became
myself.  I was altogether stopped when I happened to meet with
Aubrey de Vere's Mary Tudor and Tennyson's Queen Mary.

Soon afterwards I read Jane Eyre again, and was more than ever
astonished at it.  It is not to be classed; it is written not by a
limited human personality but by Nature herself.  The love in it is
too great for creatures who are 'even as the generations of leaves';
the existence of two mortals does not account for it.  There is an
irresistible sweep in it like that of the Atlantic Ocean in a
winter's storm hurling itself over the western rocks of Scilly.  I
do not wonder that people were afraid of the book and that it was
cursed.  The orthodox daughter of a country parson broke
conventional withes as if they were cobwebs.  Jane Eyre is not gross
in a single word, but its freedom is more complete than that of a
licentious modern novel.  Do you recollect St. John Rivers says to
Jane:  'Try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with which you
throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures.  Don't cling so
tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for
an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite, transient
objects.  Do you hear, Jane?'

She replies--'Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek.  I feel I
have adequate cause to be happy, and I WILL be happy.  Good-bye!'

Therein speaks the worshipper of the Sun.  Do you also recollect
that voice in the night from Rochester?  She breaks from St. John,
goes up to her bedroom and prays.  'In my way--a different way to
St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.  I seemed to penetrate
very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at
His feet.  I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay
down, unscared, enlightened--eager but for the daylight.'  The
Mighty Spirit, who was Jane Eyre's God, had directed her not to go
to India as St. John's bride to save souls from damnation by
conversion to Jehovah, but to set off that very day to Rochester at
Thornfield Hall.

Consider also how inseparably the important incidents in Jane Eyre
are linked with one another and with character.  Jane refused
Rochester at first and St. John finally.  She could not possibly do
otherwise.  But I must stop.  You did not ask for an essay on
Charlotte Bronte.  Suffice it to say that when I had finished Jane
Eyre I said to myself that I would not write any more.  Nor did I
ever attempt fiction again.  Judith Crowhurst is a plain, true
story, altered a little in order to prevent recognition.  I knew her
well.  There is no suffering in any stage tragedy equal to that of
the unmarried woman who is well brought up, with natural gifts above
those of women generally, living on a small income, past middle-age,
and unable to work.  It is not the suffering which is acute torture
ending in death, but worse, the black, moveless gloom of the second
floor in Hackney or Islington.  Almost certainly she has but few
friends, and those she has will be occupied with household or wage-
earning duties.  She is afraid of taking up their time; she never
calls without an excuse.  What is she to do?  She cannot read all
day, and, if she could, what is the use of reading?  Poets and
philosophers do not touch her case; descriptions of moonlit seas,
mountains, moors, and waterfalls darken by contrast the view of the
tiles and chimneys from her own window.  Ideas do not animate or
interest her, for she never has a chance of expressing them and,
lacking expression, they are indistinct.  Her eyes wander down page
after page of her book, but she is only half-conscious.  Religion,
such as it is now, gives no help.  It is based on the necessity of
forgiveness for some wrong done and on the notion of future
salvation.  She needs no forgiveness unless she takes upon herself a
burden of artificial guilt.  She rather feels she has to forgive--
whom or what she does not know.  The heaven of the churches and
chapels is remote, unprovable, and cannot affect her in the smallest
degree.  There is no religion for her and such as she, excepting
that Catholic Faith of one article only--The clods of the valley
shall be sweet unto him.  As I have said, I knew Judith Crowhurst
well, and after she was dead I wrote her biography, because I
believed there are thousands like her in London alone.  I hoped that
here and there I might excite sympathy with them.  We sympathise
when we sit in a theatre overpowered by stage agony, but a truer
sympathy is that which may require some effort, pity for common,
dull, and deadly trouble that does not break out in shrieks and is
not provided with metre and scenery.

You were kind enough to get Judith Crowhurst published for me, and
it has had what is called a 'success,' but I doubt if it will do any
good.  People devour books but, when they have finished one, they
never ask themselves what is to be done.  It is immediately followed
by another on a different subject, and reading becomes nothing but a
pastime or a narcotic.  Judith may be admired, but it is by those
who will not undergo the fatigue of a penny journey in an omnibus to
see their own Judith, perhaps nearly related to them, and will
excuse themselves because she is not entertaining.

I was asked the other day if I was not proud of some of the reviews.
Good God!  I would rather have been Alice Ayres, {148} and have died
as she died, than have been famous as the author of the Divine
Comedy, Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.  She is now forgotten and sleeps
in an obscure grave in some London cemetery.  No! there will be
nothing more.  I have said all I had to say.



CLEARING-UP AFTER A STORM IN JANUARY



A westerly storm of great strength had been blowing all day, shaking
the walls of the house and making us fear for the chimneys.  About
four o'clock, although the wind continued very high, the clouds
broke, and moved in a slow, majestic procession obliquely from the
north-west to the south-east.  Here and there small apertures
revealed the undimmed heaven behind.  Immense, rounded projections
reared themselves from the main body, and flying, ragged fragments,
apparently at a lower level, fled beside and before them.  These
fragments of lesser density showed innumerable tints of bluish grey
from the darkest up to one which differed but little from the pure
sky-blue surrounding them.  Just after the sun set a rosy flush of
light spread almost instantaneously up to the zenith and in an
instant had gone.  Low down in the west was a long, broadish bar of
orange light, crossed by the black pines on the hill half a mile
away.  Their stems and the outline of each piece of foliage were as
distinct as if they were but a hundred yards distant.  Half the
length of the field in front of me lay a small pool full to its
grassy margin.  It reflected with such singular fidelity the light
and colour above it that it seemed itself to be an original source
of light and colour.  Of all the sights to be seen in this part of
the world none are more strangely and suggestively beautiful than
the little patches of rain or spring water in the twilight on the
moorland or meadows.  Presently the wind rose again, and a rain-
squall followed.  It passed, and the stars began to come out, and
Orion showed himself above the eastern woods.  He seemed as if he
were marching through the moonlit scud which drove against him.  How
urgent all the business of this afternoon and evening has been, and
yet what it meant who could say?  I was like a poor man's child who,
looking out from the cottage window, beholds with amazement a great
army traversing the plain before him with banners and music and
knows nothing of its errand.



THE END OF THE NORTH WIND



For about six weeks from the middle of February we had bitter
northerly winds.  The frost was not very severe, but the wind
penetrated the thickest clothing and searched the house through and
through.  The shrubs, even the hardiest, were blackened by its
virulence.  There was scarcely any sunshine, and every now and then
a gloomy haze, like the smoke in London suburbs, invaded us.  The
rise and fall of the barometer meant nothing more than a variation
in the strength of the polar current.  Growth was nearly arrested,
although one morning I found three primroses in a sheltered hollow.
Never had the weather seemed more hopeless than towards the close of
March.  On the last evening of the month the sky was curiously
perplexed and agitated notwithstanding there was little movement in
the air above or below.  Next morning the change had come.  The wind
had backed to the south, and a storm from the Channel was raging
with torrents of warm rain.  O the day that followed!  Massive April
clouds hung in the air.  How much the want of visible support adds
to their charm!  One enormous cloud, with its base nearly on the
horizon, rose up forty-five degrees or so towards the zenith.  Its
weight looked tremendous, but it floated lightly in the blue which
encompassed it.  Towards the centre it was swollen and dark, but its
edges were dazzling white.  While I was watching it, it went away to
the east and partly broke up.  A new cloud, like and not like,
succeeded it . . . I followed the lane, stopped for a few minutes at
a corner where the grassy road-margin widens out near the tumble-
down barn, looked over the gate westward across the valley to the
hills beyond, and then went down to the brook that winds along the
bottom.  It runs in a course which it has cut for itself, and is
flanked on either side by delicately-carved miniature cliffs of
yellow sandstone overhung with broom and furze.  It was full of pure
glittering moor-water, which seemed to add light to the stones in
its bed, so brilliant was their colour.  It fell with incessant,
rippling murmur over its little ledges, gathering itself up into
pools between each, and so it went on to the mill-pond a mile away.
Close to me a blackbird was building her nest.  She moved when I
peeped at her, but presently returned.  Her back was struck by the
warm sun and was glossy in its rays.  A scramble of half a mile up a
rough track brought me to the common, and there, thirty miles
distant, lay the chalk downs, unsubstantial, a light-blue mist.

Youth with its heat in the blood may be more capable of exultation
at this season, but to the old man it brings the sounder hope and
deeper joy.



ROMNEY MARSH



'Proceeding from a source of untaught things'
(Prelude xiii. 310)

Here is Appledore; over there is Romney Marsh.  The sky has partly
cleared after heavy, south-westerly rain.  On the horizon where the
sea lies the clouds are in a line, and the air is so clear that
their edges are sharp against the blue.  Nearer to me they are
slowly dissolving, re-forming, and moving eastwards, and their
shadows are crossing the wide grassy plain on which in the distance
Lydd Church is just discernible.  I can report something of those
greys and that azure, but the best part of what is before me will
not outline itself to me.  Still less can I shape it in speech.
Necessity, majestic inevitable movement, the folly of heat and
hurry, all this emerges and again is blended in the simple unity of
transcendent loveliness.  But beyond there is something so close, so
precious! and yet elusive of every effort to grasp it.


She came to meet me from the line
   Where lies the ocean miles away;
And now she's close; she must be mine:
   I wait the word that she must say.

The magic word is not for me:
   The vision fades, and far and near
The west wind stirs the grassy sea
   In whispers to the watching ear.



AXMOUTH



A true Devonshire village, sloping upwards from the Axe.  The
cottages are thatched, and the walls are of cobbles, plastered.  A
little gurgling stream runs down the village street, and over the
stream each cottage on its bank has a little bridge.  The poor brook
is much troubled, unhappily, by cabbage leaves and the like
defilement, and does its best to oversweep them and carry them away,
but does not quite succeed.  In a few minutes, however, it will be
in the Axe, and in half an hour it will be in the pure sea.  A
farmhouse stands at the end of the village with a farmyard of deep
manure and black puddles coming up to the side-door.  The church,
once interesting, has been restored with more than usual barbarity,
blue slates, villa ridge-tiles, the vulgarest cheap pavement, tawdry
decorations and furniture, such as are supplied to churchwardens by
ecclesiastical tradesmen.  But the tower is still grey, and has
looked unchanged over the Axe estuary for hundreds of years.
Turning up from the main street is a Devonshire lane eight feet wide
or thereabouts.  It ascends to a farm on the hillside, and its steep
high banks are covered with ferns and primroses.  A tiny brooklet
twitters down by its side.  At the top of the down is a line of old
hawthorns blown slantingly by south-west storms into a close, solid
mass of shoots and prickles.  They are dwarfed in their struggle,
but have thick trunks, many of them covered with brilliant yellow
lichen.

For miles and miles before it comes to Axmouth, and above Axminster,
the Axe flows in singular loops, often returning almost upon itself,
reluctant to quit the lovely land of its birth, youth, and maturity;
but now it is straighter, for it is in the lowlands and feels the
tide.  Flocks of seagulls wade or float in it.  It passes quietly
under its last bridge, but beyond it is confronted by a huge shingle
barrier.  Sweeping alongside it, it suddenly turns at right angles,
cuts its way through with an exulting rush, holds back for a few
yards the sea waves that ripple against it, and is then lost.



THE PREACHER AND THE SEA



This morning as I walked by the sea, a man was preaching on the
sands to about a dozen people, and I stopped for a few minutes to
listen.  He told us that we were lying under the wrath of God, that
we might die at any moment, and that if we did not believe in the
Lord Jesus we should be damned everlastingly.  'Believe in the
Lord,' he shouted, 'believe or you will be lost; you can do nothing
of yourselves; you must be saved by grace alone, by blood, without
blood is no remission of sins.  Some of you think, no doubt, you are
good people, and you may be, as the world goes, but your
righteousness is as filthy rags, you are all wounds and bruises and
putrefying sores; the devil will have you if you don't turn to the
Lord, and you will go down to the bottomless, brimstone pit, where
shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth for ever and ever.  Believe,'
he roared, 'now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.'

Sunny clouds lay in the blue above him, and at his feet summer waves
were breaking peacefully on the shore, the sound of their soft,
musical plash filling up his pauses and commenting on his texts.



CONVERSION



In 1802 Lady B. was living at M--- Park.  She was a proud, handsome,
worldly woman about fifty-five years old, a widow with no children,
but she had a favourite nephew who was at the Park for the larger
part of the year and was the heir to her property.  She had been gay
in her youth, was the leader of society in her county, and when she
passed middle life still followed the hounds.  She was a good
landlord, respected and even beloved by her tenantry, and a staunch
Tory in politics.  The new evangelical school of Newton and Romaine
she detested bitterly, as much in fact as she detested Popery.  The
nephew, however, came under Newton's influence and was converted.
His aunt was in despair.  She could not conquer her affection for
him, but she almost raved when she reflected that the inheritor of
her estates was a pious Methodist, as she called him.  She had a
good-looking, confidential maid who had lived with her for years.
In one of her fits she told this maid that she would give half of
what she possessed if her nephew were like other young men.  'I
don't want him to be a sot or to gamble away my money,' she cried,
'but there's not much else I should mind if he were but a man.'

A few days afterwards she spoke to her maid again.  'Look you here,
Jarvis, I shall go distracted.  This morning he began to speak to me
about my soul--the brave boy that he used to be, talking of my soul
to ME!  Listen to what I tell you and be reasonable.  I know
perfectly well, and so do you, that before he took up with this
sickening cant he was in love with you and you were in love with
him.  I saw it all and said nothing.  I understand there's no more
flirting now.  Ah, well, his blood is red yet; I've not forgotten
what five-and-twenty is, and he'll come if you whistle.  You can't
marry him, of course, but you can and shall live comfortably
afterwards for all that, and when he has done what all other young
fellows do there will be an end to the prayer-meetings.'

The girl was a little staggered, but after a time her mistress's
suggestion ceased to shock her, for the nephew was a handsome fellow
capable of raising passion in a woman.  What the aunt had said was
really true.  She now threw the girl in his way.  She was sent to
him with messages when he was alone, and one evening when he had
gone over to a prayer-meeting in the town about two miles away, she
was directed to go there on an errand, to contrive to be late, and
to return with him.  She had half an hour to spare and was curious
to know what the prayer-meeting was like.  She stood close to the
inner door, which was slightly ajar, and heard her master praying
earnestly.  He rose and spoke to the little congregation for five
minutes.  When he had finished she started for home, and he came up
with her before she had passed the last house.  It was nearly dark,
but he recognised her by a light from a window, and asked her what
she was doing in the town at that hour.  She excused herself by
unexpected detention, and they went on together.  About half a mile
further at the top of the hill was the stile of the pathway that was
a short cut to the park.  From that point there was an extensive
view over the plain eastwards, and the rising moon was just emerging
from a line of silvered clouds.  They were both struck with the
beauty of the spectacle and stood still gazing at it.

