shakespeare's insomnia _and the causes thereof_ by franklin h. head 1887 [**transcriber's note: the following is a literary hoax, and the letters quoted below are fictitious.] shakespeare's insomnia, and the causes thereof. i. insomnia, the lack of "tired nature's sweet restorer," is rapidly becoming the chronic terror of all men of active life who have passed the age of thirty-five or forty years. in early life, while yet he "wears the rose of youth upon him," man rarely, except in sickness, knows the want of sound, undreaming sleep. but as early manhood is left behind and the cares and perplexities of life weigh upon him, making far more needful than ever the rest which comes only through unbroken sleep, this remedial agent cannot longer be wooed and won. youth would "fain encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in his arms." to those of riper years the "blanket of the dark" often ushers in a season of terrors,--a time of fitful snatches of broken sleep and of tormenting dreams; of long stretches of wakefulness; of hours when all things perplexing and troublesome in one's affairs march before him in sombre procession: in endless disorder, in labyrinths of confusion, in countless new phases of disagreeableness; and at length the morning summons him to labor, far more racked and weary than when he sought repose. it has been of late years much the fashion in the literature of this subject to attribute sleeplessness to the rapid growth of facilities for activities of every kind. the practical annihilation of time and space by our telegraphs and railroads, the compressing thereby of the labors of months into hours or even minutes, the terrific competition in all kinds of business thereby made possible and inevitable, the intense mental activity engendered in the mad race for fame or wealth, where the nervous and mental force of man is measured against steam and lightning,--these are usually credited with having developed what is considered a modern and even an almost distinctively american disease. as the maxim, "there is nothing new under the sun," is of general application, it may be of interest to investigate if an exception occurs in the case of sleeplessness; if it be true that among our ancestors, before the days of working steam and electricity, the glorious sleep of youth was prolonged through all one's three or four score years. medical books and literature throw no light upon this subject three hundred years ago. we must therefore turn to shakespeare--human nature's universal solvent--for light on this as we would on any other question of his time. was he troubled with insomnia, then, is the first problem to be solved. dr. holmes, our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "life of emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his own, or at least one of which he feels its tendencies and possibilities belong to himself. emerson, too, says of shakespeare, that all his poetry was first experience. when we seek to analyze what we mean by the term shakespeare, to endeavor to define wherein he was distinct from all others and easily pre-eminent, to know why to us he ever grows wiser as we grow wise, we find that his especial characteristic was an unequalled power of observation and an ability accurately to chronicle his impressions. he was the only man ever born who lived and wrote absolutely without bias or prejudice. emerson says of him that "he reported all things with impartiality; that he tells the great greatly, the small subordinately,--he is strong as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other." says he, further: "give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear: he has certain opinions which he disposes other things to bring into prominence; he crams this part and starves the other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing but his fitness and strength." but shakespeare has no peculiarity; all is duly given. thus it is that his dramas are the book of human life. he was an accurate observer of nature: he notes the markings of the violet and the daisy; the haunts of the honeysuckle, the mistletoe, and the woodbine. he marks the fealty of the marigold to its god the sun, and even touches the freaks of fashion, condemning in some woman of his time an usage, long obsolete, in accordance with which she adorned her head with "the golden tresses of the dead." but it was as an observer and a delineator of man in all his moods that he was the bright, consummate flower of humanity. his experiences were wide and varied. he had absorbed into himself and made his own the pith and wisdom of his day. as the fittest survives, each age embodies in itself all worthy of preservation in the ages gone before. in shakespeare's pages we find a reflection, perfect and absolute, of the age of elizabeth, and therefore of all not transient in the foregone times,--of all which is fixed and permanent in our own. he "held the mirror up to nature." so "his eternal summer shall not fade," because "he sang of the earth as it will be when the years have passed away." if, therefore, insomnia had prevailed in or before his time, in his pages shall we find it duly set forth. if he had suffered, if the "fringed curtains of his eyes were all the night undrawn," we shall find his dreary experiences--his hours of pathetic misery, his nights of desolation--voiced by the tongues of his men and women. shakespeare speaks often of the time in life when men have left behind them the dreamless sleep of youth. friar laurence says:- "care keeps his watch in every old man's eye, and where care lodges, sleep can never lie; but where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign." shakespeare describes, too, with lifelike fidelity, the causes of insomnia, which are not weariness or physical pain, but undue mental anxiety. he constantly contrasts the troubled sleep of those burdened with anxieties and cares, with the happy lot of the laborer whose physical weariness insures him a tranquil night's repose. henry vi. says:- "and to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds, his cold thin drink out of his leather bottle, his wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade, all which secure and sweetly he enjoys, are far beyond a prince's delicates." and henry v. says:- "'tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, the sword, the mace, the crown imperial, the intertissued robe of gold and pearl, the farcèd title running 'fore the king, the throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp that beats upon the high shore of this world,- no, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony, not all these, laid in bed majestical, can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, who, with a body filled and vacant mind, gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; never sees horrid night, that child of hell, but, like a lackey, from the rise to set, sweats in the eye of phoebus, and all night sleeps in elysium.... and, but for ceremony, such a wretch, winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, hath the forehand and vantage of a king." prince henry says, in "henry iv.":- "o polished perturbation! golden care! that keep'st the ports of slumber open wide to many a watchful night, sleep with it now! yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet as he whose brow with homely biggin bound snores out the watch of night." in this same play, too, is found the familiar and marvellous soliloquy of henry iv.:- "how many thousand of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep! o sleep, o gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have i frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness? why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, and hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, than in the perfumed chambers of the great, under the canopies of costly state, and lulled with sounds of sweetest melody? o thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile in loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch a watch-case, or a common 'larum-bell? wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains in cradle of the rude, imperious surge, and in the visitation of the winds, who take the ruffian billows by the top, curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them with deafening clamor in the slippery shrouds, that with the hurly, death itself awakes? canst thou, o partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king? then, happy low, lie down! uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." caesar, whom shakespeare characterizes as "the foremost man of all this world," says:- "let me have men about me that are fat; sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights." and again, it is not an "old man broken with the storms of state" whom he describes when he says:- "thou hast no figures nor no fantasies which busy care draws in the brains of men; therefore thou sleep'st so sound." the poet also in various passages expresses his emphatic belief as to what is the brightest blessing or the deadliest calamity which can be laid upon our frail humanity. rarely is a blessing invoked which does not include the wish for tranquil sleep; and this, too, as the best and greatest boon of all. his gracious benediction may compass honors and wealth and happiness and fame,--that one's "name may dwell forever in the mouths of men;" but "the earth hath bubbles as the water hath, and these are of them," as compared with the royal benison, "sleep give thee all his rest." the spectres of the princes and queen anne, in "richard iii.," invoking every good upon richmond, say:- "sleep, richmond, sleep in peace and wake in joy." and again:- "thou quiet soul, sleep thou a quiet sleep." romeo's dearest wish to juliet is,- "sleep dwell upon thine eyes; peace in thy breast." the crowning promise of lady mortimer, in "henry iv.," is that "she will sing the song that pleaseth thee, and on thy eyelids crown the god of sleep." titania promises her fantastic lover,- "i'll give thee fairies to attend on thee, and they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, and sing, while thou on pressèd flowers dost sleep." titus, welcoming again to rome the victorious legions, says of the heroes who have fallen: "there greet in silence, as the dead are wont, and sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars," promising them that in the land of the blest "are no storms, no noise, but silence and eternal sleep." constantly also in anathemas throughout the plays are invoked, as the deadliest of curses, broken rest and its usual accompaniment of troublous dreams. thus note the climax in queen margaret's curse upon the traitorous gloster:- "if heaven have any grievous plague in store exceeding those that i can wish upon thee, oh, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe, and then hurl down their indignation on thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace! the worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul! thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv'st, and take deep traitors for thy dearest friends! no sleep close up that deadly eye of thine, unless it be while some tormenting dream affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!" the witch, in "macbeth," cataloguing the calamities in store for the ambitious thane, says: "sleep shall neither night nor day hang upon his pent-house lid; he shall live a man forbid." it is curious also to remark, in the various lists of griefs which make life a burden and a sorrow, how often the climax of these woes is the lack of sleep, or the troubled dreams bearing their train of "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," which come with broken rest. lady percy says to hotspur:- "why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks, and given my treasures and my rights of thee to thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy? tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?" macbeth says:- "but let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep in the affliction of these terrible dreams that shake us nightly; better be with the dead." in "othello" is a striking picture of the sudden change, in the direction we are considering, which comes over a tranquil mind from the commission of a great crime. iago says to othello, after he has wrought "the deed without a name":- "not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou own'dst yesterday." the greatest punishment which comes to macbeth after the murder of duncan is lack of sleep. nowhere in the language, in the same space, can be found so many pictures of the blessedness of repose as in the familiar lines:- "methought i heard a voice cry, 'sleep no more! macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep; sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast." and the principal reason which deters hamlet from suicide is the fear that even if he does sleep well "after life's fitful fever is over," still, that sleep may be full of troubled dreams. "to sleep, perchance to dream. ay, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause." richard iii. says, when the catalogue of his crimes is full, and when he "sees as in a map the end of all":- "the sons of edward sleep in abraham's bosom, and anne, my queen, hath bid the world good night." in addition to the fuller phrases wherein are shown the blessedness of sleep, or the remediless nature of its loss, many brief sentences occur scattered throughout the plays, and emphasizing the same great lesson. for instance:- "now o'er one half the world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep." "with him above to ratify our work, we may again give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights." "you lack the season of all natures, sleep." "my soul is heavy, and i fain would sleep." "for never yet one hour in his bed have i enjoyed the golden dew of sleep." "for some must watch and some must sleep, so runs the world away." "how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank." "the best of rest is sleep." "our little lives are rounded with a sleep." the various passages cited above prove and illustrate that no author has written so feelingly, so appreciatingly, as shakespeare on the subject of sleep and its loss. the diligent commentators on his works have investigated laboriously the sources from which he drew his plots and many of the very lines of his poems. he was a great borrower; absorbing, digesting, and making his own much of the material of his predecessors. but it is a noteworthy fact, that none of the exquisite lines in praise of sleep--that gift which the psalmist says the lord giveth to his beloved--can be traced to other source than the master. these are jewels of his own; transcripts from his own mournful experience. in middle life he remembered hopelessly the tranquil sleep of his lost youth, as "he that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost." he had suffered from insomnia, and he writes of this, not "as imagination bodies forth the forms of things _unknown_," but as one who, in words burning with indestructible life, lays open to us the sombre record of what was experience before it was song; who makes us the sharers of his griefs; who would awaken in the similarly afflicted of all time that compassionate sympathy which goes out to those whose burdens are almost greater than they can bear. ii. the meagre information we have as to the life and habits of shakespeare would seem to make it an almost hopeless task now to discover the causes of his insomnia. he wrote a marvellous body of literature, and it might be thought this labor itself would suffice as an explanation: that the furnace heat in which the conceptions of hamlet and macbeth and lear were wrought in the crucible of his brain would be fatal to repose. but his contemporaries speak of him as an easy and rapid writer; one whose imagination is only paralleled by the ease, the force and beauty of the phrase in which it is embodied. we are told, too, by dr. h.a. johnson, an eminent medical authority, in the second volume of his treatise on the pathology of the optic nerve, that it is not work, even heavy and continuous, but worry over this work, which drives away repose and shortens life. i had observed, in collating the many passages in shakespeare concerning sleep, that the greater number, and those bearing evidence of deepest earnestness, occurred in six plays: "richard iii.," "macbeth," "1 henry iv.," "hamlet," "2 henry iv.," and "henry v." the chronology of shakespeare's plays seems almost hopeless, scarcely any two writers agreeing as to the order of the plays or the years in which they were written. several of the most critical authorities, however,--dyce, white, furnival, and halliwell-phillipps,--are agreed that two of the plays above named were written in 1593, three in 1602, and one in 1609. this would seem to indicate that during these three years unusual perplexities or anxieties had surrounded our author; and on noting this, it occurred to me that on these points the series of papers recently discovered and called the southampton manuscripts, which are not yet published, might give light. i accordingly addressed a letter to the director of the british museum, where the manuscripts are placed for safe keeping, and received the following reply:- british museum, office of chief curator, department of manuscripts, london, feb. 14, 1886. sir,--i am directed by the curator to acknowledge the receipt of your valued favor of february 1, transmitting for preservation and reference in the library of this institution- 1. the manuscript of the farewell address of dr. charles gilman smith, on his retirement to private life from the presidency of the chicago literary club; 2. the manuscript of the inaugural address of his successor in the office,--which is a public trust,--james s. norton, esq.; 3. an affidavit of dr. w.f. poole, that both manuscripts are originals, and in the handwriting of their eminent authors. the curator further instructs me to convey to you the thanks of the board of governors for these highly important papers, and to state to you that they may be found on file in sub-compartment no. 113,280 of contemporary documents. i am further instructed by the curator to inform you that compliance with your request that this institution reciprocate your kindness by loaning to you all papers from the recently discovered southampton shakespeare collection, bearing date in the years 1593, 1602, and 1609, is contrary to the regulations of this institution. if you cannot visit london to examine these interesting manuscripts, copies will be made and transmitted you for three halfpence per folio, payment by our rules invariably in advance. i note that you are evidently in error upon one point. the collection contains no letters or manuscripts of shakespeare. it is composed principally of letters written to shakespeare by various people, and which, after his death, in some way came into the possession of the earl of southampton. his death, so soon after that of shakespeare, doubtless caused these letters to be lost sight of, and they were but last year discovered in the donjon of the castle. i have examined the letters for the years you name, and find that copies of the same can be made for £3 3s., exclusive of postage. very respectfully yours, john barnacle, _10th ass't sub-secretary._ the money having been forwarded, i received in due time the copies. at the first date, 1593, shakespeare was a young dramatist and actor struggling for recognition, poor and almost unknown; in 1602 he had won an assured position among his fellows, and, with the thrift which characterized him, had secured an interest in the globe theatre, where his plays were performed; in 1609 he was in the fulness of his contemporary fame, had bought valuable property in stratford, and was contemplating retirement to his country home. the following are the letters from the southampton collection which serve to throw light upon the insomnia of shakespeare. they are given in their chronological order, and verbatim, but not literatim, the orthography having been modernized. the first of the letters, dated in 1593, is from a firm of lawyers, messrs. shallow & slender, and is as follows:- inner temple, london, feb. 15, 1593. to william shakespeare: mr. moses solomons, an honored client of our firm, has placed with us, that payment may be straightway enforced, a bill drawn by john heminge, for £10, due in two months from the date thereof, and the payment of which was assured by you in writing. this bill has been for some days overdue, and mr. solomons is constrained to call upon you for payment at once. your prompt attention to this will save the costs and annoyance of an arrest. the second letter is from the same parties, and bears date four days later than the first. inner temple, feb. 19, 1593. mr. william shakespeare: recurring to certain statements made by yourself at our chambers yesterday, we have considered the same, and have likewise the opinion thereon of our client, mr. solomons. as we do now recall them, you nominated three principal grounds why you should not be pressed to pay the bill drawn by mr. heminge. first, that you received no value therefor, having put your name to the bill upon the assurance that it was a matter of form, and to oblige a friend. to this we rejoin, that by the law of estoppel you are precluded to deny the consideration after the bill hath passed into the holding of a discounter unnotified of the facts. second, that, as our client paid but £1 for the bill, he should not exact £10 thereon. to the which we reply, that, so a valuable consideration was passed for the bill, the law looketh not to its exact amount. it is also asserted by our client that, beyond actual coin given for the bill, he did further release to john heminge certain tinsel crowns, swords, and apparel appurtenant to the representation of royalty, which had before then--to wit, two weeks before--been pledged to him for the sum of 8 shillings, borrowed by the said heminge. third, that it was impossible for you to pay the bill, you having no money, and receiving no greater income than 22 shillings per week, all of which was necessary to the maintenance of yourself and family. we regret again to call to your notice the statute of 16 eliz., entitled, "concerning the imprisonment of insolvent debtors," which we trust you will not oblige us to invoke in aid of our suffering client's rights. to be lenient and merciful is his inclination, and we are happy to communicate to you this most favorable tender for an acquittance of his claim. you shall render to us an order on the steward of the globe theatre for 20 shillings per week of your stipend therein. this will leave to you yet 2 shillings per week, which, with prudence, will yield to you the comforts, if not the luxuries, of subsistence. in ten weeks the face of the bill will be thus repaid. for his forbearance in the matter of time, which hath most seriously inconvenienced him, he requires that you shall pay him the further sum of £2 as usury, and likewise that you do liquidate and save him harmless from the charges of us, his solicitors, which charges, from the number of grave and complicated questions which have become a part of this case and demanded solution, we are unable to make less than £4. we should say guineas, but your evident distress hath moved us to gentleness and mercy. these added sums are to be likewise embraced in the steward's order, and paid at the same rate as the substance of the bill, and should you embrace this compassionate tender, in the brief period of sixteen weeks you will be at the end of this indebtedness. the next letter is dated the following month, and is from henry howard, an apparent pawnbroker. queer street, london, 10 march, 1593. to william shakespeare, actor: these presents are to warn you that the time has six days since passed in which you were to repay me 8 shillings, and thereby redeem the property in pledge to me; namely, one henry viii. shirt of mail and visor, and portia's law book, and the green bag therefor. be warned that unless the 8 shillings and the usance thereof be forthcoming, the town-crier shall notify the sale of the sundry articles named. the next letter, and the last in this period of the poet's career (1593), is from mordecai shylock. fleet street, near the sign of the hog in armor, nov. 22, 1593. to william shakespeare: i have been active in the way you some days since besought me; namely, the procuring for you of a loan of £5, that you might retire a bill upon which you were a guarantor. as i then told you, i have no money myself, being very poor; but i have a friend who has money with which i can persuade him to relieve your wants. had i myself the money, i should gladly meet your needs at a moderate usance, not more than twenty-five in the hundred; but my friend is a hard man, who exacts large returns for his means, and will be very urgent that repayment be made on the day named in the bill. he hath empowered me to take your bill at two months,--for him, mind you,--for £10, the payment to be assured, as you wished, by the pledge of your two new plays in manuscript,--"midsummer night's dream" and "romeo and juliet,"--for which bill he will at my strong instance, and because you are a friend to me, give £5. my charge for services in this behalf, which hath consumed much time, will be £1, which i shall straightway pay out in the purchase of a new gown, much needed by my little daughter jessica, who loves you and recalls often the pleasant tales you do repeat for her diversion. the letters in the second period (1602) are nine years later than those just read. the first is from the same mordecai shylock, who, with the poet, seems to have prospered in worldly affairs, as his letters are dated in a more reputable portion of the city. threadneedle street, london, april 17, 1602. to william shakespeare: in january last past you purchased of richard burbage four shares of the stock of the globe theatre for £100, and inasmuch as you had not available the whole means to pay therefor, borrowed from me the £60 wanting, paying yourself £40 of such purchase price, and giving me in pledge for my £60 such four shares of stock. owing to special attractions at blackfriars' theatre, the stock of the globe hath greatly declined in value, and i fear these four shares may not longer be salable at the price of even £60, and i therefore must importune that you forthwith do make a payment of £20 on your said bill, or the four shares of stock will be sold at public vendue. the next letter is from the same writer, and is dated nine days later. threadneedle street, april 26, 1602. to william shakespeare: i acknowledge to have received from you by the hand of henry condell £5, and two of your own shares in the stock of the globe theatre in further pledge of your bill of £60, as was engaged between us yesterday. it pains me to make known to you that, owing to the great demands recently made upon the goldsmiths by her sacred majesty, money hath become very dear; and as it was not my own lent you, i have been obliged to pay above the usance expected a further premium of seventeen in the hundred, which i pray you to presently repay me. i am told that shares in the globe can now be bought at £15; and inasmuch as yours were bought at £25, should you acquire other shares at £15, it would serve to equate your havings. the next letter, from the same broker, is written but a few days later. threadneedle street, may 12, 1602. to william shakespeare: acting as requested by you, i did one week ago buy for you three shares in the globe theatre for £15 each, using in such purchase the £15 given me by you, and £30, not of mine own, but which was furnished me by a goldsmith of repute. yesterday i learned that shares were offered at £10 each, perchance from the efforts of forestallers, as also from the preaching of a dissenter, who fulminates that the end of the world is but three weeks away, which hath induced great seriousness among the people. unless you can pay me, therefore, as much as £40, on the morrow i shall be constrained to offer such shares to the highest bidder at the meeting of the guild. the next letter is also from the same mordecai shylock, and is dated four days later. threadneedle street, may 16, 1602. to william shakespeare: my earnest epistle to thee of four days since having elicited no response, i did on the following day offer at the meeting of the brokers' guild some of the shares of the stock in the globe pledged to me, and three shares were bidden at £9 each by my brother, nehemiah shylock. as i offered next all the rest, one henry wriothsley, earl of southampton, did ask to whom the shares belonged, and when he was enlightened, did straightway take all the shares and pay me the whole balance owing, and called me divers opprobrious names. i answered not his railing with railing, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, but such slander is illy bestowed on one who has been your friend for long, and who was but striving to avert his own destruction. the next letter in order is from one william kempe, who would seem to be the business manager of the globe theatre, or the person having in charge the unskilled labor connected with the playhouse. globe playhouse, employment bureau, may 25, 1602. william shakespeare: in much tribulation do i write thee as to the contention which hath arisen among our stock actors and supes of the globe. nicholas bottom, whom you brought from the parish workhouse in stratford, is in ill humor with thee in especial. he says when he played with you in ben jonson's comedy, "every man in his humor," he was by far the better actor and did receive the plaudits of all; despite which he now receives but 6 shillings each week, while you are become a man of great wealth, having gotten, as he verily believes, as much as £100. vainly did i oppose to him that the reason you had money when he had none was in verity that you had labored when he was drunken, and that this was to his profit, since, had not you and the other holders of shares in the globe saved somewhat of money, unthrifty groundlings of his ilk would starve, as there would be none to hire them at wages; but he avers that he is ground in the dust by the greed of capital, and hath so much prated of this that he hath much following, and accounteth himself a martyr. i said to him that at your especial order he was paid 6 shillings per week, which was double his worth, and that he should go elsewhere if he was not content, as i could daily get a better man for half his wages; but he will not go hence, nor will he perform, and has persuaded others to join with him, his very worthlessness having made him their leader, and they threaten, unless they may receive additional 4 shillings per week, and a groat each night for sack, they will have no plays performed, nor will they allow others to be hired in their stead. they do further demand that you shall write shorter plays; that you shall write no tragedies requiring them to labor more than three hours in the rendition; that you shall cut out as much as twelve pages each in "richard iii." and "othello," and fifteen pages from "hamlet," that they may not labor to weariness, and may have more hours to recreation and improvement at the alehouse. i know not what to do. if i yield them their demands, nothing will be left for the owners of shares in the globe; and if i do not, i fear mobs and riots. fain would i receive thy counsel, which shall have good heed. the next letter is the last in the period under review, and bears date four days later than the one just quoted from william kempe. at the elephant & magpie inn, london, may 29, 1602. to william shakespeare: this is written to thee by john lely, a clerk, in behalf of nicholas bottom, who useth not the pen, and who says to me to tell william shakespeare, fie upon him that he did order the aforesaid bottom to be locked out of the globe playhouse. hath he forgotten the first play he, william shakespeare, did ever write, to wit, "pyramus and thisbe," when a boy at stratford, which was played by himself and nicholas bottom and peter quince and others, in a barn, for the delectation of the townsmen? and is not this same play a part of his "midsummer night's dream," which beggarly play he did sell for £10, and hath not nicholas bottom first and always been an ass therein? doth he refuse to render to nicholas bottom 10 shillings per week when he can get £10 or even £11 for a beggarly play, which is nought unless it be acted? many a time hath he paid me from a sponging house; often hath he given me groats for sack, and for purges when sack hath undone me; and did i ever insult him to offer to repay him a penny? say to him, remembereth he not when the horses ridden by duncan and macbeth upon the stage did break through the floor, who, affrighted, did run howling away, whereby burbage was aroused and did pick him, william shakespeare, from among the horses' feet and save his life? and now, sweet will, fie upon thee that thou didst frown upon thy townsman. delay not to send me sundry shillings for the publican, who believes you will discharge, as often before, my reckoning. this, and much more of like tenor, saith nicholas bottom to william shakespeare by your worship's humble servant, john lely. the letters in the third period bear date in 1609, seven years later than those last quoted. the first is from rev. walter blaise, who appears to be the clergyman at stratford-on-avon. stratford, feb. 23, 1609. to william shakespeare: john naps, of greece, who did recently return to his home here from london, safely has delivered to anne, your wife, the package entrusted to him for carriage. as your wife hath not the gift of writing, she does desire that i convey to you her thanks for the sundry contents of the hamper. she hath also confided to me as her spiritual adviser that she did diligently ply john naps with questions as to his visit to you in london, and that said john naps, under her interrogatories, has revealed to her much that doth make her sick at heart and weary of life. _item_. he doth report that you do pass among men as a bachelor, and, with sundry players and men of that ilk, do frequent a house of entertainment kept by one doll tearsheet, and do kiss the barmaid and call her your sweetheart. _item_. he doth also report that you did give to the daughter of the publican at whose house you do now abide, a ring of fine gold, and did also write to her a sonnet in praise of her eyebrows and her lips, and did otherwise wickedly disport with the said damsel. _item_. he doth further report of you that you did visit, with one ben jonson, on the sabbath-day, a place of disrepute, where were cock-fights and the baiting of a bear, and that with you were two brazen women, falsely called by you the wife and sister of ben jonson. these things do overmuch grieve anne, who hath been to you a loyal wife and a true, and she desires that you do forthwith renounce your evil ways and return to the new house at stratford, and in ashes and sackcloth repent of your wanderings from the straight and narrow way. thus far have i spoken to you as the mouthpiece and vicegerent of anne, your wife, who is in sore affliction and deep grief by reason of your transgressions. but, beloved lamb of my flock, i should be unworthy my high and sacred calling did i not lift up also my rebuking voice as a pelican in the wilderness, and adjure you to beware of concupiscence and fleshly lust, which unceasingly do war upon the human soul. thinkest thou to touch pitch and remain undefiled? the next letter is from the firm of coke & dogberry, lawyers in london. inner temple, march 8, 1609. to william shakespeare: we have been retained by mistress anne page as her solicitors to bring against you an action, for that you have not fulfilled and in sooth cannot fulfil with her a contract of marriage, and to seek against you under the laws of this realm heavy damages and an imprisonment of the body, in that you have in unholy ways trifled with her affections, contrary to the statute in such cases provided. she especially avers that you did, two days before michaelmas, swear to her on a parcel gilt goblet that you did love her alone, and did then give to her a bracelet of price. but yesterday, as she was bargaining with a yeoman named christopher sly, from stratford, for the purchase of a spotted pig of his own fattening, the said sly did reveal to her that you were his friend, and that you had wife and children in your native town where he dwelt. we beg you to straightway name to us your solicitors, that we may confer with them and attend to the issuance of the writs. i have aimed to select from the letters sent me only those bearing on some trouble tending to cause sleeplessness on the part of the poet, but make an exception in case of a letter of sir walter raleigh, next in chronological order, which refers to matters of general interest. the mermaid, march 20, 1609. to william shakespeare: full well do i know, my dearest will, that often hast thou wondered of the fate of thy £50, which, with a hundred times as much of mine own, was adventured to found an empire in america. great were our hopes, both of glory and of gold, in the kingdom of powhatan. but it grieves me much to say that all hath resulted in infelicity, misfortune, and an unhappy end. our ships were wrecked, or captured by the knavish spaniards. our brave sailors are perished. as i was blameworthy for thy risk, i send by the messenger your £50, which you shall not lose by my over-hopeful vision. for its usance i send a package of a new herb from the chesapeake, called by the natives tobacco. make it not into tea, as did one of my kinsmen, but kindle and smoke it in the little tube the messenger will bestow. be not deterred if thy gorge at first rises against it, for, when thou art wonted, it is a balm for all sorrows and griefs, and as a dream of paradise. and now, my sweet will, whom my soul loveth, why comest thou not as of yore to the "mermaid," that i may have speech with thee? thou knowest that from my youth up i have adventured all for the welfare and glory of our queen elizabeth. on sea and on land and in many climes have i fought the accursed spaniards, and am honored recognize thy supreme merit, for daily and hourly are sung to her the praises of this loveliness until the story is as a tale that is told and a weariness to the understanding; but thy commendations of her wisdom will be as fresh and fragrant incense, nor will their truthfulness be too closely scanned. thou knowest that i have taken all knowledge to be my province, and therefore have i oft and longingly gazed into the flowery fields of that divine art where to-day in our much-loved england thou art disporting thyself supremely and alone. but when i consider thy tragedies, throughout which is diffused the inmost soul of poesy, my crude yet labored metres seem to me as the body of a maiden, not indeed devoid of a certain comeliness and grace, yet into whose waiting bosom hath not yet been breathed the spirit of life. in thy tragedies thou hast the majestic grace which in the attic ages belonged to sophocles alone; thou hast the stately march and music of aeschylus, without in thy themes his ceaseless iteration of predestined woe which ranks his heroes outside humanity; yet the sombre hand of fate hath not more inflexibly driven the gentle iphigenia to her doom than it hath followed macbeth to his foreshadowed crime and end. but in thy canticles it is not an o'ershadowing, mysterious, and tragic fate, but a gracious and loving providence which, as thyself hath phrased it, "holds in his hands the shears of destiny, and has commandment on the pulse of life." in comedy, aristophanes is not thy master, yet must i greatly choose thy tragedies as monuments of thy abiding fame. funeral dolors rather than bridal carols inspire even the harp of david, beloved of the lord; and the pencil of the holy ghost toucheth ever the shadowed phases of our earthly lives. i am minded to now advert to another topic from the tale told me by southampton that thou wert presently to publish a volume of thy sugared sonnets. may i pray thee that this collection compass not the two sonnets written by thee for me in laud of our queen elizabeth, and the one of this morning? as thou knowest, these first were presented to our gracious sovereign as mine own, and did so pleasure her as to chiefly prosper my advancement. were the true author now known it might sadly mar my fortunes. in the vastness of thy riches, the absence of these gems shall not be noted. the loss of a star dims not the splendor of the constellations. the glorious sun seeks not to reclaim the lustre his rays have given to the tiny dewdrop. withal i have rendered to thee somewhat of recompense as i have spoken at sundry times to her gracious majesty and to our present anointed sovereign of thy dramas, and fostered as best i might thy interests when they crossed not mine own. so i trust this boon may be awarded me, and that my borrowed splendors may not be stripped away. thy immeasurable superiority, as again evidenced in the sonnet to the lady mary, has fixed anew my resolve as to my predestined field of labor. not for my brow shall be woven the poet's garland of bays. yet abundant self-confidence is mine, and i augur that in the great work for which i would fain believe the ages are waiting, will be made clear my award to be the high priest of nature. exact sciences not yet born shall be my servitors and the augmenters of my fame. by the methods i have discerned shall mankind discover and apply those beneficent innovations which are the chiefest births of time. yet even this hope hath its flavor of bitterness, as thus guided my pupils may far overpass me and my memory be lost. but the love of beauty and melody in poesy is of perennial life, and thy memory shall survive the mutations of time, and shall be the nation's heritage while fancy and imagination dwell in the souls of men. anew do i now discern that the meditation of nature and her laws, mysterious yet exact, consorteth not with the airy fancies of the poet's vision, and that our paths are diverse, yet each guiding to what is useful and divine. farewell! and until the dolors of death are mine shall i remember thy sweet, loving kindness, and admire thy shining genius where wit and wisdom guide the flight of a sovereign imagination. ever thy friend, francis bacon. one special point is notable in this letter from bacon. his ordinary correspondence is thickly sprinkled with quotations in the ancient tongues. as he was well acquainted with shakespeare, this omission of his customary latin phrases would indicate that he recognized shakespeare's lack of a thorough classical education. the next, and the last letter in the collection which seems to have a bearing upon the sleeplessness of shakespeare, is also from rev. walter blaise. stratford, april 3, 1609. to william shakespeare: sir thomas lucy, who is in her majesty's commission as a justice of the peace in this bailiwick, yesterday did inform me that he had been questioned from london if you were a married man, and if yes, when and to whom you were wedded. as the parish records are in my keeping, i could but bestow the information sought, although with great sinking of heart, as a well-wisher to you, who, though given overmuch to worldly frivolities and revels, yet are a worthy citizen, and a charitable and a just. greatly did i fear this knowledge was sought to thy injury. hast thou led a blameless life, the gates of hell shall not prevail against thee; but the wicked stand on slippery ways. anne, thy wife, to whom i did unbosom my fears, is in much tribulation lest thou art unfaithful to thy marriage vows, and again beseeches me to urge thee to come forth from wicked babylon and dwell in thy pleasant home in stratford. thou art become a man of substance; and hast moneys at usury. i have read of thy verses and plays, which, albeit somewhat given to lewdness, and addressed to gain the favor of the baser sort, yet reveal thee to be a man of understanding. i cannot, as it is rumored do some of thy town associates, award thee the title of poet, which title is reserved for the shining ones; but thou hast parts. there are many parish clerks, and even some