Suddenly she dropped on her knees and with violent sobbing called
upon God to help her.  He lifted her up, and when she was calmer she
told him everything.  They went on their way in silence.  Now comes
the remarkable part of the story.  It was he who would have been the
tempter and she had saved him.  When they reached the Park he found
his aunt ill, and in a fortnight she was dead.  In less than two
years nephew and maid were married.  His strict evangelicalism
relaxed a little, but they were both faithful to their Friend.
Lovers also they were to the last, and they died in the same month
after each of them had passed seventy-five years.

I fancy I read a long while ago somewhere in Wesley's Journal that
an attempt was made to ruin him or one of his friends with a woman,
but I think she was a bad woman.  If there is anything of the kind
in the Journal it shows that Lady B's plot is not incredible.



JULY



It is a cool day in July, and the shaded sunlight slowly steals and
disappears over the landscape.  There are none of those sudden
flashes which come when the clouds are more sharply defined and the
blue is more intense.  I have wandered from the uplands down to the
river.  The fields are cleared of the hay, and the bright green of
the newly mown grass increases the darkness of the massive foliage
of the bordering elms.  The cows are feeding in the rich level
meadows and now and then come to the river to drink.  It is overhung
with alders, and two or three stand on separate little islands held
together by roots.  The winter floods biting into the banks have cut
miniature cliffs, and at their base grow the forget-me-not, the
willow-herb, and flowering rush.  A brightly-plumaged bird, too
swift to be recognised--could it be a kingfisher?--darts along the
margin of the stream and disappears in its black shadows.  The wind
blows gently from the west:  it is just strong enough to show the
silver sides of the willow leaves.  The sound of the weir, although
so soft, is able to exclude the clacking of the mill and all
intermittent, casual noises.  For two hours it has filled my ears
and brought a deeper repose than that of mere silence.  It is not
uniform, for the voices of innumerable descending threads of water
with varying impulses can be distinguished, but it is a unity.
Myriads of bubbles rise from the leaping foam at the bottom, float
away for a few yards and then break.

It is the very summit of the year, the brief poise of perfection.
In two or three weeks the days will be noticeably shorter, the
harvest will begin, and we shall be on our way downwards to autumn,
to dying leaves and to winter.



A SUNDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER



The walk from the high moorland to the large pond or lake lies
through a narrow grassy lane.  About half-way down it turns sharply
to the left; in front are the bluish-green pine woods.  Across the
corner of them, confronting me, slants a birch with its white bark
and delicate foliage, light-green and yellow in relief against the
sombre background.  Fifty yards before I reach the wood its music is
perceptible, something like the tones of an organ heard outside a
cathedral.  In another minute the lane enters:  it is dark, but the
ruddy stems catch the sun, and in open patches are small beeches
responding to it with intense golden-brown.  Along the edge of the
path, springing from the mossy bank they grow to a greater height.
A pine has pushed itself between the branches of one of them as if
on purpose to show off the splendour of its sister's beauty.  It is
stiller than it was outside; the murmur descends from aloft.  There
was a frost last night and the leaves will soon fall.  A beech leaf
detaches itself now and then and flutters peacefully and waywardly
to the ground, careless whether it finds its grave in the bracken or
on the road where it will be trodden underfoot.  The bramble is
beginning to turn to blood.  It is strange that leaves should show
such character.  Here is a corner on which there are not two of the
same tint, but they spring from the same root, and the circumstances
of light and shade under which they have developed are almost
exactly similar.

It is eleven o'clock, and with the mounting sun the silence has
become complete save when it is broken by the heavy, quick flap of
the wood-pigeon or the remonstrance of a surprised magpie.  Service
is just beginning all over England in churches and the chapels
belonging to a hundred sects.  In the village two miles away the
Salvation Army drum is beating, but it cannot penetrate these
recesses.  Stay! a faint vibration from it comes over the hill, but
now it has gone.  A fox, unaware of any human being, walks from one
side of the lane to the other, stopping in the middle.  There is a
breath of wind and the low solemn song begins again above me.



UNDER BEACHY HEAD:  DECEMBER



At the top of the hill the north-westerly wind blows fresh, but here
under the cliffs the sun strikes warm as in June.  There is not a
cloud in the sky, and behind me broken, chalk pinnacles intensely
white rise into the clear blue, which is bluer by their contrast.
In front lies the calm, light-sapphire ocean with a glittering sun-
path on it broadening towards the horizon.  All recollection of bare
trees and dead leaves has gone.  The tide is drawing down and has
left bare a wide expanse of smooth untrodden sand through which
ridges run of chalk rock black with weed.  The sand is furrowed by
little rivulets from the abandoned pools above, and at its edge long
low waves ripple over it, flattening themselves out in thin sheets
which invade one another with infinitely complex, graceful curves.
I look southward:  there is nothing between me and the lands of heat
but the water.  It unites me with them.

It is wonderful that winter should suddenly abdicate and summer
resume her throne.  On a morning like this there is no death, the
sin of the world is swallowed up; theological and metaphysical
problems cease to have any meaning.  Men and books make me painfully
aware of my littleness and defects, but here on the shore in silence
complete save for the music of the ebbing sea, they vanish.

When I am again in London and at work the dazzling light will not be
extinguished, and will illuminate the dreary darkness of the city.



24TH DECEMBER



My housekeeper and her husband have begged for a holiday from this
morning till Boxing-day, and I could not refuse.  I can do without
them for so short a time.  I might have spent the Christmas with one
of my children, but they live far away and travelling is now irksome
to me.  I was seventy years old a month past.  Besides, they are
married and have their own friends, of whom I know nothing.  I have
locked the door of my cottage and shall walk to No-man's Corner.

It is a dark day; the sky is covered evenly with a thick cloud.
There is no wind except a breath now and then from the north-east.
It is not a frost, but it is cold, and a thick mist covers the
landscape.  It is no thicker in the river bottom than on the hills;
it is everywhere the same.  The field-paths are in many places a
foot deep in mud, for the autumn has been wet.  They are ploughing
the Ten Acres, and the plough is going along the top ridge so that
horses and men are distinctly outlined, two men and four horses, but
the pace is slow, for the ground is very heavy.  I can just hear the
ploughman talking to his team.  The upturned earth is more beautiful
in these parts than I have seen it elsewhere--a rich, reddish brown,
for there is iron in it.  The sides of the clods which are smoothed
by the ploughshare shine like silver even in this dull light.  I
pass through the hop-garden.  The poles are stacked and a beginning
has just been made with the weeds.  A little further on is the
farmhouse.  It lies in the hollow and there is no road to it, save a
cart-track.  The nearest hard road is half a mile distant.  The
footpath crosses the farmyard.  The house is whitewashed plaster and
black-timbered, and surrounded by cattle-pens in which the oxen and
cows stand almost up to their knees in slush.  A motionless ox looks
over the bar of his pen and turns his eyes to me and my dog as we
pass.  It is now twelve, and it is the dinner-hour.  The horses have
stopped work and are steaming with sweat under the hayrick.  The men
are sitting in the barn.  Leaving the farmyard I go down to the
brook which steals round the wood and stop for a few minutes on the
foot-bridge.  I can hear the little stream in the gully about twenty
feet below, continually changing its note, which nevertheless is
always the same.  In the wood not a leaf falls.  O eternal sleep,
death of the passions, the burial of failures, follies, bitter
recollections, the end of fears, welcome sleep!



DREAMING



During the retreat from Moscow a French soldier was mortally
wounded.  His comrades tried to lift him into a waggon.  'No
bandages, no brandy!' he cried; 'go, you cannot help me.'  They
hesitated, but seeing that he could not recover, and knowing that
the enemy was hard upon them in pursuit, they left him.  For half an
hour he was alive and alone.  The Emperor, whom he worshipped, was
far away; his friends had fled; to remain would have been folly, and
yet!  It was late in the afternoon and bitterly cold.  He looked
with dim and closing eyes over the vast, dreary, snowy and silent
plain.  What were the images which passed before them?  Were they of
home, of the Emperor and the retreating army, of the crucifix and
the figure thereon?  Who can tell?  Death is preceded by thoughts
which life cannot anticipate.  Perhaps his herald was a simple
longing to be at rest, joy at his approach blotting out all
bitterness and regret.  Who can tell?  But I dream and dream; the
dying, wintry day, the dark, heavily-clouded sky, the snow, and the
blood.  A Cossack came up and drove his lance through him.



OURSELVES



Lord Bacon says that 'To be wise by rule and to be wise by
experience are contrary proceedings; he that accustoms himself to
the one unfits himself for the other.'  It is singular how little
attention, in the guidance of our lives, we pay to our own needs.
It is a common falsehood of these times that all knowledge is good
for everybody, the truth being that knowledge is good only if it
helps us, and that if it does not help us it is bad.  'Whatever
knowledge,' to quote from Bacon again, 'we cannot convert into food
or medicine endangereth a dissolution of the mind and
understanding.'  We ought to turn aside from what we cannot manage,
no matter how important it may seem to be.  David refused Saul's
helmet of brass and coat of mail.  If he had taken the orthodox
accoutrements and weapons he would have been encumbered and slain.
He killed Goliath with the rustic sling and stone.  No doubt if we
determine to be ignorant of those things with which the world thinks
it necessary that everybody should be familiar we shall be thought
ill-educated, but our very ignorance will be a better education,
provided it be a principled ignorance, than much which secures a
local examination certificate or a degree.  At the same time, if any
study fits us, it should be pursued unflaggingly.  We must not be
afraid of the imputation of narrowness.  Our subject will begin to
be of most service to us when we have passed the threshold and can
think for ourselves.  If we devote ourselves, for example, to the
works and biography of any great man, the pleasure and moral effect
come when we have read him and re-read him and have traced every
thread we can find, connecting him with his contemporaries.  It is
then, and then only, that we understand him and he becomes a living
soul.  Flesh and blood are given by details.

We are misled by heroes whom we admire, and the greater the genius
the more perilous is its influence upon us if we allow it to be a
dictator to us.  It is really of little consequence to me what a
saint or philosopher thought it necessary to do in order to protect
and save himself.  It is myself that I have to protect and save.
Every man is prone to lean on some particular side and on that side
requires special support.  Every man has particular fears and
troubles, and it is against these and not against the fears and
troubles of others that he must provide remedies.  A religion is but
a general direction, and the real working Thirty-nine Articles or
Assembly's Catechism each one of us has to construct on his own
behalf.

A not insignificant advantage of loyalty to our Divine Director will
be a more correct and generally a more lenient criticism of our
fellow-creatures.  We shall cease to judge them by standards which
are not applicable to them.  Much that we might erroneously consider
wrong we shall discern to be a necessary effort to secure stability
or even to preserve sanity.  We shall pardon deviation from the
obvious path.  The boat which crosses the river may traverse
obliquely the direct line to the point for which it is making, and
if we reflect that perhaps a strong current besets it we shall not
call the steersman a fool.



THE RIDDLE



Men had sinned against the gods, and had even denied their
existence.  Zeus had a mind to destroy them, but at last resolved to
inflict on them a punishment worse than death.  He sent Hermes to
one of the chief cities with a scroll on which a few magic letters
were written, and the wise men declared they contained a riddle.
Its solution would bring immortal happiness.  The whole human race,
neglecting all ordinary pursuits, applied itself ceaselessly to the
solution of the mystery.  Professors were appointed to lecture on
it, it was attacked on all sides by induction, deduction, and by
flights of inspiration, but nobody was able to unravel it.  At last
a child, seeing the perplexity in which her father and mother were,
took one of the copies of the scroll which were hung in all the
public buildings of the city, and secretly set off to consult a
distant oracle of Phoebus Apollo of which she had heard.  She had to
traverse thirsty deserts, and not till she was nearly dead did she
reach the shrine.  She told her story and handed in her scroll to a
priestess, who disappeared in an inner chamber.  In a few minutes
the temple of the Sun-god was filled with blazing light, the child
prostrated herself on the floor, and she heard the words, THERE IS
NO RIDDLE.  She lifted herself up, and, fortified with some food
given her by the priestess, began her journey home.  She was just
able to struggle through the city gates and deliver the message
before she fell down lifeless.  It was not believed; the Secret, the
Secret, everybody upheld it, the professors lectured, the mad
inquisition and guesses continued, and the vengeance of Zeus is not
yet satisfied.



AN EPOCH



I was no longer young:  in fact I was well over sixty.  The winter
had been dark and tedious.  For some reason or other I had not been
able to read much, and I began to think there were signs of the
coming end.  Suddenly, with hardly any warning, spring burst upon
us.  Day after day we had clear, warm sunshine which deepened every
contrast of colour, and at intervals we were blessed with refreshing
rains.  I spent most of my time out of doors on the edge of a
favourite wood.  All my life I had been a lover of the country, and
had believed, if this is the right word, that the same thought,
spirit, life, God, which was in everything I beheld, was also in me.
But my creed had been taken over from books; it was accepted as an
intellectual proposition.  Most of us are satisfied with this kind
of belief, and even call it religion.  We are more content the more
definite the object becomes, no matter whether or not it is in any
intimate relationship with us, and we do not see that the moment God
can be named he ceases to be God.

One morning when I was in the wood something happened which was
nothing less than a transformation of myself and the world, although
I 'believed' nothing new.  I was looking at a great, spreading,
bursting oak.  The first tinge from the greenish-yellow buds was
just visible.  It seemed to be no longer a tree away from me and
apart from me.  The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed
and the text came into my mind, Thou in me and I in thee.  The
distinction of self and not-self was an illusion.  I could feel the
rising sap; in me also sprang the fountain of life up-rushing from
its roots, and the joy of its outbreak at the extremity of each twig
right up to the summit was my own:  that which kept me apart was
nothing.  I do not argue; I cannot explain; it will be easy to prove
me absurd, but nothing can shake me.  Thou in me and I in thee.
Death! what is death?  There is no death:  IN THEE it is impossible,
absurd.



BELIEF



He has vanished, the God of the Church and the Schools:
He has gone for us all except children and fools;
Where He dwelt is the uttermost limit of cold,
And a fathomless depth is the Heaven of old.

I turn from my books, and behold! I'm aware
There's a girl in the room, just a girl over there.
She stole in while I mused; and she watches the verge
Of a low-lying cloud whence a star doth emerge.

A touch on her shoulder; I whisper a word,
One more, and I know that the heavenly Lord
Still loves and rejoices His creatures to meet:
My faith still survives, for I kneel at her feet.



EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY ON THE QUANTOCKS



Spring 18--.

Walked from Holford to my lodgings on the hill.  Never remember to
have lived in such quietude.  The cottage stands half a mile away
from any house.  Woke very early the next morning and went down to
Alfoxden House, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived a century ago.
Here also came Coleridge.  It was almost too much to remember that
they had trodden those paths.  I could hardly believe they were not
there, and yet they were dead--such a strange overcoming sense of
presence and yet of vanishedness.