curates in this realm, scarcely more liberally endowed in mind than thou. but greatly do i fear that thou art little better than one of the wicked. how hast thou put to use this talent entrusted thee by the master of the vineyard? in the maintenance of the things which profit not; in seeking the applause of the unworthy; in the writing of vain plays, which, if of the follies of youth, may be forgiven and remembered not against thee, provided in riper years you put behind you these frivolities, and atone for the mischief thou hast wrought by rendering acceptable service to the master; by coming to the help of the lord against the mighty. gladly would i take thy training in charge, and guide thy tottering feet along the flowery paths of homiletics. who knoweth into what vessels the all-seeing one may elect to pour his spirit? perchance in mercy i may be spared to behold thee a faithful though humble preacher of the word. anne, thy wife, often hath likened me to a great light upon a high hill-top, shining in the darkness far away. i would not magnify my powers, but not to all is it given to be mighty captains of a host. yet, according to thy gifts might thy work be, and a little candle shining in a darkened valley hath its place. in the light of these letters, some passages in "richard iii." and the "comedy of errors," written in the same year (1609), have an added significance. in "richard iii.," gloster says to anne:- "your beauty was the cause of that effect: your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep, to undertake the death of all the world, so i might live one hour in thy sweet bosom." in the "comedy of errors," the abbess says to adriana:- "the venom clamors of a jealous woman poison more deadly than a mud dog's tooth. it seems his sleep was hindered by thy railing. * * * * * in food, in sport, and life-preserving rest to be disturbed, would mad or man or beast. the consequence is, then, thy jealous fits have scared thy husband from the use of wits." note, too, the kindred thought:- "love hath chased sleep from my enthrallèd eyes." and again this passage, called forth possibly by the letters of the rev. walter blaise:- "slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of nile; whose breath rides on the posting winds and doth belie all corners of the world." as also this:- "do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, and recks not his own rede." from these several letters sufficiently appear the causes for the insomnia of shakespeare, which are some of the same causes resulting in its prevalence to-day. they illustrate anew that history repeats itself forever; that humanity is always the same; that like temptations and errors come to men with like results in all the centuries; that the sleeplessness of shakespeare came, because, merely as a matter of form, he had indorsed for a friend,--because he had bought more stocks than he could pay for, and when his margins were absorbed, came forth a shorn and shivering lamb,--because of the turbulence of labor,--because, alas! he too had been dazzled and bewildered by "the light that lies in woman's eyes." marvellous as were the endowments of the master, yet was he human and as one of us. chicago, 1886. transcribed from the 1887 macmillan and co. edition by david price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk. proofing by andy mclauchan and david stapleton. a bundle of letters by henry james chapter i from miss miranda mope, in paris, to mrs. abraham c. mope, at bangor, maine. september 5th, 1879. my dear mother--i have kept you posted as far as tuesday week last, and, although my letter will not have reached you yet, i will begin another before my news accumulates too much. i am glad you show my letters round in the family, for i like them all to know what i am doing, and i can't write to every one, though i try to answer all reasonable expectations. but there are a great many unreasonable ones, as i suppose you know--not yours, dear mother, for i am bound to say that you never required of me more than was natural. you see you are reaping your reward: i write to you before i write to any one else. there is one thing, i hope--that you don't show any of my letters to william platt. if he wants to see any of my letters, he knows the right way to go to work. i wouldn't have him see one of these letters, written for circulation in the family, for anything in the world. if he wants one for himself, he has got to write to me first. let him write to me first, and then i will see about answering him. you can show him this if you like; but if you show him anything more, i will never write to you again. i told you in my last about my farewell to england, my crossing the channel, and my first impressions of paris. i have thought a great deal about that lovely england since i left it, and all the famous historic scenes i visited; but i have come to the conclusion that it is not a country in which i should care to reside. the position of woman does not seem to me at all satisfactory, and that is a point, you know, on which i feel very strongly. it seems to me that in england they play a very faded-out part, and those with whom i conversed had a kind of depressed and humiliated tone; a little dull, tame look, as if they were used to being snubbed and bullied, which made me want to give them a good shaking. there are a great many people--and a great many things, too--over here that i should like to perform that operation upon. i should like to shake the starch out of some of them, and the dust out of the others. i know fifty girls in bangor that come much more up to my notion of the stand a truly noble woman should take, than those young ladies in england. but they had a most lovely way of speaking (in england), and the men are _remarkably handsome_. (you can show this to william platt, if you like.) i gave you my first impressions of paris, which quite came up to my expectations, much as i had heard and read about it. the objects of interest are extremely numerous, and the climate is remarkably cheerful and sunny. i should say the position of woman here was considerably higher, though by no means coming up to the american standard. the manners of the people are in some respects extremely peculiar, and i feel at last that i am indeed in _foreign parts_. it is, however, a truly elegant city (very superior to new york), and i have spent a great deal of time in visiting the various monuments and palaces. i won't give you an account of all my wanderings, though i have been most indefatigable; for i am keeping, as i told you before, a most _exhaustive_ journal, which i will allow you the _privilege_ of reading on my return to bangor. i am getting on remarkably well, and i must say i am sometimes surprised at my universal good fortune. it only shows what a little energy and common-sense will accomplish. i have discovered none of these objections to a young lady travelling in europe by herself of which we heard so much before i left, and i don't expect i ever shall, for i certainly don't mean to look for them. i know what i want, and i always manage to get it. i have received a great deal of politeness--some of it really most pressing, and i have experienced no drawbacks whatever. i have made a great many pleasant acquaintances in travelling round (both ladies and gentlemen), and had a great many most interesting talks. i have collected a great deal of information, for which i refer you to my journal. i assure you my journal is going to be a splendid thing. i do just exactly as i do in bangor, and i find i do perfectly right; and at any rate, i don't care if i don't. i didn't come to europe to lead a merely conventional life; i could do that at bangor. you know i never _would_ do it at bangor, so it isn't likely i am going to make myself miserable over here. so long as i accomplish what i desire, and make my money hold out, i shall regard the thing as a success. sometimes i feel rather lonely, especially in the evening; but i generally manage to interest myself in something or in some one. in the evening i usually read up about the objects of interest i have visited during the day, or i post up my journal. sometimes i go to the theatre; or else i play the piano in the public parlour. the public parlour at the hotel isn't much; but the piano is better than that fearful old thing at the sebago house. sometimes i go downstairs and talk to the lady who keeps the books--a french lady, who is remarkably polite. she is very pretty, and always wears a black dress, with the most beautiful fit; she speaks a little english; she tells me she had to learn it in order to converse with the americans who come in such numbers to this hotel. she has given me a great deal of information about the position of woman in france, and much of it is very encouraging. but she has told me at the same time some things that i should not like to write to you (i am hesitating even about putting them into my journal), especially if my letters are to be handed round in the family. i assure you they appear to talk about things here that we never think of mentioning at bangor, or even of thinking about. she seems to think she can tell me everything, because i told her i was travelling for general culture. well, i _do_ want to know so much that it seems sometimes as if i wanted to know everything; and yet there are some things that i think i don't want to know. but, as a general thing, everything is intensely interesting; i don't mean only everything that this french lady tells me, but everything i see and hear for myself. i feel really as if i should gain all i desire. i meet a great many americans, who, as a general thing, i must say, are not as polite to me as the people over here. the people over here--especially the gentlemen--are much more what i should call _attentive_. i don't know whether americans are more _sincere_; i haven't yet made up my mind about that. the only drawback i experience is when americans sometimes express surprise that i should be travelling round alone; so you see it doesn't come from europeans. i always have my answer ready; "for general culture, to acquire the languages, and to see europe for myself;" and that generally seems to satisfy them. dear mother, my money holds out very well, and it _is_ real interesting. chapter ii from the same to the same. september 16th. since i last wrote to you i have left that hotel, and come to live in a french family. it's a kind of boarding-house combined with a kind of school; only it's not like an american hoarding-house, nor like an american school either. there are four or five people here that have come to learn the language--not to take lessons, but to have an opportunity for conversation. i was very glad to come to such a place, for i had begun to realise that i was not making much progress with the french. it seemed to me that i should feel ashamed to have spent two months in paris, and not to have acquired more insight into the language. i had always heard so much of french conversation, and i found i was having no more opportunity to practise it than if i had remained at bangor. in fact, i used to hear a great deal more at bangor, from those french canadians that came down to cut the ice, than i saw i should ever hear at that hotel. the lady that kept the books seemed to want so much to talk to me in english (for the sake of practice, too, i suppose), that i couldn't bear to let her know i didn't like it. the chambermaid was irish, and all the waiters were german, so that i never heard a word of french spoken. i suppose you might hear a great deal in the shops; only, as i don't buy anything--i prefer to spend my money for purposes of culture--i don't have that advantage. i have been thinking some of taking a teacher, but i am well acquainted with the grammar already, and teachers always keep you bothering over the verbs. i was a good deal troubled, for i felt as if i didn't want to go away without having, at least, got a general idea of french conversation. the theatre gives you a good deal of insight, and as i told you in my last, i go a good deal to places of amusement. i find no difficulty whatever in going to such places alone, and am always treated with the politeness which, as i told you before, i encounter everywhere. i see plenty of other ladies alone (mostly french), and they generally seem to be enjoying themselves as much as i. but at the theatre every one talks so fast that i can scarcely make out what they say; and, besides, there are a great many vulgar expressions which it is unnecessary to learn. but it was the theatre, nevertheless, that put me on the track. the very next day after i wrote to you last i went to the palais royal, which is one of the principal theatres in paris. it is very small, but it is very celebrated, and in my guide-book it is marked with _two stars_, which is a sign of importance attached only to _first-class_ objects of interest. but after i had been there half an hour i found i couldn't understand a single word of the play, they gabbled it off so fast, and they made use of such peculiar expressions. i felt a good deal disappointed and troubled--i was afraid i shouldn't gain all i had come for. but while i was thinking it over--thinking what i _should_ do--i heard two gentlemen talking behind me. it was between the acts, and i couldn't help listening to what they said. they were talking english, but i guess they were americans. "well," said one of them, "it all depends on what you are after. i'm french; that's what i'm after." "well," said the other, "i'm after art." "well," said the first, "i'm after art too; but i'm after french most." then, dear mother, i am sorry to say the second one swore a little. he said, "oh, damn french!" "no, i won't damn french," said his friend. "i'll acquire it--that's what i'll do with it. i'll go right into a family." "what family'll you go into?" "into some french family. that's the only way to do--to go to some place where you can talk. if you're after art, you want to stick to the galleries; you want to go right through the louvre, room by room; you want to take a room a day, or something of that sort. but, if you want to acquire french, the thing is to look out for a family. there are lots of french families here that take you to board and teach you. my second cousin--that young lady i told you about--she got in with a crowd like that, and they booked her right up in three months. they just took her right in and they talked to her. that's what they do to you; they set you right down and they talk _at_ you. you've got to understand them; you can't help yourself. that family my cousin was with has moved away somewhere, or i should try and get in with them. they were very smart people, that family; after she left, my cousin corresponded with them in french. but i mean to find some other crowd, if it takes a lot of trouble!" i listened to all this with great interest, and when he spoke about his cousin i was on the point of turning around to ask him the address of the family that she was with; but the next moment he said they had moved away; so i sat still. the other gentleman, however, didn't seem to be affected in the same way as i was. "well," he said, "you may follow up that if you like; i mean to follow up the pictures. i don't believe there is ever going to be any considerable demand in the united states for french; but i can promise you that in about ten years there'll be a big demand for art! and it won't be temporary either." that remark may be very true, but i don't care anything about the demand; i want to know french for its own sake. i don't want to think i have been all this while without having gained an insight . . . the very next day, i asked the lady who kept the books at the hotel whether she knew of any family that could take me to board and give me the benefit of their conversation. she instantly threw up her hands, with several little shrill cries (in their french way, you know), and told me that her dearest friend kept a regular place of that kind. if she had known i was looking out for such a place she would have told me before; she had not spoken of it herself, because she didn't wish to injure the hotel by being the cause of my going away. she told me this was a charming family, who had often received american ladies (and others as well) who wished to follow up the language, and she was sure i should be delighted with them. so she gave me their address, and offered to go with me to introduce me. but i was in such a hurry that i went off by myself; and i had no trouble in finding these good people. they were delighted to receive me, and i was very much pleased with what i saw of them. they seemed to have plenty of conversation, and there will be no trouble about that. i came here to stay about three days ago, and by this time i have seen a great deal of them. the price of board struck me as rather high; but i must remember that a quantity of conversation is thrown in. i have a very pretty little room--without any carpet, but with seven mirrors, two clocks, and five curtains. i was rather disappointed after i arrived to find that there are several other americans here for the same purpose as myself. at least there are three americans and two english people; and also a german gentleman. i am afraid, therefore, our conversation will be rather mixed, but i have not yet time to judge. i try to talk with madame de maisonrouge all i can (she is the lady of the house, and the _real_ family consists only of herself and her two daughters). they are all most elegant, interesting women, and i am sure we shall become intimate friends. i will write you more about them in my next. tell william platt i don't care what he does. chapter iii from miss violet ray, in paris, to miss agnes rich, in new york. september 21st. we had hardly got here when father received a telegram saying he would have to come right back to new york. it was for something about his business--i don't know exactly what; you know i never understand those things, never want to. we had just got settled at the hotel, in some charming rooms, and mother and i, as you may imagine, were greatly annoyed. father is extremely fussy, as you know, and his first idea, as soon as he found he should have to go back, was that we should go back with him. he declared he would never leave us in paris alone, and that we must return and come out again. i don't know what he thought would happen to us; i suppose he thought we should be too extravagant. it's father's theory that we are always running up bills, whereas a little observation would show him that we wear the same old _rags_ for months. but father has no observation; he has nothing but theories. mother and i, however, have, fortunately, a great deal of _practice_, and we succeeded in making him understand that we wouldn't budge from paris, and that we would rather be chopped into small pieces than cross that dreadful ocean again. so, at last, he decided to go back alone, and to leave us here for three months. but, to show you how fussy he is, he refused to let us stay at the hotel, and insisted that we should go into a _family_. i don't know what put such an idea into his head, unless it was some advertisement that he saw in one of the american papers that are published here. there are families here who receive american and english people to live with them, under the pretence of teaching them french. you may imagine what people they are--i mean the families themselves. but the americans who choose this peculiar manner of seeing paris must be actually just as bad. mother and i were horrified, and declared that main force should not remove us from the hotel. but father has a way of arriving at his ends which is more efficient than violence. he worries and fusses; he "nags," as we used to say at school; and, when mother and i are quite worn out, his triumph is assured. mother is usually worn out more easily than i, and she ends by siding with father; so that, at last, when they combine their forces against poor little me, i have to succumb. you should have heard the way father went on about this "family" plan; he talked to every one he saw about it; he used to go round to the banker's and talk to the people there--the people in the post-office; he used to try and exchange ideas about it with the waiters at the hotel. he said it would be more safe, more respectable, more economical; that i should perfect my french; that mother would learn how a french household is conducted; that he should feel more easy, and five hundred reasons more. they were none of them good, but that made no difference. it's all humbug, his talking about economy, when every one knows that business in america has completely recovered, that the prostration is all over, and that immense fortunes are being made. we have been economising for the last five years, and i supposed we came abroad to reap the benefits of it. as for my french, it is quite as perfect as i want it to be. (i assure you i am often surprised at my own fluency, and, when i get a little more practice in the genders and the idioms, i shall do very well in this respect.) to make a long story short, however, father carried his point, as usual; mother basely deserted me at the last moment, and, after holding out alone for three days, i told them to do with me what they pleased! father lost three steamers in succession by remaining in paris to argue with me. you know he is like the schoolmaster in goldsmith's "deserted village"--"e'en though vanquished, he would argue still." he and mother went to look at some seventeen families (they had got the addresses somewhere), while i retired to my sofa, and would have nothing to do with it. at last they made arrangements, and i was transported to the establishment from which i now write you. i write you from the bosom of a parisian menage--from the depths of a second-rate boarding-house. father only left paris after he had seen us what he calls comfortably settled here, and had informed madame de maisonrouge (the mistress of the establishment--the head of the "family") that he wished my french pronunciation especially attended to. the pronunciation, as it happens, is just what i am most at home in; if he had said my genders or my idioms there would have been some sense. but poor father has no tact, and this defect is especially marked since he has been in europe. he will be absent, however, for three months, and mother and i shall breathe more freely; the situation will be less intense. i must confess that we breathe more freely than i expected, in this place, where we have been for about a week. i was sure, before we came, that it would prove to be an establishment of the _lowest description_; but i must say that, in this respect, i am agreeably disappointed. the french are so clever that they know even how to manage a place of this kind. of course it is very disagreeable to live with strangers, but as, after all, if i were not staying with madame de maisonrouge i should not be living in the faubourg st. germain, i don't know that from the point of view of exclusiveness it is any great loss to be here. our rooms are very prettily arranged, and the table is remarkably good. mamma thinks the whole thing--the place and the people, the manners and customs--very amusing; but mamma is very easily amused. as for me, you know, all that i ask is to be let alone, and not to have people's society forced upon me. i have never wanted for society of my own choosing, and, so long as i retain possession of my faculties, i don't suppose i ever shall. as i said, however, the place is very well managed, and i succeed in doing as i please, which, you know, is my most cherished pursuit. madame de maisonrouge has a great deal of tact--much more than poor father. she is what they call here a belle femme, which means that she is a tall, ugly woman, with style. she dresses very well, and has a great deal of talk; but, though she is a very good imitation of a lady, i never see her behind the dinner-table, in the evening, smiling and bowing, as the people come in, and looking all the while at the dishes and the servants, without thinking of a _dame de comptoir_ blooming in a corner of a shop or a restaurant. i am sure that, in spite of her fine name, she was once a _dame de comptoir_. i am also sure that, in spite of her smiles and the pretty things she says to every one, she hates us all, and would like to murder us. she is a hard, clever frenchwoman, who would like to amuse herself and enjoy her paris, and she must be bored to death at passing all her time in the midst of stupid english people who mumble broken french at her. some day she will poison the soup or the _vin rouge_; but i hope that will not be until after mother and i shall have left her. she has two daughters, who, except that one is decidedly pretty, are meagre imitations of herself. the "family," for the rest, consists altogether of our beloved compatriots, and of still more beloved englanders. there is an englishman here, with his sister, and they seem to be rather nice people. he is remarkably handsome, but excessively affected and patronising, especially to us americans; and i hope to have a chance of biting his head off before long. the sister is very pretty, and, apparently, very nice; but, in costume, she is britannia incarnate. there is a very pleasant little frenchman--when they are nice they are charming--and a german doctor, a big blonde man, who looks like a great white bull; and two americans, besides mother and me. one of them is a young man from boston,--an aesthetic young man, who talks about its being "a real corot day," etc., and a young woman--a girl, a female, i don't know what to call her--from vermont, or minnesota, or some such place. this young woman is the most extraordinary specimen of artless yankeeism that i ever encountered; she is really too horrible. i have been three times to clementine about your underskirt, etc. chapter iv from louis leverett, in paris, to harvard tremont, in boston. september 25th. my dear harvard--i have carried out my plan, of which i gave you a hint in my last, and i only regret that i should not have done it before. it is human nature, after all, that is the most interesting thing in the world, and it only reveals itself to the truly earnest seeker. there is a want of earnestness in that life of hotels and railroad trains, which so many of our countrymen are content to lead in this strange old world, and i was distressed to find how far i, myself; had been led along the dusty, beaten track. i had, however, constantly wanted to turn aside into more unfrequented ways; to plunge beneath the surface and see what i should discover. but the opportunity had always been missing; somehow, i never meet those opportunities that we hear about and read about--the things that happen to people in novels and biographies. and yet i am always on the watch to take advantage of any opening that may present itself; i am always looking out for experiences, for sensations--i might almost say for adventures. the great thing is to _live_, you know--to feel, to be conscious of one's possibilities; not to pass through life mechanically and insensibly, like a letter through the post-office. there are times, my dear harvard, when i feel as if i were really capable of everything--capable _de tout_, as they say here--of the greatest excesses as well as the greatest heroism. oh, to be able to say that one has lived--_qu'on a vecu_, as they say here--that idea exercises an indefinable attraction for me. you will, perhaps, reply, it is easy to say it; but the thing is to make people believe you! and, then, i don't want any second-hand, spurious sensations; i want the knowledge that leaves a trace--that leaves strange scars and stains and reveries behind it! but i am afraid i shock you, perhaps even frighten you. if you repeat my remarks to any of the west cedar street circle, be sure you tone them down as your discretion will suggest. for yourself; you will know that i have always had an intense desire to see something of _real french life_. you are acquainted with my great sympathy with the french; with my natural tendency to enter into the french way of looking at life. i sympathise with the artistic temperament; i remember you used sometimes to hint to me that you thought my own temperament too artistic. i don't think that in boston there is any real sympathy with the artistic temperament; we tend to make everything a matter of right and wrong. and in boston one can't _live--on ne peut pas vivre_, as they say here. i don't mean one can't reside--for a great many people manage that; but one can't live aesthetically--i may almost venture to say, sensuously. this is why i have always been so much drawn to the french, who are so aesthetic, so sensuous. i am so sorry that theophile gautier has passed away; i should have liked so much to go and see him, and tell him all that i owe him. he was living when i was here before; but, you know, at that time i was travelling with the johnsons, who are not aesthetic, and who used to make me feel rather ashamed of my artistic temperament. if i had gone to see the great apostle of beauty, i should have had to go clandestinely--_en cachette_, as they say here; and that is not my nature; i like to do everything frankly, freely, _naivement, au grand jour_. that is the great thing--to be free, to be frank, to be _naif_. doesn't matthew arnold say that somewhere--or is it swinburne, or pater? when i was with the johnsons everything was superficial; and, as regards life, everything was brought down to the question of right and wrong. they were too didactic; art should never be didactic; and what is life but an art? pater has said that so well, somewhere. with the johnsons i am afraid i lost many opportunities; the tone was gray and cottony, i might almost say woolly. but now, as i tell you, i have determined to take right hold for myself; to look right into european life, and judge it without johnsonian prejudices. i have taken up my residence in a french family, in a real parisian house. you see i have the courage of my opinions; i don't shrink from carrying out my theory that the great thing is to _live_. you know i have always been intensely interested in balzac, who never shrank from the reality, and whose almost _lurid_ pictures of parisian life have often haunted me in my wanderings through the old wicked-looking streets on the other side of the river. i am only sorry that my new friends--my french family--do not live in the old city--_au coeur du vieux paris_, as they say here. they live only in the boulevard haussman, which is less picturesque; but in spite of this they have a great deal of the balzac tone. madame de maisonrouge belongs to one of the oldest and proudest families in france; but she has had reverses which have compelled her to open an establishment in which a limited number of travellers, who are weary of the beaten track, who have the sense of local colour--she explains it herself; she expresses it so well--in short, to open a sort of boarding-house. i don't see why i should not, after all, use that expression, for it is the correlative of the term _pension bourgeoise_, employed by balzac in the _pere goriot_. do you remember the _pension bourgeoise_ of madame vauquer _nee_ de conflans? but this establishment is not at all like that: and indeed it is not at all _bourgeois_; there is something distinguished, something aristocratic, about it. the pension vauquer was dark, brown, sordid, _graisseuse_; but this is in quite a different tone, with high, clear, lightly-draped windows, tender, subtle, almost morbid, colours, and furniture in elegant, studied, reed-like lines. madame de maisonrouge reminds me of madame hulot--do you remember "la belle madame hulot?"--in _les barents pauvres_. she has a great charm; a little artificial, a little fatigued, with a little suggestion of hidden things in her life; but i have always been sensitive to the charm of fatigue, of duplicity. i am rather disappointed, i confess, in the society i find here; it is not so local, so characteristic, as i could have desired. indeed, to tell the truth, it is not local at all; but, on the other hand, it is cosmopolitan, and there is a great advantage in that. we are french, we are english, we are american, we are german; and, i believe, there are some russians and hungarians expected. i am much interested in the study of national types; in comparing, contrasting, seizing the strong points, the weak points, the point of view of each. it is interesting to shift one's point of view--to enter into strange, exotic ways of looking at life. the american types here are not, i am sorry to say, so interesting as they might be, and, excepting myself; are exclusively feminine. we are _thin_, my dear harvard; we are pale, we are sharp. there is something meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness, our composition in richness. we lack temperament; we don't know how to live; _nous ne savons pas vivre_, as they say here. the american temperament is represented (putting myself aside, and i often think that my temperament is not at all american) by a young girl and her mother, and another young girl without her mother--without her mother or any attendant or appendage whatever. these young girls are rather curious types; they have a certain interest, they have a certain grace, but they are disappointing too; they don't go far; they don't keep all they promise; they don't satisfy the imagination. they are cold, slim, sexless; the physique is not generous, not abundant; it is only the drapery, the skirts and furbelows (that is, i mean in the young lady who has her mother) that are abundant. they are very different: one of them all elegance, all expensiveness, with an air of high fashion, from new york; the other a plain, pure, clear-eyed, straight-waisted, straight-stepping maiden from the heart of new england. and yet they are very much alike too--more alike than they would care to think themselves for they eye each other with cold, mistrustful, deprecating looks. they are both specimens of the emancipated young american girl--practical, positive, passionless, subtle, and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little. and yet, as i say, they have a certain stamp, a certain grace; i like to talk with them, to study them. the fair new yorker is, sometimes, very amusing; she asks me if every one in boston talks like me--if every one is as "intellectual" as your poor correspondent. she is for ever throwing boston up at me; i can't get rid of boston. the other one rubs it into me too; but in a different way; she seems to feel about it as a good mahommedan feels toward mecca, and regards it as a kind of focus of light for the whole human race. poor little boston, what nonsense is talked in thy name! but this new england maiden is, in her way, a strange type: she is travelling all over europe alone--"to see it," she says, "for herself." for herself! what can that stiff slim self of hers do with such sights, such visions! she looks at everything, goes everywhere, passes her way, with her clear quiet eyes wide open; skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them; pushing through brambles without tearing her robe; exciting, without knowing it, the most injurious suspicions; and always holding her course, passionless, stainless, fearless, charmless! it is a little figure in which, after all, if you can get the right point of view, there is something rather striking. by way of contrast, there is a lovely english girl, with eyes as shy as violets, and a voice as sweet! she has a sweet gainsborough head, and a great gainsborough hat, with a mighty plume in front of it, which makes a shadow over her quiet english eyes. then she has a sage-green robe, "mystic, wonderful," all embroidered with subtle devices and flowers, and birds of tender tint; very straight and tight in front, and adorned behind, along the spine, with large, strange, iridescent buttons. the revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in england, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream--to _donnor a rever_, as they say here? i think that a great aesthetic renascence is at hand, and that a great light will be kindled in england, for all the world to see. there are spirits there that i should like to commune with; i think they would understand me. this gracious english maiden, with her clinging robes, her amulets and girdles, with something quaint and angular in her step, her carriage something mediaeval and gothic, in the details of her person and dress, this lovely evelyn vane (isn't it a beautiful name?) is deeply, delightfully picturesque. she is much a woman--elle _est bien femme_, as they say here; simpler, softer, rounder, richer than the young girls i spoke of just now. not much talk--a great, sweet silence. then the violet eye--the very eye itself seems to blush; the great shadowy hat, making the brow so quiet; the strange, clinging, clutching, pictured raiment! as i say, it is a very gracious, tender type. she has her brother with her, who is a beautiful, fair-haired, gray-eyed young englishman. he is purely objective; and he, too, is very plastic. chapter v from miranda hope to her mother. september 26th. you must not be frightened at not hearing from me oftener; it is not because i am in any trouble, but because i am getting on so well. if i were in any trouble i don't think i should write to you; i should just keep quiet and see it through myself. but that is not the case at present and, if i don't write to you, it is because i am so deeply interested over here that i don't seem to find time. it was a real providence that brought me to this house, where, in spite of all obstacles, i am able to do much good work. i wonder how i find the time for all i do; but when i think that i have only got a year in europe, i feel as if i wouldn't sacrifice a single hour. the obstacles i refer to are the disadvantages i have in learning french, there being so many persons around me speaking english, and that, as you may say, in the very bosom of a french family. it seems as if you heard english everywhere; but i certainly didn't expect to find it in a place like this. i am not discouraged, however, and i talk french all i can, even with the other english boarders. then i have a lesson every day from miss maisonrouge (the elder daughter of the lady of the house), and french conversation every evening in the salon, from eight to eleven, with madame herself, and some friends of hers that often come in. her cousin, mr. verdier, a young french gentleman, is fortunately staying with her, and i make a point of talking with him as much as possible. i have _extra private lessons_ from him, and i often go out to walk with him. some night, soon, he is to accompany me to the opera. we have also a most interesting plan of visiting all the galleries in paris together. like most of the french, he converses with great fluency, and i feel as if i should really gain from him. he is remarkably handsome, and extremely polite--paying a great many compliments, which, i am afraid, are not always _sincere_. when i return to bangor i will tell you some of the things he has said to me. i think you will consider them extremely curious, and very beautiful _in their way_. the conversation in the parlour (from eight to eleven) is often remarkably brilliant, and i often wish that you, or some of the bangor folks, could be there to enjoy it. even though you couldn't understand it i think you would like to hear the way they go on; they seem to express so much. i sometimes think that at bangor they don't express enough (but it seems as if over there, there was less to express). it seems as if; at bangor, there were things that folks never _tried_ to say; but here, i have learned from studying french that you have no idea what you _can_ say, before you try. at bangor they seem to give it up beforehand; they don't make any effort. (i don't say this in the least for william platt, _in particular_.) i am sure i don't know what they will think of me when i get back. it seems as if; over here, i had learned to come out with everything. i suppose they will think i am not sincere; but isn't it more sincere to come out with things than to conceal them? i have become very good friends with every one in the house--that is (you see, i _am_ sincere), with _almost_ every one. it is the most interesting circle i ever was in. there's a girl here, an american, that i don't like so much as the rest; but that is only because she won't let me. i should like to like her, ever so much, because she is most lovely and most attractive; but she doesn't seem to want to know me or to like me. she comes from new york, and she is remarkably pretty, with beautiful eyes and the most delicate features; she is also remarkably elegant--in this respect would bear comparison with any one i have seen over here. but it seems as if she didn't want to recognise me or associate with me; as if she wanted to make a difference between us. it is like people they call "haughty" in books. i have never seen any one like that before--any one that wanted to make a difference; and at first i was right down interested, she seemed to me so like a proud young lady in a novel. i kept saying to myself all day, "haughty, haughty," and i wished she would keep on so. but she did keep on; she kept on too long; and then i began to feel hurt. i couldn't think what i have done, and i can't think yet. it's as if she had got some idea about me, or had heard some one say something. if some girls should behave like that i shouldn't make any account of it; but this one is so refined, and looks as if she might be so interesting if i once got to know her, that i think about it a good deal. i am bound to find out what her reason is--for of course she has got some reason; i am right down curious to know. i went up to her to ask her the day before yesterday; i thought that was the best way. i told her i wanted to know her better, and would like to come and see her in her room--they tell me she has got a lovely room--and that if she had heard anything against me, perhaps she would tell me when i came. but she was more distant than ever, and she just turned it off; said that she had never heard me mentioned, and that her room was too small to receive visitors. i suppose she spoke the truth, but i am sure she has got some reason, all the same. she has got some idea, and i am bound to find out before i go, if i have to ask everybody in the house. i _am_ right down curious. i wonder if she doesn't think me refined--or if she had ever heard anything against bangor? i can't think it is that. don't you remember when clara barnard went to visit new york, three years ago, how much attention she received? and you know clara _is_ bangor, to the soles of her shoes. ask william platt--so long as he isn't a native--if he doesn't consider clara barnard refined. apropos, as they say here, of refinement, there is another american in the house--a gentleman from boston--who is just crowded with it. his name is mr. louis leverett (such a beautiful name, i think), and he is about thirty years old. he is rather small, and he looks pretty sick; he suffers from some affection of the liver. but his conversation is remarkably interesting, and i delight to listen to him--he has such beautiful ideas. i feel as if it were hardly right, not being in french; but, fortunately, he uses a great many french expressions. it's in a different style from the conversation of mr. verdier--not so complimentary, but more intellectual. he is intensely fond of pictures, and has given me a great many ideas about them which i should never have gained without him; i shouldn't have known where to look for such ideas. he thinks everything of pictures; he thinks we don't make near enough of them. they seem to make a good deal of them here; but i couldn't help telling him the other day that in bangor i really don't think we do. if i had any money to spend i would buy some and take them back, to hang up. mr. leverett says it would do them good--not the pictures, but the bangor folks. he thinks everything of the french, too, and says we don't make nearly enough of _them_. i couldn't help telling him the other day that at any rate they make enough of themselves. but it is very interesting to hear him go on about the french, and it is so much gain to me, so long as that is what i came for. i talk to him as much as i dare about boston, but i do feel as if this were right down wrong--a stolen pleasure. i can get all the boston culture i want when i go back, if i carry out my plan, my happy vision, of going there to reside. i ought to direct all my efforts to european culture now, and keep boston to finish off. but it seems as if i couldn't help taking a peep now and then, in advance--with a bostonian. i don't know when i may meet one again; but if there are many others like mr. leverett there, i shall be certain not to want when i carry out my dream. he is just as full of culture as he can live. but it seems strange how many different sorts there are. there are two of the english who i suppose are very cultivated too; but it doesn't seem as if i could enter into theirs so easily, though i try all i can. i do love their way of speaking, and sometimes i feel almost as if it would be right to give up trying to learn french, and just try to learn to speak our own tongue as these english speak it. it isn't the things they say so much, though these are often rather curious, but it is in the way they pronounce, and the sweetness of their voice. it seems as if they must _try_ a good deal to talk like that; but these english that are here don't seem to try at all, either to speak or do anything else. they are a young lady and her brother. i believe they belong to some noble family. i have had a good deal of intercourse with them, because i have felt more free to talk to them than to the americans--on account of the language. it seems as if in talking with them i was almost learning a new one. i never supposed, when i left bangor, that i was coming to europe to learn _english_! if i do learn it, i don't think you will understand me when i get back, and i don't think you'll like it much. i should be a good deal criticised if i spoke like that at bangor. however, i verily believe bangor is the most critical place on earth; i have seen nothing like it over here. tell them all i have come to the conclusion that they are _a great deal too fastidious_. but i was speaking about this english young lady and her brother. i wish i could put them before you. she is lovely to look at; she seems so modest and retiring. in spite of this, however, she dresses in a way that attracts great attention, as i couldn't help noticing when one day i went out to walk with her. she was ever so much looked at; but she didn't seem to notice it, until at last i couldn't help calling attention to it. mr. leverett thinks everything of it; he calls it the "costume of the future." i should call it rather the costume of the past--you know the english have such an attachment to the past. i said this the other day to madame do maisonrouge--that miss vane dressed in the costume of the past. _de l'an passe, vous voulez dire_? said madame, with her little french laugh (you can get william platt to translate this, he used to tell me he knew so much french). you know i told you, in writing some time ago, that i had tried to get some insight into the position of woman in england, and, being here with miss vane, it has seemed to me to be a good opportunity to get a little more. i have asked her a great deal about it; but she doesn't seem able to give me much information. the first time i asked her she told me the position of a lady depended upon the rank of her father, her eldest brother, her husband, etc. she told me her own position was very good, because her father was some relation--i forget what--to a lord. she thinks everything of this; and that proves to me that the position of woman in her country cannot be satisfactory; because, if it were, it wouldn't depend upon that of your relations, even your nearest. i don't know much about lords, and it does try my patience (though she is just as sweet as she can live) to hear her talk as if it were a matter of course that i should. i feel as if it were right to ask her as often as i can if she doesn't consider every one equal; but she always says she doesn't, and she confesses that she doesn't think she is equal to "lady something-or-other," who is the wife of that relation of her father. i try and persuade her all i can that she is; but it seems as if she didn't want to be persuaded; and when i ask her if lady so-and-so is of the same opinion (that miss vane isn't her equal), she looks so soft and pretty with her eyes, and says, "of course she is!" when i tell her that this is right down bad for lady so-and-so, it seems as if she wouldn't believe me, and the only answer she will make is that lady so-and-so is "extremely nice." i don't believe she is nice at all; if she were nice, she wouldn't have such ideas as that. i tell miss vane that at bangor we think such ideas vulgar; but then she looks as though she had never heard of bangor. i often want to shake her, though she _is_ so sweet. if she isn't angry with the people who make her feel that way, i am angry for her. i am angry with her brother too, for she is evidently very much afraid of him, and this gives me some further insight into the subject. she thinks everything of her brother, and thinks it natural that she should be afraid of him, not only physically (for this _is_ natural, as he is enormously tall and strong, and has very big fists), but morally and intellectually. she seems unable, however, to take in any argument, and she makes me realise what i have often heard--that if you are timid nothing will reason you out of it. mr. vane, also (the brother), seems to have the same prejudices, and when i tell him, as i often think it right to do, that his sister is not his subordinate, even if she does think so, but his equal, and, perhaps in some respects his superior, and that if my brother, in bangor, were to treat me as he treates this poor young girl, who has not spirit enough to see the question in its true light, there would be an indignation, meeting of the citizens to protest against such an outrage to the sanctity of womanhood--when i tell him all this, at breakfast or dinner, he bursts out laughing so loud that all the plates clatter on the table. but at such a time as this there is always one person who seems interested in what i say--a german gentleman, a professor, who sits next to me at dinner, and whom i must tell you more about another time. he is very learned, and has a great desire for information; he appreciates a great many of my remarks, and after dinner, in the salon, he often comes to me to ask me questions about them. i have to think a little, sometimes, to know what i did say, or what i do think. he takes you right up where you left off; and he is almost as fond of discussing things as william platt is. he is splendidly educated, in the german style, and he told me the other day that he was an "intellectual broom." well, if he is, he sweeps clean; i told him that. after he has been talking to me i feel as if i hadn't got a speck of dust left in my mind anywhere. it's a most delightful feeling. he says he's an observer; and i am sure there is plenty over here to observe. but i have told you enough for to-day. i don't know how much longer i shall stay here; i am getting on so fast that it sometimes seems as if i shouldn't need all the time i have laid out. i suppose your cold weather has promptly begun, as usual; it sometimes makes me envy you. the fall weather here is very dull and damp, and i feel very much as if i should like to be braced up. chapter vi from miss evelyn vane, in paris, to the lady augusta fleming, at brighton. paris, september 30th. dear lady augusta--i am afraid i shall not be able to come to you on january 7th, as you kindly proposed at homburg. i am so very, very sorry; it is a great disappointment to me. but i have just heard that it has been settled that mamma and the children are coming abroad for a part of the winter, and mamma wishes me to go with them to hyeres, where georgina has been ordered for her lungs. she has not been at all well these three months, and now that the damp weather has begun she is very poorly indeed; so that last week papa decided to have a consultation, and he and mamma went with her up to town and saw some three or four doctors. they all of them ordered the south of france, but they didn't agree about the place; so that mamma herself decided for hyeres, because it is the most economical. i believe it is very dull, but i hope it will do georgina good. i am afraid, however, that nothing will do her good until she consents to take more care of herself; i am afraid she is very wild and wilful, and mamma tells me that all this month it has taken papa's positive orders to make her stop in-doors. she is very cross (mamma writes me) about coming abroad, and doesn't seem at all to mind the expense that papa has been put to--talks very ill-naturedly about losing the hunting, etc. she expected to begin to hunt in december, and wants to know whether anybody keeps hounds at hyeres. fancy a girl wanting to follow the hounds when her lungs are so bad! but i daresay that when she gets there she will he glad enough to keep quiet, as they say that the heat is intense. it may cure georgina, but i am sure it will make the rest of us very ill. mamma, however, is only going to bring mary and gus and fred and adelaide abroad with her; the others will remain at kingscote until february (about the 3d), when they will go to eastbourne for a month with miss turnover, the new governess, who has turned out such a very nice person. she is going to take miss travers, who has been with us so long, but who is only qualified for the younger children, to hyeres, and i believe some of the kingscote servants. she has perfect confidence in miss t.; it is only a pity she has such an odd name. mamma thought of asking her if she would mind taking another when she came; but papa thought she might object. lady battledown makes all her governesses take the same name; she gives 5 pounds more a year for the purpose. i forget what it is she calls them; i think it's johnson (which to me always suggests a lady's maid). governesses shouldn't have too pretty a name; they shouldn't have a nicer name than the family. i suppose you heard from the desmonds that i did not go back to england with them. when it began to be talked about that georgina should be taken abroad, mamma wrote to me that i had better stop in paris for a month with harold, so that she could pick me up on their way to hyeres. it saves the expense of my journey to kingscote and back, and gives me the opportunity to "finish" a little in french. you know harold came here six weeks ago, to get up his french for those dreadful examinations that he has to pass so soon. he came to live with some french people that take in young men (and others) for this purpose; it's a kind of coaching place, only kept by women. mamma had heard it was very nice; so she wrote to me that i was to come and stop here with harold. the desmonds brought me and made the arrangement, or the bargain, or whatever you call it. poor harold was naturally not at all pleased; but he has been very kind, and has treated me like an angel. he is getting on beautifully with his french; for though i don't think the place is so good as papa supposed, yet harold is so immensely clever that he can scarcely help learning. i am afraid i learn much less, but, fortunately, i have not to pass an examination--except if mamma takes it into her head to examine me. but she will have so much to think of with georgina that i hope this won't occur to her. if it does, i shall be, as harold says, in a dreadful funk. this is not such a nice place for a girl as for a young man, and the desmonds thought it _exceedingly odd_ that mamma should wish me to come here. as mrs. desmond said, it is because she is so very unconventional. but you know paris is so very amusing, and if only harold remains goodnatured about it, i shall be content to wait for the caravan (that's what he calls mamma and the children). the person who keeps the establishment, or whatever they call it, is rather odd, and _exceedingly foreign_; but she is wonderfully civil, and is perpetually sending to my door to see if i want anything. the servants are not at all like english servants, and come bursting in, the footman (they have only one) and the maids alike, at all sorts of hours, in the _most sudden way_. then when one rings, it is half an hour before they come. all this is very uncomfortable, and i daresay it will be worse at hyeres. there, however, fortunately, we shall have our own people. there are some very odd americans here, who keep throwing harold into fits of laughter. one is a dreadful little man who is always sitting over the fire, and talking about the colour of the sky. i don't believe he ever saw the sky except through the window--pane. the other day he took hold of my frock (that green one you thought so nice at homburg) and told me that it reminded him of the texture of the devonshire turf. and then he talked for half an hour about the devonshire turf; which i thought such a very extraordinary subject. harold says he is mad. it is very strange to be living in this way with people one doesn't know. i mean that one doesn't know as one knows them in england. the other americans (beside the madman) are two girls, about my own age, one of whom is rather nice. she has a mother; but the mother is always sitting in her bedroom, which seems so very odd. i should like mamma to ask them to kingscote, but i am afraid mamma wouldn't like the mother, who is rather vulgar. the other girl is rather vulgar too, and is travelling about quite alone. i think she is a kind of schoolmistress; but the other girl (i mean the nicer one, with the mother) tells me she is more respectable than she seems. she has, however, the most extraordinary opinions--wishes to do away with the aristocracy, thinks it wrong that arthur should have kingscote when papa dies, etc. i don't see what it signifies to her that poor arthur should come into the property, which will be so delightful--except for papa dying. but harold says she is mad. he chaffs her tremendously about her radicalism, and he is so immensely clever that she can't answer him, though she is rather clever too. there is also a frenchman, a nephew, or cousin, or something, of the person of the house, who is extremely nasty; and a german professor, or doctor, who eats with his knife and is a great bore. i am so very sorry about giving up my visit. i am afraid you will never ask me again. chapter vii from leon verdier, in paris, to prosper gobain, at lille. september 28th. my dear prosper--it is a long time since i have given you of my news, and i don't know what puts it into my head to-night to recall myself to your affectionate memory. i suppose it is that when we are happy the mind reverts instinctively to those with whom formerly we shared our exaltations and depressions, and _je t'eu ai trop dit, dans le bon temps, mon gros prosper_, and you always listened to me too imperturbably, with your pipe in your mouth, your waistcoat unbuttoned, for me not to feel that i can count upon your sympathy to-day. _nous en sommes nous flanquees des confidences_--in those happy days when my first thought in seeing an adventure _poindre a l'horizon_ was of the pleasure i should have in relating it to the great prosper. as i tell thee, i am happy; decidedly, i am happy, and from this affirmation i fancy you can construct the rest. shall i help thee a little? take three adorable girls . . . three, my good prosper--the mystic number--neither more nor less. take them and place thy insatiable little leon in the midst of them! is the situation sufficiently indicated, and do you apprehend the motives of my felicity? you expected, perhaps, i was going to tell you that i had made my fortune, or that the uncle blondeau had at last decided to return into the breast of nature, after having constituted me his universal legatee. but i needn't remind you that women are always for something in the happiness of him who writes to thee--for something in his happiness, and for a good deal more in his misery. but don't let me talk of misery now; time enough when it comes; _ces demoiselles_ have gone to join the serried ranks of their amiable predecessors. excuse me--i comprehend your impatience. i will tell you of whom _ces demoiselles_ consist. you have heard me speak of my _cousine_ de maisonrouge, that grande _belle femme_, who, after having married, _en secondes_ noces--there had been, to tell the truth, some irregularity about her first union--a venerable relic of the old noblesse of poitou, was left, by the death of her husband, complicated by the indulgence of expensive tastes on an income of 17,000 francs, on the pavement of paris, with two little demons of daughters to bring up in the path of virtue. she managed to bring them up; my little cousins are rigidly virtuous. if you ask me how she managed it, i can't tell you; it's no business of mine, and, _a fortiori_ none of yours. she is now fifty years old (she confesses to thirty-seven), and her daughters, whom she has never been able to marry, are respectively twenty-seven and twenty-three (they confess to twenty and to seventeen). three years ago she had the thrice-blessed idea of opening a sort of _pension_ for the entertainment and instruction of the blundering barbarians who come to paris in the hope of picking up a few stray particles of the language of voltaire--or of zola. the idea _lui a porte bonheur_; the shop does a very good business. until within a few months ago it was carried on by my cousins alone; but lately the need of a few extensions and embellishments has caused itself to be felt. my cousin has undertaken them, regardless of expense; she has asked me to come and stay with her--board and lodging gratis--and keep an eye on the grammatical eccentricities of her _pensionnaires_. i am the extension, my good prosper; i am the embellishment! i live for nothing, and i straighten up the accent of the prettiest english lips. the english lips are not all pretty, heaven knows, but enough of them are so to make it a gaining bargain for me. just now, as i told you, i am in daily conversation with three separate pairs. the owner of one of them has private lessons; she pays extra. my cousin doesn't give me a sou of the money; but i make bold, nevertheless, to say that my trouble is remunerated. but i am well, very well, with the proprietors of the two other pairs. one of them is a little anglaise, of about twenty--a little _figure de keepsake_; the most adorable miss that you ever, or at least that i ever beheld. she is decorated all over with beads and bracelets and embroidered dandelions; but her principal decoration consists of the softest little gray eyes in the world, which rest upon you with a profundity of confidence--a confidence that i really feel some compunction in betraying. she has a tint as white as this sheet of paper, except just in the middle of each cheek, where it passes into the purest and most transparent, most liquid, carmine. occasionally this rosy fluid overflows into the rest of her face--by which i mean that she blushes--as softly as the mark of your breath on the window-pane. like every anglaise, she is rather pinched and prim in public; but it is very easy to see that when no one is looking _elle ne demande qu'a se laisser aller_! whenever she wants it i am always there, and i have given her to understand that she can count upon me. i have reason to believe that she appreciates the assurance, though i am bound in honesty to confess that with her the situation is a little less advanced than with the others. _que voulez-vous_? the english are heavy, and the anglaises move slowly, that's all. the movement, however, is perceptible, and once this fact is established i can let the pottage simmer. i can give her time to arrive, for i am over-well occupied with her _concurrentes_. _celles-ci_ don't keep me waiting, _par exemple_! these young ladies are americans, and you know that it is the national character to move fast. "all right--go ahead!" (i am learning a great deal of english, or, rather, a great deal of american.) they go ahead at a rate that sometimes makes it difficult for me to keep up. one of them is prettier than the other; but this hatter (the one that takes the private lessons) is really _une file prodigieuse_. _ah, par exemple, elle brule ses vais-seux cella-la_! she threw herself into my arms the very first day, and i almost owed her a grudge for having deprived me of that pleasure of gradation, of carrying the defences, one by one, which is almost as great as that of entering the place. would you believe that at the end of exactly twelve minutes she gave me a rendezvous? it is true it was in the galerie d'apollon, at the louvre; but that was respectable for a beginning, and since then we have had them by the dozen; i have ceased to keep the account. _non, c'est une file qui me depasse_. the little one (she has a mother somewhere, out of sight, shut up in a closet or a trunk) is a good deal prettier, and, perhaps, on that account _elle y met plus de facons_. she doesn't knock about paris with me by the hour; she contents herself with long interviews in the _petit salon_, with the curtains half-drawn, beginning at about three o'clock, when every one is _a la promenade_. she is admirable, this little one; a little too thin, the bones rather accentuated, but the detail, on the whole, most satisfactory. and you can say anything to her. she takes the trouble to appear not to understand, but her conduct, half an hour afterwards, reassures you completely--oh, completely! however, it is the tall one, the one of the private lessons, that is the most remarkable. these private lessons, my good prosper, are the most brilliant invention of the age, and a real stroke of genius on the part of miss miranda! they also take place in the _petit salon_, but with the doors tightly closed, and with explicit directions to every one in the house that we are not to be disturbed. and we are not, my good prosper; we are not! not a sound, not a shadow, interrupts our felicity. my _cousine_ is really admirable; the shop deserves to succeed. miss miranda is tall and rather flat; she is too pale; she hasn't the adorable _rougeurs_ of the little anglaise. but she has bright, keen, inquisitive eyes, superb teeth, a nose modelled by a sculptor, and a way of holding up her head and looking every one in the face, which is the most finished piece of impertinence i ever beheld. she is making the _tour du monde_ entirely alone, without even a soubrette to carry the ensign, for the purpose of seeing for herself _a quoi s'en tenir sur les hommes et les choses--on les hommes_ particularly. _dis donc_, prosper, it must be a _drole de pays_ over there, where young persons animated by this ardent curiosity are manufactured! if we should turn the tables, some day, thou and i, and go over and see it for ourselves. it is as well that we should go and find them _chez elles_, as that they should come out here after us. _dis donc, mon gras prosper_ . . . chapter viii from dr. rudolf staub, in paris, to dr. julius hirsch, at gottingen. my dear brother in science--i resume my hasty notes, of which i sent you the first instalment some weeks ago. i mentioned then that i intended to leave my hotel, not finding it sufficiently local and national. it was kept by a pomeranian, and the waiters, without exception, were from the fatherland. i fancied myself at berlin, unter den linden, and i reflected that, having taken the serious step of visiting the head-quarters of the gallic genius, i should try and project myself; as much as possible, into the circumstances which are in part the consequence and in part the cause of its irrepressible activity. it seemed to me that there could be no well-grounded knowledge without this preliminary operation of placing myself in relations, as slightly as possible modified by elements proceeding from a different combination of causes, with the spontaneous home-life of the country. i accordingly engaged a room in the house of a lady of pure french extraction and education, who supplements the shortcomings of an income insufficient to the ever-growing demands of the parisian system of sensegratification, by providing food and lodging for a limited number of distinguished strangers. i should have preferred to have my room alone in the house, and to take my meals in a brewery, of very good appearance, which i speedily discovered in the same street; but this arrangement, though very lucidly proposed by myself; was not acceptable to the mistress of the establishment (a woman with a mathematical head), and i have consoled myself for the extra expense by fixing my thoughts upon the opportunity that conformity to the customs of the house gives me of studying the table-manners of my companions, and of observing the french nature at a peculiarly physiological moment, the moment when the satisfaction of the _taste_, which is the governing quality in its composition, produces a kind of exhalation, an intellectual transpiration, which, though light and perhaps invisible to a superficial spectator, is nevertheless appreciable by a properly adjusted instrument. i have adjusted my instrument very satisfactorily (i mean the one i carry in my good square german head), and i am not afraid of losing a single drop of this valuable fluid, as it condenses itself upon the plate of my observation. a prepared surface is what i need, and i have prepared my surface. unfortunately here, also, i find the individual native in the minority. there are only four french persons in the house--the individuals concerned in its management, three of whom are women, and one a man. this preponderance of the feminine element is, however, in itself characteristic, as i need not remind you what an abnormally--developed part this sex has played in french history. the remaining figure is apparently that of a man, but i hesitate to classify him so superficially. he appears to me less human than simian, and whenever i hear him talk i seem to myself to have paused in the street to listen to the shrill clatter of a hand-organ, to which the gambols of a hairy _homunculus_ form an accompaniment. i mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage, in consequence of my german nationality, had proved completely unfounded. no one seems to know or to care what my nationality is, and i am treated, on the contrary, with the civility which is the portion of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too narrowly. this, i confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and i have not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly. my determination to take up my abode in a french interior was largely dictated by the supposition that i should be substantially disagreeable to its inmates. i wished to observe the different forms taken by the irritation that i should naturally produce; for it is under the influence of irritation that the french character most completely expresses itself. my presence, however, does not appear to operate as a stimulus, and in this respect i am materially disappointed. they treat me as they treat every one else; whereas, in order to be treated differently, i was resigned in advance to be treated worse. i have not, as i say, fully explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the explanation to which i tend. the french are so exclusively occupied with the idea of themselves, that in spite of the very definite image the german personality presented to them by the war of 1870, they have at present no distinct apprehension of its existence. they are not very sure that there are any germans; they have already forgotten the convincing proofs of the fact that were presented to them nine years ago. a german was something disagreeable, which they determined to keep out of their conception of things. i therefore think that we are wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the _revanche_; the french nature is too shallow for that large and powerful plant to bloom in it. the english-speaking specimens, too, i have not been willing to neglect the opportunity to examine; and among these i have paid special attention to the american varieties, of which i find here several singular examples. the two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly of some diminutive hellenised roman of the third century. he is an illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that of production that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental condition becomes analogous to that of a malarious bog. i learn from him that there is an immense number of americans exactly resembling him, and that the city of boston, indeed, is almost exclusively composed of them. (he communicated this fact very proudly, as if it were greatly to the credit of his native country; little perceiving the truly sinister impression it made upon me.) what strikes one in it is that it is a phenomenon to the best of my knowledge--and you know what my knowledge is--unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. with the americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this deplorable young man, which is one and which is the other; they are inextricably mingled. i prefer the talk of the french _homunculus_; it is at least more amusing. it is interesting in this manner to perceive, so largely developed, the germs of extinction in the so-called powerful anglo-saxon family. i find them in almost as recognisable a form in a young woman from the state of maine, in the province of new england, with whom i have had a good deal of conversation. she differs somewhat from the young man i just mentioned, in that the faculty of production, of action, is, in her, less inanimate; she has more of the freshness and vigour that we suppose to belong to a young civilisation. but unfortunately she produces nothing but evil, and her tastes and habits are similarly those of a roman lady of the lower empire. she makes no secret of them, and has, in fact, elaborated a complete system of licentious behaviour. as the opportunities she finds in her own country do not satisfy her, she has come to europe "to try," as she says, "for herself." it is the doctrine of universal experience professed with a cynicism that is really most extraordinary, and which, presenting itself in a young woman of considerable education, appears to me to be the judgment of a society. another observation which pushes me to the same induction--that of the premature vitiation of the american population--is the attitude of the americans whom i have before me with regard to each other. there is another young lady here, who is less abnormally developed than the one i have just described, but who yet bears the stamp of this peculiar combination of incompleteness and effeteness. these three persons look with the greatest mistrust and aversion upon each other; and each has repeatedly taken me apart and assured me, secretly, that he or she only is the real, the genuine, the typical american. a type that has lost itself before it has been fixed--what can you look for from this? add to this that there are two young englanders in the house, who hate all the americans in a lump, making between them none of the distinctions and favourable comparisons which they insist upon, and you will, i think, hold me warranted in believing that, between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the english-speaking family is destined to consume itself; and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness, to which i alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland! chapter ix miranda hope to her mother. october 22d dear mother--i am off in a day or two to visit some new country; i haven't yet decided which. i have satisfied myself with regard to france, and obtained a good knowledge of the language. i have enjoyed my visit to madame de maisonrouge deeply, and feel as if i were leaving a circle of real friends. everything has gone on beautifully up to the end, and every one has been as kind and attentive as if i were their own sister, especially mr. verdier, the french gentleman, from whom i have gained more than i ever expected (in six weeks), and with whom i have promised to correspond. so you can imagine me dashing off the most correct french letters; and, if you don't believe it, i will keep the rough draft to show you when i go back. the german gentleman is also more interesting, the more you know him; it seems sometimes as if i could fairly drink in his ideas. i have found out why the young lady from new york doesn't like me! it is because i said one day at dinner that i admired to go to the louvre. well, when i first came, it seemed as if i _did_ admire everything! tell william platt his letter has come. i knew he would have to write, and i was bound i would make him! i haven't decided what country i will visit yet; it seems as if there were so many to choose from. but i shall take care to pick out a good one, and to meet plenty of fresh experiences. dearest mother, my money holds out, and it _is_ most interesting! generously made available by kentuckiana digital library (http://kdl.kyvl.org/) note: images of the original pages are available through kentuckiana digital library. see http://kdl.kyvl.org/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=kyetexts;cc=kyetexts;xc=1&idno=b92-203-30752381&view=toc the smart set correspondence & conversations by clyde fitch 1897 chicago & new york herbert s. stone & co copyright, 1897, by herbert s. stone & co. to "mumsy" to whom i owe everything from the little beginning of my life new york 1897 the correspondence and the conversations page the makeway ball 3 the plaintiff 43 the summer 53 the children 65 maternity 85 a letter of introduction 105 wagner, 1897 113 art 131 sorrow 139 the theatre 149 the opera 159 a perfect day 167 the westington's bohemian dinner 175 the gamblers 187 the makeway ball five letters i. from wm. h. makeway ii. from mrs. makeway iii. from miss makeway iv. from a guest v. from an uninvited the smart set i _from wm. h. makeway to joseph k. makeway, of denver._ new york, jan. 12, 189--. my dear brother: you did well to stay west. would to god i had! julia's big party came off last night. i told her weeks ago, when she began insinuating it, that if it must be it must be, of course, and that i would pay all the bills, but i wished it distinctly understood i wouldn't have anything else to do with it. she assured me that nothing whatever would be expected of me. unfortunately, she wasn't the only woman with an american husband, and that people would understand. she promised me i should have a voice in the matter of cigars and champagne--you can know they were _all right_--and i believe the success of the party was, in a great measure, due to them. my having "nothing whatever to do" with it consisted in hearing nothing else discussed for days, and on the night in question having no room i could call my own, my bedroom being devoted to the men (of course you know that julia and i haven't shared the same room for years, not since the six months she spent with her married sister, lady glenwill), my own sanctum down stairs was turned into a smoker, and i was obliged to hang around in any place i could find, all ready for the guests a couple of hours before they began to arrive. of course, too, she finally bulldozed me into helping her receive. you see, the little woman really was worn out, for she had overseen everything. she is a wonder! there isn't an english servant in new york, or london, either, who can teach her anything, altho' our second footman happens to have been with the duke of cambridge at one time. not that i care a damn about such things--except that the duke is a soldier--but in speaking of them i get to taking julia's point of view. i helped her receive some of the people, to sort of give her a feeling of not having the whole infernal thing on her own shoulders. everybody julia wanted came, and a great many she didn't want. i suppose out where you live you don't have to ask the people you don't want. here it's much more likely you can't ask the people you do want. i have some business friends, first-rate fellows, with good looking, dressy wives, but julia bars them every one because they aren't fashionables. you ought to see me when _i'm_ fashionable! the most miserable specimen you ever saw. i look just like one of the figures in a plate in a tailor's window, labeled "latest autumn fashions," and i feel like one, too. julia looked stunning! by jove! she was the handsomest woman there. there isn't another in new york anywhere near her age who can touch her. they say every one asked about her in london when she went out with her sister in english society, and i don't wonder. you know she has a tall crown of diamonds--tiaras, they call them--i've always been ashamed to tell you before! she came home with it from tiffany's one day, and said it was my birthday present to her, and i let it go at that. well, last night no duchess could have worn the same sort of thing any better. the young one, too, looked as pretty as a ---whatever you like, only it must be damned pretty! it was her first ball, you know; she's a ----, you know what, it's her first time in society. she had more bouquets than patti used to get when you and i were running about town. and she was as unconcerned about it! she's fashionable enough--i only hope she isn't too much so. i don't want her to marry this young lord who's hanging around, and i say so three times a day. the "young'un" says i'd better wait till he's asked her, but i don't dare. julia's fixed on it. she won't even argue with me, so you can imagine how determined she is. but i want my daughter to marry an american, and live in her own home where her father and mother live. one thing, i know: most of these marrying foreigners that come over here want money, and i'll be hanged if i'll give the young'un a penny if she takes this one. i mean it. i give you my word. he led the cotillon with her last night. i wouldn't watch it. i staid in my den and helped smoke the cigars. none better! i can tell you that! well, good bye, old man. if you hear of any thing good out your way to drop a couple of hundred thousand in, let me know--better wire me. politics have played the deuce with my utahs. julia sends her love, and wants me to enclose you yards of newspaper clippings about the party. ha! ha! not by a damn sight! it's enough that i was bored to death by it! the "young'un" often speaks of you. she is getting togged out to go with her mother and do the town in the way of at homes and such things. what a life! yet they seem to enjoy it, and pity us. us! in wall street! the elysian fields of america! can i do anything for you here? you know i am always glad of a chance. your affectionate brother, will. how about that girl you were running after? why don't you give it all up? you know what a bad lot she is. settle down and marry. it's the only real happiness. believe your old brother. ii _letter from mrs. wm. h. makeway to lady glenwill, of london._ thursday. my darling tina: it is over, and my dear, i'm dead! only--_such_ a success! surpassed my wildest dreams! if you had _only_ been here. in the first place every one of any consequence in new york came; except, of course, those who are in mourning. there are certain people who have always held off from me, you know; but they've come around at last, and were all in evidence last night and in their best clothes, and _all_ their jewels, and you know that always speaks well for the hostess. i wore my tiara that will so generously gave me my last birthday (of course he hates it himself, but i brought it home, and he had to give in--the dear!). my wedding necklace, three strings of real pearls, and one string of those "orient" things we bought on bond st.