A certain degree of ignorance is necessary for a summary essay on
creatures of this order.  The expression of Dorothy's soul is spread
over large surfaces.  Some people require much space and time, and
the striking events of a life are often not those which are most
significant.  It is in small, spontaneous actions and their
reiteration that character plainly appears.  After prolonged
acquaintance with Dorothy we see that she was great and we love her
reverentially and passionately.  She could look at a beautiful thing
for an hour without reflection, but absorbed in its pure beauty--a
most rare gift.  For how long can we watch a birch tree against the
sky?  Here are two extracts from her journal in the very place where
I now am.  They are dated 26th January and 24th February 1798, in
the winter it will be noticed.  'Sat in the sunshine.  The distant
sheep-bells; the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the
half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled
with the dewdrops; the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense masses of
cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine.' . . .
'Went to the hill-top.  Sat a considerable time overlooking the
country towards the sea.  The air blew pleasantly around us. . . .
Scattered farmhouses, half-concealed by green, mossy orchards; fresh
straw lying at the doors; haystacks in the fields.  Brown fallows;
the springing wheat, like a shade of green over the brown earth; and
the choice meadow plots, full of sheep and lambs, of a soft and
vivid green; a few wreaths of blue smoke, spreading along the
ground; the oaks and beeches in the hedges retaining their yellow
leaves; the distant prospect on the land side, islanded with
sunshine; the sea, like a basin full to the margin; the dark, fresh-
ploughed fields; the turnips, of a lively, rough green.'  That bit
about the farmhouses reminds me of two very early lines of
Wordsworth which are a prophecy of his peculiar quality:-


'Calm is all nature as a resting wheel';


and


'By secret villages and lonely farms.'
(first version.)


The image in the first line looks rude and unpoetical, but will be
felt by anybody who has strolled observantly through a farmyard--say
on a Sunday summer afternoon--and has noticed a disused wheel
leaning against a wall.  Wordsworth shows himself not afraid of the
commonplace.  A great object may gain by comparison with one which
is superficially lower or even mean--nature with a cart-wheel.


Went over the hills to Bicknoller--a sunny, hazy day--and the
Bristol Channel was in a mist.  The note of the cuckoo was
unceasing.  Down in the valley at Bicknoller the hedges and banks of
the lanes are in the most ardent stage of spring.  Everything is
pressing forward with joyous impetuosity, and yet is satisfied with
what it is at the present moment and is completely at rest in it.
Along this path to Bicknoller the Ancient Mariner was begun.  The
most wonderful piece of criticism on record is perhaps that of Mrs.
Barbauld on the poem.  She objected to it because it had no moral.
Coleridge replied:  'In my judgment the poem had too much; and the
only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the
moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of
action in a work of such pure imagination.  It ought to have no more
moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down
to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside,
and lo! a genie starts up, and says he MUST kill the aforesaid
merchant, BECAUSE one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the
eye of the genie's son.'


To the first draft of Youth and Age, written in 1823, there is a
little prose introduction, a reminiscence of the Quantocks, which is
a lovely example of the way in which one sensation gains by
description in terms of another.  ' . . .  At earliest dawn . . .
the first skylark . . . was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and
sparkling to the Ear's eye, in full column or ornamented shaft of
sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the
Cornfields on the descent of the Mountain on the other side--out of
sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine
like a falling star of silver.'


Coleridge! Coleridge!  How empty do the sweeping judgments passed on
him appear if we recollect that by Wordsworth, Dorothy, Charles and
Mary Lamb, he was honoured and fervently loved.  If a man is loved
by any human being condemnation is rash, and we ought at least to be
silent.


Wandered about Holford.  The apple-trees are in full blossom.  One
of them was a particularly exquisite survival of youth in old age.
Its head was a white-and-pink mass, but it leaned almost
horizontally, battered and weather-worn.


Thunder off and on all day till the afternoon.  A low grey mist
covered the whole sky at five o'clock, and the landscape was
uninteresting, but in ten minutes the mist thinned a little, so that
the sun came through it and lighted up the torn vapour.


Went over to East Quantock's Head and came back across the hill.  It
was a dark day; the sky was overcast, and the moors were very
lonely.  The thought of London and other big cities over the horizon
somewhat marred the solitude.  Nevertheless there are the deserts of
Arabia and Africa, the regions of the North and South Poles, the
Ocean, and, encompassing the globe itself, silent, infinite space.


To Nether Stowey and Tom Poole's house.  In the hideous church is a
monument to him fairly appreciative, but disfigured by snobbism.
'His originality and grasp of mind,' says the inscription,
'counterbalanced the deficiencies of early education and secured him
the friendship,' etc.  His 'originality and grasp of mind'--his
soul, that is to say, managed, when put in the scale, to turn it
against those deficiencies which are made good to youths
providentially directed to Eton and Oxford.  According to the slab
in the church, Poole died 8th September 1837, seventy-two years old.
The house in which he lived in his later years is a pleasant place,
but has been tortured into modern gentility.  His revolving grate,
which he turned round when he went out, has been replaced by an
approved cast-iron 'register.'  He was called 'Justice Poole' in the
country round.  Afterwards to Coleridge's cottage--small, somewhat
squalid rooms.  Pity, pity, almost to tears.  The second edition of
his poems was published while he was here in 1797.  In a note added
to Religious Musings in that edition he declares his belief in the
Millennium; that 'all who in past ages have endeavoured to
ameliorate the state of man, will rise and enjoy the fruits and
flowers, the imperceptible seeds of which they had sown in their
former life; and that the wicked will, during the same period, be
suffering the remedies adapted to their several bad habits.'  This
period is to be 'followed by the passing away of this earth, and by
our entering the state of pure intellect; when all creation shall
rest from its labours.'  The 'coadjutors of God' in Religious
Musings are Milton, Newton, Hartley, and Priestley.  In the
beginning of 1798 Coleridge was preaching at the Unitarian Chapel at
Shrewsbury.  But on the 13th November 1797, at half-past four in the
afternoon (let us be particular in dating such an event), he and
Dorothy and her brother began their walk over these Quantock hills,
and The Ancient Mariner was born.  These are the facts, and rash
indeed would anybody be who should attempt to deduce anything from
them.  Of all foolish criticism there is none more foolish than that
which treats the mental movement of men like Coleridge or Wordsworth
as if it were in an imaginary straight line.  Excepting lines 123-
270, composed in the latter part of 1796, Coleridge wrote his
contribution to Joan of Arc between 1794 and 1795.  The Rose and
Kisses were written in 1793, and On a Discovery Made Too Late in
1794.  Could anybody, not knowing the dates, have believed that
these three poems last-named, if not written before the Joan of Arc,
were contemporaneous with it?  In the Joan of Arc Coleridge is
immature and led astray by politics, religion, and philosophy, but
in the three little poems where he has subjects akin to him he is
perfect, and could have done nothing better ten years later.  Still
more remarkable, Lewti, in its earliest form, cannot have been
written later than 1794, for it was originally addressed to Mary
Evans, from whom Coleridge parted in December 1794.  As an example
of the survival of his poetic power take Love's First Hope, written
probably in 1824:


'O fair is Love's first hope to gentle mind!
As Eve's first star thro' fleecy cloudlet peeping;
And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind,
O'er willowy meads, and shadow'd waters creeping,
And Ceres' golden field;--the sultry hind
Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping.'


Coleridge was indebted to Sir Philip Sidney for the third and fourth
lines, excepting 'o'er willowy meads,' but these three words and the
first and last two lines are his own.  Not only does his genius
survive, but emotion as pure and deep as that of the Nether Stowey
days or those preceding.  There is no trace of the interval between
them and those of 1824.


In the post-office at Kilve hangs an old trombone, a memento of the
time when the village orchestra assisted in the service at the
church.  How well I remember those artists and their jealousies!
The clarionet or 'clarnet,' as he called himself, caused much ill-
feeling because he drowned the others, and the double-bass strove
ineffectually to avenge himself.  The churchyard yew is one of the
largest I ever beheld--twenty feet in girth by measurement, four
feet from the ground.  A gay morning:  heavy, white masses of clouds
sailing over the hills; light most brilliant when the sun came out.
How singularly beautiful is a definitely outlined white cloud when
it is cut by the ridge of a hill!


Across the hills in a south-westerly storm of wind and rain to
Bicknoller.  A walk not to be forgotten:  overcast sky, dark moors;
clouds sweeping over them and obscuring them.  I should not have
found my way if I had not lost it when I went to Bicknoller before.
I then put three stones at the point where I afterwards discovered I
had gone astray.  These three stones saved me to-day.


Whitsunday morning:  sat at the open window between five and six:
the hills opposite lay in the light of the eastern sun.  Bicknoller
church and the little old village were beneath me.  Perfect
quietude, save for the bells of Stogumber church ringing a peal two
miles away.  Earth has nothing to give compared with this peace.
The air was so still that delicious mingled scents floated up from
the garden and fields below.  It was one of those days on which
every sense is satisfied, and no mortal imperfection appears.  Took
the Excursion out of doors after breakfast, and read The Ruined
Cottage.

Much of the religion by which Wordsworth lives is very indefinite.
Look at the close of this poem:-


'I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall
By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,
As once I pass'd, did to my heart convey
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.  I turn'd away,
And walk'd along my road in happiness.'


Because this religion is indefinite it is not therefore the less
supporting.

Why, by the way, did Wordsworth expunge from Michael these wonderful
lines?


'In his thoughts there were obscurities,
Wonder, and admiration, things that wrought
Not less than a religion in his heart.'


Something like them had been said before, but they ought to have
been retained.


The changes in the sky in this Quantock country are as sudden and
strange as in Cumberland.  During a walk from Cleeve Abbey to
Bicknoller it rained in torrents till within half a mile of the end
of my journey.  All at once it ceased, and the uniform sheet of
rain-cloud broke into loose ragged masses swirling in different
directions and variously lighted, the sun almost shining through
some of the clefts between them.  Cleeve Abbey, lying in the trough
of a green valley through which runs a stream, the cloister garth
and the Abbot's seat at the end of it, are most impressive.  Under
the turf lie the dead monks.  A place like this begets half-
unconscious dreaming which issues in nothing and is not wholesome.
It would be better employment to learn something about the history
of the abbey and about its architecture.


DETACHED QUANTOCK NOTES.


Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds' singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save where your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind.'


These lines from France were written by Coleridge when he was a
little over twenty-five years old.  In the combination of two gifts,
music and meaning, he is hardly surpassable at his best by any poet.
Not an atom of meaning is sacrificed to gain a melody:  in fact the
melody adds to the meaning.

Here is another example showing how the poetic form with Coleridge
is not a hindrance to expression, but aids it.


Gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures
Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures
The things of Nature utter; birds or trees,
Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves,
Or where the stiff grass 'mid the heath-plant waves,
Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.'


His similitudes are not mere external comparisons; the objects
compared become MODES of unity.  'A brisk gale and the foam that
peopled the ALIVE [italics C.'s] sea, most interestingly combined
with the number of white seagulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if
the foam-spit had taken life and wing, and had flown up.'


The intimations which are but whispered, the Presences which are but
half-disclosed, are those which we should intently obey.  The
coarsely obvious has its own strength.


   'She went forth alone
Urged by the indwelling angel-guide, that oft,
With dim inexplicable sympathies
Disquieting the heart, shapes out Man's course
To the predoomed adventure.'

Destiny of Nations.


Wordworth's habit of spending so much time in the open air and with
the humble people around him gives to what he says the value of
experience, distinguishable totally from the ideas of the literary
man, which may be brilliant, but do not agree with the sun, moon and
stars, and turn out to be nothing when we ask is the thing really
SO.

Wordsworth's verses have been in the sun and wind.  It is a test of
good sane writing that we can read it out of doors.


If Wordsworth's love of clouds and mountains ended there it would be
no better than the luxury of a refined taste.  But it does not end
there.  It affects the whole of his relationships with men and
women, and is therefore most practical.


In Wordsworth what we expect does not come, but in its place the
unexpected.  In the twelfth book of the Prelude he tells us:


There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master--outward sense
The obedient servant of her will.'


He then gives us one of these 'passages,' and what is it?  A day
when as a child he saw


'A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind.'


It was, as he says, an 'ordinary sight,' but


'Colours and words that are unknown to man'


would have failed him


'To paint the visionary dreariness'


which invested what he saw.

Years afterwards, when he revisited the spot, the 'loved one at his
side,' there fell on it


'A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more sublime
For these remembrances, and for the power
They had left behind?  So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.'


This was the experience, then, of 'distinct pre-eminence' in whose
recollection his mind was 'nourished and invisibly repaired.'  It is
in such a moment that the soul's strength is shown; when common
objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which
they are a suggestion.  Although he expands here and elsewhere he
does not elaborate.  He stops where the fact ends and shuns
abstractions.


'So taught, so trained, we boldly face
All accidents of time and place;
   Whatever props may fail,
Trust in that sovereign law can spread
New glory o'er the mountain's head,
   Fresh beauty through the vale.'


This is from The Wishing-Gate Destroyed, a late poem, not published
till 1842, when Wordsworth was seventy-two years old.  It is his
Nicene and Apostles' Creed and Thirty-Nine Articles.  Trust, with no
credentials but its own existence, and yet they are indisputable.


'Is it that Man is soon deprest?
A thoughtless Thing! who, once unblest,
Does little on his memory rest,
   Or on his reason.'

To the Daisy.


An example of Wordsworth's wisdom disclosing itself in his simplest
pieces.  For one sad conclusion to which the reason leads us, the
uncontrolled, baseless procedure in the brain which we call
thinking, but is really day-dreaming, leads us to a score.  Reason
on the whole is sanative.


'Blest Statesman He, whose Mind's unselfish will
Leaves him at ease among grand thoughts:  whose eye
Sees that, apart from magnanimity,
Wisdom exists not, nor the humbler skill
Of Prudence, disentangling good and ill
With patient care.'


Exist not.  We are befooled by words.  We conceive wisdom, prudence,
and magnanimity as distinct entities, without intercommunication.
If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of
definition!


Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that
which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.



GODWIN AND WORDSWORTH



(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901.  With added postscript.)

Dr. Emile Legouis, in his singularly interesting book, La Jeunesse
de William Wordsworth, well translated into English by Mr. T. W.
Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on
Wordsworth in his early years of Godwin's Political Justice.  On
reading Political Justice now, it is difficult to understand why
Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it.  Its philosophy,
if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of
conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and
the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate
nature.  'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31).
{205}  'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility
with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and
judge' (i. 57).  'Justice . . . is coincident with utility' (i.
121).  'If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder
outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was
my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my
exertions' (i. 83).  'But,' says an objector, 'your mother nourished
you in the helplessness of infancy.'  'When she first subjected
herself,' replies Godwin, 'to the necessity of these cares, she was
probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her
future offspring. . . .  It is the disposition of the mind . . .
that entitles to respect,' and consequently justice demands that I
should rescue the most meritorious person first.'  All moral science
may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future' (ii.
468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation.  The
statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on
engagements 'would be somewhat more accurate if we said "that it was
essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we
should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of
convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to
others from our conduct"' (i. 156).  The understanding is supreme in
us, and 'depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if
every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment' (i.
174).  Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or
even extinguish the strongest of all passions.  Marriage having been
denounced as 'the most odious of all monopolies' (ii. 850), Godwin
is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman
'the same preference that I do.'  'This,' says he, 'will create no
difficulty.  We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise
enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial
object.'  It was impossible not to acknowledge that the
understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding
whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest
balance of happiness.  Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately
came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the
welfare of mankind; but 'Calvin was unacquainted with the principles
of justice, and therefore could not practise them.  The duty of no
man can exceed his capacity' (i. 102).  As to Godwin's
necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in
order to explain it.  It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if
the question is to be settled by common logic.  'Volition is that
state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in
a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a
certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is
found to be produced' (i. 297).  'A knife has a capacity of cutting.
In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though
it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that
he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity' (i.
308).  'A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the
purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to
its employment.  The mode in which a knife is made subservient to
these purposes is by material impulse.  The mode in which a man is
made subservient is by inducement and persuasion.  But both are
equally the affair of necessity.  The man differs from the knife,
just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one
more way of being acted upon.  This additional way in man is motive,
in the candlestick is magnetism' (i. 309).

At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth
should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the
evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a
nightmare.  I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will
be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the
Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive.  "Throw aside your books of
chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple,
"and read Godwin on Necessity"' (Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, p. 49,
3rd edition).  Now it is a question, important historically, but
more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth's
temporary subjugation by Political Justice was due to pure
intellectual conviction.  I think not.  Coleridge noticed that
Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria.  He complains that
during the Scotch tour in 1803 'Wordsworth's hypochondriacal
feelings keep him silent and self-centred.'  He again says to
Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has 'occasional fits of
hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at
longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his
very childhood,' and that he has a 'hypochondriacal graft in his
nature.'  Wordsworth himself speaks of times when -


' . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness--and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.'


He is haunted with


' . . . the fear that kills,'


and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.

During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria
must have been greatly encouraged.  His hopes in the Revolution had
begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him
wretched.  He wandered about from place to place, unable to
conjecture what his future would be.  'I have been doing nothing,'
he tells Matthews, 'and still continue to do nothing.  What is to
become of me I know not.'  He proposed to start a Republican
magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring
whether he could get work on the London newspapers.  Hypochondriacal
misery is apt to take an intellectual shape.  The most hopeless
metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us,
and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease
assumes.  The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil
for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.


      'So I fared,
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours; now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of obligation, what the rule and whence
The sanction; till, demanding formal PROOF,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This was the crisis of that strong disease,
This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
Where wanted most:  "The lordly attributes
Of will and choice," I bitterly exclaimed,
"What are they but a mockery of a Being
Who hath in no concerns of his a test
Of good and evil; knows not what to fear
Or hope for, what to covet or to shun:
And who, if those could be discerned, would yet
Be little profited, would see, and ask,
Where is the obligation to enforce?"'


In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of
Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he
immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the
beginning of recovery.  It was obviously written to exhibit the
character of Oswald, the villain.  He is one of a band of outlaws,
and is jealous of the appointment of Marmaduke as chief.  His
revenge is a determination to make Marmaduke as guilty as himself.
Marmaduke is in love with Idonea, and Oswald, partly by inventing
lies about her blind father, Herbert, and partly by dexterous
sophistry derived from Political Justice, endeavours to persuade
Marmaduke to kill him.  Marmaduke hesitates, but is finally
overpowered.  Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he draws
him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish.  Oswald then
recounts his own story.  When he was on a voyage to Syria he had
believed on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by
his captain, and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die
in agony on a barren island.  Oswald discovered that he had been
deceived, but he declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being
somewhat stunned, he found himself emancipated:-


'Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way
Cleared for a monarch's progress.  Priests might spin
Their veil, but not for me--'twas in fit place
Among its kindred cobwebs.'


He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that
the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his
death was -


'I would have made us equal once again.'


This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin's parable by which he
illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul.
'When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,' etc. etc.  'Exactly
similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind' (i. 306-7).
Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:-


'But for the motive?'


and Wallace replies:-


   'Natures such as his
Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!'


The Borderers is stuffed full with Godwinism.  'Remorse,' exclaims
Oswald,


'It cannot live with thought; think on, think on,
And it will die.  What!  In this universe,
Where the least things control the greatest, where
The faintest breath that breathes can move a world;
What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,
A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been
Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.'


So Godwin:  'We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of
our own faults than of the faults of others' (i. 315).  The noxious
thing is now, however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object,
and when a man can cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is
three parts achieved.

There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned
confutation of Political Justice.  It was falsified in him by
Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister,
and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but
little intimacy with him till the summer of 1797, and the Borderers
was finished in 1796.  This, then, is the moral--to repeat what has
been said before--that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of
Wordsworth's stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of
vitality and the influx of joy they disappear.

One other observation.  Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself
with free will, necessity, and the like.  He knew such matters were
not for him.  Many problems may appear to be of great consequence,
but it is our duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us
away.


POSTSCRIPT


The most singular portion of Political Justice is that which deals
with Population, and some notice of it, by way of postscript, may be
pardoned, for it cannot be neglected in our estimate of Godwin, and
it is a curious instance of the futility of attempting to comprehend
character without searching into corners and examination of facts
which, judged by external bulk, are small.  These small facts may
contain principles which are constituent of the man.  The chapter on
Population occupies a few pages at the end of the second volume of
the Political Justice.

Godwin would like to see property equalised, or common, and he tries
to answer the argument that excessive population would ensue.  He
quotes (ii. 862) a reported conjecture of Franklin's that 'mind will
one day become omnipotent over matter.'  If over matter, which is
outside us, thinks Godwin, why not over our own bodies, 'in a word,
why may not man be one day immortal' (ii. 862).  He points out that
the mind already has great power over the body, that it can conquer
pain, assist in the cure of disease, and successfully resist old
age.

'Why is it that a mature man soon loses that elasticity of limb
which characterises the heedless gaiety of youth?  Because he
desists from youthful habits.  He assumes an air of dignity
incompatible with the lightness of childish sallies.  He is visited
and vexed with all the cares that rise out of our mistaken
institutions, and his heart is no longer satisfied and gay.  Hence
his limbs become stiff and unwieldy.  This is the forerunner of old
age and death' (ii. 863-64).  'Medicine may reasonably be stated to
consist of two branches, the animal and intellectual.  The latter of
these has been infinitely too much neglected' (ii. 869).  We may
look forward to a time when we shall be 'indifferent to the
gratifications of sense.  They please at present by their novelty,
that is because we know not how to estimate them.  They decay in the
decline of life indirectly because the system refuses them, but
directly and principally because they no longer excite the ardour
and passion of mind . . . The gratifications of sense please at
present by their imposture.  We soon learn to despise the mere
animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would
be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it, only as it happens
to be relieved by personal charms or mental excellence.  We absurdly
imagine that no better road can be found to the sympathy and
intercourse of minds.  But a very slight degree of attention might
convince us that this is a false road, full of danger and deception.
Why should I esteem another, or by another be esteemed?  For this
reason only, because esteem is due, and only so far as it is due.

'The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a
more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no
longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them.  In
addition to this they will perhaps be immortal.  The whole will be a
people of men, and not of children.  Generation will not succeed
generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her
career at the end of every thirty years.  There will be no war, no
crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no
government.  These latter articles are at no great distance; and it
is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to
see them in part accomplished.  But, besides this, there will be no
disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no resentment.  Every man
will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all' (ii. 870-72).

A very curious vein, not golden indeed but copper, let us say, is
hidden away in the earthy mass of Godwin.  The dull, heavy-featured
creature sees an apocalyptic vision and becomes poetical.  It is
partly absurd, but not because it is ideal, and there are lineaments
in it of the true Utopia.  Godwin probably would have denounced the
Revelation of St. John the Divine as superstitious nonsense, but he
saw before him a kind of misty, distorted reflection of the New
Jerusalem, in which there shall be no more death, neither sorrow,
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall
be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun.  It
might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a
connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first
postulate of Euclid's elements holds good universally, 'that a
straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point.'



NOTES



Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris.--HOR.  Sat., II. i. 30.

Nothing is more dangerous than a mass of discontent which does not
know what remedy is to be sought.  All sorts of cures will be tried,
many of them mere quackery, and their failure will make matters
worse.


Whatever may be the meaning of the process of the world, however
disheartening some steps in its evolution may be, they are
necessary, and without them, perhaps, some evil could not thoroughly
have been worked out.


People often manifest a diseased desire to express their will.  A
theory is adopted, not because the facts force it upon them, but
because its adoption shows their power.  The larger, the freer the
nature, the less there is of this action of the will, the more the
mind is led.


A mere dream, a vague hope may be more potent than certainty in a
lesser matter.  The faintest vision of God is more determinative of
life than a gross earthly certainty.


The more nearly the performer on a musical instrument approaches
perfection, the larger is that part of his execution which is
unconscious.  Consciousness arises with defect, or sense of
something to be overcome.  How conscious we are when striving to
think and work in ill-health!


The highest education is that which teaches us to guide ourselves by
motives which are intangible, remote, incapable of direct and
material appreciation.


Weak minds find confirmation of their beliefs in the discovery of
the same beliefs in other people.  They do not take the trouble to
find out how their neighbours obtained these beliefs.  If they are
current at the time, the probability is that the coincidence is
worthless as any evidence of validity.


The certainty which comes of intelligent conviction is a tempered
certainty.  Its possessor knows the difficulty of the path by which
he has reached it, and the reasons which on his way have appeared so
potent against it.  Fanaticism is the accompaniment of conclusions
which are not the result of reason.


To understand a thing is to understand all its laws.  The thing is
then nothing but law, and mere matter seems to disappear.


What is it which governs the selection of truths which make up
religions?  Why are this and that chosen?  Has not the selection a
damaging effect upon the great body of truth?


Every action should be an end in itself as well as a means.  The end
of getting up in the morning, as Goethe says, is getting up.


We are always searching for something extraordinary which shall give
life its pleasure and value.  The extraordinary must be contributed
by our own minds and feelings.


The real object in any human being of my love and worship is that
which is not in any table of virtues, nor can I in any way describe
it:  it is something which perpetually escapes, which is not to be
found in anything said or done.


It is a common mistake to demand a definition of that which can have
none.  We loosely cover a mass of phenomena which are diverse with a
single word.  For example, we puzzle over a definition of life, but
there is no such thing as life in the sense of a single, distinct
entity.


Religion has done harm by assigning an artificial urgency to
insoluble problems.  We are all told that we must be certain on
matters concerning which the wisest man is ignorant.  When we begin
to reflect and to doubt, the urgency unhappily remains and we are
distressed.


I know a man who had to encounter three successive trials of all the
courage and inventive faculty in him.  If he had failed in one he
would have been ruined.  The odds were desperate against him in
each, and against ultimate victory were overwhelming.  Nevertheless
he made the attempt and was triumphant almost by a miracle in each
struggle.  How often calculation is folly and cowardice!


Before we can hear the Divine Voice we must shut out all other
voices, so that we may be able to listen, to discern its faintest
whisper.  The most precious messages are those which are whispered.


A negative may be really positive.  It depends on the extent of that
which the negative excludes.  If I say of hydrogen that it is not
oxygen, nothing is gained.  If I say it is not a fluid nor a solid,
more is gained.  So in the determinations of Spirit, God, etc.,
although we use negatives, the results may be of value.


True mental training is a discipline compelling us to DWELL on that
which is presented to us, to discover what unites it to other
objects and what differentiates it from them.  To the untrained mind
creation is a blur.  The moral effect on a child of teaching it to
express distinction by significant words is great.


'Ought' is a singular instance of the confusion wrought by words and
of their inefficiency.  There is no single 'ought' and therefore no
science of the obligation it implies.  'Ought' in the phrase 'you
ought to speak the truth' refers to an instinct in us to report
veraciously what we see.  'Ought' of self-sacrifice refers to love,
and 'ought' of sobriety to the subordination of desires, to a
difference in their authority of which we can give no account,
excepting that we are creatures fashioned in a certain way.


In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves:
we are inaccurate, say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense.
When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of
ourselves.  Never go near these people.


What cardboard puppets are the creations of fiction compared with a
common man or woman intimately known!


How much of what I say is an echo; how little is myself!  Sometimes
it seems as if my real self were nothing and that what stands for it
were a mere miscellany of odds and ends picked up here and there.
What a Self is the Jesus of the Gospels!


A cousin of mine had an evening class of poor girls.  She was trying
to explain to them the words 'liquid' and 'solid.'

'You walked over the bridge; it was a hard road.'

'Yes, teacher.'

'If you had gone down by the side of the bridge you could not have
walked across there?'

'No, teacher.'

'If you were to try and were to put your feet on the water, where
would you go?'

'To hell, teacher.'

The association of the question, 'Where would you go?' was too
strong.


This sunset, which is common to the whole county, is more to me than
anything exclusively mine.


If emotion be profound, symbolism, as a means of expression, is
indispensable.


There would be no objection to 'telling the truth' about Burns,
Byron, and Shelley if it could be told.  But it cannot be told.  We
are informed that they did this or that, and the thing they did is
to us what it would be if done by ourselves.


We are most vain of that which is least ourselves, of that which is
acquired, put on, stuck in.  It is not correct to say that a woman
is vain of her beauty.


Controversy is demoralising.  Never suffer yourself to become an
advocate.  Never rely on controversy to convince.  Say what you have
to say and leave it.  DO it if you wish to persuade.


People are often unkind, not from malignity, but from ineptitude.


It is of the greatest importance continually to bear in mind that
the violation of a law personal to myself is as immoral as the
violation of a general law, and may be more mischievous.


To die is easy when we are in perfect health.  On a fine spring
morning, out of doors, on the downs, mind and body sound and
exhilarated, it would be nothing to lie down on the turf and pass
away.


What we want is wise counsel on particular occasions.  Principles we
can get by the bushel anywhere.  The reason why our friends are so
useless is that they will not take trouble.  The selection and the
application of the principle are difficult.


It is terrible to live with a person who has a strong, narrow sense
of duty without further-reaching thought or love by which the
rigidity of duty may be softened.


By the third, which is neither ourselves nor the object, do we
recognise it.  The third is the celestial light.


It is appalling to reflect that there are enormous masses of human
energy which can find no proper outlet.  The consequence is mischief
either through expression in any direction and at any cost, or
through suppression.  We want an organisation of energy, one of the
noblest offices of a true church.


The tyranny of the imagination is perhaps that which is most to be
dreaded.  By strength of will we can prevent an act, but no strength
of will is able to prevent the invasion of self-created pictures.
The only remedies are health and indifference to them when they
present themselves.  If we worry ourselves about them they become
worse.  If we let them alone they fade and we forget them.


Thinking much upon insoluble problems is apt to breed superstition
even in the strongest minds.  The failure of the reason weakens our
reliance on it, and the difference between the incomprehensible and
the absurd is very fine.


In this howling Bedlam of voices, it is of no use to talk or write--
no man, if he has anything to say, can be heard.  He is reviewed to-
day and forgotten to-morrow.  To soothe the pangs of a single
sufferer, to drain a poor man's cottage and give him wholesome
drinking water, are good things done of which we can be sure.


Life is a matter of small virtues, but we have to bring them to
perfection.  This may be done by great principles.  The humblest act
may proceed from that which is beyond the stars.


What a vile antithesis is that between a man and his faults!  If I
love a man, I do not love his faults, for they are abstractions, but
I love the man IN his faults.  Are they not truly himself?  He is
often more himself in his faults than in his virtues.


We should not talk as if we were responsible for the effect of what
we say.  We are responsible for saying it, and for nothing more.  A
higher power is responsible for the effect which is to follow from
each cause.