--no one could ever tell the difference except will, who makes a fuss every time i wear them. he swears he will give me a new real string if i put them on again, but i tell him we must economize now to make up for what the party cost. my dress was charming. grace nott brought it over from pacquin for her mother, and meanwhile this cruel indecent new tariff came on! get down on your knees, my dear, and be grateful you don't live in this wretched country which is being turned into one great picnicking ground for the working classes. the custom house wanted to make grace pay an awful duty, and then, fortunately for me, but of course it was terrible for them, something in wall street went up instead of down, or vice versa (i never can understand those things), and the poor notts went to smash. the dress was to be left in the custom house. when i heard about it i bought it, duties and all. my dear girl, it fitted me like a dream. did you ever hear anything like it? of course, mrs. nott never could have squeezed herself into it, so it's just as well she didn't try! it is the new color, and made in the very latest way--in fact, the coming spring mode. i really think will's description is the best. i'll try to quote it to you: "it begins at the top--_i.e._ decidedly below the shoulders--to be one kind of a dress, changes its mind somewhere midway, and ends out another sort altogether. one side starts off in one direction, but comes to grief and a big jewel, somewhere in the back. the other side, taking warning, starts off in an absolutely different way, color, and effect, and explodes at the waist under the opposite arm in a diamond sunburst and a knot of tulle, on accidentally meeting its opponent half." it really is quite like that, too! will is as amusing as ever. and he was _so_ sweet about the party. of course, at first, i had to be very diplomatic and get his consent without his knowing. he still hates society in the most unreasonable manner; would even rather stay at home quietly than go to his club. but last night he accepted the inevitable and behaved like a prince. i wonder how many couples in new york who have been married nineteen years are as happy as will and i are? he made a great fuss, of course, about the champagne and cigars. you would have thought the whole fate of the ball depended upon them; and i must say they cost a ridiculous price. however, he pays for them, and they made him happier; so i don't complain. i am sure, after all, he enjoyed the ball thoroughly, too. you could see it in his face. and what perfect manners he has! do you remember? will may not be "smart," but he's a gentleman, and his grandfathers before him were gentlemen, and that always tells. we don't seem to have had many grandfathers, my dear--of our own, i mean, of course. i know you've married a wonderful collection of them, dating back to goodness knows when, but it isn't so important for american women; they can acquire breeding in their own lifetime. i know no other nation whose women can do the same, and even our men haven't the same ability. look at the american duchesses--don't they grace even the parties at marlborough house? look at yourself, my dear girl. but you won't, because you're too modest. still you must acknowledge your success in england is conspicuous. will's manners are perhaps a little old-school, but that's much better than the new-school. young men's manners nowadays are becoming atrocious, and i'm sorry to say i think they get them from england. the first thing one knows the only gentlemen left in america will be the women. but i hope american men _won't_ lose their reputation--deserved, you must acknowledge--of being the most courteous men in the world to women. well, to go back to the ball. of course, all my feelings outside my guests were centered in helen. i might as well tell you at once, she is considered the most attractive debutante of the year--not by me, i don't mean, nor by my friends, but by the people who hate us, and _everybody_. i think she is very like you, a sort of _distingué_ air that you always had. i sometimes wonder if some of our grandmothers (for even if we didn't have grandfathers we must have had grandmothers), if some _one_ of them--hope not _two_--didn't make a wee slip once when royal personages were about! of course there is no use boasting of royal blood in one's veins when it has no business there, but that would account for certain things. you may remember the old portrait of mother's mother. she looked a perfect duchess. helen can have a title if she wants it. i might as well tell you now. please find out all you can for me about young lord ----. he will be duke of ---when his father or some one dies; so find out if you can, too, how long you think it will probably be before he becomes a duke. and is he rich or poor? he needn't be rich, but i don't want to think it's helen's money he's after. i'm doing all i can to bring about the match, and yet i'm not so worldly after all as to want a daughter of mine to make a loveless marriage. helen isn't exactly pretty, but she's extremely attractive. her figure is perfect, and she's the most stylish thing in the world. i am very happy today as i think that i have _lancéed_ her in the best new york can offer. it has not been all downhill work. her father's name entitled her to it; but he hated society, so he was more of a drawback than anything else. i couldn't boast of any social position in buffalo, and it's extraordinary how well that was known here. however, the fact of my being of a good, sterling, unpretentious family did help in the end, when i got started, and people saw i was serious about "getting in." of course, you gave us our first big push forward, you darling. an _entrée_ into smart english society doesn't mean so much for a new yorker nowadays as it used to, but it means a good deal. and a sister-in-law of lord glenwill is a desirable person to know when in london, so it is wise to take her up at home, and i, always having helen's future in mind, took advantage of every possibility. perhaps i shouldn't have had to push my way so much here if the prince of wales were still _making_ an american girl each season, but you know for several years now he seems to have given it up. i think he was discouraged by the last two he made at homburg; neither of them had any success here the following winter, "hall-marked" as they were, and even london hasn't found them husbands yet. of course, as to one of them, i remember the gossip you wrote me about colonel ----. but, as you said, he had a wife and other incumbrances; so the least said about that the better. under any circumstance, i think it's a much bigger triumph to give helen all new york first, now, simply by our own right, and then this may we'll take her to an early drawing-room, and see what happens next. i shall depend upon you, dear, to see that we go to one of the princess' drawing-rooms, and don't get palmed off on one of the princess christian's or anything of that sort. helen was dressed very simply, of course, and no jewels, but looked so sweet. lord ---was devotion itself all evening. naturally every one is on the _qui vive_ for the engagement, but that's all right. they danced the cotillon together. we had charming favors, not too extravagant--that's such wretched taste--but things we bought in venice last year, and hungarian things, and some russian, and a set of tiny gold things tiffany got up especially for us. i had several people down from buffalo, and mother, of course. i wish you could have seen her, bless her heart. she had on all her old lace, and my coiffeur did her hair beautifully. she looked so handsome, and will insisted on her dancing a figure of a quadrille with him, and how graceful and dignified she was. you would have been very proud. i was. lots of people asked about her, and some seemed so surprised when they heard she was my mother. how rude people are; and what did they expect my mother to be like? after all, do _i_ look like the daughter of a washerwoman? i think not. we might ask the grand duke ----, if we meet him again at aix. you know i told will about my small, timid flirtation with the russian, and really he seemed proud of my absurd little conquest! a convenient husband for some women we know, wouldn't he be? ah, but then you see _they_ wouldn't deserve him! sherry did my supper. he imported some birds from austria especially for it, and invented some dishes of his own. i think it was all right. people said so, but, of course, you can't believe people. i can vouch at any rate for the serving of it. it was like magic. we seated _every one_ at little tables which seemed to come up thro' the floors. they were everywhere except in the ball-room; that was left clear. we've built the ball-room since you were over. will bought the house next to us (such a sum as they asked when they heard _we_ wanted it!) and the whole lower floor we made into a ball-room. it just holds my series of gobelins we bought for that outrageous price two years ago in paris at the marquis de shotteau's sale. for flowers, i had quantities of gorgeous palms and lovely cut flowers in bowls and vases wherever it was possible. that was all,--i hate this stuffing a house with half-fading flowers, it always suggests a funeral to me, with the banked-up mantels for coffins. it's horrid, i know, but i can't help it. however, if i am writing in this vein it's time i stopped. my letter is abnormally long as it is--i hope the right number of stamps will be put on it. forgive me for mentioning it, my dear, but we always have to pay double postage due on your epistles. i don't mind at all--they are quite worth it--only i thought you might like to know. i have all the newspapers about the ball for you, but i will wait till after thursday and then send them on in a package. i want to see what _town topics_ will say. nobody cares, of course, only you don't like to see horrid things about you in print. sometimes it treats me very well, and it's devoted to helen, but once in a while it's atrocious. i'm only a little worried about lord ----. i don't want it to say i am after him for helen, because i am _not_! if the english papers have anything in, please send them over--i know some articles are going to be written. if there are any of them absurd and extravagant accounts, of course you will take pains to contradict them. the english press seems often determined to make american society ridiculous. will says we will be greatly indebted to your husband if he will get us a house for the season, as you proposed. carleton house terrace, if possible; if not, use your own judgment, only not grosvenor square--they make too much fun of strangers who go there. i hope you are well and taking some sort of care of yourself, which you know you never do. and please, if you go to paris at easter, be sure to write us at once if sleeves are still growing smaller, if hats are big or little, and whether it's feathers or flowers, or both. also, of course, anything else that will help us. and don't forget to find out all you can about lord ----. and do you advise announcing the engagement before her presentation, or afterward? and by no means say a word to anybody, as he hasn't proposed yet. by the way, will is violently opposed to it. but i think helen and i together will be too much for him, and if absolutely necessary _my health_ can give out! that had to happen, you remember, before i could get him out of 15th street and up here. my love to the hon. bertha. how is the dear child? i long to see you. say what you like, this society life isn't altogether satisfactory. i think after helen is happily married--to whomever it is--i shall drift quietly out of it, and gradually take to playing joan to will's darby. i'm sure will would _love_ it. love to you both, and a heart full to yourself, tina, dearest. your affectionate old sister, mary. p.s.--don't laugh at what i said about a society life. of course i don't mean it. i don't believe i could live without it now. i'm tired after the ball, that's all. to tell the truth i don't quite know where my head is. i shall take two phoenacetine powders right away. do you know about them; they're so good. did i ask you if you went to paris easter to be sure and write me if sleeves---o yes, i remember, i did. iii _from miss makeway to miss blanche matheson in rome._ thursday. my darling blanche: of course i know you are having a wonderful time in rome with royalties and all sorts of smart people and gay entertainments, but still i wish you had been at our ball last night. i believe you would have enjoyed it. i don't think anyone can deny we know how to give balls in america, and mama is a wonder! you know she's been fishing for guests for this ball for years. and she wouldn't give it till she was sure of a list of people who would be present that would bear comparison with anybody's; and, my dear, we had it! and i am sure mama feels more than repaid. with such a culmination everything has been worth while--the french _chef_ and his terrible extravagances, for you must pay to be known as a good house to dine at--all the deadly afternoon parties, all the exorbitant fees paid for years to the opera singers to sing, the house at newport--and the one at lennox, the seasons in london, that shooting box in scotland (it bored us to death), it was all worth while now that we have arrived at the toppest top. and no one could become her position better than mama. a society matron of the first water is certainly her _métier_. lord ---is very much struck with mama. i will tell you about him later. of course poor papa looks a little what that amusing young englishman would call perhaps 1872. he wasn't in it for a minute; bored to death, poor thing. you know he hates parties. thank heaven i am "out" at last, for now i can go to everything that comes on. and do as i please, that is if i want to, because i may marry soon! i wish i could see your expression when you read that. of course it is lord ----. he proposed last night, but i told him he must wait, and propose again in a couple of weeks. i wasn't ready to decide yet. i must be free "out" for a couple of weeks at least. he will be duke of ----, some day. as the duchess i shall have precedence over mamie smith, gertrude strong, and irene van worth, and even over all the older women who have married abroad, except the duchesses of ---and ----. think what fun it would be to sail in everywhere ahead of mamie smith, after all the insufferable airs she has put on! i don't believe i could make a better match. besides he's youngish and good-looking, has splendid estates, and i really like him. i mean i think he is the sort of man you can get very romantic about. and of course there's no real social life anywhere but abroad, and there's no other life that wouldn't bore me to death. it's only natural, for my whole childhood was spent in an atmosphere of searching after it. ever since i can remember the chief occupation and interest of mama was how diplomatically to get into the smartest set with dignity. it seemed as difficult as the proverbial camel and eye of a needle and the rich man getting into heaven, and in my younger days the three were all very much mixed up together in my mind. i think i should prefer london to paris. smart life in paris seems to be so very much more immoral than in london, judging from what one hears and the books one reads, and you know i don't care about immorality. i get that from mama, too. she is shocked all the time in the "world," over here even, tho' she tries to hide it. our house looked lovely last night. we had powdered footmen, and just enough music and just enough supper and just enough people. one of the secrets of success in society is not to overcrowd anything. of course there were some drawbacks to the ball, but small things that didn't really count. mary farnham came and sat the whole evening thro', as usual, without once dancing. even papa said he "drew the line at that." why doesn't she take something? you see lots of things advertised that change people almost as big as she into a perfect shadow in no time. you feel so sorry for her when she's your guest. i had a great mind to put lord ---to the test, but i didn't quite dare! then tommy baggs came and repeated his customary gymnastics--waltzed on everybody's toes in the rooms (slipper sellers ought to pay him a commission), tore two women's gowns nearly off their waists and spilled champagne frappé down mrs. carton's back; would have ruined her bodice, if she'd had any on, at the back. she bore it like a lamb. her teeth were fairly chattering, but she laughed and said it was rather pleasant. good heavens! who do you suppose is down stairs? lord ----! it's going to be a bore if he's coming every day. i shall go down and tell him these two weeks i am to have a complete holiday. do write me all you're doing. with love always, helen. _later_--i have accepted him! he was so perfectly charming! i couldn't help it! iv _from a guest._ thursday. my dear claire: i was so glad to hear from you about florida, and, as you are having such an amusing time, and as the season here is practically finished now that the much-talked of makeway ball is over, i've decided to join you next week. besides, i've missed you awfully, and it will be so nice to be with you again. will you be so good as to engage my rooms for me?--a bedroom with two windows facing south; not near the elevator by any means; not above the third floor--_but not on the first_. please see that the coloring is blue or pink; i'm not particular about design or material, or anything of that sort (i don't think people should be too _exigeant_)--only yellow, or red, or white, or green rooms are too awfully unbecoming to me. have drawing-room to connect with the bedroom please, and then a room for my maid. i hope you won't have to pay more than seven dollars a week for her (all included, naturally). she isn't at all particular. i'm sure i couldn't afford to keep her if she were, and she's such a treasure. of course she reads all my letters and minds my own business more than i do myself, and uses up my crested writing paper at a terrific rate; but that one expects--don't you think so--with a _good_ servant? i know you are mad to hear all about the ball, so i'll tell you. in the first place it was a great success, and that settles it! the makeways are now a power in new york society, and there's really no reason why they shouldn't be. his family are all right and her english connections are better; and then what a charming woman she is! she makes a perfect hostess. such tact! everything was carried out in the best of taste. if they erred at all it was on the side of simplicity; and yet that gives you a wrong idea about the ball, because it really could boast of splendor. yes, i mean it, but of a solid, real kind. there is nothing papier maché about the makeway house; nor about its owners, nor about their entertainment. you can't help but believe this, and it gives you a sense of social security! everyone anyone would want in their house was there. if any line was drawn tightly inside the smart circle, it defined the pseudo-déclassé. mrs. makeway might be described in england as a slightly early-victorian hostess, or if our presidents had at all the position and social power of royalties, she would be ticketed perhaps as of the hayes period, except that would imply "total abstinence," which would mean instant death to anyone in smart society, thank goodness! i suppose you've heard that old _mot_ of the dinners at the white house during the hayes administration, that water flowed like champagne! well, that will never be said of the makeways. their wine was the very best, too; i never had better at any party, seldom as good, and even john, who scoffs at the idea of women being a judge of wines, confesses, that, though we've entertained everybody all our lives, we've never had such a good wine inside our doors. the supper was, in the first place, comfortable, and, in the second place, faultless. (there was a queer kind of game, which i loathed, but of course i knew, whatever it was, under the circumstances it was the right thing, so i choked it down.) the music was superb--all the good hungarian orchestras in town. the cotillon favors were lovely, and some very stunning gold and jeweled things from tiffany's must have cost a fortune. but of course what you want to know about most is the people and what they had on. i wore my--but you'll see my dress in florida, so never mind. mrs. makeway had a superb dress, but she always dresses handsomely. what a nice man mr. makeway is. you felt sure he was bored to death by the party, and all of us at it, but he concealed it with such charming manners and such natural courtesy that you really felt somehow it was a pleasure to come and put him out. the daughter is a great success; there's no denying that. she has a perfect figure, and is very graceful. she seems to have her father's manners, brought up to date by her mother. she's going to be a leader, you can tell that, and apparently she can be an eventual duchess, if she wishes. young lord ---is still here, and his devotion in the makeway quarter is undisguised. everyone likes him, and says he isn't the sort of young fellow to be merely after her money; but no one can tell if helen is going to take him or not. i am sure of one thing, she will do as she pleases. there were beautiful jewels in evidence at the ball. mrs. makeway wore, i believe, a dozen strings of the most gorgeous pearls. all _real_, of course, with their money. they must represent a fortune in themselves. poor old mrs. hammond blake came with _all_ her switzerland amethysts, and a few new topazes mixed in (she must have been at lucerne last summer). she looked like one of those glass gas-lit signs. but really, all the best jewels in new york were there. and it is wonderful to see how the women whose throats are going the way of the world have welcomed the revival of black velvet if they haven't the pearl collarettes. i shall be wanting something of the sort myself soon. woe is me! and john does keep looking so abominally young. i tell him out of courtesy to me he must get old more quickly, or people will be saying i married a man years younger than myself! john says i needn't trouble to furnish people with subjects for talking; they can make up their own. but i don't think we are gossips nowadays here in america; do you? which reminds me that everybody says the mathews are going to separate at last. she's going to dakota, and get it on incaptability, or cruelty, or some little thing like that. everybody wondered at first why, since she'd stood it so long, she was going to divorce ned now, at this late day, but it has leaked out. think of it--charlie harris! aren't you surprised? it's only about two years since _he_ divorced his wife. mrs. harris got the children, so i presume mrs. mathews will keep hers to give charlie in place of his own. if i remember the number he will be getting compound interest! you know the mathews babies came with such lightning rapidity we lost count. one was always confusing the last baby with the one that came before it. anyway, i think charlie harris gets the best of it; so, even if it isn't altogether ideal to possess your children "ready made," as it were, still elsie mathews is a charming woman, and i never could bear mrs. harris. she told such awful fibs, and her exaggerations were not decorative; they were criminal. why, i couldn't recognize a piece of news i told her myself when i heard her repeating it to some one else not five minutes after, as john says. heavens! for the third time, "as john says," i must stop. but _i am_ a very happy married woman! john gives me everything i want, and i adore him. when i hear from you i will telegraph my train. we missed you awfully at the makeways. john spoke of it several times. he loves to dance with you because you are always ready to sit it out and do all the talking. dear me, i'm afraid that doesn't sound complimentary, but i assure you he _meant_ it as such! how nice it will be to be with you. you aren't strict about your mourning, are you? i don't think it's at all necessary, way off there. with love, always affectionately, maybel parke rodney. v _from an uninvited._ thursday. my darling george: i hope this letter will reach you before you leave minneapolis. i do wish you would leave politics alone, if they're going to take you away like this. believe me, the country can get along much better without you than _i_ can! when we are married you have _got_ to give them up. when we are married, too, and this bore of a divorce of mine is finally settled, i presume i shall be invited to mrs. makeway's parties! i wasn't asked last night to her big ball!--not that i care. i am sure that beast of a husband of mine will never be able to prove his nasty charges against us, and that i shall win the case. then there'll be no excuse for mrs. makeway and her prudish set, and i promise you they shall eat "humble pie," if there's any left in the world after all my dear friends have made me devour. tom has been making overtures to my maid through a detective, but lena is faithful to us, and i've promised her double any sum they offer her. _when_ my position is all right again, i shall go in for society in the most extravagant, splendid way for one long, brilliant, spiteful season, and i shall punish every one of these women who have snubbed me so terribly. after all, half of them owe their positions in the world to my family, and with my family to back me there will be no trouble about my being absolutely reinstated. my people will back me up, too, for we have never had a scandal up till now. we have been almost the only family left. of course the papers are full of the makeway ball, and the pictures of mrs. makeway are too deliciously absurd for anything. one looks like that one of me in the evening news when i gave my evidence. i really believe it's the same picture. i hear that she looked rather well with her famous pearls on (which, between you and me, i believe are false), and her tiara, which all the out-of-town people go to the opera to see. but they say she was dressed entirely too young, and showed she thought her own party a great success. however, what can you expect? she was nobody; her family are most ordinary people, the kind that are prominent in some unfashionable church and influential in its sunday-school. o, la-la-la-la! she prides herself on having an ancestor of some sort who fought in the war of independence--a common soldier, i suppose, in washington's army; that's why she has had an office in the "daughters of the revolution." _we_ had several ancestors in the war--commissioned officers; and they all fought for king george, thank heaven; and if they had only won my father would have been the third lord banner, probably, if not something better. so hang mrs. makeway! her daughter is an ugly little creature; she hasn't a single feature that doesn't go its own way irrespective of the others, and with a total disregard for the _tout ensemble_ of the poor girl's face. you know the sort of thing--each feature seems to be minding the other's business. her teeth _look_ lovely, but i believe some of them are "crowns"--they do that sort of thing so well nowadays! what i will grant her is a beautiful figure, but my corset-maker, who is hers, too, gives me her word of honor she laces awfully! they say she had the best time of any girl at the ball; which, if you ask me, i think beastly taste. the house everyone says looked very beautiful--of course, money will do everything--and the music was superb for the same reason, and the supper not too extravagant. (i suppose they economized on that!) but lots of people i've met say they were bored to death, and that there was an awful crowd. it's extraordinary the people she had there! how she got them i don't know--all the swells. but dear me, after all, that's nothing; swells will go to anyone who'll amuse them. i hear old makeway looked fearfully miserable, and, instead of paying other women compliments, made love to his own wife all the evening. it's extraordinary, because he is really a gentleman. his great-grandfather and my great-grandfather were great chums; made their money, i think, in the same business. by the way, the pinkertons have written me that they have still more evidence against tom. they say _she_ is "doing a turn"--whatever that is--in some variety theatre. according to accounts she _did_ tom for a good deal--just served him right. do hurry back--i miss you so, and am so lonely. it's a year and a half since we've been separated so long as this. come back. don't make me jealous or _suspicious_. besides it isn't complimentary to _trust_ me so tremendously. the lawyer is here--i hope he has come to assure me of my positive victory. * * * * * he has thrown up the suit. we are lost! he says tom has indisputable proof, and that there is no use trying. can lina be a wretch after all? or do you suppose it is your man? come at once, at no matter what sacrifice. the majestic sails on wednesday. hadn't we better throw up the sponge and take it? always, and in spite of everything, your adoring edith. the plaintiff two letters from mr. john stuart kennington to mrs. kennington, his wife. from mrs. john stuart kennington, by special messenger, to the law firm of jordan & fields. i _from john stuart kennington to mrs. kennington, his wife._ newport, october --th, 189-. suspicion is absolutely foreign to my nature. therefore, far from a thought of worry when i found my business visits to new york this summer becoming more and more easy to make as far as you were concerned, i used instead to get "a lump in my throat" on the train which left you here behind, believing that your love for me influenced you to hide your own feelings and aid me all you could in the performance of my duties, even at the cost of your own preferred pleasure and at the price of a good many hours of loneliness. loneliness! oh, what fools we men sometimes are! yes, and how careless you women become! i shall never forget the day i changed my plans suddenly, deciding i wouldn't go to new york that week after all, although my bag was packed and smithers already at the station with it. the instantaneous look of disappointment which leaped across your face, and which for some seconds you didn't sufficiently realize to conceal--what a vista that look opened out to me--a hellish vista! and your constrained little smile--a sort of conscious visible movement of the muscles about your mouth--"on purpose"--came too late. that first look had been like a röntgen ray over the last six months of our life--lives i should say, for while you and i were living one life, you at the same time, without me, were living another. then i understood this summer's comfortable weekly good-byes, so different from other years! i think, down in the bottom of my heart, i understood _all_ at _that moment_,--though i wouldn't acknowledge it not even in secret to myself, and even when, before another twenty-four hours had passed, my eyes were damnable witnesses against you. i couldn't believe them, and doubt if i would have if you had not confessed. of course, i knew whenever we had guests jack tolby was always one of them, and also one of the guests wherever we went, but it only seemed natural. he was extremely agreeable in our house; it's only now i realize he has always rather avoided me at the club. i suppose even men like him have some sort of conscience, or at least a sense of decency, if not of honor, toward their own friends, and, if so, good god, how ashamed he must have been every time he had to take my hand! and _you_, when you received my lips on yours, already satiated with kisses in my absence! ugh! kate! kate! how i hate you! yes, hate is the word. and to think _you_ are the mother of my children! that is the _big_ hurt. i want you to understand that what i am going to do is entirely for their sake, not at all for yours. you who have been the first to drag the name of kennington in the public mud. three honest generations of us have kept it clean and honorable, and our wives have done the same for us all down to you--all except my wife. i used to think that in marrying me you had placed me deeper in your debt than i could ever repay. ever since the first time i saw you i loved you; and after that meeting i put my arms about no woman--arms that had been free enough before--until i put them around you. and since then the same. i have been an absolutely faithful husband to you. do you understand what that means? i don't believe so. i preferred you to every other woman in the world. when away from you, your memory guarded my embraces. yet i am not a romantic man. now, for instance, i look at it all in a straightforward light. i realize that you were a girl with no money and no particular position in the world; and in marrying me you obtained both. you have reveled in society--thanks to me and my family--and this is the return you have made. you have dishonored us. now listen; this is what i propose doing. i do not intend to have my children suffer publicly, as they would, especially my two little daughters, if your disgrace were made public. it happens to be with us that a father's falling in this direction does not so seriously, if at all, affect his children; therefore, for their sake, instead of my divorcing _you_, i am going to give you proof and witness by which you may divorce _me_, for your own sin. but there are certain conditions with which you must comply. i will send by my lawyer a paper, which you will sign in the presence of witnesses before any further steps are taken. in this paper you will agree on your securing your divorce to marry tolby. i have had an interview with him (this is not an age nor a country of duels), and i demanded that he make me the reparation of marrying you when you are free. i must frankly say from his manner i do not judge him over anxious. i believe even a duel with pistols would on the whole have pleased tolby better. it is true that precedent is not in his favor. his own experience with you will doubtless make him a little uneasy. to continue: you are to marry him. you are to demand of me in your suit the sum of $---(and do not be uneasy, you will win your suit). this will be convenient for you when you re-marry, for you know tolby hasn't a cent. it will be a real love match on your part, charming! you are to give all my mother's jewels to our oldest daughter on her marriage, and all the jewels i have ever given you to our second on hers. should the girls not marry at twenty-five, they are then to have the jewels. as to the children i shall have to submit, in my rôle of the guilty party, to letting you have control over them; but i warn you that this is to be only nominal. if ever i find you prejudicing either one of them _against me in any way whatever_--even if i find their affections are being alienated from me by some sort of public opinion or gossip--i warn you that when each one is old enough to understand he shall be told the _truth_. you had better look to it then that my children love me. your own hold over their affections rests upon it. these points, and a few others bearing upon them, will be set forth legally in the paper which my lawyer will bring you. kindly send me word if you are prepared to sign, and, if so, when mr. jordan or his representative may call. good bye. john stuart kennington. ii _from mrs. john stuart kennington, by special messenger, to the law firm of jordan & fields._ no. -east 66th street. benj. k. jordan, esq. dear sir: on second thoughts, after you have left me, i have decided to ask you to write mr. kennington as follows--i mean i will give you the idea of what i wish said: acknowledge the receipt of his letter, and say i shall be delighted to sign the paper he proposes at his earliest convenience. i must ask, however, that he submits the document through you, etc. (the same as we agreed on just now in our interview). now, besides, you must demand for me the following changes or corrections, or whatever is right to call them, in the paper. first, the sum of $---is too small; $---must be added to it. also, i am not willing to give up all my homes. either the house in new york, or in newport, or on long island must be made over to me. and i positively refuse to part with the ruby necklace to one of my daughters unless i should choose to do so of my own free will. for the other jewels i have no use whatever. you can express that as you see fit. ask him to let me hear as soon as possible. yours truly, gertrude corte kennington. tuesday. the summer a letter grand hôtel de l'europe, aix-les-bains, sunday. my dear mary: our summer has been a perfect failure. i said in the very beginning if we followed john and the children's ideas it would be; but as i was in the minority i gave in. fortunately we did catch the tail end of the london season. the others wanted to go straight on to paris, but for that once i put my foot down--and all the trunks as well. it was very warm; still there was a great deal going on, so we didn't mind the heat, at least i didn't. heat in london during the season is such a different thing from heat in switzerland or some dull seaside place, where there is not sufficient distraction to take your mind off it. i was doing something every minute. that's the charm of london. every hour of the day there is something, and if there ever was a dull interval i dropped into one of the picture galleries. you know you have to do that sort of thing over here. people talk about pictures, and some do it very well, too, and you really meet painters out. the children go and see things that are good for their education, you know--the tower, where mary queen of scots, or anne boleyn, i forget which, was beheaded, and the--well, all sorts of places like that. the heat made them rather irritable, and evelyn had a rash, but i thought it was good for them to see all the historical sights. so we staid on just the same till after goodwood. and the races ended my pleasure, for next we started for lucerne. i said all along there would be no one in the place. of course people do go there, but on their way to somewhere else, or coming home at odd times, and not for too long. there is never really any society there. i knew it. i have had experience with it. besides, we know the places that every one does go to in july and august. i preferred homburg, with aix at the end, but i would have put up with trouville first, or ostend, or even dinard. but no, switzerland it was! i hate it; i always did. it's too like its photographs. it has absolutely no style. it's all nature, nature, _nature_! the mountains and lakes, no matter how old they really may be, still always have the _beauté du diable_; and for a woman of my age--who has to resort to art to keep herself looking the slightest little bit younger than she is!--it gets on one's nerves, all this natural beauty! i prefer some _place_ that has to resort to art, too, and make itself up a little with gorgeous hotels, casinos, theatres, and baccarat tables. mountains bore me, and i hate to go on the water. there at lucerne the mountains stood continually and solemnly around, just like elderly relatives at a family reunion, and the flat lake lies as uninteresting as the conversation of these estimable creatures would be. and then the people! the town crowded to suffocation, scarcely breathing space, and yet _nobody_ there. to be sure once in a while one notices an extraordinary old frump go by, who turns out to be the duchess of this, or princess that, but i assure you one would have been ashamed to drive in the park with her (at home), unless she was placarded. now and then somebody decent from new york or boston arrived on a morning train, but, of course, they usually left in the evening, driven away by the glare, or the white dust, or by the eternal tourists. that man cook has done more to spoil attractive places than any other dozen people in the world put together. sometimes, of course, they are amusing. one day i went to see the lion! don't laugh. john bet me five hundred dollars i wouldn't go. so, of course, i did. fortunately i'd heard the children explaining it or i shouldn't have enjoyed so much the following joke. a woman and her daughter, both cooks, (tourists i mean, of course, tho' heaven knows what the mother mightn't have been at home), stood in front of the monument. "what's this, clara?" asked the older woman. clara. why this is the famous lion of lucerne, mother! mother. oh is it, ain't it lovely! what's it for--i mean why is it? clara. why, you know, mother, for defending poor marie antoinette in the tuilleries! mother. oh, did it! and then people say lions are such nasty, heartless creatures. clara. (laughing.) o mother! the lion didn't do it; it's only put up for a monument to the soldiers who died trying to protect her from the mob! mother. oh, i see; it's just a fancy picture! well, anyway, i think it's awful sad. * * * * * what do you think of that? and those are the kind of people switzerland was full of. some were alone, and some were impersonally conducted in a very loose sort of way. wherever you wanted to go they were sure to be ahead, and kicking up a middle-class dust that choked you. the loud sound of their incessant _talk_ echoed from snow peak to snow peak. and their terrible clothes, chosen evidently "not to show the dirt" (but they did), came between your eyes and any beauty of scenery there might be, even if you cared to see it, and i didn't. and then the droves of rich americans at the hotels! where did they come from? where did they learn how not to dress? where did they learn how not to behave? those are the questions i asked myself continually, and always gave them up! i became so tired of hearing of pilatus and the rigi, i felt as if one were at the head of my grave and the other at the foot! i had a sort of indigestion of mountains and lakes! and there was john! rushing out every other minute to sit and look at them (i assure you i was threatened very much with the neuralgia from the damp of the lake terrace). and he climbed everything that was climbable, even preferred walking up; but when there were railways i made him take them for fear he'd hurt himself. i believe he went to the top of every blessed thing that had any top! i found plenty of horrid people to look down on without going to the tops of mountains. i tried to drive, but there wasn't a decent turnout in the place. i went out in a little steam launch, but was frightened to death for fear i'd be run down by one of the steamers crowded with cooks. oh, no! _assez_ of switzerland for me! i said to john--"bring me here to bury me if you like, but don't bring me here alive again." and finally, when he and the children couldn't find anything more to climb, i managed to move them on to aix, and here i am. and, of course, the english season has just finished, and the french people haven't begun to come yet, and aix is hot, and dull, and empty! really, isn't it trying? there are even only second-rate cocottes about, none of the smart ones yet! i am dying of the blues. besides i have to take the baths, although i don't want them, because the only way i managed to persuade john to come here was by pretending i _needed_ them! when i think of you in newport, in spite of the heat, leading an absolutely ideal life with your visits, your dinners, and your balls, i am green with envy. these are the times when life seems really almost too complicated to worry through. or course if i were like john's sister margaret, sort of half-crazy, who loves the real country, prefers a farmhouse to a hotel, fields and woods to a casino, i might get on well enough. but i consider that nothing short of a morbid state of mind. if you love me, write me soon, and cheer me up. but don't tell me of too much going on with you, or it will be more than i can bear. if you could honestly say that it was rather a dull season in newport this year, you don't know what a comfort it would be. i do hope john and the children appreciate the sacrifice i am making for them. i'm sure i try to have them realize it. it only shows what we mothers will do for our children. with love, your affectionate, but depressed, geraldine. p.s.--of course, as you can imagine, the shops at lucerne were filthy. i didn't buy a thing except some presents for the servants. at aix the shops are better, but with so few people here, somehow one has no inspiration. i've bought literally nothing except five hats. the children three dialogues i. divorce. ii. birth. iii. death. i _divorce._ tom barnes, _age ten, whose mother, mrs. barnes, having divorced his father, her second husband, has since remarried, and is now mrs. fenley._ claire worthing, _age seven, whose mother, mrs. worthing, having divorced her father to marry the divorced mr. barnes, is now mrs. barnes._ scene, _a fashionable dancing school in new york. a quadrille has been announced. master barnes goes up to miss claire and bowing somewhat stiffly, mumbles some not altogether intelligible wards. miss claire, sliding down from her chair, says "thank you," with perfect composure and a conventional smile, as, taking his arm, they choose a position in the dance._ tom. shall we stop here in this set? claire. no! becky twines' dress would ruin mine. and she made her maid give her that one on purpose i'm sure, because she knew what i was going to wear. but i don't care. i heard mama say, yesterday, her mother, in spite of all her money, hadn't been able to buy her way into several houses. i don't think she ought to have been invited to join our dancing class at all. when people buy their way into other people's houses like that, how do they do it do you suppose? does the butler sell tickets at the door, do you think? tom. perhaps so! butlers look like that. my! i'd jolly like to be a butler! (_they have moved on to another set._) shall we stop here? claire. oh, no, not here! teddy jones always mixes us up. he treads on our toes. tom. yes, and squeezes the girls' hands, too. claire. oh, that we don't mind! would you like to sit this dance out on the stairs? (_she would prefer it herself._) tom. no, let's dance. come on, this is a good place. claire. as you please. do you like kissing games? tom. (_red in the face._) no; do you? (_he does._) claire. oh, i don't mind. (_an embarrassed pause._) tom. i like football and those kind of games. claire. they are all very well for boys. but i don't much care for games myself, and, besides, i don't have the time. tom. what do girls do with themselves all the time? claire. oh! i have my lessons, and i walk out with my maid every morning, and i dress three times a day, and then i have visits to make on other little girls. tom. you've got a new father, haven't you? claire. yes, mama was married two weeks ago. tom. how do you like him? claire. oh, very much! tom. you take my word for it, he's a brick. i know! he used to be my father once. [_the music starts up, and the couples bow._ ii _birth_ elsie, _age 6_. teresa, _age 8_. bob, _age 7_. (_they are sitting on the steps of the large piazza of a beautiful country house, the two little girls affectionately close, the boy at an awkward distance. there has been a pause in the conversation, which the boy breaks._) bob. we've got a new baby at our house! (_splendid effect!