Wisdom for old age.--Check the propensity to dwell on what you have
thought before.  Try to get new ideas into your head.  Beware of
giving trouble or asking for sympathy.  Do everything yourself,
which you have been in the habit of doing, so long as you can move a
muscle, and when you cannot, secure, if possible, paid help:  watch
what the most devoted of friends or relatives say of continued
attendance on the sick:  note the relief when the sick man dies.
Let not the thought sadden you that six weeks after you are in your
grave those to whom you are now dear will be laughing and living
just as if you had never existed.  Why should they not?  Are you of
such consequence that they should for ever wear mourning for you?  A
slow march as you are carried to the churchyard, but when a handful
of earth has been thrown on your coffin, let everybody go home to
draw up the blinds and open the windows.  So much dead already, all
passion, so many capacities for enjoyment, why care for this
miserable residuum, this poor empty _I_?


Clear vision is not often the cause of distress.  It is rather the
cloud of imagination distorting what is before us and preventing
distinct view.  Science, removing the heavens to an infinite
distance, destroying traditions, abolishing our little theologies,
does not disturb our peace so seriously as that vague dreaming in
which there is no thinking.


Ah, it is not a quarrel which is so deadly!  It is the strange
transformation of what were once thought to be charms and virtues.
The soft blue eyes are now simply silly; innocence is stupidity;
docility is incapacity of resolution; the sweet, even temper is
absence of passion.


Is it true that less evidence is necessary to prove an event which
is probable than one that is improbable?  The probability of an
event is no evidence that it actually happened.  Its probability may
be the reason why we should examine the evidence more closely,
because witnesses are more likely, in the case of a probable event,
to refrain from scrutiny than in the case of one not probable.  I
sit at my window and see a whitish object with four legs in a field.
I am short-sighted, but I at once say 'a cow,' and take no pains to
ascertain whether it is a cow or not.  If I had seen a white object
apparently with three legs only, I should have gone out, inspected
it closely, and should have called other people to look at it.


I pray for a gift which perhaps would be miraculous:  simply to be
able to see that field of waving grass as I should see it if
association and the 'film of custom' did not obscure it.


Why do we admire intellect when it is united with even diabolic
disregard of moral laws?  Partly because it stands out more
prominently; partly because it triumphs over obstacles; but mainly
because we are all more or less in sympathy with insurrection and
the assertion of individuality.


As we move higher, personality becomes of less consequence.  We do
not live in the 'I,' but in truths.  Something of a metaphysical
hint here.


Principles are dangerous tools for a fool.  What awful mischief they
have done!


Never was there a time in which men were less governed by ideas.
The Church and the sects are neither Calvinist nor Arminian,
orthodox nor rational, and in politics an idea damns a measure at
once.


We have no capitalised happiness, nothing on which to draw when
temporary sources fail.


A decided bent or twist, is not unsuitable in a man, but I do not
care for it in a woman.  I love that equipoise in the faces of the
Greek women in the old statues and sculptures.  It appears also in
some pictures of the Virgin.


The duty of the State as to toleration cannot be decided by an
appeal to rights.  Everybody admits that government is sometimes
justified in suppressing what is honestly believed.  But if
government had not been resisted we should have had no Christianity.
The vindication of the authority of the State is a vindication of
persecution, and if we dispute this authority we cannot logically
disallow dangerous licence.  There is no way out of the difficulty
so long as we generalise.  Toleration is an abstraction, nothing but
a word.  What we have to decide is, whether it is wise or unwise to
send to prison the people now before us who preach bigamy,
assassination of kings, or theological heresy.


When we struggle to see more than we possibly can see we undervalue
what we indubitably see.


There is but little thinking, or perhaps it is more correct to say
but little reflection, in the Bible.  There is profound sympathy
with a few truths, but ideas are not sought for their own sake.
Carlyle is Biblical.  It has been said scoffingly that he is no
thinker.  It is his glory that he is not.


What we have toiled after painfully often lies unused.  No
opportunity occurs for saying or doing a tithe of it.  The hour
demands its own special wisdom.


When we really love we cannot believe that our love is mortal.  We
feel, not only that it is immortal, but that it is eternal, in the
sense in which Spinoza uses the word.  It is not the attraction of
something entirely limited and personal to that which is also
limited and personal.


We think of rest as natural to bodies, and motion as something
added.  But the new doctrine is that motion is primary.  Nothing is
at rest, and, so far as we know, rest has never been.  It is an
astounding conception.


There is a certain distance at which each person whom we know is
naturally placed from us.  It varies with each, and we must not
attempt to alter it.  We may clasp him who is close, and we are not
to pull closer him who is more remote.


Many people would be much better if they would let themselves be as
good as they really are.  They seem to take delight in making
themselves less.


We are much misled by characters in fiction or on the stage, for
they are always more consistent than men and women in real life.
Real men and women are seldom controlled for twenty-four hours by
the same motives or principles.  If my friend is mean to-day, let me
not doubt his generosity to-morrow.  Let me joyously believe in it
when the morrow comes.


What a pest is the re-appearance in us of discarded conclusions!  It
would be of service if we could keep a register of those things
which, after careful examination, we have determined to be false.


Acting from the strongest motives, even if they are bad, is perhaps
not so dangerous as acting from none.  The evils which arise through
deeds done from conspicuous motives attract attention, but the vast
sum of misery caused by mere idle, irresolute swaying hither and
thither passes unnoticed.


Pig-headedness is often a sign of weakness of will.  The pig-headed
person knows he is weak, and to convince himself and others of his
resolution holds to any chance purpose with tenacity.  The less
reasonable the purpose is, the more obstinately he clings to it,
because, by so doing, he shows as he thinks his strength of
volition.


If we desire peace we must get beyond the notion of personality.
Nothing of any value is bound up with it:  it is an illusion.


Intense feeling gives intellectual precision.  The man who feels
profoundly the beauty of a cloud is the man who can describe it.
But the first effect of intense feeling is often to break up false
precision.  The ideas of God, life, personality, right and wrong,
are examples.


The blue sky is more beautiful because we know it is not painted
opacity, but transparent.


The slowness of the change in the sky is exquisite, the dying out of
the light in the clouds after sunset.  The quiet abiding of the grey
cloud as darkness thickens is wonderful.


June--Sky and sea pure blue.  The blue tint suffuses the distant
vessels.  One large sailing ship with sails all set is so blue that
it differs only by a shade from sky and sea.


It is not true that guileless people are the most easily deceived.
S. G. is not sharp-witted, but she is transparent as a pool of rain
on meadow grass, and consequently it is impossible to deceive her,
and ridiculous to attempt it:  her eyes forbid it.  She does not
infer insincerity:  it is automatically rejected.


July.--North-easterly wind, strong:  hateful in the streets and even
in the house:  dust everywhere.  Inclined to shut the windows and
stay indoors, but went out for a long walk up to the flag-staff.  A
perfect day for that view.  The bay all shades of blue; here and
there deep, and, inshore, the blue is broken with pure white from
the tops of the waves:  the yellow beach to the farthest point
clasping the sea like an arm.  So beautiful that it gives pain:  it
is not possible to extend oneself to it.


Whether truth does or does not lie in the mean depends on the
selection of the extremes.  A mechanical choice of the mean is
stupidity.


The Athanasian Creed is not objectionable because of its damnatory
clauses.  Neglect to observe the finest distinctions continually
involves damnation.  The difference between a vice and a virtue may
be a hair-line.  The true reason for rejecting the Creed is that it
is manufactured, that it is not a statement of what is seen and felt
to be true.  There is nevertheless a certain dogmatic pride in it, a
desire to affirm as offensively as possible.


The peace which orthodox religion is said to bring is obtained by
clipping the Infinite and reducing it to a finite.  The joy of
INCLUSION is great but false.


'And thy fats shall overflow with new wine'--Proverbs iii. 10,
Revised Version.  Called on A. in London.  I forget how it came
about, but in course of conversation he asked me if 'fats' were not
a mistake for 'vats.'  I told him it was not, turning up the word in
the dictionary as an equivalent to 'vats.'  Called on his sister,
who was staying three or four miles away and had come up to town
that afternoon from the country where she lived.  That very evening
she asked me the same question her brother had asked.  She had not
seen him, nor held any communication with him on the subject, nor
had it been suggested to them by any person or book.  Moreover,
neither of them is a frequent reader of the Bible.  Yesterday I told
the story to A. in his sister's presence.  She confirmed it, and A.,
who is accustomed to scientific investigation, was quite unable to
account for it.  If a jury were trying a prisoner charged with
murder, and an equally singular concurrence of circumstances were in
evidence against him, they would not hesitate to hang him.


If you are very short-sighted or half blind, it is safer in the
twilight to shut the eyes and depend entirely on the touch in moving
about.


The books on the adjustment of astronomical instruments say that if
there is a slight error, it is better always to make allowance for
it than to attempt to correct it.


The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat IS the sun, here
on this window-ledge.


The contact of a SYSTEM of philosophy or religion with reality is
that of a tangent with a circle.  It touches the circle at one
point, but instantly the circle edges away.


In every man there is something of the Universal Spirit, strangely
limited by that which is finite and personal, but still there.
Occasionally it makes itself known in a word, look, or gesture, and
then he becomes one with the stars and sea.


We cannot really understand a religion unless we have believed it.


We ought to cultivate strength of will by doing what we have once
decided to do.  Subsequent reasons for not doing it may appear
plausible, but it will generally be better to adhere to our first
resolution.  The advantage gained by change will not be equal to
that derived from persistence.


Never be afraid of being commonplace.  Never turn aside from the
truth because it is commonplace.


A nightmare is not scattered while we are asleep.  It disappears
simply by--WAKING.


Cursed temperament.--A long drought broke up.  The grass had been
burnt, and the cattle were dying for want of water.  In one week two
inches of rain fell.

A.  'What a blessing this rain is!'

B.  'Yes, but a reaction is sure to follow.  I've noticed that after
weather like this we always have a spell of dry, northerly winds.'


The prompter which urges us on from one point to another, never
discouraged by failure to see in the present moment what it seemed
to possess when we pursued it, or rather, not permitting us to stop
to find out if there be any failure--this it is by which we live.
When it departs it is time to die.


January.--The wind is north-west after yesterday's fog and rain from
the south.  Suddenly and silently, just after sunset, the whole
south-western sky has blazed up, passing from glowing flame-colour
on the horizon to carmine on the zenith.  Between the promontories
of cloud are lakes and gulfs of the tenderest green and blue.  What
magnificent pomp, fit to celebrate the death of a god for the
world's salvation!  But there is nothing below to explain it.  It
must be a spectacle displayed for celestial reasons altogether
hidden.


Much misunderstanding would be prevented if we were to say exactly
what we believe and not modify it to suit, as we suppose, the person
to whom we speak.


Humour people sometimes in what you do, but not in the expression of
your convictions.  Go a mile out of your way to please an obstinate
friend, but utter with precision what you believe.  It is in the
sharpness and finish that its value lies.


Everybody in these civilised, intercommunicative days seems
arrested:  everybody is a compromise.  It is rare that we meet with
a person who has been let alone, whose own particular self has been
developed free from intrusion.


People believe the truth more readily if something difficult of
belief or incredible is mixed with it.


I want no more beliefs.  What I want is active strength in those I
have.  I know there is no ghost round the corner, but I dare not go.


There is always a point in our insistence or persuasion when it is
most effective, and generally it is much lower than we suppose.  One
degree above it is waste and impediment.


Keep a watch upon your tongue when you are in particularly good
health.


Early morning before sunrise:  the valley was filled with mist; red
clouds in the sky.  For a minute or two the mist took the colour,
but fainter, of the clouds.  What patience is required in order to
see!  The sun had not risen, the grass in the field was obviously
green, but not without intent fixture of the eyes upon it was the
dark, twilight shade of green recognised which was its peculiar
meaning and beauty.  To most of us, perhaps not to artists, it is
more difficult to look than to think.


The just judgment is not that of the judge who has no interest in
it.  The most unjust judgments are due to indifference.


The sun is setting in crimson, delicate blue and green.  I think of
the earth as a revolving ball.  'This was the Creator's design, or,
if we prefer so to speak, this was the law, that there should be a
ball and that it should turn on its axis.  But just as surely was it
the design or law that there should be these colours, crimson, blue,
and green, and that I should be affected by them.  This affection
was rolled up in the primal impulse which started the planet and is
as necessary as its revolution.


Zeal in proselytising is often due to an uneasy suspicion that we
only half-believe.


We should take pains to be polite to those whom we love.  Politeness
preserves love, is a kind of sheath to it.


The hornbeam hedge is coming into leaf in patches although all parts
of each side face the same point of the compass.  The leaves of some
patches are fully expanded, while in others they are only in bud.
The dry, brown, dead leaves of last year have remained through the
winter and early spring, but they are dropping off now that the new
leaves begin to shoot.


We ought not to expect every child to be religious.  The religious
temper is an endowment like that for painting or poetry.


A. and B. meet on the road.  B. is a retired official and has
nothing to do.

B.  'Meant to have come to see you several times' (has not called
for nine months), 'but I have so many engagements.'  (Shows a
basket.)  'Look here, just had to take some eggs to C. for my wife.'


'If a man turns to Christ, nothing in him is to be left behind.
Every passion must be brought to Him to be transformed by Him.
Otherwise the man does not come, but only a part of him.'  [Said to
me years ago by a pious friend now dead.]


The real proportion between vice and virtue in a man is often
misjudged because the vice is before us continually, while the
virtue does not obtrude.


If you are to live in happiness and peace with the woman you love,
you must not permit the daily course of life to have its way
unchecked.  There must be hours of removal to a distance when in
silence you create anew her ideal and proper form, when you think of
her as sculptured in white marble.


Blacksmiths forging one on this side of the anvil and the other on
the opposite side.  Each keeps his own time, not regulating his
stroke by watching his mate.


There is in man an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever
you like to call it.  If a course is not cut for it, it turns the
ground round it into a swamp.


Went into the cathedral and heard morning service.  Miracle of
miracles!  Into the soul of a carpenter's son more than eighteen
centuries ago came a thought, and it is returned to us to-day in
majestic architecture, music of voice and organ.


Disbelief in Christianity is not so much to be dreaded as its
acceptance with a complete denial of it in society and politics.


The love that has lasted for years; which has resisted all weakness
and defect; has been constant in all moods and circumstances better
and worse; has exacted nothing; has been content with silence;
always soft and easy as the circumambient air, a love with no
reserve; what is there in any relationship to person or thing worth
a straw compared with it!


We ought to endeavour to give our dreams reality, but in Reality we
should preserve the dream.


If her unhappiness does not destroy my happiness, and if her
happiness does not make me happy, I do not love her.


There are problems which cannot be solved, for directly we have
stated them, as we suppose, they elude the statement and are
outside.  Who can say what is the meaning of the question, 'Does God
exist?'


There is always a multitude of reasons both in favour of doing a
thing and against doing it.  The art of debate lies in presenting
them; the art of life in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.


How beautiful is a rapid rivulet trying to clear itself from
stirred-up mud.


The most foolish things we say are said from another person's point
of view and not from our own.