_) elsie, teresa. (_together._) oh! (_their eyes are suddenly bright and their faces glow with a sort of awed curiosity and pleasure, not unmixed with envy._) elsie. what kind? teresa. (_eagerly._) yes; which is it? bob. (_proudly._) a boy, of course! (_the two little girls' faces fall for a second, and they are silent, but not for long._) elsie. of course there have to be boys sometimes. teresa. yes, to make a change. elsie. isn't it funny where babies come from! bob. yes, you find them in cabbages. elsie. oh, no! they come down in rainstorms. teresa. no, no! they come out of the flowers. bob. stuff! elsie. they do come from the skies, because you know the stars are little babies waiting to be picked. teresa. i thought the stars were the places where god put his fingers through. bob. they aren't any such thing; they're the gold tacks that fasten on the carpet of heaven. elsie. when i grow up i shall have eleven babies, because i have eleven favorite names, and i shall have them all at once, so they can have nice, happy times playing together, and there won't have to be any horrid older brother and sister, always getting the best of everything. teresa. and i'll tell you what! i'll have eleven children too, to marry yours. bob. no, i'll marry one of them. elsie. no, you must marry one of us. bob. which one? elsie. well, i think it would be best for you to marry me and be father for my eleven children. i want them to have a father. i love my father. teresa. yes; but then who'll be a father to my children? elsie. yours can be sort of orphans; they needn't ever have had any father. teresa. (_approaching a tearful state._) no, that's awfully sad. i want my children to have a father, too! bob. never mind. i'll be their father besides. elsie. let's play house. teresa. let's! bob. let's play indians, and i'll scalp you two girls! elsie. no, that's too rough. we'll play husband and wife. bob and i will get married, and, teresa, you must be the minister and a bridesmaid. (_they retire into the house, where, with the aid of a wrapper, a night dress, a bouquet, and a black mackintosh, the ceremony is properly performed._) elsie. now we'll have a little girl baby, and (_to teresa_) you must be it. teresa. no, i want to be the wife now, and you be the baby. elsie. no, i'll be the husband, and let bob be the baby. bob. i won't be the baby! teresa. anyway, it isn't polite for a little baby to come right away like that. they never do. elsie. that's so; you have to wait till the news that they want one gets up to the skies. iii _death_ _teddy and elsie are in the drawing-room, which is shadowy and sad with the drawn curtains. the children speak in half whispers, and with an air of importance._ teddy. it's going to be in here. elsie. isn't it awful. (_sobs._) teddy. papa was a brick! elsie. (_sob._) now he's an angel. teddy. (_thoughtfully._) do you really think papa would like being an angel? elsie. everybody likes to be an angel. teddy. i don't. elsie. o teddy! teddy. it sounds stupid to me, like sunday all the week. besides, papa won't have any office there, and what'll he do without an office? elsie. isn't it awful. (_sob._) poor papa! teddy. (_swallowing a lump._) don't cry! [_there is a slight noise overhead._ elsie. o teddy! what was that? teddy. (_trembling._) don't be afraid! (_he puts his arm comfortingly around her, and they sit in a huge arm-chair together._) elsie. what is it like to be dead. teddy. it's like school all the time, never letting out, and no recess. elsie. (_with another sob._) poor papa! are you afraid of him now? teddy. no---elsie. do you want to go up and see him? teddy. no. that isn't him anyway upstairs! elsie. yes, it's him; only his soul isn't there. teddy. do you believe it? say, if that's true, how did his soul get out? elsie. i've thought of that. this is what i believe: when people die, god kisses them, and their soul comes right out of their lips to god's. teddy. i'll never play be dead with you, anymore. elsie. no, i don't want to, either. teddy. god might think i really was dead, and i might lose my soul. elsie. you can't make believe with god. teddy. that's so; i forgot. i say, elsie, i'm never going to be wicked again in all my life. elsie. nor i. teddy. oh! girls never are wicked. i believe when we die death comes along and pulls us by our feet; that's why our souls go out. they're afraid of death. (_elsie shudders, and nestles closer to her brother._) teddy. don't be afraid; i won't let him catch you. elsie. poor mama, she cries all the time. teddy. and she won't eat. elsie. i know where there are some little cakes. teddy. (_eagerly._) could you get them? elsie. not alone. i'm afraid. teddy. i'll go with you. (_they get down out of the big chair._) do we go to school the next day after it? elsie. yes; and wear all black. (_sobs._) poor papa. teddy. (_choking._) don't cry. elsie. you're crying too. teddy. no, i ain't! (_crying._) (_she kisses him. he is comforted, but very much ashamed._) elsie. do you think we can go to the circus next week just the same? teddy. i don't care about circuses now. elsie. neither do i. i don't want to go anyway. let's find the cakes. teddy. and then we'll make a coach out of the chairs, and you'll drive me four in hand. [_they go out of the room smiling._ maternity three letters and a cable from mrs. stanton, a widow i _to robert n. stanton, esq., her son_ (_and only child_) venice, thursday. my darling boy: your letter reached me a few moments ago. we were just starting off to see the tintorettos in the scuola, but i opened your envelope before i stepped into the gondola, and read enough in the first few lines to let the others go on without me. first, let me say this; no one in all the world wishes you more joy, more real happiness, than your mother. i wish it more than anything else in the world, and have prayed for it for you every night of my life since you first came into this world. and i've always counted a wife for you as one of the chief joys of your future. i have always wanted you to marry, only i have always said to myself--not yet; i can't spare him yet. mothers begin their children's lives by being the most unselfish beings in the world; and then, as we grow older, i'm afraid we are inclined to go to the other extreme. i won't tell a falsehood and say i am glad you are going to be married now. forgive me, dear, forgive me; but in my heart there is still the same cry--"not yet! not yet!" oh, i know i'm wrong! it _is_ to be, and i accept it; but it seems so sudden; and, after all, i was so unprepared, and you are my life, dear--my everything. you must let me sigh just a little; i'll promise to be all smiles at the wedding. when you first laughed in the sun, and twinkled your baby eyes at the stars i was not a very happy woman. you were only six months old when i divorced your father. (how much i have regretted that step since. it would have been far better had i borne with him. he was the only man in the world for me; and he would have come back to me if i had only waited. then, instead of dying wretchedly miserable as he did, he might have been alive to-day, and we would be companions for each other; but i was proud and wilful--however, enough of that.) as i said: when you were a tiny baby i was an unhappy woman, with an heart empty and bruised. how i hugged you to it! o never, _never_ can i tell you, nor can you imagine, the comfort, the blessing you became to me! your butterfly-like little kisses made well all the bruises; your little hands, with their soft, flower-like caresses, smoothed away the troubles, and before long you seemed to have crept in, little body, little soul, into my heart, till you filled it completely. and now i must share--oh, we _are_ selfish, we mothers! for i want all--all! i used to be a little jealous, in those early days, even of your nurse. do you know, rob, that i bathed my baby every morning of your little life, so long as you took infant tubs? i wouldn't leave it to anyone else; and for more than one year of your life, in the middle of each night and early morning, i warmed over a little spirit lamp (i have it yet) your preparation of milk, and fed it to you, so that you would get your food from me in one way, if the doctor wouldn't let me feed you as i hungered to do. how soon it was you knew me. i could make you smile when no one else could; and what a joy it was to see a love for me coming into your infantile existence. i had cried a good deal before you were born, and some afterward, first out of relief and then for pure gladness. but under your dear influence i gradually forgot how tears came. you almost never cried; and what a good baby you were--oh, a blessed baby!--and i tried to repay you by not worrying you with too many kisses, with too much loving, which i'm sure is not good for a child. sometimes i had to clench my hands, so strong was my desire to take you up and clasp you tight. then how quickly you began to grow; and before long my letters and intimate conversation began to be filled with what "rob said this morning;" and you did say such delightful things! i never knew so naïvely witty a child! and soon you reached the age when i could play the rôle of comforter. the knocks and bruises i've healed by kissing them!--do you remember one-third? i'm sure i don't. the many imagined slights of your little friends, which were forgotten on my lap! the little aches and pains that were slept away in my arms! how full my life was then! what a blessed boy you were! and then those half-lonely years, when everyone frightened me--by saying you would be spoiled--into sending you away to school. i begrudge those months i spent without you yet. but how we enjoyed the vacations! that's when we began reading together again real stories, not those of the younger days. do you remember your favorite when a very small boy? we always read it when you weren't feeling very well, or after you'd been punished for being naughty, sitting together in the great big old rocking-chair. it was about two poor little fatherless boys whose mother died in a garret, and they were so terribly poor they had to beg a coffin for her, and they alone followed it to the grave. there was a very trying and sad woodcut of the two little orphans doing this, and we always cried together over it. it wasn't a healthy story for a small boy, and i don't know how we got hold of it. oh yes, i do! it was published by the tract society, and had a moral. it was your aunt sent it to you, but i have forgotten the moral. the football period began in the school vacations, and went all through college; but still i think you were always more fond of books and music than athletics; and i was never good at outdoor sports; i only managed to master tennis so as to be able to play with you. the four years of college had some loneliness in them, too; but i enjoyed my visits to williamstown, and then is when i began going into "society" a good deal again, for i said when rob comes out he will want to go. he will have at least three cotillon years, and i want him to go in the best society we have. besides, there is sure to be a wife; let her be a girl of our own position and class. but the dearest parts of your college life were our four trips abroad during the summer. and then it was that i began to turn the tables, and when _i_ was tired to lean on _you_, and when disagreeable things happened to let you take mother in your arms and hold her there till she promised to forget them. then it was when your judgment began to mature, and i found it so clear and good, and have been guided by it ever since. oh, those perfect years between the day you graduated and now! how proud i was of you, too, in society. it seemed to me no one was so brilliant a talker at a dinner table. it was all i could ever do to listen to my neighbor instead of straining my ears across the table in your direction. and i am sure it was not maternal prejudice that picked you out in a ball room, for it was not i who made you leader of all the cotillons so long as you cared to dance them. then how more proud i was of you when you interested yourself in politics. i love my country. your father fought, and bravely, in the civil war; so did my brother. and i know if such a terrible calamity as another war should befall us, you would be ready. the patriot fights for his country, in peace, in politics, and i am happy to say your interest in our government is as keen and active to-day as ever. then there is the ever increasing success in your profession--haven't i been through it all with you! never, i am sure, were a mother and son more sympathetic. the reason i came abroad this year was because i was afraid we were getting too dependent on each other. i realized you now preferred staying home with me evening after evening instead of going out. i loved it, but i knew it was wrong. i argued if i went away for a little you would go out into society again, and to your clubs, seeking companionship. it was not good for a young man--i said to myself--not more than thirty-three, to be spending all of his spare time with an old woman--for practically i am that, though you must never call me so; it would break my heart! and so, though it was really an awful break for me to do it, i went away, and the only thing i wanted to happen did, only more. oh, yes! more than i wanted--because i didn't want you to marry--not yet! and if i hadn't gone away you would probably never have met this miss stone, and you would have been just as happy. for you _were_ happy with me before you met her; weren't you? oh, of course, i know not _so_ happy, and not in the same way, but later on you would have met perhaps miss stone, or somebody else you would have cared for in the same way; don't you think so? i am afraid, if i let myself, i'd be sorry i went away. and yet no--_no_; i'm not so selfish as all that. if you really have found the one woman in the world for you i will try to be glad. i will be glad. i am glad! there! i am. after all it is your happiness. how unhappy i should feel if you loved her and she hadn't returned your love! yes, it is much better as it is--for _you_, so it must be for me, too. allowing even for all a lover's enthusiasm, miss stone must be very charming and very lovable. i can see it in her picture, too, which i thank you for sending. of course, without it i should have been cruelly anxious to see what she was like. she is very pretty--very. i am obliged to confess that. i think i shall come to love her for her own sake, and not only for yours. if only she will love me! you love me more than i deserve or merit, so don't say too much about me or she will be sure to be disappointed. if i must be a mother-in-law (horrid name), i want to be a nice one and be loved. i shall do my best. only it is the giving you up. o rob, darling! what shall i do without you--without my blessed son? breakfast alone, luncheon alone, dinner alone, everything alone! ah, i can't bear the thought of it! no! no! i don't mean that! but of course i can't and won't live with you--it's very kind and like you, dear, to say i must, but i don't believe in that. you'll see enough of me, i'm sure, as it is. and i shall have my memories. baby and boy, you are mine alone. i didn't have to share you then; and i won't have to share the memories now, and no one can take them away from me. and what if you make me a grandmother? it isn't at all sure. everybody doesn't have babies now, like they used to. still, if you do! well, i shall probably adore it. but then i must settle down, wear caps, and perhaps revive a widow's veil. i certainly shall have to be more dignified and not go gallivanting about everywhere, and control some of my enthusiasms, or i shall be a ridiculous old creature. you see, i have always kept your age. now i must take one awful flying leap to my own; and then go along with myself properly. i shall have to become much more regular about church and know all the saints' days. a good thing that will be for me, too, i'm sure--what do you think? they've just knocked on the door and told me it is dinner time. i've been three hours over this disgraceful letter. i knew i'd been dreaming[1] a good deal between sentences; but i didn't know it was so bad as all that. well, i'm going down to tell the others my _good_ news (you understand that _good_, don't you?), and we'll drink to the health and happiness of you both in some crimson chianti. and they shall all see how happy i am over your happiness. for i am. and you will see it, too, when i come back; which will be as soon as i can. [1] the words "and crying" are well scratched over, so he couldn't possibly read them. good bye, my boy. forgive your old mother if she's seemed a little cross in this letter, because she isn't really. i shall write miss stone a little letter to-night. god bless you and her (and me), and fill your lives as full of happiness as your hearts can hold and mine can hold for you! good night, my comfort, you best son in the world! your devoted mother. yes, yes, i _am_ glad, dear; so glad. don't misunderstand my letter. your mother is glad, honestly and with--yes, i _can_ say it now--with _all_ her heart. ii _a cable to her son._ (_sent fifteen minutes after the preceding letter._) overjoyed, congratulations, love. mother. iii _letter to miss lucy stone, troy, n.y._ venice, thursday. my dear miss stone: so you are going to take my boy away from me? i begrudge him, just a little, or just a good deal; but i will tell you a secret. i feel pretty sure that when i know you, i shall be grateful to him, instead of grudging, for giving me you for a daughter; and you must love me, for after all if it wasn't for me you wouldn't have him, would you? he has been a perfect son, and they make perfect husbands. and he loves you, my dear. oh, if you had any doubts of it--which of course you haven't, or i shouldn't like you--but if you had, could you have read over my shoulder his letter to me to-day telling me about it. i am very impatient to know you, but i think we shall be great friends, through rob, before we even meet. till then believe me your--dear me, what?--your robert's affectionate old mother. katherine miles stanton. i am sending with this a little old jewel i found at an old shop the other day; it is a love ring of the sixteenth century. perhaps you will find a place for it. i send it with my love. k. m. s. iv _letter to mrs. henry a. austin, troy, n.y._ venice, thursday. dear gertrude: you will be very much surprised to hear from me, i imagine, as a correspondence is something we could never keep up. but our friendship has lasted without it a long time, my dear girl--forty-two years--for we met when i was fourteen. i haven't forgotten yet how the whole school became bearable after you took possession of the other little white cot in my room. it's a year and a half now since i've seen you, and i've missed you. troy is so near; and yet, after all, it is so far, too, when we realize how seldom we meet. you must give me a whole winter soon! yes, for i am going to be alone; rob is going to marry, and that's why i am writing you. it is to a miss lucy stone, of troy. do write me about her. do you know the family? are they friends of yours? rob is fearfully and wonderfully in love; and i can't blame him after seeing her picture. she is lovely (and charmingly dressed), and i am sure rob would never fall in love with any one but a lady. still, i want to know if she, or rather her family, are really smart people, or what. even if they are "what," i'm sure it won't make any difference to rob, and so it mustn't make any difference to me. but it will be a _relief_ to know that they are friends of yours, or even that you know them. i pretend not to believe in class distinctions, and i don't; but when it comes to your own son, somehow or other you do want him to choose his wife among his own social equals. between you and me i am just about broken-hearted. i know it is very wrong of me, but i had sort of let myself grow very dependent upon him, and always had looked upon his marriage much as one looks upon death, as inevitable, but always remote and the end of all things. it still seems like the end of all things, but in time i shall get used to it. i feel simply ashamed of myself for feeling as i do now. of course, if it were given me the choice, "your son's happiness, woman, or your own selfish comfort," i wouldn't hesitate a moment, but it's so hard for a mother who has spent such happy years with her son to realize that his happiness does altogether and absolutely depend on some one else, and on that one and no other? and then we always have that terrible doubt,--has he chosen the right woman for him? just as if he wasn't, after all, the best judge for himself. of course he is; and in time i know i shall be able to thank god he made this choice, but just now--just to-night--it seems to me i come nearer to envying you your childless wifehood than i would ever have thought possible. being in this sentimental, unreal city, doesn't help me any! forgive this, i'm afraid morbid, letter, and believe me affectionately always--write me the truth--your school girl friend, kitty. have they any position whatever in troy? a letter of introduction four letters i. from mrs. joslyn of new york to mrs. lemaire of washington. ii. the same. iii. from mrs. lemaire to mrs. joslyn. iv. from mr. hamilton-locks to the hon. forbes redding of england. i _letter from mrs. joslyn of new york to mrs. lemaire of washington, unsealed and unstamped._ friday. my dear mrs. lemaire: i am very happy to introduce to you mr. hamilton-locks, of london, a friend of mine, who goes to washington for the first time. i know i am giving you both a pleasure in bringing you together, and any courtesy you may be able to extend to mr. hamilton-locks will be as if shown to me also. always sincerely, emily joslyn. ii _a second letter from mrs. joslyn to mrs. lemaire, sent with a special delivery stamp._ friday. my dear mrs. lemaire: i gave a letter of introduction to you to a young englishman this morning. i hasten to write, and beg you, as far as i am concerned, to pay no attention whatever to it. he was sent over to us by lady heton, a traveling acquaintance, whom we know really nothing of, and it's been a great bother trying to be civil and everything else to him. i felt obliged to give him the letter, but you will understand by this that you are to ignore it quite as much as you like. he is no friend of ours whatever, merely an acquaintance that has been forced upon us. we hear you are having such a gay season in washington. we think of taking a house there for next winter. can you manage to keep out of the political set if you want to? i don't mind ambassadors, but i should think all the other people would be most ordinary. i suppose you will come on for the makeway ball; won't you? if so, do lunch with me the day after; don't forget. yours, ever sincerely, emily joslyn. iii _letter from mrs. lemaire to mrs. joslyn._ wednesday. my dear mrs. joslyn: where is your young englishman? i adore young englishmen, and why doesn't yours come to see me? did you give him the letter? he has been in washington a week, is constantly at the p----'s, and all the diplomatic corps are entertaining him. the women are mad about him, he's so awfully good-looking. if you want a house in washington next winter why not rent ours? we are going to rome in december. yours, always cordially, gertrude lemaire. iv _letter from mr. hamilton-locks to the hon. forbes redding._ washington, january, '97. my dear old chap: this place is a very good sort, rather like a little english paris; more cosmopolitan than boston, i mean, tho' no other city here seems quite so lively as new york. the embassy is giving me no end of a good time. i'm sure i'm more than grateful to your uncle. i find society in this place is more like european without trying to be, while in new york they try more, and _aren't_. new york society has an air of its own, and, i must say, it's a damn fine air, too. of course, like other places, it has some frumps, and what blanche heton meant by giving me a letter to a mrs. joslyn is more than meets the eye. but we are not burnt twice by the same flame. the _lady_ gave me in turn a letter to some one here, and i was so afraid i'd forget and use it by mistake, or leave it at the woman's door one day when i'd been drinking a good many whiskeys and sodas and didn't care what i did, that i tore it into bits and dropped them in an umbrella stand in mrs. joslyn's hall five minutes after she gave it to me. there's no use in running any risks. and when a woman over here _is_ stupid she's damn stupid. so is she superlatively fetching when she is charming. and, by jove! but they know how to draw the line--all but mrs. joslyn. people over on this side think every englishman comes over after a wife, and at first they pretend to be very haughty and independent, and then if they find out he is not after a wife after all, like your humble servant, they are quite angry about it. i hope you're keeping an eye on my dogs for me. love to millicent. yours, ted. wagner, 1897 _a letter from lady aires to the countess of upham, at homburg_. bayreuth, aug., 1897. my dear rose: our stay at bayreuth is nearly over--the last opera to-morrow; and, to be frank, i am extremely glad, although of course it has been perfectly charming. first we heard parsifal and the ring; which is four operas, you know. why they call them a "ring" i can't see yet; and i don't like to ask, it gives the musical people who really know the chance to be so superior, and they are conceited enough as it is, goodness knows. anyone would think it was a disgrace not to have been lullabyed to sleep when a baby by a symphony orchestra! i'm sure it isn't my fault if i don't know which is schumann and which is schubert; and what's the difference? (between you and me i don't care. of course i adore music, but it's like a great many other things--you mustn't ask too many questions!) well the first day was "parsifal." it's a _dear_! beautiful, perfectly beautiful! i wore my white mulle with my green and white hat, and if i _do_ say it (and i must, for i'm sure no one else will say it for me), women are such jealous cats about frocks. i didn't see a better turned out woman. such a tremendous lot of smart people as are here, too. really you ought to have come. i'm sure you would have enjoyed it. between the acts it's quite like sunday in the park. the entre-acts are very long, giving us a chance to shake out our frocks and wake up and amuse ourselves. some people go up a little hill, or into some pine woods; but that's rather dull, for you don't meet half so many others--most everyone stays in front of the theatre. but i must tell you about "parsifal." in the first place it is awfully long. and parsifal himself is entirely too fat! i am sure such a very good young person as parsifal shouldn't have a stomach! there are a lot of sort of monks in rather fetching pink red cloaks, with pale bluey gray skirts underneath. (not at all a bad combination, and gave me an idea for a costume for up the river.) their chief is ill, and almost always in great pain, but it does not prevent his singing the longest of speeches. parsifal kills a lovely swan--it flies in _so_ naturally. really wagner was a most wonderful man! then there is a gypsy girl; a sort of snake charmer, who has bottles of things all through the play. i couldn't make out quite if she were parsifal's mother or what. but she is quite mad, and wears only a very uninteresting old brown dress. i must make this criticism of wagner: you don't see many pretty dresses in his operas. then everyone goes to a banqueting hall, which is also partly a church. the scenery moves along in a most miraculous way and the hall is really very lovely. there are children in this scene, and they lift the chalice, and it glows--an electric light in it you know, but it's really lovely. and the music is simply heavenly. i assure you i cried like a baby at this part; i couldn't tell you why, unless it's the poor wretched creature (am-something his name is; i can't find my programme). he's very handsome. i intend to buy his photograph. he has to lift the holy cup, and he feels he is unfit to do it. he is a sinner and wishes he were dead, and somehow or other you feel awfully sympathetic with him. i know the times i've been to church and knelt down so ashamed i couldn't lift my head, thinking of some of the beastly wicked things i've done in my life. and that's just what the second act is. a crowd of women try to seduce parsifal, but they are all german chorus women, and it really doesn't seem such a great temptation. but then the girl who was ugly in the other act comes on very beautiful (but hideously dressed, why don't they get worth or doucet, i wonder, to help them?) and she sings a great deal and very loud, and kisses parsifal, and then everything goes suddenly to wrack and ruin. i shall never dare kiss any very good young man again--not after that! in the last act, this same creature, looking more like act i., washes parsifal's feet. i should hate to play that part, but it's all very pretty and affecting, and the music--well there are no words to describe it. and the whole rest of the act is too wonderful! really you have to cry. of course, it's too long, and you're awfully hungry, but there is a rather smart restaurant now, where everybody goes afterward to get their spirits back; which reminds me that mrs. gordon turned up yesterday and appeared at the restaurant at night, affording us a good deal of amusement. first she started to courtesy to the royalties, who don't want to be noticed. this she perceived in the middle of her courtesy, and cut it short in a quick way, which made her look exactly as if _something_ important in her toilet had burst or broken. then she flew all over from room to room, trying to find a table that suited her, disturbing the whole atmosphere, like meteors are said to do in the skies, and creating the impression, or trying to, that she owned the entire place. she won't be happy here, for it isn't easy for anyone else to own anything where frau wagner is installed; which reminds me to stop this gossip and tell you seriously about the other operas. the first of the ring is the valkyrie; you can remember it because of lord dunraven's yacht. and they swim around in the water; which is, i suppose, why he called it so. but no; on second thoughts, that isn't it at all. the first opera is rheingold, and it's the rhine maidens that go swimming about. how absurd of dunraven to have made such a mistake. i like the rheingold awfully. the first act looks just like water, and the music is so pretty. then, in the second act, there are two splendid big men--one in white, the other in black bear skins--who are rather fetching. the rheingold is the least sociable of the operas, as there is no entre-act. but it is fortunately a great deal the shortest. i think it is one of my favorites. i seem to know more what wagner is about in it. i don't believe he knows himself what he is about some of the time in the valkyrie. this second opera is awfully long. however, it has two good entre-acts, when you can walk around and talk to everybody; and i can assure you we have plenty to say after having been kept quiet for over an hour in the dark theatre. the chairs are so uncomfortable, and if you move somebody hisses. there is not much politeness in bayreuth. we don't get as good a view of the stage as some people, but we have splendid places; the countess of ---is in front of us, her sister right beside me, and behind are the ----s, and near by lady ----. so you see we couldn't possibly have better seats. for the valkyrie i wore a new mauve and pale green frock. i don't think you've seen it. the bill was atrocious. i sha'n't pay it; but the costume is a great success. portions of this second opera are awfully tiresome, first one couple and then another, going on for hours about nothing, but there are some exquisite clouds that move and grow and scatter exactly like nature, only more so, and make up a little for the dull people. i notice one thing: _all_ the gods and goddesses have always such troubles. there isn't a single happy creature among them, not even wotan, who is god of them all, and wears a silly gold curl over one eye. i think it lowers his whole dignity; but they make a great many mistakes like that. of course, one oughtn't to think of these things, but should simply listen to and enjoy the beautiful music, but my nature is so sensitive i can't help it. there are a lot of valkyrie, you know, who wear a sort of antique dress-reform costume, not pretty, and ride through the air on deliciously funny-looking horses. and brunhilde, the leader of them, a rather nice person, behaves quite like a human being in "siegfried," the next opera, which i will tell you about later. in "valkyrie" you think she is going to be burnt up, but in "siegfried" she is saved after all. i suppose there is some sort of biblical idea about hell. you recognized the bible very often in "parsifal." i much prefer siegfried as a person to parsifal. he's not such a _very_ good boy. there's more an air of athletics, football, rowing, and all that about siegfried, while parsifal smacks just a little, i think, of the young men's christian association. you can _kiss_ siegfried with impunity, too; in fact, it saved brunhilde's life, and i wouldn't mind running a few risks myself to be saved in the same way! you get perfectly drunk with this music of the last act of siegfried. of course, my dear, you know i am now writing about the _third_ opera, "siegfried." you must follow me closely, for it's very easy to get confused about them. "siegfried" is awfully long, too, and the first act--well, i don't mind telling you i slept a good deal. you see, the theatre gets so stuffy, and then one is digesting one's luncheon, and the stage is so dark, and i maintain that the music soothes you. i wore, of course, another dress, something quiet, as it was rainy, but i saw no one who looked any better. between the first and second acts i managed to get a bow and a hand-shake from the prince, to the visible envy of mrs. gordon. i wish you could see the dear beast. she flutters around the royalties every minute, like a nervous bird, and as if they were her nest of eggs and a bad little boy was in the neighborhood. i _hate_ snobs; don't you? i am lunching, by the way, with mrs. g. to-morrow. quite a big, smart party of us, i hear. that funny dragon comes in "siegfried," you know, and of course it is much more amusing here than in covent garden or new york. but it's the last act that i _love_! such passionate music! brunhilde falls madly in love with siegfried, who is, of course, ever so many years younger than she. but it's just like us women, especially when we are brunhilde's age. for i suppose she's forty something, as she was grown up and went to sleep before siegfried was born, and when he kisses her he seems to be quite a man! by the way, brunhilde was put to sleep for interfering somehow or other in the love affairs of siegfried's mother and father, who are really sister and brother. if you think of it, the story is extremely indecent, but operatic things never seem to be shocking; music, apparently, covers a multitude of naughtiness, like charity is reported to do. very likely that's why mrs. ---is always doing so much for institutions and what not--for her sins, i suppose. i always thought she was a naughty old hypocrite! by the way, there is a comic character in "siegfried," and in one of the others, i forget which, called mime--a funny little dwarf, the sort of thing they put in a christmas pantomime to amuse the children. _later._ i have just come from the "götterdämmerung," the last opera, and i am completely exhausted. i am as if i were in a dream, and can only think and feel and write of this beautiful, beautiful music and scenery. i am absolutely absorbed in it. some people took the train for nuremberg right after the performance. i am sure i never could have. i really can't believe they _felt_ the thing. our train goes at 1:45. such a nice hour; one doesn't have to hurry in the morning, and can have one's hair done properly. i have a charming new way of doing the hair. i got it from a frenchwoman who sat just in front of me in the theatre to-day, and when it was light enough i studied the arrangement till i got it by heart. you want something like that to do during the long duets. otherwise your attention is apt to wander from the opera, or you get sleepy. to go back to the opera, it began with the same scene that siegfried finished with, which was rather disappointing, but a real horse came on and behaved as quiet as a lamb, with brunhilde screaming like mad all about him. i suppose they put cotton in his ears, or something. the scene changed (without letting us go out for a rest, which i thought something of a sell) to the house, where siegfried falls in love with another woman (oh, these men!) i forgot to tell you, my mind is so full of the music, that i wore my new russell & allen winter frock, and i caught lots of people taking it in. but, dear me, how badly the german women dress! i haven't seen a single _chic_ one among them since i've been here, i don't believe i shall come to bayreuth again. besides, the music is too wearing. the rhine maidens come back in this act! it is most wonderful the way they swim about! but, as far as i can gather, they are rather nasty cats. one thing i will say, though: i think wagner's on the side of the women; for, in spite of brunhilde's being in love with little more than a boy, she has all your sympathies. so has siegfried, too; which is odd. i really sobbed when he died, he was so good-looking, and seemed so sad. this whole opera is very depressing. we reach munich to-morrow night at 7; and i propose going to the residenz theatre there, and seeing a light opera just for contrast. but how bad the shops are at munich. i believe there are some good pictures, but i think one sees so many pictures in europe; don't you? i presume you know brunhilde behaves rather like dido in the end: nearly everybody, more or less, is murdered off, and there is a sort of madame tussaud exhibition in the clouds at the curtain. of course, i haven't really given you any sort of an idea about it at all. there are no words that will adequately describe it, only i promised to give you a detailed personal account; and i have done so. the reason we are going to munich is we can't get a sleeper yet, everything is so crowded. isn't it disgusting. this last opera is rather too noisy at times, and awfully long--longer than the others. but there's a men's ballet in it that is rather nice; not dancing, you know, but singing and posing and walking about, with imitation bare legs, most of them. but i think the best thing about the opera is it leaves you in such an exalted mood. i know i won't be able to think of small or worldly things for weeks, much less write about them. before i forget it, be sure and write me if it's true that mrs. ---and sir george ---are both at homburg, at the same hotel. i hear they are, and there's no end of talk about it. but then i find there's no end of talk about everything and everybody. it is not that people mean badly, but one has to pass the time somehow. i think i love best of all the rheingold music. it is like a jeweller's shop window in bond street; it seems to shine and glitter and sparkle. you see very few jewels here in bayreuth; of course, there's very little chance to display them. women wear the usual small string of pearls. that's about all. as most everyone wore one i wear two, with a different pendant each day. i like to be just a little original, and keep my own individuality. well, now i must tumble into bed or i shall lose my beauty sleep. i'd hate to have my figure get like these german singers. i wonder why! i'd have myself strapped between boards--i'd do _something_. good-bye, my dear. write me all the gossip you can get a hold of. i haven't sent you any in this, but that you couldn't expect. it was impossible that this letter should be anything but wagner, wagner, wagner. i wish you could have been here with me--you'd have seen heaps of your friends. of course i ought to tell you one thing, because i felt it myself: there's nothing catchy about the music. lovingly, fanny. art a letter _a second letter from lady aires to the countess of upham._ munich. my dear rose: it was very thoughtful of you to write me so soon, and aubrey and i wish very much we could join you, but our money is all spent and we must hurry back to england, where we can economize by making cheap visits among our friends for a couple of months. in december we go to new york to spend the winter with mother. you never go home, do you? i am so glad you felt you got so complete an idea of wagner from my letter. i was a little afraid i hadn't done the whole thing justice, but i assure you there were many more people there than i thought of suggesting, and the operas, tho' long, are very delightful. here in munich the chief thing is the picture gallery, as of course at this time of year all fashionable society is away and the theatres and opera either closed or giving second-rate performances. there are more musées than you really care to visit, and are full of masterpieces, many quite as atrocious as masterpieces so often are. the principal one--its name begins with a p--is the one we've been to. i wish you could see the rubens, or else it's the van dykes--i forget which, but they are beautiful; and when one thinks how long ago they were painted, it's wonderful, isn't it? one thing awfully interesting about a picture gallery is to see the absurd difference in women's dress now and in former times; don't you think so? and sometimes one gets ideas for one's self. this particular gallery is altogether one of the most satisfactory i've ever been in. it wasn't crowded full of baedeker people and that sort of thing. in the second room we went in we met lord and lady jenks and the countess of towns. that was the room where we saw a portrait the living image of janet cowther. we all shrieked with laughter! you know how she has what my vulgar little brother calls an "ingrowing face"--it sinks in instead of coming out, so that the poor creature can't know what it seems like to have a real profile. it's extraordinary that there should have been two such faces in the world--don't you think so?--even with two or three hundred years between them. the portrait was painted by--dear me! i can't remember, but it was some one we all know. there's one thing i shouldn't mind, and that is knowing the lady's corset maker; i'd like to give his address to janet, because, my dear, in spite of her face he had made the lady's figure beautiful. i think that's really the nicest part of a picture gallery--seeing comic likenesses to your friends. lady jenks and i sat down on an uncomfortable bench without any back and talked away for nearly an hour. what an amusing creature she is! has stories to tell about everybody under the sun. by the way, she vowed you and your husband got on awfully, and only lived together as a matter of form! i took up your cudgels, my dear, and told her it wasn't true in any particular; that ned adored you and was an angel. of course, he got drunk--that i knew, as all the world did, but you were used to that. it isn't true, is it? he never struck you? i'm sure he didn't! you'd have told a good friend like me; wouldn't you? well, just as lady jenks and i finished the others came back from going through all the other rooms. we were everyone of us dead tired, looking at pictures is so fatiguing. we decided to go back to the hotel and have tea in the garden. but i think it is a dear gallery, and to-morrow--we don't leave till the next day--if we've any time left after doing the shops, i intend to go back and see the pictures all over again. write to eaton sqr.; the servants will forward. poor things, they must have had a dull summer! they say the heat in town has been fearful! but i don't think servants mind; do you? and then they have the run of the house. i am sure they use the drawing-room and sleep in my bed! good-bye, lovingly, fanny. aubrey says janet's portrait is by rembrandt; but i tell him i don't think it was by a frenchman at all, i think it was by greuze. sorrow a letter _a letter to mrs. carly, florence, italy._ new york, wednesday. my dear mary: you were right when you said to me, two years ago, that the time would come when i would realize the futility, the selfish, the absurd insufficiency of my life. it is now six months since i lost my little girl--my only child. i thank you so much for your letter; i was sure you, who had so much heart, would realize more than most people what i suffered and feel still. and it needn't have been--i shall always maintain it _needn't_ have been! she was overheated at dancing-school and caught cold coming home. i was late dressing for an early dinner, thought it was nothing, and paid no attention. from the dinner i went to the opera, from the opera to a ball, on to somebody else's. i was dead tired when i came home and fell into bed and asleep. all this time, my child, with her cold, was sleeping close beside an open window! the maid was careless, of course, but it wasn't _her_ child--it was mine--and i hold myself most to blame. in two more days the doctor told me she couldn't live. i shall never forgive him! in six hours she was dead. i think i went quite mad. i know i really felt as if i had wantonly murdered her; and i still feel i was myself largely responsible. she was the dearest little creature! i am so sorry you never saw her. "i love my mamma best, and god next," she kept on saying all that last day. one wondered and wondered what thought was in her little brain. "you are mother's darling," i said to her--"mother's precious little girl, but god gave you to her, so you are god's first!" she threw her arms about my neck and kissed me, and said: "i like you better than all the little boys at dancing-school put together!" she fluttered about the bed with her arms like a little tired bird! she made me sing to her. i sang hours and hours--lullabies and comic songs she liked best. my maid came to me: "madame is lunching out." i was furious with her for coming to me with any such remark. "telegraph!" was all i said. "telegraph what, madame?" "i don't care," i answered. o my dear mary! to watch a little soul going--a little soul that is all yours, or at least that you thought was all yours! to watch the light of life fade and fade out of a face precious to you, into which you cannot kiss the color again; to watch this little life, dearer to you than your own, slip, slip away from you in spite of your hands clutching to hold it back, or clasped in prayer to keep it! to sit and lose and be helpless! oh, the agony of it! marie came once more; it was dark; i guessed her errand, and only looked at her. she went away without a word. i took the child out of the bed--it was like lifting a flower. at dawn she died in my arms. oh, were ever arms so empty as when they hold the dead body of someone loved? and then began the revelations. the stilted letters of condolence, written with exactly the same amount of feeling as a note of regrets or acceptance, and couched very much in the same sort of language. one woman recommended her dressmaker as being the most _chic_ woman in new york for mourning--as if i cared! a great many cards were left at the door with their corners turned down, and for awhile no invitations came. that was all! most of the people i was unfortunate enough to meet made such remarks as---"my dear mrs. emery, i am so sorry to hear of your loss" (as if the house had been burned down or the silver plate had been stolen); or else---"dear mrs. emery, i was so shocked to hear it; such a _sweet_ child! which was it, a boy or a girl? oh, yes, i remember, a boy--a nice creature; but, my dear, so many boys turn out badly. you must try and console yourself with thinking perhaps you have both been saved a world of trouble after all!" "my child was a little girl," i answered. another woman came to me, saying: "you poor, dear thing! i'm glad you are bearing it so well--you look splendidly. of course you won't stay in mourning long; will you? it's really not necessary for a child; and then i think one _needs_ the distractions of society to drown one's sorrows!" and all in such a flippant tone! there are some who haven't heard of it at all, which seems so strange to me, who see and think of nothing else indoor and out! and sue troyon i shall never forget or stop loving as long as i live. she put her arms about me and kissed me, when she first met me, right in the street, and never said a word, but her eyes were wet. _she_ is a woman and a friend! so now i am going to join you abroad, to travel and live among pictures and music and real people. these months out of society have broken the charm. i've tried to go back, but i can't stand it. the inanities of an afternoon at home are more than i can bear. everybody repeating to each other the same absurd commonplaces over and over again. society conversation in one way is like a wagner opera: it is composed of the same themes, which recur over and over again; only, in the conversation referred to, these themes are deadly, dull, fatuous remarks. as for balls and evening parties, i don't care about dancing any more, somehow, and to see the young _débutantes_ about me almost breaks my heart, full of memories of my daughter and what she might have been. tears are not becoming to a very low-necked dress, and shouldn't be worn with powder and jewels. no, my dear mary, i see in this society of ours, we all grow so hardened, that if we don't have some such grief as i have had, we become hopeless. people soon forgot i had ever had a child, or at least that she hadn't been dead for years. i find myself becoming a bore, because of perhaps a certain lack of spirit that i used to have; and i began to realize that i had never been liked for myself, but for what i gave, and for the atmosphere of amusement which i helped to create by nearly always being gay and enjoying myself. as you yourself said of society, it is absolutely unsatisfactory. i never knew a purely society woman yet who wasn't somewhat or sometimes dissatisfied. first, they can't go as much or everywhere they want; and soon after they have all the opportunities they desire, they find that isn't sufficient, after all, to make life perfect, and then the boredom of fatigue begins to creep upon them with the years, and soon old age begins like a worm to eat into what happiness they have had. oh, no! when i think of how full your life is, of the interesting people you know--not merely empty names with a fashionable address or a coronet on their note paper,--of the places you see and the books you read; and then hear you say your life is too short to see or enjoy a third the world has to offer you! you happy, _happy_ woman you! well! the house is for sale! what furniture i want to keep stored! john, who is prematurely old and half-dead with trying to earn enough money to keep us going as we wished in new york, has entered into it all in exactly my spirit. he has sold his seat on the stock exchange. he has disposed of all his business interests here. we find we have quite enough income to travel as long as we like, moderately, and to live abroad for as many years as we please. when we get homesick--as we are both sure to, for after all we are good americans--we will come back here and settle down quietly in some little house, near everybody, but not in the whirlpool--on the banks of society, as it were, so that when we feel like it we can go and paddle in it for a little, just over our ankles. two weeks after you receive this letter you will receive us! we sail on _kaiser wilhelm_ to naples. no one here knows what to make of us! it's absurd the teapot tempest we've created. the verdict finally is that we've either lost our money or else our minds! with a heart full of love, affectionately, agnes. the theatre four letters, a bill, and a quotation from a newspaper i _a letter from mrs. frederick strong to her husband._ ... fifth avenue, saturday. my dear fred: you must come home at once. dick has announced his engagement to an actress--a soubrette, too, in a farce-comedy. if it had been a woman who played shakespeare, it would have been bad enough, but a girl who sings and dances and does all sorts of things, including wearing her dresses up-side down, as it were--that is, too high at the _bottom_ and too _low_ at the top--well, this is a little too much!--just as we were getting a really good position in society. if the marriage isn't put a stop to, you can be sure she'll soon dance and kick us out of any position whatever that's worth holding. it isn't as if we had any one to back us; but you never had any family, and the least said about mine the better, so we have to be our own ancestors. and just as we had succeeded in getting a footing, in placing ourselves so that our children will be all right, your brother must go and do his best to ruin it all! you see how necessary it is for you to be on the spot. we may be able to break the engagement off before it is too late. leave the mine to take care of itself, or go to pieces if need be. one mine more or less won't make any difference to us. besides, you must think of your children! your brother, too; he's sure to regret it. i am ill over this thing. can't sleep, and have frightful indigestion. everybody's talking about it, and the newspapers are full this morning. my new costume came home from mme. v----'s yesterday; but there's no pleasure now in wearing it! with love, annie. january 19th. and the ball we were going to give next month! what about the ball? mrs. w---had promised me we should have some of the smartest people here! this will ruin everything. telegraph me when you will come. i am suicidal. ii _a bill._ mr. fred'k strong, dr. to the ---private detective agency, for services rendered, $-----. rec'd payment, ----feb. 10th, 189-. iii _a letter from miss beatrice north to richard strong, sent by special delivery to his club._ february 11th. my darling dick: what is the meaning of this letter from a lawyer? who has been trying to damage my character? to ruin my happiness? who hates me? i have never willingly harmed any one. i can't and won't believe this letter was sent with your approval. but why didn't you come to see me yesterday? my dearest in the world, you wouldn't believe evil stories of me, surely! you to whom i have told all my life, everything, for there has been nothing to hide. no, no; i am sure you don't know anything about this cruel letter, and for god's sake hurry and tell me so yourself, hurry and tell me so, and let me kiss the words as they come to your lips. thine, beatrice. iv _letter from the same to the same._ the evidence that you have proves nothing whatever, and even then much of it is exaggerated, which i, in my turn, can prove. i shall sue you for breach of promise. beatrice north. v _from the same to the same, a day later._ i will not write to your lawyers. this second letter of theirs is too insulting. they know very well they could never win the case against me. (i am innocent; and even if i were not, your evidence is ridiculously insufficient.) and that is why they offer to "settle" with me privately. but my own feelings have changed over night. that you could, first, believe the charges against me, and second, that you could have allowed me to be insulted by your--_or your brother's_--lawyers, as you have done, these two things have opened my eyes to your own weak contemptible character. i am grateful the discovery came before it was too late. i release you from your engagement to me, and far from bringing a suit against you i feel i owe you a debt of thanks. i trust this is a sufficient reply to your insult to "settle" privately. the matter is at end with this letter. beatrice north. vi _headlines of a column in a daily new york paper._ the strong's ball! all the swells there! dick strong gets the cold shoulder from most of his friends! the opera _mrs. sternwall's box. the first act of tristan and isolde is three-quarters over. mr. alfred easterfelt is seated alone in the corner. he is bored._ mr. alfred easterfelt. (_to himself, after a long sigh._) damn it! what did i come so early for? (_people are heard by the entire audience entering the little ante-room behind. the men's chorus on the stage drowns the sound of artificial laughter. the curtains part, and_ mr. easterfelt _is joined by_ mrs. sternwall, mrs. morley, miss beebar, and mr. carn.) mrs. morley. (_seriously._) what a pity we've missed so much. (_there are general greetings, whispered pleasantly. each person, without exception, glances first all about the house, and then turns his eyes slowly toward stage. mrs. sternwall sits in_ _the corner, facing the audience with three-quarters face, as the photographers express it, one-quarter toward the singers and_ mise en scène. _she beckons easterfelt to sit behind her. the others fall into the other places more or less as they happen, the women in front looking lovely, as each one is well aware, with her beautiful white neck, her jewels, and her charming coif. the music continues._) mrs. morley. (_suddenly noticing that mr. sternwall is not with them._) but where is mr. sternwall? mrs. sternwall. oh, henry always goes across to hammerstein's olympia during the acts, but he will join us for each of the entre-acts. (_she takes up her opera glass, and examines the house minutely._) miss beebar. what is the opera? mrs. morley. tristan and isolde. i don't care for the new woman; do you? somehow she hasn't the soul for wagner. she sings well enough, mechanically, but she doesn't feel enough. miss beebar. precisely. that's a wig of course; isn't it? and what an ugly one! mrs. sternwall. (_low to mr. easterfelt._) come to-morrow at four. he has taken to leaving the office much earlier the last few days. (_owing to a sudden pause in the music, her voice has been heard quite distinctly. she is embarrassed for a moment, to cover which she leans over toward mrs. morley and miss beebar._) i wish eames sang in this, she wears such good clothes. mr. carn. what's that about eames? miss beebar. i thought eames' name would wake you up! mr. carn. i was listening to the music. miss beebar. don't be absurd; you know you never come to hear the opera, except when i am going. mr. carn. or when eames sings. miss beebar. ah! you acknowledge it! you brute! mr. carn. it's her arms, and her eyes, and her hair. you must acknowledge she's very beautiful---miss beebar. (_interrupts._) for heaven's sake stop; you bore me to death. besides you must listen. it isn't the thing to talk at the opera any more. (_isolde gives tristan the cup with the love potion in it._) mrs. sternwall. (_in a very low voice to mr. easterfelt._) just before the curtain falls change your position quietly. go near miss beebar and mrs. morley, on account of henry. he will come to the box the minute the lights are turned up. miss beebar. (_very low to mr. carn._) i _hate_ eames! mr. carn. no. (_he kisses, without sound, her bare shoulders._) (_tristan and isolde approach each other with outstretched arms. for the first time mrs. morley takes her gaze from the stage. it rests upon a dim figure in a certain seat in the opera club's box. her eyes are full of tears._) a perfect day a leaf from the diary of mrs. herbert dearborn, living in paris _may --, 1897._ a charming, delightful day! marie brought me my coffee at nine, as usual, with a perfect mail. no nasty business letters from america, but only most desirable invitations, notes full of gossip, and regrets from the thompsons for the expensive dinner i felt obliged to give them at _armenonville_, so i won't have to give it! one's old friends in america are really rather a bother, coming to paris in the very middle of the season. if they came only in midsummer, when every one is away, one would be very glad to do what one could, if one were in the city. of course, as far as the thompsons themselves are concerned, i love them. my coffee never tasted so deliciously, and marie said i looked unusually well after my night's rest. to be sure marie says that every morning; but never mind, it is always pleasant to hear the first thing one wakes up, and i only wish i didn't have a sneaking fear that the new empire pink bed-hangings help a good deal. marie sprayed the room with my new perfume (a secret; no one else has it), laved my face in rose-water, and then i had a wee little nap by way of a starter for the day. after my bath i answered my mail; and then, marie having manicured my nails, my toilet was made. i wore, to go out, my striking blue costume, with the hat and sun-shade to match, which always necessitates the greatest care with the complexion. i use an entirely different powder with this dress, and one has to be most careful about one's cheeks. but marie is invaluable so far as the complexion is concerned, and i went out quite satisfied. first, to the hair-dresser's to have my hair re-dyed, as i went to the races in the afternoon, and the light there is very trying. unless your hair has been dyed very lately it is quite useless to go. my hair was never done so well. i am trying it a very little darker, and i am almost sure i like it better. then i went into some shops. i think it is always a good thing to have one's carriage seen waiting outside the smart shops often. i priced a great many things, and had several--which i of course have no idea whatever of buying--sent home on approval. to the dressmaker's, to try on my new dress. it was finished; but didn't suit me. i am having entirely new sleeves and all the trimming changed. i persuaded them it was their fault. i had really thought i should like it that way until i saw it completed. then to breakfast with the countess of ----; a charming _déjeuner_. all the women very desirable to know and very _chicly_ dressed, and not one looking so young for their age, i am sure, as i. in fact, several made that remark to me. i know they say just the opposite behind my back, but it is pleasant to hear nice things under any circumstances. i think it is all one should ask of people, that they should be nice to our faces. i left _déjeuner_ first, because that makes a good impression, as if you are crowded with engagements, and flatters your hostess, who is naturally pleased to catch a much-sought-after guest. i really drove home to rest a little before the races. i find taking off _everything_ and indulging in complete relaxation, if only for ten minutes, is wonderfully refreshing, and saves lots of _lines_! while i was resting my _masseur_ came and gave me face massage. there is nothing like it for a wrinkle-destroyer. and the man is a rather nice person who amuses me. i got him two new clients at the luncheon today. as the other women said, one is only too willing to pay extra to get a man who is good-looking. the races were very exciting. it was a lovely day, our coach had a fine position, and our party was much stared at! i had the most conspicuous seat, and did my best to become it. it isn't for me to say to myself if i succeeded or not, but i owe it to my dress-maker to make the statement that no one else had on a better gown. i wish that statement was the only thing i owed him! i won forty louis; i don't know how. i am absolutely ignorant about horses. i only go because it seems to be the thing to do now. but i thought one of the jockeys looked rather fetching, and so i put my money on him, and he happened to win. we all went for tea to mrs. ----'s, where one of the most expensive singers sang. but i didn't hear her, because if you go into the music room you have to sit down in rows, and you don't see any of the people. i was obliged to hurry away, as my appointment with jacques to-day was for 6:30, and i wanted to stop at an imitation jeweller's place in the rue de la paix, where i had heard were some wonderful paste necklaces. they are quite extraordinary. i ordered one, and shall never tell a soul it's not real. i was late home, but jacques, the dear boy, was waiting, and seemed to me sweeter than ever this afternoon. i gave him the cuff links i have had made for him, with his initials in rubies, and it was too delightful to see his pleasure. i took him out to dine. i think i will marry him. i know he is much younger than i, and all that, but he's so sweet, and, after all, i have enough money for two. the westington's "bohemian dinner" a letter _the sherwood_ 58 west 57th st. my dear dora: we are just home from dining in one of the smartest houses in new york, and i've been bored so wide awake i can't think of going to bed, so i am sitting in my petticoat (that charming white silk, much-festooned, and many-flounced one you brought me over from paris) and a dressing sack (pink, not so very unbecoming). my hair is down, but dick doesn't paint it any more--it's getting thin, dear!--and i've nice little swansdown lined slippers over my best white silk-stockings. i've worn to-night the best of everything my wardrobe affords, and i wasn't ashamed of myself! no, i was much more ashamed of the westingtons, and i'm going to tell you all about it before i touch the pillow! i'm sure you'll be amused. in the first place, to be honest, we were rather pleased to be asked. there is no one smarter than the w.'s, and, besides, they are attractive and good-looking. the truth is, we've always been anxious to go to their house--heaven knows why, now that we've been. we are sufficiently punished, however, for being so foolish as to be flattered by our invitation. for, my dear, we weren't asked to a swell dinner at all; we were invited to what was intended for a "bohemian" affair (but it was only a dull and ungainly one), and it was apparently taken for granted that, as dick painted and i hadn't millions, we were decidedly eligible. of course, as you know, there is no such thing as a real bohemia in new york. the dinner was given in honor (apparently) of the hungarian pianist romedek and his wife. he has been an enormous success here this year, and society has taken him up. but the trouble is with madame romedek; no one is sure she _is_ madame romedek, and a great many people are sure she isn't. she is a pretty, rather common-looking person, with no particular intelligence or _esprit_. i am told she is more communicative _under_ the table than she is over it; and i know some men are crazy about her. of course, she isn't a woman any of us can stand for a moment. if romedek were a painter we should know she'd been his model, and be awfully sorry for him. but romedek is a musician (a great one--i wish you could hear him); and they say she hasn't even the social prestige or poetic license of having been an artist's model, but of having been something quite wrong to begin with. naturally, you see, some of society won't have her at any price. those that must have _him_ have difficulty in entertaining them. i hear one prominent woman who was asked last week to dine and meet the romedeks considered herself insulted, and has struck her would-be hostess' name off her visiting list. so you see it wasn't all plain sailing with the westington's, and i can hear them decide between themselves to give a "real bohemian dinner;" that is, ask people who "do things," and whom you sometimes do meet out at houses where they are not particular about mixing--the kind of people who would probably not take offense at being asked to meet mrs. romedek without having her marriage certificate for their dinner card. of course, as you know, i don't mind being asked to meet anybody. thank goodness! i feel perfectly secure about my reputation, and also about my position, which is quite good enough to please me. but there is a difference in being asked to meet a questionable person because that person is brilliant, or beautiful, or talented, and that therefore you (belonging to the aristocracy of brains) will appreciate her, and, on the other hand, being asked to meet her because you are an artist's wife and don't mind that sort of thing. we _do_ mind it very much! we don't even _care_ for it in geniuses--only we overlook it in a genius; disregard it as not being our affair. but to be asked to meet a silly, loose woman with the idea that i won't mind, almost as if i approved, i resent that. however, let me tell you who was there. on mrs. westington's right, of course, sat romedek, and he is very handsome and very charming, and i think at least mrs. westington enjoyed her dinner if nobody else did. on mrs. w.'s left was mr. ----, who is, you know, a great swell here and who poses as being a fast patron of the arts and graces--especially the graces--after the pattern of a frenchman who has his _entrée_ behind the scenes of the opera. his wife never accepts invitations that he does; they meet, you know, under their own roof, for the sake of the children--but under their _own_ roof only. so in her place belle carterson was asked, who has gone in for keeping a swell florist's place, and they say is making money. she is independent, and i like her, but of course it is considered by her friends in society that since she went in for business she can't refuse to meet _anyone_. dick sat next to her, and had on the other side of him mrs. ----, who likes celebrities without the knack of selection, and whose invitations nowadays i believe are never accepted at once, but are kept open as long as possible to see if something better won't turn up. then came mrs. romedek and mr. westington; he looking bored to death, and she as if she didn't know where she was at. then bobbie lawsher, who writes books and operettas and things--rather amusing he is, but becoming more and more of a snob every day. it's bad enough to see a woman straining every nerve to get into society, but when you see a man it's worse than ridiculous. i met him at a smart party the other night, and he stuck by me for hours, asking who everybody was till i lost my patience and told him i couldn't be a blue book for him or anybody, and he would either have to dance with me at once or go to some one else with his questions. i never knew any one who could bring in the names of as many smart people in one short remark as bobbie can. if you happen to ask him what time it is, you could make a wager that, in his answer, in a perfectly natural way, he will mention familiarly three smart society women (calling one at least by her first name). of course he does get asked a great deal, because he's little more than a snub-cushion--holds any amount of them as easily as pins. besides he goes to afternoon bores, like teas and at homes and days, for which free and untrammelled men can only be obtained by subterfuge and trick or some extraordinary bribe. to a young man like bobbie lawsher afternoon affairs are a sort of happy hunting ground, a social grab bag, where he can never be sure there isn't a dinner invitation, or one for the opera, or a luncheon, to be secured if one is clever and careful. why, when a woman has a man guest back out at the last moment from a dinner, the first thing she does is to rush off to any at home, that's going on, with the fairly confident expectation of finding bobbie lawsher and making him fill her vacancy. bobbie has accomplishments of a certain sort, can sing a pretty little song in a pretty little way, and can pass a tea cup without spilling, and drink tea himself, and can hang around when he's wanted, and be got rid of easily when he isn't. he is a sort of society errand boy, and very useful. i take it back about his having accomplishments--a better word for them is _conveniences_! well, on the other side of bobbie was mrs. ----, red in the face, so angry she was asked to meet madame romedek, talking with poor bobbie in a sharp, spasmodic sort of way, as if she were carrying on the conversation with her knife and fork, cutting the sentences into bits, some ignoring and some eating,--and none agreeing with her, or she agreeing with none. then george ringold asked, i suppose, for me. i am quite aware that women who are indiscreet themselves think there is "more than meets the eye" between george and me. i am very fond of him, and so is dick. and he has kissed me, and dick knows it; but i am sure i need not tell you that is all. on the other side was romedek, and perhaps i ought to feel complimented, but as, thanks to mrs. westington, we didn't succeed in carrying on to a finish any single conversation we started, i don't allow myself to be too flattered. mrs. w. talked music, of course--the commonplaces of it--such as any well-bred, smart, educated woman of the world knows how to talk nowadays, with perhaps just one good, big, absurd mistake thrown in,--thus, by the grace of humor keeping banality from becoming absolutely fatal. madame romedek was rather amusing. she tried to be the lady--which, as she doesn't know how, and only succeeds in being impossibly stupid, must have bored the men on each side of her tremendously. that's where foolish women of that sort spoil their own game. if they would make the best of the bargain, and be frankly a common cocotte _gone right_, they would certainly be more amusing, and might have something like success, at any rate with the men. the food was excellent, the wine good, the house lovely! and as soon after dinner as was at all decent, we left. we decided in the cab on our way home, from no point of view had it paid,--financially least of all; for our dinner in the restaurant, with all our jolly friends, would have cost us only seventy-five cents, while our cab bill for the evening was three dollars. as for having had a good time, there was only one person there who had that--mrs. westington herself. i believe even the servants must have been bored by the dinner, unless, perhaps, madame romedek flirted with _them_; which i should think extremely likely. i am getting sleepy now, of which fact my letter undoubtedly bears "internal evidence." so good night and sweet dreams to you, and none to me--i don't like them! write me what you are doing in paris. i am sure your husband will have his usual great success in the champ de mars. we are all very proud of him. with love, dear dora, guenne barrows. the gamblers i. madame eugenie leblanche, veuve, age 62 years. ii. mlle. nina and mlle. fifi. iii. mrs. henry b. gording and mrs. wm. h. lane. iv. mme. borté and mme. lautre. i _the baccarat table in the villa des fleurs, aix-les-bains._ madame eugenie leblanche, _veuve_. (_a large, stout lady in black satin and brocade, violet-colored face-powder, and a reddish blonde display underneath a questionable bonnet. she wears a somewhat profuse and miscellaneous display of jewels, principally diamonds dull as the eyes of dissipation. she holds her chips in large loose white cotton gloves that reach to her elbow. her lips, compressed together, move constantly, with a sort of excited switch-back motion._) (_to herself._) i wonder who has the cards. oh, it's that monsieur there, i see. not good! i will only place two louis. (_she asks the gentleman in front of her to place them for her. he does so._) no, i am wrong, i will put three. (_she asks the gentleman to place a third louis for her. in doing so the chip rolls from his fingers; he immediately recaptures it and places it properly._) monsieur, monsieur, if you please. return me my louis, if you please! i never play a louis that has rolled on the table. that would bring us bad fortune, you would see! thank you, thank you very much. (_to herself again._) i am sorry i did not ask him to hand me back two. we are going to lose! good heavens! it is sure we lose! ah, the cards! bad, that's sure! o, what emotion! o good heavens! seven! but the bank! no, we gain! o---o good heavens! good heavens! what emotion! we gain! what a misfortune i didn't leave the extra louis! it is disgusting! i regret it now. o, i regret it very much! but it is always like that with me! are we going to be paid? i don't think so! no, we won't be paid! it is always like that; when one loses one is taken, and when one wins one is never paid! o good heavens! now he will pay our side. after all there ought to be enough money. o yes, yes, we will be paid! all the better! two louis for me if you please, thank you. monsieur, i am sorry to trouble you to give me my four louis! no, no, you haven't given me enough! i put down two louis. o yes, you are right. pardon me, i didn't understand; yes, i have four. thank you very much. you are very kind. (_to herself again._) i am paid! after all, i am paid! so much the better! what emotion! i will play two louis again; no, three; no, two; no, one must have courage. monsieur, if you please, will you have the kindness to place my four louis on the table? thank you very much! (_to herself again._) but, if i lose! and i will lose. good heavens! o---what emotion! (_etc., etc._) ii mlle. nina. (_young, very beautiful, in an exquisite gown from laferiere, with gorgeous jewels and a wonderful hat._) who is the banker? mlle. fifi. (_equally charming, as magnificently jeweled, and as exquisitely gowned; also a chapeau of wonderful birds, such as never sang in any wood._) he? he is an old russian. he has millions and millions, my dear! mlle. nina. (_raising her eyebrows and regarding the banker affectionately._) really? mlle. fifi. yes, yes; and he is a perfect gentleman. he gave lala of the vaudeville three strings of pearls in two days. he is very generous and altogether nice. mlle. nina. (_jealously._) do you know him? mlle. fifi. o no, my dear; he is not my style. you know i never like a gentleman who parts his hair on the left side. it's my fad. mlle. nina. (_very pleasantly._) have you won to-night, dearie? mlle. fifi. ah, yes, my dear! _think!_ two thousand francs already! mlle. nina. (_very sweetly, moving away._) so much the better. i've lost like the devil. (_she very slowly makes a detour of the table in the direction of the russian banker. at the same time an elderly gentleman approaches mlle. fifi and speaks to her._) le monsieur. good evening, my dear! mlle. fifi. good evening, my pig of a prince! le monsieur. you have won? mlle. fifi. oh, but _no_, my dear! i have lost _enormously_! it is _terrible_ what i've done! i have lost nearly _all_ i have! mlle. nina. (_who has just arrived behind the banker, leaning over his shoulder and watching him win an enormous coup._) ah, ha! you see, monsieur, i bring you good fortune always! the banker. i didn't know you were behind me, mademoiselle. (_he looks up. she smiles sweetly and innocently. he is pleased._) mlle. nina. oh, yes, for a long time! the banker. you don't play? mlle. nina. (_with a manner altogether modest, and a soft, low voice._) oh, no; never! i have nothing to risk; besides, it doesn't amuse me very much. i never play. the banker. put on that hundred francs just to try your fortune. mlle. nina. (_leaning over, takes the note from the pile._) if you wish it. (_she plays and wins; brushes his cheek and shoulder with her arm as she reaches over to take up her money._) (_the play continues._) mlle. nina. (_still winning._) you know you are very nice. (_she plays again with a note from the banker's pile._) iii mrs. henry b. gording, _of rochester, new york._ do you play? mrs. wm. h. lane, _of brooklyn_. no, not really. i don't quite approve of it, but i just try my luck once in awhile for amusement. mrs. henry b. gording. yes, that's exactly the way i feel. so long as you don't go in for it seriously i don't see any harm. mrs. wm. h. lane. and if you stop as soon as you begin to lose. mrs. henry b. gording. yes, indeed! oh my! are you putting one down? mrs. wm. h. lane. yes, i think that man looks lucky over there with the glasses; besides i like him because his wife sits right by him all the evening. mrs. henry b. gording. (_smiling nervously and fumbling in her glove where she has concealed the money to have it conveniently ready._) put one down for me, too; will you? (_she smiles hysterically._) dear me, i wonder what my husband would say if he could see me? mrs. wm. h. lane. i don't know a single thing about the game; do you? mrs. henry b. gording. (_with two small red spots coming into her cheeks._) not the slightest. it's finished! i wonder who's won! mrs. wm. lane. (_after a long excited sigh._) i don't know. i never can tell till i see them either taking up our chips, or else paying us! mrs. henry b. gording. (_breathlessly._) if i lose, i shall go. mrs. wm. h. lane. so shall i! we've won! mrs. henry b. gording. ah! -----. mrs. wm. h. lane. (_looking at least ten years older than she did two minutes before._) no, we've lost! mrs. henry b. gording. o! -----. mrs. wm. h. lane. i'm not going. i shall try once more! mrs. henry b. gording. so shall i. mrs. wm. h. lane. and i don't believe the woman is that man's wife after all. if she had been we wouldn't have lost our dollars! iv mme. borté. (_leaning over a man's right shoulder for some gold on the table._) i beg pardon; that is my two louis! mme. lautre. (_leaning over the man's left shoulder._) but no, madame, it is mine! i put a louis down there! mme. borté. no, no! that is where i put mine. give me my louis! mme. lautre. but you are wrong, madame; it is my louis, and i shall keep it! mme. borté. but no, madame! mme. lautre. but yes----! three women beside mme. borté. yes, madame is right. she certainly put a louis down there. the same number of women beside mme. lautre. no, it is the other madame who put the money down there. a man on the opposite side of the table. ssss---un monsieur. oh, the women! the women!--always rowing! croupier. make your plays, gentlemen! mme. lautre and mme. borté. (_together; each to her own coterie._) you know perfectly it is my louis; isn't it? oh, never in my life! never! never! (_the game continues, and so does the discussion._) printed at the lakeside press, chicago, for the publishers, herbert s. stone & co. chicago, u.s.a. liber amoris, or, the new pygmalion by william hazlitt advertisement the circumstances, an outline of which is given in these pages, happened a very short time ago to a native of north britain, who left his own country early in life, in consequence of political animosities and an ill-advised connection in marriage. it was some years after that he formed the fatal attachment which is the subject of the following narrative. the whole was transcribed very carefully with his own hand, a little before he set out for the continent in hopes of benefiting by a change of scene, but he died soon after in the netherlands--it is supposed, of disappointment preying on a sickly frame and morbid state of mind. it was his wish that what had been his strongest feeling while living, should be preserved in this shape when he was no more.--it has been suggested to the friend, into whose hands the manuscript was entrusted, that many things (particularly in the conversations in the first part) either childish or redundant, might have been omitted; but a promise was given that not a word should be altered, and the pledge was held sacred. the names and circumstances are so far disguised, it is presumed, as to prevent any consequences resulting from the publication, farther than the amusement or sympathy of the reader. contents part i the picture the invitation the message the flageolet the confession the quarrel the reconciliation letters to the same to the same written in a blank leaf of endymion a proposal of love part ii letters to c. p.----, esq. letter ii letter iii letter iv letter v letter vi letter vii letter viii to edinburgh a thought another another letter ix letter x letter xi to s. l. letter xii. unaltered love perfect love from c. p., esq. letter xiii letter the last part iii addressed to j. s. k.---to the same (in continuation) to the same (in conclusion) part i the picture h. oh! is it you? i had something to shew you--i have got a picture here. do you know any one it's like? s. no, sir. h. don't you think it like yourself? s. no: it's much handsomer than i can pretend to be. h. that's because you don't see yourself with the same eyes that others do. i don't think it handsomer, and the expression is hardly so fine as yours sometimes is. s. now you flatter me. besides, the complexion is fair, and mine is dark. h. thine is pale and beautiful, my love, not dark! but if your colour were a little heightened, and you wore the same dress, and your hair were let down over your shoulders, as it is here, it might be taken for a picture of you. look here, only see how like it is. the forehead is like, with that little obstinate protrusion in the middle; the eyebrows are like, and the eyes are just like yours, when you look up and say--"no--never!" s. what then, do i always say--"no--never!" when i look up? h. i don't know about that--i never heard you say so but once; but that was once too often for my peace. it was when you told me, "you could never be mine." ah! if you are never to be mine, i shall not long be myself. i cannot go on as i am. my faculties leave me: i think of nothing, i have no feeling about any thing but thee: thy sweet image has taken possession of me, haunts me, and will drive me to distraction. yet i could almost wish to go mad for thy sake: for then i might fancy that i had thy love in return, which i cannot live without! s. do not, i beg, talk in that manner, but tell me what this is a picture of. h. i hardly know; but it is a very small and delicate copy (painted in oil on a gold ground) of some fine old italian picture, guido's or raphael's, but i think raphael's. some say it is a madonna; others call it a magdalen, and say you may distinguish the tear upon the cheek, though no tear is there. but it seems to me more like raphael's st. cecilia, "with looks commercing with the skies," than anything else.--see, sarah, how beautiful it is! ah! dear girl, these are the ideas i have cherished in my heart, and in my brain; and i never found any thing to realise them on earth till i met with thee, my love! while thou didst seem sensible of my kindness, i was but too happy: but now thou hast cruelly cast me off. s. you have no reason to say so: you are the same to me as ever. h. that is, nothing. you are to me everything, and i am nothing to you. is it not too true? s. no. h. then kiss me, my sweetest. oh! could you see your face now--your mouth full of suppressed sensibility, your downcast eyes, the soft blush upon that cheek, you would not say the picture is not like because it is too handsome, or because you want complexion. thou art heavenly-fair, my love--like her from whom the picture was taken--the idol of the painter's heart, as thou art of mine! shall i make a drawing of it, altering the dress a little, to shew you how like it is? s. as you please.-the invitation h. but i am afraid i tire you with this prosing description of the french character and abuse of the english? you know there is but one subject on which i should ever wish to talk, if you would let me. s. i must say, you don't seem to have a very high opinion of this country. h. yes, it is the place that gave you birth. s. do you like the french women better than the english? h. no: though they have finer eyes, talk better, and are better made. but they none of them look like you. i like the italian women i have seen, much better than the french: they have darker eyes, darker hair, and the accents of their native tongue are much richer and more melodious. but i will give you a better account of them when i come back from italy, if you would like to hear it. s. i should much. it is for that i have sometimes had a wish for travelling abroad, to understand something of the manners and characters of different people. h. my sweet girl! i will give you the best account i can--unless you would rather go and judge for yourself. s. i cannot. h. yes, you shall go with me, and you shall go with honour--you know what i mean. s. you know it is not in your power to take me so. h. but it soon may: and if you would consent to bear me company, i would swear never to think of an italian woman while i am abroad, nor of an english one after i return home. thou art to me more than thy whole sex. s. i require no such sacrifices. h. is that what you thought i meant by sacrifices last night? but sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold. s. i have no way of doing it. h. you have not the will.-s. i must go now. h. stay, and hear me a little. i shall soon be where i can no more hear thy voice, far distant from her i love, to see what change of climate and bright skies will do for a sad heart. i shall perhaps see thee no more, but i shall still think of thee the same as ever--i shall say to myself, "where is she now?