On a siding at one of the stations on the Great Western Railway were
a number of old engines waiting to be broken up.  There they stood,
uncleaned, their bright parts rusted and indistinguishable from the
others.  Some were back to back and some front to front.  There they
stood and saw the expresses rush past them with their new engines.


Went out this afternoon to call on C. and his wife.  They are
certainly the most cultivated people I know.  They travel a good
deal, and each of them can speak two or three languages besides
English.  They read the best books, and do not read those which are
bad.  Some friends were there, and I was entertained with
intelligent criticism of literature, music, and pictures, and
learned much that was worth knowing.  But I came away unsatisfied,
and rather dazed.  On my way back--it was a singularly warm, clear
evening in February--I turned in to see an old lady who lives near
me.  She was sitting wrapped up at her wide-open window, looking at
the light that was still left in the south-west.  I said, of course,
that I hoped she would not take cold.  'Oh no,' she replied, 'I
often sit here, and so long as I keep myself warm I come to no harm.
I cannot read by candlelight, and I am thankful that this room faces
the south.  I know the stars much better than when I was young.'  I
took the chair beside her, and for ten minutes neither of us spoke,
but I was not conscious for an instant of the disagreeable feeling
that silence must be broken, and search be made for something with
which to break it.  If two persons are friends in the best sense of
the word, they are not uncomfortable if they do not talk when they
are together.  Presently she told me that she had received news that
morning of the birth of a granddaughter.  She was much pleased.  The
mother already had two sons and desired a girl.  I stayed for about
half an hour, and went home in debt to her for peace.


Bacon observes that whatever the mind seizes and dwells upon with
peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion.  Naturally so,
because it is nearly certain to be something merely personal to
ourselves.


Excepting in one word, the betrayal of Jesus, the defection of
Peter, the examination before Pilate and Herod, and the crucifixion,
are recorded, as Spedding notices, without any vituperation.  The
excepted word, not named by Spedding, is 'blasphemously' (Luke xxii.
65). {250}


Coleridge says that great minds are never wrong but in consequence
of being right, which is perfectly true; but it may be added that
they are also right through being wrong.


'When he is moderate and regular in any of these things, out of a
sense of Christian sobriety and self-denial, that he may offer unto
God a more reasonable and holy life, then it is, that the smallest
rule of this kind is naturally the beginning of great piety.  For
the smallest rule in these matters is of great benefit, as it
teaches us some part of the government of ourselves, as it keeps up
a tenderness of mind, as it presents God often to our thoughts, and
brings a sense of religion into the ordinary actions of our common
life.'--(Law's Serious Call.)  Men are restrained by fear of
consequences, but it is Law's rule which gives strength and dignity.
Living in a certain way because Perfection demands it produces a
result different from that obtained by living in the same way
through fear of injury to health.


Man is the revelation of the Infinite, and it does not become finite
in him.  It remains the Infinite.

Luther says somewhere, 'Do not anxiously search for the pillars
which are to keep the sky from falling.'  Many of us have been
afraid all our lives that the sky would fall, and have anxiously
searched for the pillars.  There are none, and yet the sky will not
fall.


Idolatry is the worship of that which is non-significant.  The
worship of one God, as Coleridge says, may be idolatry.


What a man is conscious of, is not himself, but that which is not
himself.  Without a belief in the existence of an external world, I
could not believe in my own existence.


The dialectic of Socrates is positive in so far as it shows the
futility of reasoning as a means of reaching the truth.  If we wish
to know whether courage is knowledge, we must face imminent danger.


The omnipotence of God--that is to say, absolute omnipotence, a
power which knows no resistance--is an utterly inconceivable
abstraction.  Yet much speculation is based on it.


There is a great reserve of incomprehensibility in all the few
friends for whom I really care.  It is better that it should be so.
What would a comprehensible friend be worth?  The impenetrable
background gives the beauty to that which is in front of it.  The
most unfathomable also of my friends are those who are most sincere
and luminous.


Note on a picture.--The sea-shore; low cliffs topped with grass; a
small cove; the open sea, calm, intensely blue; sky also deep blue,
but towards the horizon there are soft, white clouds.  On a little
sandy ridge sit a brown fisher-boy and fisher-girl, immortal as the
sea, cliffs, and clouds which are a setting or frame for them.


The strength of the argument in favour of a philosophy or religion
is proportionate to the applicability of the philosophy or religion
to life.  If in all situations we find it ready, it is true.


Bacon observes that 'interpretations' of Nature, that is to say real
generalisations elicited from facts by a just and methodical
process, 'cannot suddenly strike the understanding' like
'anticipations' collected from a few instances.  I have often
noticed that 'striking' is seldom a sign of truth, and that those
things which are most true, the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables
for example, do not 'strike.'


We foolishly exaggerate ingratitude to us.  Ought we to require of
those whom we have served, that they should be always confessing
their obligations to us?  Why should we care about neglect?  'Seek
Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of
death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth
for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the
earth:  The Lord is His name,'


The worship of the idol is often more passionate than that of God.
People prostrate themselves in ecstasy before the idol, and remain
unmoved in the presence of a starry night.  A starry night does not
provoke hysterics.  The adoration of the veritably divine is calm.


'It is a sad thing,' said she, 'that so kind and good a man should
be an infidel.'  'It is a sad thing to me,' said her terrible
sister, 'that an infidel should be what you call kind and good.'


Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit. {254}
Quoted by Montaigne (Of Presumption) from Lactantius.
Characteristic of Montaigne and true, so far that a man can know
nothing thoroughly unless the knowledge be a necessity.


 'Certainty of knowledge,' says Dr. Johnson in the Idler (No. 84),
'not only excludes mistake, but fortifies veracity. . . .  That
which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of
understanding, and alarm of conscience:  of understanding, the lover
of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.'

At the present day we are chiefly taken up with that which is beyond
our grasp.  Our literature is the newspapers, and nine-tenths of
what we read in them morning and evening we do not understand.
Everybody is expected to take sides in politics, but not one person
in a thousand can give an intelligible account of political
questions.  The difficulty of so doing is much increased by the
absence of systematic information.  We get leading articles and
columns of telegrams, but seldom concise exposition or carefully
edited and connected history.

An object is of importance to us in inverse proportion to the square
of the distance, but men worry themselves about the news from China
and will not give five minutes' thought in a week to their own souls
or to those of wife or child.  It is pathetic to see how excited
they become about remote events which cannot affect their happiness
one iota.  Why should we not occupy ourselves with that which is
definite when there is so much of it?  Political problems confront
us, but if they are too big for us, let us avoid them by every means
in our power.  If we are in doubt we ought not to vote.  The
question which we are incapable of settling will be settled better
by Time than by the intermeddling of ignorance.

In religion, and science also, we dare not say I DO NOT KNOW.  We
must always be dabbling in matters on which we can come to no
conclusion worth a rotten nut.  We busy ourselves with essays on the
dates and composition of the books of the Old Testament and cannot
tell the story of Joshua or Saul; we listen to lectures on radium,
or the probable exhaustion of the sun's energy, and have never
learned the laws of motion.  Few people estimate properly the evil
of habitual intercourse with that which is vague and indeterminate.
The issues before us not being clearly cut and comprehensible, the
highest faculties of our minds are not exercised.  We lazily wander
over the surface without coming to a definite conclusion.  Perhaps
we pick up by chance some irrational notion, which we defend with
obstinacy, for we are more dogmatic concerning that which we cannot
prove than we are concerning a truth which is incontrovertible.  The
former is our own personal property, the latter is common.  One step
further, and by constantly affirming and denying when we have no
demonstration, lying becomes easy.

There is much which is called criticism that is poisonous, not
because it is mistaken, but because it invites people to assert
beyond their knowledge or capacity.  A popular lecturer discusses
the errors of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot
before an audience but superficially acquainted with the works of
these great authors and not qualified to pass judgment upon them.
He is considered 'cheap' if he does not balance


'His wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss.'


If we will be content with admiring, we are on much surer ground.
It is by admiration and not by criticism that we live, and the main
purpose of criticism should be to point out something to admire,
which we should not have noticed.  One great advantage of studying
Nature is that we are not tempted to criticise her.  We go to the
Academy, and for a whole morning contrast faults with merits.  If
the time so spent had been passed in the fields with the clouds we
should have gone home less conceited.


It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its
very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by
weakness and wilfulness, lies the TRUTH as it is, exact without
qualification.


The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing.  What I was
fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self-
control, with no greater magnanimity.  How much I might have gained
had I taken life as an art I cannot say.


I have been looking at a cabinet of flies.  Hundreds of them, each
different, were arranged in order and named.  Some I had to examine
through a microscope.  Their beauty was marvellous, but more
marvellous was their variety.  The differences, although the type
was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke
down.  If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it
confined to one species?  Why this range of colour?  Why these
purely fantastic forms?  The only word we can say with certainty is
that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression.  Verum ego
me satis clare ostendisse puto, a summa Dei potentia sive infinita
natura infinita infinitis modis, hoc est, omnia necessario
effluxisse, vel semper eadem necessitate sequi; eodem modo, ac ex
natura trianguli ab aeterno et in aeternum sequitur ejus tres
angulos aequari duobus rectis.  Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab
aeterno fuit et in aeternum in eadem actualitate manebit.


Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in
the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight.  'None
would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other
subjects have eluded their hopes . . .  That misery does not make
all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less
certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the
greatest part.'


There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must
not be disappointed if it passes without great passion.  We must
expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary
bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without
excitement.


I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life's journey
through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through,
but nobody has told me of it.


How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat!  It silently departs, the
iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives!


'Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed,
If haply the heart that burned within the rose,
The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead?
If haply the wind that slays with storming snows
Be one with the wind that quickens?'
SWINBURNE, A Reminiscence.


With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante
culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure.  Amos and Isaiah do
not deal in ideas.  Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the
keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong.  They
repeat the work of God the Creator:  chaotic sameness becomes
diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and
there is Darkness.



SHAKESPEARE



'Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator!'
(Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Landor).

2 Henry VI. iii. 3.--The lines beginning with the one which follows
are not in the old play and are Shakespeare's own:


'O thou eternal Mover of the heavens,' etc.


Johnson's note is:  'This is one of the scenes which have been
applauded by the criticks, and which will continue to be admired
when prejudices shall cease, and bigotry give way to impartial
examination.  These are beauties that rise out of nature and of
truth; the superficial reader cannot miss them, the profound can
image nothing beyond them.'  We talk idly of Johnson's pompous
redundance.  His sentences are balanced, and it is therefore
supposed that the second part repeats the first, but the truth is
that each part contains a new thought.  It was his manner to throw
successive ideas into this form.  Those who are acquainted with his
history and his awful mental struggles will find infinite pathos in
this restrained comment.


Midsummer Night's Dream.--Shakespeare's overlooking quality, as that
of a god surveying human affairs, is shown in this play:


'When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision.'
. . .
'Her dotage now I do begin to pity.'
. . .
'And think no more of this night's accidents
But as the fierce vexation of a dream.'
. . .


All this night's storm from a drop of magic juice!  Oberon has been
watching Titania's courtship of Bottom.  She sleeps, and he touches
her eyes with Dian's bud:


'Now, my Titania, wake you, my sweet queen'


Romeo and Juliet.--The love of Juliet is a thing altogether by
itself, not to be classed, never anticipated by any other author,
and not imitable.  It is sensuous.  Look at her soliloquy, 'Gallop
apace, you fiery-footed steeds,' etc., and yet it is woven through
and through with immortal threads of fidelity and contempt of death:


'O! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower.
. . .
Or bid me go into a new-made grave.'


How great this girl is!  If I were to meet her, how I should be
awed!  The Juliets I have seen on the stage fail here.  They do not
bend my knees in that adoration which is inspired by the sea and
stars.  The love of Romeo for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo does
not stimulate passion, but rather controls it.  I never become hot
in reading the play.  What a solemnity there is in its movement!
The lovers are not merely two human beings with no other meaning.
The Eternal Powers are at work throughout.  Romeo's love for
Rosaline is taken over from Brooke's poem.  Shakespeare adds the
touch that it was not genuine.  He makes Friar Laurence say:


   'O she knew well!
Thy love did read by rote, and could not spell.'


The love for Rosaline is different altogether from the love for
Juliet.


   'O heavy lightness! serious vanity!'


is artificial.

Shakespeare also follows Brooke in Juliet's momentary outburst
against Romeo when she hears of Tybalt's death, but the
contradiction of the echo by the nurse is Shakespeare's own:


   'Blister'd be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.'


Apart from the quarrel between the Montagus and Capulets, we feel
that the love between Romeo and Juliet could have no other than a
tragic end.  This world of ours conspires against such passion.


I Henry IV. v. 4 -

'O Harry, thou hast robb'd me of my youth!
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:
But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.'


The last three lines are not melancholy philosophising.  As such
they would be out of place coming from Hotspur.  They are
consolation and joy.  Death will extinguish for us the memory of
certain things suffered and done.  That is a gain which is not
outweighed by the loss of any pleasure life can give.

Luders' essay three parts of a century ago showed conclusively that
Holinshed's and Shakespeare's Prince of Wales, as we see him in the
play of Henry IV., wild and dissolute with ignoble companions, is a
legend which is disproved by documentary history, but Shakespeare's
Prince is nevertheless dramatically true.  Johnson says, 'He is
great without effort, and brave without tumult.  The trifler is
roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler.  The
character is great, original, and just.'  Johnson's criticism is
true.  There is no interruption or strain in the passage from one
self to the other self:  they are both in fact the same self.  It is
something of a shock that the King should cast off Falstaff, but if
a man is appointed to command it is necessary that he should at once
take up his proper position.  I remember the promotion of a
subordinate to a responsible post.  His manner changed the next day.
He had the courage to ring his bell and give orders to his senior
under whom he had been serving.

He became one of the most efficient administrators I ever knew.  On
the other hand, nearly at the same time another subordinate was
promoted who was timid and continued his habits of familiarity with
his colleagues.  His department fell into disorder and he was
dismissed.


As You Like It.--Lady Anne Blunt in her admirable books, A
Pilgrimage to Nejd and The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, notices
that the true Arab sheykh of the desert, when a traveller seeks his
hospitality, asks no questions until food and drink have been
offered, and even then is in no hurry.  So also the Duke:


'Welcome, fall to:  I will not trouble you
As yet, to question you about your fortunes.'


Curiosity about personal matters is ignoble.

Rosalind's love for Orlando is born of pity.  'If I be foiled, there
is but one shamed that was never gracious; if killed, but one dead
that is willing to be so:  I shall do my friends no wrong, for I
have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have
nothing; only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better
supplied when I have made it empty.'

It is a proof of Orlando's gentle breeding that he instantly yields
to courtesy:


'Speak you so gently?  Pardon me, I pray you.'


Orlando says to Jaques:  'I will chide no breather in the world, but
myself, against whom I know most faults.'  This is characteristic of
Shakespeare, and is in the spirit of the Gospels.