--what is she doing?" but i shall hardly wish you to think of me, unless you could do so more favourably than i am afraid you will. ah! dearest creature, i shall be "far distant from you," as you once said of another, but you will not think of me as of him, "with the sincerest affection." the smallest share of thy tenderness would make me blest; but couldst thou ever love me as thou didst him, i should feel like a god! my face would change to a different expression: my whole form would undergo alteration. i was getting well, i was growing young in the sweet proofs of your friendship: you see how i droop and wither under your displeasure! thou art divine, my love, and canst make me either more or less than mortal. indeed i am thy creature, thy slave--i only wish to live for your sake--i would gladly die for you-s. that would give me no pleasure. but indeed you greatly overrate my power. h. your power over me is that of sovereign grace and beauty. when i am near thee, nothing can harm me. thou art an angel of light, shadowing me with thy softness. but when i let go thy hand, i stagger on a precipice: out of thy sight the world is dark to me and comfortless. there is no breathing out of this house: the air of italy will stifle me. go with me and lighten it. i can know no pleasure away from thee-"but i will come again, my love, an' it were ten thousand mile!" the message s. mrs. e---has called for the book, sir. h. oh! it is there. let her wait a minute or two. i see this is a busy-day with you. how beautiful your arms look in those short sleeves! s. i do not like to wear them. h. then that is because you are merciful, and would spare frail mortals who might die with gazing. s. i have no power to kill. h. you have, you have--your charms are irresistible as your will is inexorable. i wish i could see you always thus. but i would have no one else see you so. i am jealous of all eyes but my own. i should almost like you to wear a veil, and to be muffled up from head to foot; but even if you were, and not a glimpse of you could be seen, it would be to no purpose--you would only have to move, and you would be admired as the most graceful creature in the world. you smile--well, if you were to be won by fine speeches-s. you could supply them! h. it is however no laughing matter with me; thy beauty kills me daily, and i shall think of nothing but thy charms, till the last word trembles on my tongue, and that will be thy name, my love--the name of my infelice! you will live by that name, you rogue, fifty years after you are dead. don't you thank me for that? s. i have no such ambition, sir. but mrs. e---is waiting. h. she is not in love, like me. you look so handsome to-day, i cannot let you go. you have got a colour. s. but you say i look best when i am pale. h. when you are pale, i think so; but when you have a colour, i then think you still more beautiful. it is you that i admire; and whatever you are, i like best. i like you as miss l----, i should like you still more as mrs. ----. i once thought you were half inclined to be a prude, and i admired you as a "pensive nun, devout and pure." i now think you are more than half a coquet, and i like you for your roguery. the truth is, i am in love with you, my angel; and whatever you are, is to me the perfection of thy sex. i care not what thou art, while thou art still thyself. smile but so, and turn my heart to what shape you please! s. i am afraid, sir, mrs. e---will think you have forgotten her. h. i had, my charmer. but go, and make her a sweet apology, all graceful as thou art. one kiss! ah! ought i not to think myself the happiest of men? the flageolet h. where have you been, my love? s. i have been down to see my aunt, sir. h. and i hope she has been giving you good advice. s. i did not go to ask her opinion about any thing. h. and yet you seem anxious and agitated. you appear pale and dejected, as if your refusal of me had touched your own breast with pity. cruel girl! you look at this moment heavenly-soft, saint-like, or resemble some graceful marble statue, in the moon's pale ray! sadness only heightens the elegance of your features. how can i escape from you, when every new occasion, even your cruelty and scorn, brings out some new charm. nay, your rejection of me, by the way in which you do it, is only a new link added to my chain. raise those downcast eyes, bend as if an angel stooped, and kiss me. . . . ah! enchanting little trembler! if such is thy sweetness where thou dost not love, what must thy love have been? i cannot think how any man, having the heart of one, could go and leave it. s. no one did, that i know of. h. yes, you told me yourself he left you (though he liked you, and though he knew--oh! gracious god! that you loved him) he left you because "the pride of birth would not permit a union."--for myself, i would leave a throne to ascend to the heaven of thy charms. i live but for thee, here--i only wish to live again to pass all eternity with thee. but even in another world, i suppose you would turn from me to seek him out who scorned you here. s. if the proud scorn us here, in that place we shall all be equal. h. do not look so--do not talk so--unless you would drive me mad. i could worship you at this moment. can i witness such perfection, and bear to think i have lost you for ever? oh! let me hope! you see you can mould me as you like. you can lead me by the hand, like a little child; and with you my way would be like a little child's:--you could strew flowers in my path, and pour new life and hope into me. i should then indeed hail the return of spring with joy, could i indulge the faintest hope--would you but let me try to please you! s. nothing can alter my resolution, sir. h. will you go and leave me so? s. it is late, and my father will be getting impatient at my stopping so long. h. you know he has nothing to fear for you--it is poor i that am alone in danger. but i wanted to ask about buying you a flageolet. could i see that which you have? if it is a pretty one, it would hardly be worth while; but if it isn't, i thought of bespeaking an ivory one for you. can't you bring up your own to shew me? s. not to-night, sir. h. i wish you could. s. i cannot--but i will in the morning. h. whatever you determine, i must submit to. good night, and bless thee! [the next morning, s. brought up the tea-kettle as usual; and looking towards the tea-tray, she said, "oh! i see my sister has forgot the tea-pot." it was not there, sure enough; and tripping down stairs, she came up in a minute, with the tea-pot in one hand, and the flageolet in the other, balanced so sweetly and gracefully. it would have been awkward to have brought up the flageolet in the tea-tray and she could not have well gone down again on purpose to fetch it. something, therefore, was to be omitted as an excuse. exquisite witch! but do i love her the less dearly for it? i cannot.] the confession h. you say you cannot love. is there not a prior attachment in the case? was there any one else that you did like? s. yes, there was another. h. ah! i thought as much. is it long ago then? s. it is two years, sir. h. and has time made no alteration? or do you still see him sometimes? s. no, sir! but he is one to whom i feel the sincerest affection, and ever shall, though he is far distant. h. and did he return your regard? s. i had every reason to think so. h. what then broke off your intimacy? s. it was the pride of birth, sir, that would not permit him to think of a union. h. was he a young man of rank, then? s. his connections were high. h. and did he never attempt to persuade you to any other step? s. no--he had too great a regard for me. h. tell me, my angel, how was it? was he so very handsome? or was it the fineness of his manners? s. it was more his manner: but i can't tell how it was. it was chiefly my own fault. i was foolish to suppose he could ever think seriously of me. but he used to make me read with him--and i used to be with him a good deal, though not much neither--and i found my affections entangled before i was aware of it. h. and did your mother and family know of it? s. no--i have never told any one but you; nor i should not have mentioned it now, but i thought it might give you some satisfaction. h. why did he go at last? s. we thought it better to part. h. and do you correspond? s. no, sir. but perhaps i may see him again some time or other, though it will be only in the way of friendship. h. my god! what a heart is thine, to live for years upon that bare hope! s. i did not wish to live always, sir--i wished to die for a long time after, till i thought it not right; and since then i have endeavoured to be as resigned as i can. h. and do you think the impression will never wear out? s. not if i can judge from my feelings hitherto. it is now sometime since,--and i find no difference. h. may god for ever bless you! how can i thank you for your condescension in letting me know your sweet sentiments? you have changed my esteem into adoration.--never can i harbour a thought of ill in thee again. s. indeed, sir, i wish for your good opinion and your friendship. h. and can you return them? s. yes. h. and nothing more? s. no, sir. h. you are an angel, and i will spend my life, if you will let me, in paying you the homage that my heart feels towards you. the quarrel h. you are angry with me? s. have i not reason? h. i hope you have; for i would give the world to believe my suspicions unjust. but, oh! my god! after what i have thought of you and felt towards you, as little less than an angel, to have but a doubt cross my mind for an instant that you were what i dare not name--a common lodging-house decoy, a kissing convenience, that your lips were as common as the stairs-s. let me go, sir! h. nay--prove to me that you are not so, and i will fall down and worship you. you were the only creature that ever seemed to love me; and to have my hopes, and all my fondness for you, thus turned to a mockery--it is too much! tell me why you have deceived me, and singled me out as your victim? s. i never have, sir. i always said i could not love. h. there is a difference between love and making me a laughing-stock. yet what else could be the meaning of your little sister's running out to you, and saying "he thought i did not see him!" when i had followed you into the other room? is it a joke upon me that i make free with you? or is not the joke against her sister, unless you make my courtship of you a jest to the whole house? indeed i do not well see how you can come and stay with me as you do, by the hour together, and day after day, as openly as you do, unless you give it some such turn with your family. or do you deceive them as well as me? s. i deceive no one, sir. but my sister betsey was always watching and listening when mr. m---was courting my eldest sister, till he was obliged to complain of it. h. that i can understand, but not the other. you may remember, when your servant maria looked in and found you sitting in my lap one day, and i was afraid she might tell your mother, you said "you did not care, for you had no secrets from your mother." this seemed to me odd at the time, but i thought no more of it, till other things brought it to my mind. am i to suppose, then, that you are acting a part, a vile part, all this time, and that you come up here, and stay as long as i like, that you sit on my knee and put your arms round my neck, and feed me with kisses, and let me take other liberties with you, and that for a year together; and that you do all this not out of love, or liking, or regard, but go through your regular task, like some young witch, without one natural feeling, to shew your cleverness, and get a few presents out of me, and go down into the kitchen to make a fine laugh of it? there is something monstrous in it, that i cannot believe of you. s. sir, you have no right to harass my feelings in the manner you do. i have never made a jest of you to anyone, but always felt and expressed the greatest esteem for you. you have no ground for complaint in my conduct; and i cannot help what betsey or others do. i have always been consistent from the first. i told you my regard could amount to no more than friendship. h. nay, sarah, it was more than half a year before i knew that there was an insurmountable obstacle in the way. you say your regard is merely friendship, and that you are sorry i have ever felt anything more for you. yet the first time i ever asked you, you let me kiss you; the first time i ever saw you, as you went out of the room, you turned full round at the door, with that inimitable grace with which you do everything, and fixed your eyes full upon me, as much as to say, "is he caught?"--that very week you sat upon my knee, twined your arms round me, caressed me with every mark of tenderness consistent with modesty; and i have not got much farther since. now if you did all this with me, a perfect stranger to you, and without any particular liking to me, must i not conclude you do so as a matter of course with everyone?--or, if you do not do so with others, it was because you took a liking to me for some reason or other. s. it was gratitude, sir, for different obligations. h. if you mean by obligations the presents i made you, i had given you none the first day i came. you do not consider yourself obliged to everyone who asks you for a kiss? s. no, sir. h. i should not have thought anything of it in anyone but you. but you seemed so reserved and modest, so soft, so timid, you spoke so low, you looked so innocent--i thought it impossible you could deceive me. whatever favors you granted must proceed from pure regard. no betrothed virgin ever gave the object of her choice kisses, caresses more modest or more bewitching than those you have given me a thousand and a thousand times. could i have thought i should ever live to believe them an inhuman mockery of one who had the sincerest regard for you? do you think they will not now turn to rank poison in my veins, and kill me, soul and body? you say it is friendship--but if this is friendship, i'll forswear love. ah! sarah! it must be something more or less than friendship. if your caresses are sincere, they shew fondness--if they are not, i must be more than indifferent to you. indeed you once let some words drop, as if i were out of the question in such matters, and you could trifle with me with impunity. yet you complain at other times that no one ever took such liberties with you as i have done. i remember once in particular your saying, as you went out at the door in anger--"i had an attachment before, but that person never attempted anything of the kind." good god! how did i dwell on that word before, thinking it implied an attachment to me also; but you have since disclaimed any such meaning. you say you have never professed more than esteem. yet once, when you were sitting in your old place, on my knee, embracing and fondly embraced, and i asked you if you could not love, you made answer, "i could easily say so, whether i did or not--you should judge by my actions!" and another time, when you were in the same posture, and i reproached you with indifference, you replied in these words, "do i seem indifferent?" was i to blame after this to indulge my passion for the loveliest of her sex? or what can i think? s. i am no prude, sir. h. yet you might be taken for one. so your mother said, "it was hard if you might not indulge in a little levity." she has strange notions of levity. but levity, my dear, is quite out of character in you. your ordinary walk is as if you were performing some religious ceremony: you come up to my table of a morning, when you merely bring in the tea-things, as if you were advancing to the altar. you move in minuet-time: you measure every step, as if you were afraid of offending in the smallest things. i never hear your approach on the stairs, but by a sort of hushed silence. when you enter the room, the graces wait on you, and love waves round your person in gentle undulations, breathing balm into the soul! by heaven, you are an angel! you look like one at this instant! do i not adore you--and have i merited this return? s. i have repeatedly answered that question. you sit and fancy things out of your own head, and then lay them to my charge. there is not a word of truth in your suspicions. h. did i not overhear the conversation down-stairs last night, to which you were a party? shall i repeat it? s. i had rather not hear it! h. or what am i to think of this story of the footman? s. it is false, sir, i never did anything of the sort. h. nay, when i told your mother i wished she wouldn't * * * * * * * * * (as i heard she did) she said "oh, there's nothing in that, for sarah very often * * * * * *," and your doing so before company, is only a trifling addition to the sport. s. i'll call my mother, sir, and she shall contradict you. h. then she'll contradict herself. but did not you boast you were "very persevering in your resistance to gay young men," and had been "several times obliged to ring the bell?" did you always ring it? or did you get into these dilemmas that made it necessary, merely by the demureness of your looks and ways? or had nothing else passed? or have you two characters, one that you palm off upon me, and another, your natural one, that you resume when you get out of the room, like an actress who throws aside her artificial part behind the scenes? did you not, when i was courting you on the staircase the first night mr. c---came, beg me to desist, for if the new lodger heard us, he'd take you for a light character? was that all? were you only afraid of being taken for a light character? oh! sarah! s. i'll stay and hear this no longer. h. yes, one word more. did you not love another? s. yes, and ever shall most sincerely. h. then, that is my only hope. if you could feel this sentiment for him, you cannot be what you seem to me of late. but there is another thing i had to say--be what you will, i love you to distraction! you are the only woman that ever made me think she loved me, and that feeling was so new to me, and so delicious, that it "will never from my heart." thou wert to me a little tender flower, blooming in the wilderness of my life; and though thou should'st turn out a weed, i'll not fling thee from me, while i can help it. wert thou all that i dread to think--wert thou a wretched wanderer in the street, covered with rags, disease, and infamy, i'd clasp thee to my bosom, and live and die with thee, my love. kiss me, thou little sorceress! s. never. h. then go: but remember i cannot live without you--nor i will not. the reconciliation h. i have then lost your friendship? s. nothing tends more to alienate friendship than insult. h. the words i uttered hurt me more than they did you. s. it was not words merely, but actions as well. h. nothing i can say or do can ever alter my fondness for you--ah, sarah! i am unworthy of your love: i hardly dare ask for your pity; but oh! save me--save me from your scorn: i cannot bear it--it withers me like lightning. s. i bear no malice, sir; but my brother, who would scorn to tell a lie for his sister, can bear witness for me that there was no truth in what you were told. h. i believe it; or there is no truth in woman. it is enough for me to know that you do not return my regard; it would be too much for me to think that you did not deserve it. but cannot you forgive the agony of the moment? s. i can forgive; but it is not easy to forget some things! h. nay, my sweet sarah (frown if you will, i can bear your resentment for my ill behaviour, it is only your scorn and indifference that harrow up my soul)--but i was going to ask, if you had been engaged to be married to any one, and the day was fixed, and he had heard what i did, whether he could have felt any true regard for the character of his bride, his wife, if he had not been hurt and alarmed as i was? s. i believe, actual contracts of marriage have sometimes been broken off by unjust suspicions. h. or had it been your old friend, what do you think he would have said in my case? s. he would never have listened to anything of the sort. h. he had greater reasons for confidence than i have. but it is your repeated cruel rejection of me that drives me almost to madness. tell me, love, is there not, besides your attachment to him, a repugnance to me? s. no, none whatever. h. i fear there is an original dislike, which no efforts of mine can overcome. s. it is not you--it is my feelings with respect to another, which are unalterable. h. and yet you have no hope of ever being his? and yet you accuse me of being romantic in my sentiments. s. i have indeed long ceased to hope; but yet i sometimes hope against hope. h. my love! were it in my power, thy hopes should be fulfilled to-morrow. next to my own, there is nothing that could give me so much satisfaction as to see thine realized! do i not love thee, when i can feel such an interest in thy love for another? it was that which first wedded my very soul to you. i would give worlds for a share in a heart so rich in pure affection! s. and yet i did not tell you of the circumstance to raise myself in your opinion. h. you are a sublime little thing! and yet, as you have no prospects there, i cannot help thinking, the best thing would be to do as i have said. s. i would never marry a man i did not love beyond all the world. h. i should be satisfied with less than that--with the love, or regard, or whatever you call it, you have shown me before marriage, if that has only been sincere. you would hardly like me less afterwards. s. endearments would, i should think, increase regard, where there was love beforehand; but that is not exactly my case. h. but i think you would be happier than you are at present. you take pleasure in my conversation, and you say you have an esteem for me; and it is upon this, after the honeymoon, that marriage chiefly turns. s. do you think there is no pleasure in a single life? h. do you mean on account of its liberty? s. no, but i feel that forced duty is no duty. i have high ideas of the married state! h. higher than of the maiden state? s. i understand you, sir. h. i meant nothing; but you have sometimes spoken of any serious attachment as a tie upon you. it is not that you prefer flirting with "gay young men" to becoming a mere dull domestic wife? s. you have no right to throw out such insinuations: for though i am but a tradesman's daughter, i have as nice a sense of honour as anyone can have. h. talk of a tradesman's daughter! you would ennoble any family, thou glorious girl, by true nobility of mind. s. oh! sir, you flatter me. i know my own inferiority to most. h. to none; there is no one above thee, man nor woman either. you are above your situation, which is not fit for you. s. i am contented with my lot, and do my duty as cheerfully as i can. h. have you not told me your spirits grow worse every year? s. not on that account: but some disappointments are hard to bear up against. h. if you talk about that, you'll unman me. but tell me, my love,--i have thought of it as something that might account for some circumstances; that is, as a mere possibility. but tell me, there was not a likeness between me and your old lover that struck you at first sight? was there? s. no, sir, none. h. well, i didn't think it likely there should. s. but there was a likeness. h. to whom? s. to that little image! (looking intently on a small bronze figure of buonaparte on the mantelpiece). h. what, do you mean to buonaparte? s. yes, all but the nose was just like. h. and was his figure the same? s. he was taller! [i got up and gave her the image, and told her it was hers by every right that was sacred. she refused at first to take so valuable a curiosity, and said she would keep it for me. but i pressed it eagerly, and she look it. she immediately came and sat down, and put her arm round my neck, and kissed me, and i said, "is it not plain we are the best friends in the world, since we are always so glad to make it up?" and then i added "how odd it was that the god of my idolatry should turn out to be like her idol, and said it was no wonder that the same face which awed the world should conquer the sweetest creature in it!" how i loved her at that moment! is it possible that the wretch who writes this could ever have been so blest! heavenly delicious creature! can i live without her? oh! no--never--never. "what is this world? what asken men to have, now with his love, now in the cold grave, alone, withouten any compagnie!" let me but see her again! she cannot hate the man who loves her as i do.] letters to the same feb., 1822. --you will scold me for this, and ask me if this is keeping my promise to mind my work. one half of it was to think of sarah: and besides, i do not neglect my work either, i assure you. i regularly do ten pages a day, which mounts up to thirty guineas' worth a week, so that you see i should grow rich at this rate, if i could keep on so; and i could keep on so, if i had you with me to encourage me with your sweet smiles, and share my lot. the berwick smacks sail twice a week, and the wind sits fair. when i think of the thousand endearing caresses that have passed between us, i do not wonder at the strong attachment that draws me to you; but i am sorry for my own want of power to please. i hear the wind sigh through the lattice, and keep repeating over and over to myself two lines of lord byron's tragedy-"so shalt thou find me ever at thy side here and hereafter, if the last may be."-applying them to thee, my love, and thinking whether i shall ever see thee again. perhaps not--for some years at least--till both thou and i are old--and then, when all else have forsaken thee, i will creep to thee, and die in thine arms. you once made me believe i was not hated by her i loved; and for that sensation, so delicious was it, though but a mockery and a dream, i owe you more than i can ever pay. i thought to have dried up my tears for ever, the day i left you; but as i write this, they stream again. if they did not, i think my heart would burst. i walk out here of an afternoon, and hear the notes of the thrush, that come up from a sheltered valley below, welcome in the spring; but they do not melt my heart as they used: it is grown cold and dead. as you say, it will one day be colder.--forgive what i have written above; i did not intend it: but you were once my little all, and i cannot bear the thought of having lost you for ever, i fear through my own fault. has any one called? do not send any letters that come. i should like you and your mother (if agreeable) to go and see mr. kean in othello, and miss stephens in love in a village. if you will, i will write to mr. t----, to send you tickets. has mr. p---called? i think i must send to him for the picture to kiss and talk to. kiss me, my best beloved. ah! if you can never be mine, still let me be your proud and happy slave. h. to the same march, 1822. --you will be glad to learn i have done my work--a volume in less than a month. this is one reason why i am better than when i came, and another is, i have had two letters from sarah. i am pleased i have got through this job, as i was afraid i might lose reputation by it (which i can little afford to lose)--and besides, i am more anxious to do well now, as i wish you to hear me well spoken of. i walk out of an afternoon, and hear the birds sing as i told you, and think, if i had you hanging on my arm, and that for life, how happy i should be--happier than i ever hoped to be, or had any conception of till i knew you. "but that can never be"--i hear you answer in a soft, low murmur. well, let me dream of it sometimes--i am not happy too often, except when that favourite note, the harbinger of spring, recalling the hopes of my youth, whispers thy name and peace together in my ear. i was reading something about mr. macready to-day, and this put me in mind of that delicious night, when i went with your mother and you to see romeo and juliet. can i forget it for a moment--your sweet modest looks, your infinite propriety of behaviour, all your sweet winning ways--your hesitating about taking my arm as we came out till your mother did--your laughing about nearly losing your cloak--your stepping into the coach without my being able to make the slightest discovery--and oh! my sitting down beside you there, you whom i had loved so long, so well, and your assuring me i had not lessened your pleasure at the play by being with you, and giving me your dear hand to press in mine! i thought i was in heaven--that slender exquisitely-turned form contained my all of heaven upon earth; and as i folded you--yes, you, my own best sarah, to my bosom, there was, as you say, a tie between us--you did seem to me, for those few short moments, to be mine in all truth and honour and sacredness--oh! that we could be always so--do not mock me, for i am a very child in love. i ought to beg pardon for behaving so ill afterwards, but i hope the little image made it up between us, &c. [to this letter i have received no answer, not a line. the rolling years of eternity will never fill up that blank. where shall i be? what am i? or where have i been?] written in a blank leaf of endymion i want a hand to guide me, an eye to cheer me, a bosom to repose on; all which i shall never have, but shall stagger into my grave, old before my time, unloved and unlovely, unless s. l. keeps her faith with me. * * * * * * * * * * * --but by her dove's eyes and serpent-shape, i think she does not hate me; by her smooth forehead and her crested hair, i own i love her; by her soft looks and queen-like grace (which men might fall down and worship) i swear to live and die for her! a proposal of love (given to her in our early acquaintance) "oh! if i thought it could be in a woman (as, if it can, i will presume in you) to feed for aye her lamp and flames of love, to keep her constancy in plight and youth, outliving beauties outward with a mind that doth renew swifter than blood decays: or that persuasion could but thus convince me, that my integrity and truth to you might be confronted with the match and weight of such a winnowed purity in love- how were i then uplifted! but, alas, i am as true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth." troilus and cressida. part ii letters to c. p----, esq. bees-inn. my good friend, here i am in scotland (and shall have been here three weeks, next monday) as i may say, on my probation. this is a lone inn, but on a great scale, thirty miles from edinburgh. it is situated on a rising ground (a mark for all the winds, which blow here incessantly)--there is a woody hill opposite, with a winding valley below, and the london road stretches out on either side. you may guess which way i oftenest walk. i have written two letters to s. l. and got one cold, prudish answer, beginning sir, and ending from yours truly, with best respects from herself and relations. i was going to give in, but have returned an answer, which i think is a touch-stone. i send it you on the other side to keep as a curiosity, in case she kills me by her exquisite rejoinder. i am convinced from the profound contemplations i have had on the subject here and coming along, that i am on a wrong scent. we had a famous parting-scene, a complete quarrel and then a reconciliation, in which she did beguile me of my tears, but the deuce a one did she shed. what do you think? she cajoled me out of my little buonaparte as cleverly as possible, in manner and form following. she was shy the saturday and sunday (the day of my departure) so i got in dudgeon, and began to rip up grievances. i asked her how she came to admit me to such extreme familiarities, the first week i entered the house. "if she had no particular regard for me, she must do so (or more) with everyone: if she had a liking to me from the first, why refuse me with scorn and wilfulness?" if you had seen how she flounced, and looked, and went to the door, saying "she was obliged to me for letting her know the opinion i had always entertained of her"--then i said, "sarah!" and she came back and took my hand, and fixed her eyes on the mantelpiece--(she must have been invoking her idol then--if i thought so, i could devour her, the darling--but i doubt her)--so i said "there is one thing that has occurred to me sometimes as possible, to account for your conduct to me at first--there wasn't a likeness, was there, to your old friend?" she answered "no, none--but there was a likeness!" i asked, to what? she said "to that little image!" i said, "do you mean buonaparte?"--she said "yes, all but the nose."--"and the figure?"--"he was taller."--i could not stand this. so i got up and took it, and gave it her, and after some reluctance, she consented to "keep it for me." what will you bet me that it wasn't all a trick? i'll tell you why i suspect it, besides being fairly out of my wits about her. i had told her mother half an hour before, that i should take this image and leave it at mrs. b.'s, for that i didn't wish to leave anything behind me that must bring me back again. then up she comes and starts a likeness to her lover: she knew i should give it her on the spot--"no, she would keep it for me!" so i must come back for it. whether art or nature, it is sublime. i told her i should write and tell you so, and that i parted from her, confiding, adoring!--she is beyond me, that's certain. do go and see her, and desire her not to give my present address to a single soul, and learn if the lodging is let, and to whom. my letter to her is as follows. if she shews the least remorse at it, i'll be hanged, though it might move a stone, i modestly think. (see before, part i. first letter.) n.b.--i have begun a book of our conversations (i mean mine and the statue's) which i call liber amoris. i was detained at stamford and found myself dull, and could hit upon no other way of employing my time so agreeably. letter ii dear p----, here, without loss of time, in order that i may have your opinion upon it, is little yes and no's answer to my last. "sir, i should not have disregarded your injunction not to send you any more letters that might come to you, had i not promised the gentleman who left the enclosed to forward it the earliest opportunity, as he said it was of consequence. mr. p---called the day after you left town. my mother and myself are much obliged by your kind offer of tickets to the play, but must decline accepting it. my family send their best respects, in which they are joined by yours, truly, s. l. the deuce a bit more is there of it. if you can make anything out of it (or any body else) i'll be hanged. you are to understand, this comes in a frank, the second i have received from her, with a name i can't make out, and she won't tell me, though i asked her, where she got franks, as also whether the lodgings were let, to neither of which a word of answer. * * * * is the name on the frank: see if you can decypher it by a red-book. i suspect her grievously of being an arrant jilt, to say no more--yet i love her dearly. do you know i'm going to write to that sweet rogue presently, having a whole evening to myself in advance of my work? now mark, before you set about your exposition of the new apocalypse of the new calypso, the only thing to be endured in the above letter is the date. it was written the very day after she received mine. by this she seems willing to lose no time in receiving these letters "of such sweet breath composed." if i thought so--but i wait for your reply. after all, what is there in her but a pretty figure, and that you can't get a word out of her? hers is the fabian method of making love and conquests. what do you suppose she said the night before i left her? "h. could you not come and live with me as a friend? "s. i don't know: and yet it would be of no use if i did, you would always be hankering after what could never be!" i asked her if she would do so at once--the very next day? and what do you guess was her answer--"do you think it would be prudent?" as i didn't proceed to extremities on the spot, she began to look grave, and declare off. "would she live with me in her own house--to be with me all day as dear friends, if nothing more, to sit and read and talk with me?"--"she would make no promises, but i should find her the same."--"would she go to the play with me sometimes, and let it be understood that i was paying my addresses to her?"--"she could not, as a habit--her father was rather strict, and would object."--now what am i to think of all this? am i mad or a fool? answer me to that, master brook! you are a philosopher. letter iii dear friend, i ought to have written to you before; but since i received your letter, i have been in a sort of purgatory, and what is worse, i see no prospect of getting out of it. i would put an end to my torments at once; but i am as great a coward as i have been a dupe. do you know i have not had a word of answer from her since! what can be the reason? is she offended at my letting you know she wrote to me, or is it some new affair? i wrote to her in the tenderest, most respectful manner, poured my soul at her feet, and this is the return she makes me! can you account for it, except on the admission of my worst doubts concerning her? oh god! can i bear after all to think of her so, or that i am scorned and made a sport of by the creature to whom i had given my whole heart? thus has it been with me all my life; and so will it be to the end of it!--if you should learn anything, good or bad, tell me, i conjure you: i can bear anything but this cruel suspense. if i knew she was a mere abandoned creature, i should try to forget her; but till i do know this, nothing can tear me from her, i have drank in poison from her lips too long--alas! mine do not poison again. i sit and indulge my grief by the hour together; my weakness grows upon me; and i have no hope left, unless i could lose my senses quite. do you know i think i should like this? to forget, ah! to forget--there would be something in that--to change to an idiot for some few years, and then to wake up a poor wretched old man, to recollect my misery as past, and die! yet, oh! with her, only a little while ago, i had different hopes, forfeited for nothing that i know of! * * * * * * if you can give me any consolation on the subject of my tormentor, pray do. the pain i suffer wears me out daily. i write this on the supposition that mrs. ---may still come here, and that i may be detained some weeks longer. direct to me at the post-office; and if i return to town directly as i fear, i will leave word for them to forward the letter to me in london--not at my old lodgings. i will not go back there: yet how can i breathe away from her? her hatred of me must be great, since my love of her could not overcome it! i have finished the book of my conversations with her, which i told you of: if i am not mistaken, you will think it very nice reading. yours ever. have you read sardanapalus? how like the little greek slave, myrrha, is to her! letter iv (written in the winter) my good friend, i received your letter this morning, and i kiss the rod not only with submission, but gratitude. your reproofs of me and your defences of her are the only things that save my soul from perdition. she is my heart's idol; and believe me those words of yours applied to the dear saint--"to lip a chaste one and suppose her wanton"--were balm and rapture to me. i have lipped her, god knows how often, and oh! is it even possible that she is chaste, and that she has bestowed her loved "endearments" on me (her own sweet word) out of true regard? that thought, out of the lowest depths of despair, would at any time make me strike my forehead against the stars. could i but think the love "honest," i am proof against all hazards. she by her silence makes my dark hour; and you by your encouragements dissipate it for twenty-four hours. another thing has brought me to life. mrs. ---is actually on her way here about the divorce. should this unpleasant business (which has been so long talked of) succeed, and i should become free, do you think s. l. will agree to change her name to ----? if she will, she shall; and to call her so to you, or to hear her called so by others, would be music to my ears, such as they never drank in. do you think if she knew how i love her, my depressions and my altitudes, my wanderings and my constancy, it would not move her? she knows it all; and if she is not an incorrigible, she loves me, or regards me with a feeling next to love. i don't believe that any woman was ever courted more passionately than she has been by me. as rousseau said of madame d'houptot (forgive the allusion) my heart has found a tongue in speaking to her, and i have talked to her the divine language of love. yet she says, she is insensible to it. am i to believe her or you? you--for i wish it and wish it to madness, now that i am like to be free, and to have it in my power to say to her without a possibility of suspicion, "sarah, will you be mine?" when i sometimes think of the time i first saw the sweet apparition, august 16, 1820, and that possibly she may be my bride before that day two years, it makes me dizzy with incredible joy and love of her. write soon. letter v my dear friend, i read your answer this morning with gratitude. i have felt somewhat easier since. it shewed your interest in my vexations, and also that you know nothing worse than i do. i cannot describe the weakness of mind to which she has reduced me. this state of suspense is like hanging in the air by a single thread that exhausts all your strength to keep hold of it; and yet if that fails you, you have nothing in the world else left to trust to. i am come back to edinburgh about this cursed business, and mrs. ---is coming from montrose next week. how it will end, i can't say; and don't care, except as it regards the other affair. i should, i confess, like to have it in my power to make her the offer direct and unequivocal, to see how she'd receive it. it would be worth something at any rate to see her superfine airs upon the occasion; and if she should take it into her head to turn round her sweet neck, drop her eye-lids, and say--"yes, i will be yours!"--why then, "treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing could touch me further." by heaven! i doat on her. the truth is, i never had any pleasure, like love, with any one but her. then how can i bear to part with her? do you know i like to think of her best in her morning-gown and mob-cap--it is so she has oftenest come into my room and enchanted me! she was once ill, pale, and had lost all her freshness. i only adored her the more for it, and fell in love with the decay of her beauty. i could devour the little witch. if she had a plague-spot on her, i could touch the infection: if she was in a burning fever, i could kiss her, and drink death as i have drank life from her lips. when i press her hand, i enjoy perfect happiness and contentment of soul. it is not what she says or what she does--it is herself that i love. to be with her is to be at peace. i have no other wish or desire. the air about her is serene, blissful; and he who breathes it is like one of the gods! so that i can but have her with me always, i care for nothing more. i never could tire of her sweetness; i feel that i could grow to her, body and soul? my heart, my heart is hers. letter vi (written in may) dear p----, what have i suffered since i parted with you! a raging fire is in my heart and in my brain, that never quits me. the steam-boat (which i foolishly ventured on board) seems a prison-house, a sort of spectre-ship, moving on through an infernal lake, without wind or tide, by some necromantic power--the splashing of the waves, the noise of the engine gives me no rest, night or day--no tree, no natural object varies the scene--but the abyss is before me, and all my peace lies weltering in it! i feel the eternity of punishment in this life; for i see no end of my woes. the people about me are ill, uncomfortable, wretched enough, many of them--but to-morrow or next day, they reach the place of their destination, and all will be new and delightful. to me it will be the same. i can neither escape from her, nor from myself. all is endurable where there is a limit: but i have nothing but the blackness and the fiendishness of scorn around me--mocked by her (the false one) in whom i placed my hope, and who hardens herself against me!--i believe you thought me quite gay, vain, insolent, half mad, the night i left the house--no tongue can tell the heaviness of heart i felt at that moment. no footsteps ever fell more slow, more sad than mine; for every step bore me farther from her, with whom my soul and every thought lingered. i had parted with her in anger, and each had spoken words of high disdain, not soon to be forgiven. should i ever behold her again? where go to live and die far from her? in her sight there was elysium; her smile was heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her, breathing balm into my heart: for a little while i had sat with the gods at their golden tables, i had tasted of all earth's bliss, "both living and loving!" but now paradise barred its doors against me; i was driven from her presence, where rosy blushes and delicious sighs and all soft wishes dwelt, the outcast of nature and the scoff of love! i thought of the time when i was a little happy careless child, of my father's house, of my early lessons, of my brother's picture of me when a boy, of all that had since happened to me, and of the waste of years to come--i stopped, faultered, and was going to turn back once more to make a longer truce with wretchedness and patch up a hollow league with love, when the recollection of her words--"i always told you i had no affection for you"--steeled my resolution, and i determined to proceed. you see by this she always hated me, and only played with my credulity till she could find some one to supply the place of her unalterable attachment to the little image. * * * * * i am a little, a very little better to-day. would it were quietly over; and that this misshapen form (made to be mocked) were hid out of the sight of cold, sullen eyes! the people about me even take notice of my dumb despair, and pity me. what is to be done? i cannot forget her; and i can find no other like what she seemed. i should wish you to call, if you can make an excuse, and see whether or no she is quite marble--whether i may go back again at my return, and whether she will see me and talk to me sometimes as an old friend. suppose you were to call on m---from me, and ask him what his impression is that i ought to do. but do as you think best. pardon, pardon. p.s.