The difficulty in this play is not Oliver's sudden love for Celia,
although Shakespeare seems to have felt that it was a little too
rapid, for Orlando asks Oliver, 'Is't possible that on so little
acquaintance you should like her?'  It is rather Celia's prompt
response which takes us aback.  It looks too much like 'any woman to
any man.'  It may be said in excuse that Celia had heard the piteous
story of his conversion, how he had become 'a wretched ragged man
o'ergrown with hair,' and what is more to the point, she had heard
of Orlando's noble kindness to him.  It is odd that Shakespeare does
not adopt from Lodge's novel Oliver's rescue of Celia from a band of
ruffians.  Johnson says, 'To Celia much may be forgiven for the
heroism of her friendship.'  She forsook not only her father--she
had reason not to care much about him--but she forsook the COURT for
Rosalind.


Much Ado about Nothing.--Why should Don Pedro offer to take
Claudio's place in the wooing of Hero and why should Claudio
consent?

Borachio says, 'Hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret call me
Claudio.'

When Borachio recounts to Conrad what he had done, he makes no
mention of his personation of Claudio--'Know, that I have to-night
wooed Margaret, the lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the name of Hero;
she leans me out at her mistress's chamber-window, bids me a
thousand times good night.'

Theobald remarks that if Claudio saw another man with the woman
supposed to be Hero and heard her call him Claudio, Claudio would
merely suppose that Hero was deceived.  Theobald proposes to
substitute 'Borachio' for 'Claudio' in the line just quoted.
Borachio had just asked Don John to tell Don Pedro and Claudio that
Hero loved him, Borachio.  But if Theobald's emendation be received,
difficulties still remain.  Margaret must have been persuaded to
answer to the name of Hero.  After Borachio's arrest he tells us
that Margaret wore Hero's garments.  But Shakespeare, deserting
Spenser, from whom this mystification appears to be borrowed, gives
no reason which induced Margaret to play this part.

Where was Hero on that night?  Borachio promises Don John that 'he
will so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent.'  Claudio
asks Hero


'What man was he talk'd with you yesternight
Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?'


She does not reply, as we should think she would, that she was not
sleeping in that room, although Benedick asks Beatrice,


'Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?'


and Beatrice replies,


'No, truly not; although until last night,
I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.'


Claudio is despicable, and his marriage with Hero is a foul, black
spot in the play.  Observe that in the first scene he asks Don
Pedro,


'Hath Leonato any son, my lord?'


and Don Pedro, understanding the drift of the question, replies:


'No child but Hero, she's his only heir.'


What a mean, damnable excuse he makes.


   'Yet sinn'd I not,
But in mistaking.'


Beatrice with sure eye discerns the scoundrel.  'Kill Claudio.'  Not
Don Pedro, not even Don John, although she had heard Benedick
denounce him as the author of the villainy.

Beatrice and the Friar never doubt Hero's innocence.  The Friar
declares that


'In her eye there hath appear'd a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.'


What an amplitude there is in Beatrice!  What a sweep it is to bring
into what we already know of her such divine faith in her friend!
This light-hearted girl suddenly becomes sublime.


Hamlet.--Coleridge's remark that the two former appearances of the
Ghost increase its objectivity when it appears to Hamlet is subtle
and true.  Observe that the Ghost is visible to Hamlet, Marcellus,
Bernardo and Horatio, but not to the Queen.

There is in Coleridge an activity of intellect which is so
fascinating that we do not stay to inquire whether the result is in
accordance with the facts.  He says that taedium vitae as in the
case of Hamlet is due to 'unchecked appetency of the ideal.'  Was
the appetency of the ideal strong in Hamlet?  The ideal exalts our
interest in earthly things.

'Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.'  Johnson says that this
speech, in which Hamlet contrives damnation for the man he would
punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered; whereupon
Coleridge remarks that Hamlet's postponement of revenge till it
should bring damnation to soul as well as body 'was merely the
excuse Hamlet made to himself for not taking advantage of this
particular and favourable moment for doing justice upon his guilty
uncle, at the urgent instance of the spirit of his father.'  I doubt
if this is a complete explanation.  Would it strike the audience as
the motive?  Men of Hamlet's mould not only speak but feel
extravagantly.  Incapacity for prompt action is accompanied with
more intense emotion than that which is felt by him who acts at
once.  Hamlet meditates on revenge instead of executing it, and his
desire, by brooding, becomes diabolic.

Generalisations like those of Polonius are obtained from observation
during youth and middle age.  In old age the creation of
generalisations ceases and we fall back on our acquired stock.  They
remain true, but the application fails.  We must be increasingly
careful in the use of these ancient abstractions, and more intent on
the consideration of the instance before us.  The temptation to drag
it under what we already know is great and must be resisted.
Proverbs and wise saws are more suitable to common life than to
intricate relationships.  They are inapplicable to deep passion and
spiritual matters.

Johnson notes that the Ghost's visits are a failure so far as
Hamlet's resolution is concerned.

Hamlet says,


   'O! from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!'


but they remained thoughts.  The play is to be the thing to decide
him, but when it is over and he has the clearest proofs, he does not
act, but consents to leave Denmark and returns by accident.  Had he
obeyed the Ghost's promptings and killed the King at the end of the
play in the third act, Polonius, Ophelia, the Queen, Laertes, and
Hamlet himself might have been saved.


Troilus and Cressida is an inexplicable play.  It is a justification
of those critics who obstinately, but without external evidence,
refuse to believe that much which is attributed to Shakespeare
really belongs to him.  It is absolutely impossible that the man who
put these words into the mouth of Achilles:


   'I have a woman's longing,
An appetite that I am sick withal,
To see great Hector in his weeds of peace;
To talk with him, and to behold his visage,
Even to my full of view.'


could have adapted from the Recuyell the shocking ignominy of the
ninth scene in the fifth act in which Achilles calls on his
myrmidons to slay Hector unarmed, and then triumphs in these lines:


'My half-supp'd sword, that frankly would have fed,
Pleas'd with this dainty bit, thus goes to bed.
   [Sheathes his sword.
Come, tie his body to my horse's tail;
Along the field I will the Trojan trail.'


Measure for Measure as a play is hateful to me, although there are
passages in it as truly Shakespeare as anything to be found in all
his works.  The chief objection to it is that justice, to use
Coleridge's word, is 'baffled.'  There are other objections almost
as great.  From beginning to end almost everybody is base, foolish,
or uninteresting.  The Duke's temporary withdrawal is stupid and
contemptible, considering that he is the governor of the state; the
condemnation of Claudio is wildly unnatural; the substitution of
Mariana loathsome; the treachery of Angelo in not reprieving Claudio
inconceivable, notwithstanding what we already know of the deputy's
hypocrisy and villainy.  The lowest depth of scoundrelism is reached
when, face to face with Mariana and publicly at the city gate before
the Duke and all the company assembled, he excuses himself from
marrying her because


   'her reputation was disvalued
In levity.'


And yet he is let off scot-free, and Mariana marries him!
Isabella's apology,


   'I partly think,
A due sincerity govern'd his deeds,
Till he did look on me,'


might be sufficient for an outbreak of his lust but not for his
lying, and Mariana's is still worse:


'Best men are moulded out of faults.'


Not out of such faults as Angelo's are the best men moulded.

The punishment inflicted on the poor wretch Lucio is horrible.


Lucio.  'I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore! . . .
Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping and
hanging.

Duke.  Slandering a prince deserves it.'


This is a foul line.  I should like to discover documentary proof
that it is not Shakespeare's, but the gag of some actor desirous of
pleasing court folk

The Promos and Cassandra from which Measure for Measure is taken is
certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra
(Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, 'tyed in
the greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest
suter for his life.'


Henry VIII.--The scene in which Katherine appears before the court
is perhaps the finest in the play.  To what noble use is her Spanish
pride turned!  The last line of the following quotation from
Katherine's reply to Wolsey is infinite:


   'For it is you
Have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me,
Which God's dew quench.'


Othello is pure tragedy, for the judgment which falls on Othello and
Desdemona, although it is disproportionate to the character or life
of either, is necessary from the beginning.  Brabantio was not
wholly without justification in thinking the marriage unnatural, and
Desdemona's desertion of him without a word was unfeeling.  The
depth of the tragedy is increased by his death.


'Poor Desdemon I am glad thy father's dead.
Thy match was mortal to him.'


Iago feels the necessity of obtaining motives for his conduct.  He
tries to find them in the supposed infidelity of his wife with
Othello and in his supersession by Cassio.  Neither is sufficient,
but he partly believes in them, and they partly serve their purpose.

Coleridge says Othello was not jealous:  he lacked the suspicion
that is essential to jealousy.  Perhaps so, but in that case we want
a name for the passion which rushes to belief of that which it prays
may be false.  The very intensity of love, so far from inducing
careful examination of slander against the divinity I worship,
prevents reflection by anxiety; by terror lest the love should be
disturbed.  Iago's evidence, thinks Coleridge, was so strong that
Othello could not have done otherwise; but would he have acted in
war on evidence equally weak?

How mad Iago is with all his cunning!  What a fool!  Had he been
anything but the maddest fool, he would have seen that in the end
his plans must break down.  Intellect?  Yes, of a kind he had it
pre-eminently, but intellect becomes folly when it is inhuman.


'Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars.'


Shakespeare might have made Othello the more eager to plunge into
the big wars, but Desdemona is so inwoven with him that the whole
fabric goes to ruin when she is torn out.

Othello 'falls in a trance' after his outburst at the beginning of
the fourth act.  He is a Moor.  In the background also lies
Brabantio's prophecy.  Venice cannot do without him, but he cannot
hold a Venetian woman.


King Lear.--There are passages in King Lear which are enough to make
us wish we had never been born.  They are almost an impeachment of
the Ruler of the Universe, and yet--there is Cordelia.  Whence did
she come?  She is as much His handiwork as Regan, and in all our
conclusions about Him we must take her into account.

Lear does not go mad.  He is mad from the beginning, but his madness
is in abeyance.  Look at the style of his curses on Goneril.

Coleridge's criticism is exact:  'Lear's self-supportless leaning
for all pleasure on another's breast.'  If a man desires not to go
mad or not to be soured into oil of vitriol, let him watch the doors
of his heart; let him never solicit any expression of love.

Cordelia's 'nothing, my lord,' as Coleridge says, is partly
irrepressible disgust at her sisters' hypocrisy.  There was also, as
France admits, 'a tardiness in nature' in Cordelia.  She was her
father's favourite, but what sort of a life must she have lived with
such a father before the time at which the play opens?  We ought not
to be surprised that she refuses to be demonstrative.  She reacts
against his exaggeration.

I cannot read the blinding of Gloucester.  The only excuse that can
be offered, not good for much, is that Shakespeare found the story
in the Arcadia, and that in his day horrors on the stage were not so
repulsive as they are to us.  Cordelia's death taken from Holinshed
is almost as bad.  It is not involved in the tragedy like the death
of Ophelia or of Desdemona.


All's Well that Ends Well.--Johnson comments, 'I cannot reconcile my
heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without
truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a
profligate:  when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a
second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends
himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.'  This is just.
Bertram is atrocious.  With Helena before him he says,


'If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.'


Did he require a deposition on oath in presence of a magistrate?  He
deserved a scourging in the market place.

Coleridge calls Helena one of Shakespeare's loveliest women.  I
cannot agree.  She secures her husband's embraces under a false
pretence.  How a woman could consent to lie in the arms of a man who
had cast her off, and who believed when he was enjoying her that she
was a mistress whom he preferred is beyond my comprehension.  It is
so in Boccaccio, but that is no excuse.  Devotion to a man who is
indifferent or who hates, is tragically possible, but in its
greatest intensity would hardly permit such humiliation.

The play is bad altogether.  What was the necessity for suggesting
Bertram's second marriage?  There is nowhere any trace of
Shakespeare's depth.  The difficulties of the text are singular, and
seem to mark this drama as one different from the rest.


Macbeth.--Johnson's remark that the events are so great that they
overpower the persons and prevent nice discrimination of character
is partly true.

Coleridge notices that Lady Macbeth was a person of high rank,
living much alone.  A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can
conceive without being startled the most awful designs.  The same
imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against
Duncan's life drove her to delirium and suicide.

Shakespeare transfers the most perilous stuff in him to Macbeth.
The function smothered in surmise; the reflection on the emptiness
of life--tale told by an idiot--Shakespeare empties it into this
murderous traitor.  He makes him the PREY of that which is mixed in
the composition of the best.

The witches do not strike us as miraculous.  They are not
supernatural, but extensions of the natural.

It is an apology for emendation that one of the most celebrated
passages in the play is based on conjecture (confirmed by what
follows) and on analogy.


'I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares NO [Folio] more is none.'


'No'--corrected by Rowe to 'do.'

In Measure for Measure we have


   'Be that you are,
That is, a woman; if you be more, you're none.'


Note the terrible, gasping brevity of the dialogue between Lady
Macbeth and her husband after the murder:


Lady M.  'Did not you speak?
M.  When?
Lady M.  Now.
M.  As I descended?
Lady M.  Ay.'


Macbeth's speech beginning just before he hears of Lady Macbeth's
death, and ending after he hears of it, should be interpreted and
spoken as follows.  He had just said he 'will laugh a siege to
scorn.'  Then a cry of women within.


   'What is that noise?
Seyton.  It is the cry of women, my good lord.
[Exit.
Macbeth (musing).  I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in 't:  I have supp'd full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.

Re-enter Seyton.

   Wherefore was that cry?
Seyton.  The queen, my lord, is dead.
Macbeth (with a touch of impatience).  She should have died
hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.'


He makes no inquiry about his wife, but goes on with his reverie,
which does not specially refer to her.


'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:  it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.'


The 'PETTY pace,' coming from Macbeth!  The 'out, out, brief
candle,' should be spoken in the same musing tone.

Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line in Macbeth
which is defective in metre:  'This is one of the effects of
literature in minds not naturally perspicacious'--a criticism which
might be extended to much Shakespearean comment.


Cymbeline.--The wager is loathsome.  If any man with whom we were
acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him?  It was a
crime to mention Imogen's name in such society as that which met at
Philario's house.  The only excuse is Boccaccio, but what shall we
say of Iachimo's interview with Imogen, invented by Shakespeare!
After his beastly experiment upon her, he excuses himself:


'I have spoke this, to know if your affiance
Were deeply rooted.'


She begs him to prolong his visit!  The apology is worse than the
original insult.

The royal behaviour, or what Shakespeare means us to take for royal
behaviour, in the two youths is overdone and sometimes repulsive.

Arviragus goes out of his way to put his love for Imogen higher than
that for his supposed father, Belarius, who is present.


   'The bier at door,
And a demand who is't shall die, I'd say
My father, not this youth.'


Yet the point of the scene is the nobility of blood in these youths!

Lucius, who had protected Imogen, hopes she will plead for his life,
and she turns on him:


   'No, no; alack!
There's other work in hand:  I see a thing
Bitter to me as death:  your life, good master,
Must shuffle for itself.'


In the fifth act Posthumus believes his wife to be guilty, and yet
breaks out into strains like these:


   'So I'll die,
For thee, O Imogen! even for whom my life
Is every breath a death.
. . .
For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though
'Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life; you coin'd it.'


Shakespeare surely ought to have made Posthumus revert to perfect
faith.  He ought to have borrowed something from his own Beatrice.
Posthumus wishes Imogen saved, because, if her life had been spared,
she might have repented.

Iachimo is impossible, simple blackness, worse than Iago.  He is
unactable, for some motivation is necessary.

Shakespeare's genius is so immense that it overpowers us, and we
must be on our guard lest it should twist our instinct for what is
true and right.  The errors of a fool are not dangerous, but those
of a Shakespeare, Goethe, or Byron it is almost impossible to
resist.


Twelfth Night.--The play is two plays in one without much
connection.  The Viola play is improbable.  Why did Shakespeare omit
that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen
the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had
fallen in love with him?  In the play, hearing of the Duke, she
discloses a design to make her 'own occasion mellow.'

Malvolio shut up as mad -


Clown.  'What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

Malvolio.  That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown.  What thinkest thou of his opinion?

Malvolio.  I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his
opinion.'


Malvolio was a gentleman, but he was more.  Shakespeare may go a
little too far with the yellow stockings and cross-gartering, but
the liability to deception by a supposed profession of love is a
divine weakness, not inconsistent with true nobility of intellect
and with sagacity.  There is no reason to suppose he was often
deceived in worldly matters.  Maria is a bad sort of clever barmaid,
and was not unwilling to marry the drunken Sir Toby.  When I last
saw Twelfth Night acted, the whole of the latter part of the fifth
act was omitted, for the purpose, apparently, of strengthening the
representation of Malvolio as a comic fool whose silly brain is
turned by conceit.  It was shocking, but the manager knew his
audience.


Julius Caesar.--Casca is indignant that Caesar should be offered the
crown, but he despises the applause of the mob when Caesar rejected
it.  'The rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and
threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of
stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost
choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own
part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving
the bad air.'


Brutus.  'Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.'


I cannot think Dr. Johnson, Mason, and Delius are right in supposing
the Genius to be the power which watches over us for our protection,
and that the mortal instruments are the passions which rebel against
it, and, as Johnson says, 'excite him to a deed of honour and
danger.'  The Genius and the mortal instruments are in council.  The
Genius is the president and the mortal instruments are subordinates.
The insurrection is their resistance because they cannot at once be
brought to do what the Genius directs.  There is no hint in what
goes before of 'safety.'  The mortal instruments suggest


'I know no personal cause to spurn at him.'


Blakeway agrees with this interpretation.

In both Plutarch and Shakespeare, Brutus refuses to kill Antony.
Brutus will go no further than justice demands.  But this is not
enough for success.  Hence the ruin of the republican cause.

Steevens says that the apparition at Sardis 'could not be at once
the shade of Caesar and the evil genius of Brutus.'  But Shakespeare
intended that it should be both.  Brutus in the fifth scene of the
fifth act thus replies to Volumnius:


'The ghost of Caesar hath appear'd to me
Two several times by night:  at Sardis, once;
And, this last night, here in Philippi's fields.'


It is an instance of Steevens' prosaic temper that he could not see
the fitness of the combination.


Brutus.  And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take;
For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius!
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.
Cassius.  For ever, and for ever, farewell, Brutus!
If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed;
If not, 'tis true, this parting was well made.


These verses are perhaps the noblest in our language.  Nothing ever
has gone or could go beyond them.  Shakespeare here justifies the
claim on his behalf to be placed alone and unreachable.  Observe the
repetition by Cassius almost word for word.  Swift must have had
this passage in his mind when in a letter to Pope, which I quote
from memory, as I cannot lay my hand on it, he tells Pope that he
will come over to England and see him if possible, but, if not, 'we
must part, as all human creatures have parted.'


'Why, then, lead on.  O! that a man might know
The end of this day's business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.  Come, ho! away!'


These lines might easily be turned into commonplace, but what could
be more pathetic or solemn?

The true drama of Julius Caesar is indicated by Plutarch.  It is
Caesar's triumph over innumerable difficulties, any one of which
might have been fatal, the protection by his genius, the limitation
of its power, the Dictatorship--'Semideus,' his death.  Shakespeare
gives no reason, nor does Plutarch, why Brutus should have plotted
to kill Caesar, excepting the fear of what might happen if he were
to become absolute.  Brutus is abstract.


'Such one he was (of him we boldly say),
In whose rich soule all sovereigne powres did sute,
In whom in peace the elements all lay
So mixt, as none could soveraigntie impute;
As all did govern, yet all did obey;
His lively temper was so absolute,
That 't seem'd, when heaven his modell first began,
In him it show'd perfection in a man.'


This is Drayton's imitation of what Antony says of Brutus, and it is
one which not only does not spoil the original, but is itself
original.


Antony and Cleopatra.--It is not Antony's passion for Cleopatra
which ruins him.  He has not the cohesion which obtains success.  He
is loose-bonded.  Caesar is his complete foil and contrast.  Caesar
exists dramatically to explain Antony.  Antony's challenge to single
combat and the speeches he makes to his servants are characteristic.
The marriage to Octavia, more than his Egyptian slavery, shows his
weakness.  There is a line in Plutarch which I wish Shakespeare had
used.  'But it was in the nature of Antonius to show his best
qualities in difficulties, and in his misfortune he was as like as
may be to a good man.'

Scenes 6 and 7, Act ii., the interview with Pompey, are in Plutarch,
but it is not evident why they are in the drama.  They do not
advance the action.  Shakespeare preserves also Antony's message to
Octavius that if he was dissatisfied with the treatment of Thyreus
he might hang or torture Antony's freedman Hipparchus--a detestable
piece of brutality which might well have been omitted.

Cleopatra is quite apart from Shakespeare's other women.  She is a
most complicated and difficult study.  Shakespeare takes over from
Plutarch her wandering disguised through the streets at night with
Antony; the voyage down the Cydnus; the hanging of the salt fish on
Antony's hook; the flight at Actium; the fact that she was mistress
of Julius Caesar and Cnaeus Pompey; the second betrayal of the
fleet; her petition to Octavius for her son; and her attempt to
cheat Octavius in the account of her treasures.  In addition
Shakespeare makes her 'hop forty paces through the public street.'
What could have induced him to invent this story?  She threatens
Charmian with bloody teeth; lets Thyreus kiss her hand, arousing
thereby Antony's rage.  Thyreus tells her that Caesar knows she did
not embrace Antony from love but from fear, and she replies:


   'He is a god, and knows
What is most right:  mine honour was not yielded,
But conquer'd merely.'


This may be mockery, but after she has let Thyreus kiss her she goes
on:


   'Your Caesar's father oft,
When he hath mus'd of taking kingdoms in,
Bestow'd his lips on that unworthy place,
As it rain'd kisses.'


She reminds herself of this, fresh from Antony, who had just told
her of Octavius's offer to protect her if she would give up the
'grizled head' of her lover.

After Antony's death she finds


   'nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.'


She tells Proculeius before he surprises her that she would gladly
look Caesar in the face, but she tries to stab herself, for,


   'Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court;
Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia.  Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome?  Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country's high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!'


She asks Dolabella what Caesar means to do with her, and when she
learns that she is to be taken to Rome she recurs to the horror of
the triumph.


   'Now, Iras, what think'st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome, as well as I:  mechanick slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall
Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forced to drink their vapour.
Iras.  The gods forbid!
Cleopatra.  Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras:  saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune; the quick comedians,
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.'


This was a motive for death, but it was not all.  She reproves
herself because she let Iras die first, because Antony will


   'make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have';


and Antony is her last word.

Charmian declares her to be 'a lass unparallel'd,' of 'royal eyes.'

It is impossible to shut this woman up within the limits of what we
call a character, but why should we attempt it?  Why cannot we be
content with what we have before us?  Shakespeare never defined his
people to himself.  In Cleopatra we have a new combination of the
simple, eternal elements, a combination subtle, and beyond analysis.
What celestial lights begin to play over this passion as the drama
goes on!


Coriolanus.--We cannot help being sorry that Shakespeare should have
gone out of his way to select such a subject.  It leaves a
disagreeable taste in the mouth.  The aristocrat is overdone.  No
true aristocrat would talk such rant as Coriolanus talks in Act i.
Sc. I.  Shakespeare omits Plutarch's account of the oppression of
the plebeians, or only slightly alludes to it.  Volumnia's contempt
for the people is worse than that of Coriolanus.  To her they are
not human, and she does not consider that common truthfulness is
binding in her intercourse with them.


   'It lies you on to speak
To the people, not by your own instruction,
Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but rooted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom's truth.'


Reading such passages as these we understand Whitman when he says
that although Shakespeare is 'of astral genius,' he is 'entirely fit
for feudalism . . . is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism,' and
contains much which is 'ever offensive to democracy.'


Winter's Tale.--Coleridge is perhaps super-subtle in his
discrimination between the jealousy of Leontes and that of Othello,
which Coleridge will not call jealousy.  But the difference is not
greater than that between the two men.  The passion of Leontes is
roused simply by Hermione's giving her hand to Polixenes.  This
common courtesy is 'paddling palms.'  There is something
contemptible in his transports:  not so in the case of Othello.
Leontes cursing Hermione in the presence of his lords is
unendurable.

Leontes in his passion disbelieves the oracle.


   'There is no truth at all i' the oracle:
The sessions shall proceed:  this is mere falsehood.'


But he is reversed, suddenly, completely, when he is told his son is
dead.


'Apollo's angry; and the heavens themselves
Do strike at my injustice.'


Perdita is brought up by a shepherd and talks like a well-educated
patrician's daughter.  'O Proserpina,' etc.  Polixenes says to
Camillo:


'This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward:  nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.'


Here again the emphasis on descent is exaggerated and we resent it.

Leontes after the statue is unveiled -


   'But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.'


Who can read this without choking?  Like Exeter in Henry V.:


   'I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.'


Could I have continued to live when that music sounded and she
descended?  I think not.  I should have sought pardon and death.


   'Now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?'


Who can--I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than
that?  Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him!  It
is difficult to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems,
but in this passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to
be revealed.


Pericles.--The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene,
is Shakespeare at his highest.


'O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.'


What can equal in purifying, regenerative power the fact that one
human being can be so much to another?  No theology, morality, or
philosophy can bring a man so near to God.


Tempest.--Prospero's pardon for those who had conspired against him
proceeds from 'our little life is rounded with a sleep.'

The Tempest is called a comedy, but it suggests a tragedy in
Prospero's return to Milan and the months or years he spent there
till he died.  For twelve years he had been on the island with
Miranda, 'a thrid of his own life,' 'that for which he lived,' 'the
cherubin that did preserve him' during his voyage, who raised in him


'An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.'


He hears her, smitten with Ferdinand almost in a moment, declare to
him:


   'I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you,
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of';


and she leaves her father and goes far away to Naples with her
husband.

Ariel, whom Prospero had freed from his miserable enchantment, had
never ceased to thirst for liberty and returns to the winds.  Dearly
had Prospero loved his delicate Ariel.


'Why, that's my dainty Ariel!  I shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom:  so, so, so.'


Caliban he had tried to reclaim, had taught him speech and to name
the big and lesser light, but all his pains were 'lost, quite lost,'
and the 'born devil' rewarded them by an attempt on Miranda's
chastity.  He is left behind, master of the island again, to take up
his abode in the cell which Prospero and Miranda had inhabited, and
with the added experience of Stephano's drink, which he probably
soon learned to imitate.

Antonio, the usurping brother, is said to have been penitent, but
his penitence was not profound.  He offered no apology, and the
first words he is recorded to have uttered after his guilt was
discovered were a joke upon 'the plain fish,' Caliban.  He was
forgiven, and most likely once more became malignant.

There is nothing to show us that the citizens of Milan were in much
trouble when Prospero was deposed, or that they rejoiced when he was
restored.  They, doubtless, regretted Antonio, who


   'Set all hearts i' the state
To what tune pleased his ear.'


The lord of the spirits, of the elves who chased the ebbing Neptune,
he who had given fire to the dread rattling thunder, broke his staff
and drowned his book and went back to his lonely palace.  Did he
never long for his island, for Ariel's music, for his daughter's
daily presence, replaced by infrequent letters with news of the
Court, her children, and Ferdinand?  He may have reflected that she
was happy, but nevertheless every third thought was his grave.


Merchant of Venice.--Jessica is hateful from the beginning; the
disguise in boy's clothes, the robbery of her father, and the
exchange for a monkey of the jewel which belonged to her mother.  I
am afraid Shakespeare intended we should like her.  But she is only
a part of the perplexity of the play.  That Shakespeare should have
used the casket story is inexplicable.  Not only is it, as Johnson
says, 'wildly improbable,' it confuses Portia's character:  it is an
irritating absurdity.


'But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis.'


We have no proof that Antonio did this.  He may have done it.  He
was the kind of person who might like popularity.  If he was really
guilty of 'low simplicity,' I sympathise with Shylock's hatred of
him.  But if he was not, I understand it.  Shylock was not bound to
be generous.  It would have been ridiculous in him, an alien in
blood and religion, persecuted, spat upon.

The interest of the play departs with Shylock.


Shakespeare's plays are organic, one character cannot be understood
without the other; Hamlet without Ophelia; Romeo without Juliet.
Each is in, by, and of the other; particularised by the other.  I do
not find this quality, at least in anything like the same degree, in
Beaumont and Fletcher.

Note the way in which Shakespeare's characters--Macbeth, for
example--unfold themselves by new circumstances, what
unconjecturable development takes place.


When a serious defect presents itself in a living friend it seems to
obtrude itself, press upon us, and affect our judgment more than if
we see it in a play of Shakespeare's.  In the play the background of
counterbalancing virtue is not obscured and forgotten.  In actual
life we lose sight of it.


FINIS


'He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others
will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by
himself.  While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps
not one appears to deserve our notice, or excite our sympathy, we
should remember that we likewise are lost in the same throng; that
the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him
that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or
fear, is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.'--The
Rambler, No 159.



Footnotes

{148}  On the 24th April 1885 a fire broke out in an oil-monger's
house in the Borough.  The inmates were the oil-monger, his wife,
four children, and Alice, the servant-of-all-work.  She came to the
window as soon as the alarm was raised and shouted for help.  Before
the fire brigade arrived the whole building was in flames.  The
people in the street called to her to jump and held out clothes to
break her fall, but she went back and presently reappeared dragging
a feather bed with her, which she pushed out.  It was instantly
extended below, and Alice fetched one of the children and threw it
most carefully down.  It was saved, and two other children also were
saved by her in the same way.  By this time it was evident that the
suffocating fumes were beginning to affect her, for her aim with the
last two was not steady.  The crowd implored her to leap, but it was
too late.  She could not make a proper spring and fell on the
ground.  Five minutes afterwards the engines and fire-escape
appeared.  She was picked up and died in Guy's Hospital.  I begged
her portrait from her brother.  It is not remarkable.  That,
perhaps, is the best thing that can be said about it.  It is a
pleasant, brave face--a face that you might see a dozen times on a
Sunday afternoon.

M. R.

{205}  The references are to the first edition, that of 1793.

{250}  Even this word disappears in the Revised Version, where the
Greek is translated 'reviling Him.'

{254}  The vulgar is the wiser, because it is but as wise as it must
needes.--(Florio's translation.)




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MORE PAGES FROM A JOURNAL ***

This file should be named mpjn10.txt or mpjn10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, mpjn11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mpjn10a.txt

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04

Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*