--i send this from scarborough, where the vessel stops for a few minutes. i scarcely know what i should have done, but for this relief to my feelings. letter vii my dear friend, the important step is taken, and i am virtually a free man. * * * what had i better do in these circumstances? i dare not write to her, i dare not write to her father, or else i would. she has shot me through with poisoned arrows, and i think another "winged wound" would finish me. it is a pleasant sort of balm (as you express it) she has left in my heart! one thing i agree with you in, it will remain there for ever; but yet not very long. it festers, and consumes me. if it were not for my little boy, whose face i see struck blank at the news, looking through the world for pity and meeting with contempt instead, i should soon, i fear, settle the question by my death. that recollection is the only thought that brings my wandering reason to an anchor; that stirs the smallest interest in me; or gives me fortitude to bear up against what i am doomed to feel for the ungrateful. otherwise, i am dead to every thing but the sense of what i have lost. she was my life--it is gone from me, and i am grown spectral! if i find myself in a place i am acquainted with, it reminds me of her, of the way in which i thought of her, --"and carved on every tree the soft, the fair, the inexpressive she!" if it is a place that is new to me, it is desolate, barren of all interest; for nothing touches me but what has a reference to her. if the clock strikes, the sound jars me; a million of hours will not bring back peace to my breast. the light startles me; the darkness terrifies me. i seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. she has deceived me, and the earth fails from under my feet; no object in nature is substantial, real, but false and hollow, like her faith on which i built my trust. she came (i knew not how) and sat by my side and was folded in my arms, a vision of love and joy, as if she had dropped from the heavens to bless me by some especial dispensation of a favouring providence, and make me amends for all; and now without any fault of mine but too much fondness, she has vanished from me, and i am left to perish. my heart is torn out of me, with every feeling for which i wished to live. the whole is like a dream, an effect of enchantment; it torments me, and it drives me mad. i lie down with it; i rise up with it; and see no chance of repose. i grasp at a shadow, i try to undo the past, and weep with rage and pity over my own weakness and misery. i spared her again and again (fool that i was) thinking what she allowed from me was love, friendship, sweetness, not wantonness. how could i doubt it, looking in her face, and hearing her words, like sighs breathed from the gentlest of all bosoms? i had hopes, i had prospects to come, the flattery of something like fame, a pleasure in writing, health even would have come back with her smile--she has blighted all, turned all to poison and childish tears. yet the barbed arrow is in my heart--i can neither endure it, nor draw it out; for with it flows my life's-blood. i had conversed too long with abstracted truth to trust myself with the immortal thoughts of love. that s. l. might have been mine, and now never can--these are the two sole propositions that for ever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. i am in some sense proud that i can feel this dreadful passion--it gives me a kind of rank in the kingdom of love--but i could have wished it had been for an object that at least could have understood its value and pitied its excess. you say her not coming to the door when you went is a proof--yes, that her complement is at present full! that is the reason she doesn't want me there, lest i should discover the new affair--wretch that i am! another has possession of her, oh hell! i'm satisfied of it from her manner, which had a wanton insolence in it. well might i run wild when i received no letters from her. i foresaw, i felt my fate. the gates of paradise were once open to me too, and i blushed to enter but with the golden keys of love! i would die; but her lover--my love of her--ought not to die. when i am dead, who will love her as i have done? if she should be in misfortune, who will comfort her? when she is old, who will look in her face, and bless her? would there be any harm in calling upon m----, to know confidentially if he thinks it worth my while to make her an offer the instant it is in my power? let me have an answer, and save me, if possible, for her and from myself. letter viii my dear friend, your letter raised me for a moment from the depths of despair; but not hearing from you yesterday or to-day (as i hoped) i have had a relapse. you say i want to get rid of her. i hope you are more right in your conjectures about her than in this about me. oh no! believe it, i love her as i do my own soul; my very heart is wedded to her (be she what she may) and i would not hesitate a moment between her and "an angel from heaven." i grant all you say about my self-tormenting folly: but has it been without cause? has she not refused me again and again with a mixture of scorn and resentment, after going the utmost lengths with a man for whom she now disclaims all affection; and what security can i have for her reserve with others, who will not be restrained by feelings of delicacy towards her, and whom she has probably preferred to me for their want of it. "she can make no more confidences"--these words ring for ever in my ears, and will be my death-watch. they can have but one meaning, be sure of it--she always expressed herself with the exactest propriety. that was one of the things for which i loved her--shall i live to hate her for it? my poor fond heart, that brooded over her and the remains of her affections as my only hope of comfort upon earth, cannot brook this new degradation. who is there so low as me? who is there besides (i ask) after the homage i have paid her and the caresses she has lavished on me, so vile, so abhorrent to love, to whom such an indignity could have happened? when i think of this (and i think of nothing else) it stifles me. i am pent up in burning, fruitless desires, which can find no vent or object. am i not hated, repulsed, derided by her whom alone i love or ever did love? i cannot stay in any place, and seek in vain for relief from the sense of her contempt and her ingratitude. i can settle to nothing: what is the use of all i have done? is it not that very circumstance (my thinking beyond my strength, my feeling more than i need about so many things) that has withered me up, and made me a thing for love to shrink from and wonder at? who could ever feel that peace from the touch of her dear hand that i have done; and is it not torn from me for ever? my state is this, that i shall never lie down again at night nor rise up in the morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy's face with pleasure while i live--unless i am restored to her favour. instead of that delicious feeling i had when she was heavenly-kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its own tenderness and her sweetness, i am now inclosed in a dungeon of despair. the sky is marble to my thoughts; nature is dead around me, as hope is within me; no object can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, nor the prospect of it in time to come. i wander by the sea-side; and the eternal ocean and lasting despair and her face are before me. slighted by her, on whom my heart by its last fibre hung, where shall i turn? i wake with her by my side, not as my sweet bedfellow, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart in her bosom, cold, insensible, or struggling from me; and the worm gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. i have lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety; and my favourite beverage, which used to refresh me when i got up, has no moisture in it. oh! cold, solitary, sepulchral breakfasts, compared with those which i promised myself with her; or which i made when she had been standing an hour by my side, my guardian-angel, my wife, my sister, my sweet friend, my eve, my all; and had blest me with her seraph kisses! ah! what i suffer at present only shews what i have enjoyed. but "the girl is a good girl, if there is goodness in human nature." i thank you for those words; and i will fall down and worship you, if you can prove them true: and i would not do much less for him that proves her a demon. she is one or the other, that's certain; but i fear the worst. do let me know if anything has passed: suspense is my greatest punishment. i am going into the country to see if i can work a little in the three weeks i have yet to stay here. write on the receipt of this, and believe me ever your unspeakably obliged friend. to edinburgh --"stony-hearted" edinburgh! what art thou to me? the dust of thy streets mingles with my tears and blinds me. city of palaces, or of tombs--a quarry, rather than the habitation of men! art thou like london, that populous hive, with its sunburnt, well-baked, brick-built houses--its public edifices, its theatres, its bridges, its squares, its ladies, and its pomp, its throng of wealth, its outstretched magnitude, and its mighty heart that never lies still? thy cold grey walls reflect back the leaden melancholy of the soul. the square, hard-edged, unyielding faces of thy inhabitants have no sympathy to impart. what is it to me that i look along the level line of thy tenantless streets, and meet perhaps a lawyer like a grasshopper chirping and skipping, or the daughter of a highland laird, haughty, fair, and freckled? or why should i look down your boasted prince's street, with the beetle-browed castle on one side, and the calton hill with its proud monument at the further end, and the ridgy steep of salisbury crag, cut off abruptly by nature's boldest hand, and arthur's seat overlooking all, like a lioness watching her cubs? or shall i turn to the far-off pentland hills, with craig-crook nestling beneath them, where lives the prince of critics and the king of men? or cast my eye unsated over the frith of forth, that from my window of an evening (as i read of amy and her love) glitters like a broad golden mirror in the sun, and kisses the winding shores of kingly fife? oh no! but to thee, to thee i turn, north berwick-law, with thy blue cone rising out of summer seas; for thou art the beacon of my banished thoughts, and dost point my way to her, who is my heart's true home. the air is too thin for me, that has not the breath of love in it; that is not embalmed by her sighs! a thought i am not mad, but my heart is so; and raves within me, fierce and untameable, like a panther in its den, and tries to get loose to its lost mate, and fawn on her hand, and bend lowly at her feet. another oh! thou dumb heart, lonely, sad, shut up in the prison-house of this rude form, that hast never found a fellow but for an instant, and in very mockery of thy misery, speak, find bleeding words to express thy thoughts, break thy dungeon-gloom, or die pronouncing thy infelice's name! another within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears. letter ix my dear p----, you have been very kind to me in this business; but i fear even your indulgence for my infirmities is beginning to fail. to what a state am i reduced, and for what? for fancying a little artful vixen to be an angel and a saint, because she affected to look like one, to hide her rank thoughts and deadly purposes. has she not murdered me under the mask of the tenderest friendship? and why? because i have loved her with unutterable love, and sought to make her my wife. you say it is my own "outrageous conduct" that has estranged her: nay, i have been too gentle with her. i ask you first in candour whether the ambiguity of her behaviour with respect to me, sitting and fondling a man (circumstanced as i was) sometimes for half a day together, and then declaring she had no love for him beyond common regard, and professing never to marry, was not enough to excite my suspicions, which the different exposures from the conversations below-stairs were not calculated to allay? i ask you what you yourself would have felt or done, if loving her as i did, you had heard what i did, time after time? did not her mother own to one of the grossest charges (which i shall not repeat)--and is such indelicacy to be reconciled with her pretended character (that character with which i fell in love, and to which i made love) without supposing her to be the greatest hypocrite in the world? my unpardonable offence has been that i took her at her word, and was willing to believe her the precise little puritanical person she set up for. after exciting her wayward desires by the fondest embraces and the purest kisses, as if she had been "made my wedded wife yestreen," or was to become so to-morrow (for that was always my feeling with respect to her)--i did not proceed to gratify them, or to follow up my advantage by any action which should declare, "i think you a common adventurer, and will see whether you are so or not!" yet any one but a credulous fool like me would have made the experiment, with whatever violence to himself, as a matter of life and death; for i had every reason to distrust appearances. her conduct has been of a piece from the beginning. in the midst of her closest and falsest endearments, she has always (with one or two exceptions) disclaimed the natural inference to be drawn from them, and made a verbal reservation, by which she might lead me on in a fool's paradise, and make me the tool of her levity, her avarice, and her love of intrigue as long as she liked, and dismiss me whenever it suited her. this, you see, she has done, because my intentions grew serious, and if complied with, would deprive her of the pleasures of a single life! offer marriage to this "tradesman's daughter, who has as nice a sense of honour as any one can have;" and like lady bellaston in tom jones, she cuts you immediately in a fit of abhorrence and alarm. yet she seemed to be of a different mind formerly, when struggling from me in the height of our first intimacy, she exclaimed--"however i might agree to my own ruin, i never will consent to bring disgrace upon my family!" that i should have spared the traitress after expressions like this, astonishes me when i look back upon it. yet if it were all to do over again, i know i should act just the same part. such is her power over me! i cannot run the least risk of offending her--i love her so. when i look in her face, i cannot doubt her truth! wretched being that i am! i have thrown away my heart and soul upon an unfeeling girl; and my life (that might have been so happy, had she been what i thought her) will soon follow either voluntarily, or by the force of grief, remorse, and disappointment. i cannot get rid of the reflection for an instant, nor even seek relief from its galling pressure. ah! what a heart she has lost! all the love and affection of my whole life were centred in her, who alone, i thought, of all women had found out my true character, and knew how to value my tenderness. alas! alas! that this, the only hope, joy, or comfort i ever had, should turn to a mockery, and hang like an ugly film over the remainder of my days!--i was at roslin castle yesterday. it lies low in a rude, but sheltered valley, hid from the vulgar gaze, and powerfully reminds one of the old song. the straggling fragments of the russet ruins, suspended smiling and graceful in the air as if they would linger out another century to please the curious beholder, the green larch-trees trembling between with the blue sky and white silver clouds, the wild mountain plants starting out here and there, the date of the year on an old low door-way, but still more, the beds of flowers in orderly decay, that seem to have no hand to tend them, but keep up a sort of traditional remembrance of civilization in former ages, present altogether a delightful and amiable subject for contemplation. the exquisite beauty of the scene, with the thought of what i should feel, should i ever be restored to her, and have to lead her through such places as my adored, my angelwife, almost drove me beside myself. for this picture, this ecstatic vision, what have i of late instead as the image of the reality? demoniacal possessions. i see the young witch seated in another's lap, twining her serpent arms round him, her eye glancing and her cheeks on fire--why does not the hideous thought choke me? or why do i not go and find out the truth at once? the moonlight streams over the silver waters: the bark is in the bay that might waft me to her, almost with a wish. the mountain-breeze sighs out her name: old ocean with a world of tears murmurs back my woes! does not my heart yearn to be with her; and shall i not follow its bidding? no, i must wait till i am free; and then i will take my freedom (a glad prize) and lay it at her feet and tell her my proud love of her that would not brook a rival in her dishonour, and that would have her all or none, and gain her or lose myself for ever!-you see by this letter the way i am in, and i hope you will excuse it as the picture of a half-disordered mind. the least respite from my uneasiness (such as i had yesterday) only brings the contrary reflection back upon me, like a flood; and by letting me see the happiness i have lost, makes me feel, by contrast, more acutely what i am doomed to bear. letter x dear friend, here i am at st. bees once more, amid the scenes which i greeted in their barrenness in winter; but which have now put on their full green attire that shews luxuriant to the eye, but speaks a tale of sadness to this heart widowed of its last, its dearest, its only hope! oh! lovely bees-inn! here i composed a volume of law-cases, here i wrote my enamoured follies to her, thinking her human, and that "all below was not the fiend's"--here i got two cold, sullen answers from the little witch, and here i was ---and i was damned. i thought the revisiting the old haunts would have soothed me for a time, but it only brings back the sense of what i have suffered for her and of her unkindness the more strongly, till i cannot endure the recollection. i eye the heavens in dumb despair, or vent my sorrows in the desart air. "to the winds, to the waves, to the rocks i complain"--you may suppose with what effect! i fear i shall be obliged to return. i am tossed about (backwards and forwards) by my passion, so as to become ridiculous. i can now understand how it is that mad people never remain in the same place--they are moving on for ever, from themselves! do you know, you would have been delighted with the effect of the northern twilight on this romantic country as i rode along last night? the hills and groves and herds of cattle were seen reposing in the grey dawn of midnight, as in a moonlight without shadow. the whole wide canopy of heaven shed its reflex light upon them, like a pure crystal mirror. no sharp points, no petty details, no hard contrasts--every object was seen softened yet distinct, in its simple outline and natural tones, transparent with an inward light, breathing its own mild lustre. the landscape altogether was like an airy piece of mosaic-work, or like one of poussin's broad massy landscapes or titian's lovely pastoral scenes. is it not so, that poets see nature, veiled to the sight, but revealed to the soul in visionary grace and grandeur! i confess the sight touched me; and might have removed all sadness except mine. so (i thought) the light of her celestial face once shone into my soul, and wrapt me in a heavenly trance. the sense i have of beauty raises me for a moment above myself, but depresses me the more afterwards, when i recollect how it is thrown away in vain admiration, and that it only makes me more susceptible of pain from the mortifications i meet with. would i had never seen her! i might then not indeed have been happy, but at least i might have passed my life in peace, and have sunk into forgetfulness without a pang.--the noble scenery in this country mixes with my passion, and refines, but does not relieve it. i was at stirling castle not long ago. it gave me no pleasure. the declivity seemed to me abrupt, not sublime; for in truth i did not shrink back from it with terror. the weather-beaten towers were stiff and formal: the air was damp and chill: the river winded its dull, slimy way like a snake along the marshy grounds: and the dim misty tops of ben leddi, and the lovely highlands (woven fantastically of thin air) mocked my embraces and tempted my longing eyes like her, the sole queen and mistress of my thoughts! i never found my contemplations on this subject so subtilised and at the same time so desponding as on that occasion. i wept myself almost blind, and i gazed at the broad golden sunset through my tears that fell in showers. as i trod the green mountain turf, oh! how i wished to be laid beneath it--in one grave with her--that i might sleep with her in that cold bed, my hand in hers, and my heart for ever still--while worms should taste her sweet body, that i had never tasted! there was a time when i could bear solitude; but it is too much for me at present. now i am no sooner left to myself than i am lost in infinite space, and look round me in vain for suppose or comfort. she was my stay, my hope: without her hand to cling to, i stagger like an infant on the edge of a precipice. the universe without her is one wide, hollow abyss, in which my harassed thoughts can find no resting-place. i must break off here; for the hysterica passio comes upon me, and threatens to unhinge my reason. letter xi my dear and good friend, i am afraid i trouble you with my querulous epistles, but this is probably the last. to-morrow or the next day decides my fate with respect to the divorce, when i expect to be a free man. in vain! was it not for her and to lay my freedom at her feet, that i consented to this step which has cost me infinite perplexity, and now to be discarded for the first pretender that came in her way! if so, i hardly think i can survive it. you who have been a favourite with women, do not know what it is to be deprived of one's only hope, and to have it turned to shame and disappointment. there is nothing in the world left that can afford me one drop of comfort--this i feel more and more. everything is to me a mockery of pleasure, like her love. the breeze does not cool me: the blue sky does not cheer me. i gaze only on her face averted from me--alas! the only face that ever was turned fondly to me! and why am i thus treated? because i wanted her to be mine for ever in love or friendship, and did not push my gross familiarities as far as i might. "why can you not go on as we have done, and say nothing about the word, forever?" was it not plain from this that she even then meditated an escape from me to some less sentimental lover? "do you allow anyone else to do so?" i said to her once, as i was toying with her. "no, not now!" was her answer; that is, because there was nobody else in the house to take freedoms with her. i was very well as a stopgap, but i was to be nothing more. while the coast was clear, i had it all my own way: but the instant c---came, she flung herself at his head in the most barefaced way, ran breathless up stairs before him, blushed when his foot was heard, watched for him in the passage, and was sure to be in close conference with him when he went down again. it was then my mad proceedings commenced. no wonder. had i not reason to be jealous of every appearance of familiarity with others, knowing how easy she had been with me at first, and that she only grew shy when i did not take farther liberties? what has her character to rest upon but her attachment to me, which she now denies, not modestly, but impudently? will you yourself say that if she had all along no particular regard for me, she will not do as much or more with other more likely men? "she has had," she says, "enough of my conversation," so it could not be that! ah! my friend, it was not to be supposed i should ever meet even with the outward demonstrations of regard from any woman but a common trader in the endearments of love! i have tasted the sweets of the well practiced illusion, and now feel the bitterness of knowing what a bliss i am deprived of, and must ever be deprived of. intolerable conviction! yet i might, i believe, have won her by other methods; but some demon held my hand. how indeed could i offer her the least insult when i worshipped her very footsteps; and even now pay her divine honours from my inmost heart, whenever i think of her, abased and brutalised as i have been by that circean cup of kisses, of enchantments, of which i have drunk! i am choked, withered, dried up with chagrin, remorse, despair, from which i have not a moment's respite, day or night. i have always some horrid dream about her, and wake wondering what is the matter that "she is no longer the same to me as ever?" i thought at least we should always remain dear friends, if nothing more--did she not talk of coming to live with me only the day before i left her in the winter? but "she's gone, i am abused, and my revenge must be to love her!"--yet she knows that one line, one word would save me, the cruel, heartless destroyer! i see nothing for it but madness, unless friday brings a change, or unless she is willing to let me go back. you must know i wrote to her to that purpose, but it was a very quiet, sober letter, begging pardon, and professing reform for the future, and all that. what effect it will have, i know not. i was forced to get out of the way of her answer, till friday came. ever yours. to s. l. my dear miss l----, evil to them that evil think, is an old saying; and i have found it a true one. i have ruined myself by my unjust suspicions of you. your sweet friendship was the balm of my life; and i have lost it, i fear for ever, by one fault and folly after another. what would i give to be restored to the place in your esteem, which, you assured me, i held only a few months ago! yet i was not contented, but did all i could to torment myself and harass you by endless doubts and jealousy. can you not forget and forgive the past, and judge of me by my conduct in future? can you not take all my follies in the lump, and say like a good, generous girl, "well, i'll think no more of them?" in a word, may i come back, and try to behave better? a line to say so would be an additional favour to so many already received by your obliged friend, and sincere well-wisher. letter xii. to c. p---i have no answer from her. i'm mad. i wish you to call on m---in confidence, to say i intend to make her an offer of my hand, and that i will write to her father to that effect the instant i am free, and ask him whether he thinks it will be to any purpose, and what he would advise me to do. unaltered love "love is not love that alteration finds: oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken." shall i not love her for herself alone, in spite of fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard to me, is not to love her, but myself. she has robbed me of herself: shall she also rob me of my love of her? did i not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? did i not adore her every grace? does she bend less enchantingly, because she has turned from me to another? is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her caprice? no, i will have it lasting as it is pure; and i will make a goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form; and when that fails, the memory of it shall survive; and my bosom shall be proof to scorn, as hers has been to pity; and i will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave, and tend her steps without notice and without reward; and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead. and thus my love will have shewn itself superior to her hate; and i shall triumph and then die. this is my idea of the only true and heroic love! such is mine for her. perfect love perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. there is one object (at least) in which the soul finds absolute content, for which it seeks to live, or dares to die. the heart has as it were filled up the moulds of the imagination. the truth of passion keeps pace with and outvies the extravagance of mere language. there are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them, that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. what idle sounds the common phrases, adorable creature, angel, divinity, are? what a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave; and the air of heaven is around it. from c. p., esq. london, july 4th, 1822. i have seen m----! now, my dear h----, let me entreat and adjure you to take what i have to tell you, for what it is worth--neither for less, nor more. in the first place, i have learned nothing decisive from him. this, as you will at once see, is, as far as it goes, good. i am either to hear from him, or see him again in a day or two; but i thought you would like to know what passed inconclusive as it was--so i write without delay, and in great haste to save a post. i found him frank, and even friendly in his manner to me, and in his views respecting you. i think that he is sincerely sorry for your situation; and he feels that the person who has placed you in that situation is not much less awkwardly situated herself; and he professes that he would willingly do what he can for the good of both. but he sees great difficulties attending the affair--which he frankly professes to consider as an altogether unfortunate one. with respect to the marriage, he seems to see the most formidable objections to it, on both sides; but yet he by no means decidedly says that it cannot, or that it ought not to take place. these, mind you, are his own feelings on the subject: but the most important point i learn from him is this, that he is not prepared to use his influence either way--that the rest of the family are of the same way of feeling; and that, in fact, the thing must and does entirely rest with herself. to learn this was, as you see, gaining a great point.--when i then endeavoured to ascertain whether he knew anything decisive as to what are her views on the subject, i found that he did not. he has an opinion on the subject, and he didn't scruple to tell me what it was; but he has no positive knowledge. in short, he believes, from what he learns from herself (and he had purposely seen her on the subject, in consequence of my application to him) that she is at present indisposed to the marriage; but he is not prepared to say positively that she will not consent to it. now all this, coming from him in the most frank and unaffected manner, and without any appearance of cant, caution, or reserve, i take to be most important as it respects your views, whatever they may be; and certainly much more favourable to them (i confess it) than i was prepared to expect, supposing them to remain as they were. in fact as i said before, the affair rests entirely with herself. they are none of them disposed either to further the marriage, or throw any insurmountable obstacles in the way of it; and what is more important than all, they are evidently by no means certain that she may not, at some future period, consent to it; or they would, for her sake as well as their own, let you know as much flatly, and put an end to the affair at once. seeing in how frank and straitforward a manner he received what i had to say to him, and replied to it, i proceeded to ask him what were his views, and what were likely to be hers (in case she did not consent) as to whether you should return to live in the house;--but i added, without waiting for his answer, that if she intended to persist in treating you as she had done for some time past, it would be worse than madness for you to think of returning. i added that, in case you did return, all you would expect from her would be that she would treat you with civility and kindness--that she would continue to evince that friendly feeling towards you, that she had done for a great length of time, &c. to this, he said, he could really give no decisive reply, but that he should be most happy if, by any intervention of his, he could conduce to your comfort; but he seemed to think that for you to return on any express understanding that she should behave to you in any particular manner, would be to place her in a most awkward situation. he went somewhat at length into this point, and talked very reasonably about it; the result, however, was that he would not throw any obstacles in the way of your return, or of her treating you as a friend, &c., nor did it appear that he believed she would refuse to do so. and, finally, we parted on the understanding that he would see them on the subject, and ascertain what could be done for the comfort of all parties: though he was of opinion that if you could make up your mind to break off the acquaintance altogether, it would be the best plan of all. i am to hear from him again in a day or two.--well, what do you say to all this? can you turn it to any thing but good--comparative good? if you would know what _i_ say to it, it is this:--she is still to be won by wise and prudent conduct on your part; she was always to have been won by such;--and if she is lost, it has been not, as you sometimes suppose, because you have not carried that unwise, may i not say unworthy? conduct still farther, but because you gave way to it at all. of course i use the terms "wise" and "prudent" with reference to your object. whether the pursuit of that object is wise, only yourself can judge. i say she has all along been to be won, and she still is to be won; and all that stands in the way of your views at this moment is your past conduct. they are all of them, every soul, frightened at you; they have seen enough of you to make them so; and they have doubtless heard ten times more than they have seen, or than anyone else has seen. they are all of them including m---(and particularly she herself) frightened out of their wits, as to what might be your treatment of her if she were yours; and they dare not trust you--they will not trust you, at present. i do not say that they will trust you, or rather that she will, for it all depends on her, when you have gone through a probation, but i am sure that she will not trust you till you have. you will, i hope, not be angry with me when i say that she would be a fool if she did. if she were to accept you at present, and without knowing more of you, even i should begin to suspect that she had an unworthy motive for doing it. let me not forget to mention what is perhaps as important a point as any, as it regards the marriage. i of course stated to m---that when you are free, you are prepared to make her a formal offer of your hand; but i begged him, if he was certain that such an offer would be refused, to tell me so plainly at once, that i might endeavour, in that case, to dissuade you from subjecting yourself to the pain of such a refusal. he would not tell me that he was certain. he said his opinion was that she would not accept your offer, but still he seemed to think that there would be no harm in making it!---one word more, and a very important one. he once, and without my referring in the slightest manner to that part of the subject, spoke of her as a good girl, and likely to make any man an excellent wife! do you think if she were a bad girl (and if she were, he must know her to be so) he would have dared to do this, under these circumstances?--and once, in speaking of his not being a fit person to set his face against "marrying for love," he added "i did so myself, and out of that house; and i have had reason to rejoice at it ever since." and mind (for i anticipate your cursed suspicions) i'm certain, at least, if manner can entitle one to be certain of any thing, that he said all this spontaneously, and without any understood motive; and i'm certain, too, that he knows you to be a person that it would not do to play any tricks of this kind with. i believe--(and all this would never have entered my thoughts, but that i know it will enter yours) i believe that even if they thought (as you have sometimes supposed they do) that she needs whitewashing, or making an honest woman of, you would be the last person they would think of using for such a purpose, for they know (as well as i do) that you couldn't fail to find out the trick in a month, and would turn her into the street the next moment, though she were twenty times your wife--and that, as to the consequences of doing so, you would laugh at them, even if you couldn't escape from them.--i shall lose the post if i say more. believe me, ever truly your friend, c. p. letter xiii my dear p----, you have saved my life. if i do not keep friends with her now, i deserve to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. she is an angel from heaven, and you cannot pretend i ever said a word to the contrary! the little rogue must have liked me from the first, or she never could have stood all these hurricanes without slipping her cable. what could she find in me? "i have mistook my person all this while," &c. do you know i saw a picture, the very pattern of her, the other day, at dalkeith palace (hope finding fortune in the sea), just before this blessed news came, and the resemblance drove me almost out of my senses. such delicacy, such fulness, such perfect softness, such buoyancy, such grace! if it is not the very image of her, i am no judge.--you have the face to doubt my making the best husband in the world; you might as well doubt it if i was married to one of the houris of paradise. she is a saint, an angel, a love. if she deceives me again, she kills me. but i will have such a kiss when i get back, as shall last me twenty years. may god bless her for not utterly disowning and destroying me! what an exquisite little creature it is, and how she holds out to the last in her system of consistent contradictions! since i wrote to you about making a formal proposal, i have had her face constantly before me, looking so like some faultless marble statue, as cold, as fixed and graceful as ever statue did; the expression (nothing was ever like that!) seemed to say--"i wish i could love you better than i do, but still i will be yours." no, i'll never believe again that she will not be mine; for i think she was made on purpose for me. if there's anyone else that understands that turn of her head as i do, i'll give her up without scruple. i have made up my mind to this, never to dream of another woman, while she even thinks it worth her while to refuse to have me. you see i am not hard to please, after all. did m---know of the intimacy that had subsisted between us? or did you hint at it? i think it would be a clencher, if he did. how ought i to behave when i go back? advise a fool, who had nearly lost a goddess by his folly. the thing was, i could not think it possible she would ever like me. her taste is singular, but not the worse for that. i'd rather have her love, or liking (call it what you will) than empires. i deserve to call her mine; for nothing else can atone for what i've gone through for her. i hope your next letter will not reverse all, and then i shall be happy till i see her,--one of the blest when i do see her, if she looks like my own beautiful love. i may perhaps write a line when i come to my right wits.--farewel at present, and thank you a thousand times for what you have done for your poor friend. p. s.--i like what m---said about her sister, much. there are good people in the world: i begin to see it, and believe it. letter the last dear p----, to-morrow is the decisive day that makes me or mars me. i will let you know the result by a line added to this. yet what signifies it, since either way i have little hope there, "whence alone my hope cometh!" you must know i am strangely in the dumps at this present writing. my reception with her is doubtful, and my fate is then certain. the hearing of your happiness has, i own, made me thoughtful. it is just what i proposed to her to do--to have crossed the alps with me, to sail on sunny seas, to bask in italian skies, to have visited vevai and the rocks of meillerie, and to have repeated to her on the spot the story of julia and st. preux, and to have shewn her all that my heart had stored up for her--but on my forehead alone is written--rejected! yet i too could have adored as fervently, and loved as tenderly as others, had i been permitted. you are going abroad, you say, happy in making happy. where shall i be? in the grave, i hope, or else in her arms. to me, alas! there is no sweetness out of her sight, and that sweetness has turned to bitterness, i fear; that gentleness to sullen scorn! still i hope for the best. if she will but have me, i'll make her love me: and i think her not giving a positive answer looks like it, and also shews that there is no one else. her holding out to the last also, i think, proves that she was never to have been gained but with honour. she's a strange, almost an inscrutable girl: but if i once win her consent, i shall kill her with kindness.--will you let me have a sight of somebody before you go? i should be most proud. i was in hopes to have got away by the steam-boat to-morrow, but owing to the business not coming on till then, i cannot; and may not be in town for another week, unless i come by the mail, which i am strongly tempted to do. in the latter case i shall be there, and visible on saturday evening. will you look in and see, about eight o'clock? i wish much to see you and her and j. h. and my little boy once more; and then, if she is not what she once was to me, i care not if i die that instant. i will conclude here till to-morrow, as i am getting into my old melancholy.-it is all over, and i am my own man, and yours ever-part iii addressed to j. s. k.---my dear k----, it is all over, and i know my fate. i told you i would send you word, if anything decisive happened; but an impenetrable mystery hung over the affair till lately. it is at last (by the merest accident in the world) dissipated; and i keep my promise, both for your satisfaction, and for the ease of my own mind. you remember the morning when i said "i will go and repose my sorrows at the foot of ben lomond"--and when from dumbarton bridge its giant-shadow, clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view. we had a pleasant day's walk. we passed smollett's monument on the road (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most military heroes)--talked of old times; you repeated logan's beautiful verses to the cuckoo,* which i wanted to compare with wordsworth's, but my courage failed me; you then told me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly broken off; we considered together which was the most to be pitied, a disappointment in love where the attachment was mutual or one where there has been no return, and we both agreed, i think, that the former was best to be endured, and that to have the consciousness of it a companion for life was the least evil of the two, as there was a secret sweetness that took off the bitterness and the sting of regret, and "the memory of what once had been" atoned, in some measure, and at intervals, for what "never more could be." in the other case, there was nothing to look back to with tender satisfaction, no redeeming trait, not even a possibility of turning it to good. it left behind it not cherished sighs, but stifled pangs. the galling sense of it did not bring moisture into the eyes, but dried up the heart ever after. one had been my fate, the other had been yours! [*--"sweet bird, thy bower is ever green, thy sky is ever clear; thou hast no sorrow in thy song, no winter in thy year." so they begin. it was the month of may; the cuckoo sang shrouded in some woody copse; the showers fell between whiles; my friend repeated the lines with native enthusiasm in a clear manly voice, still resonant of youth and hope. mr. wordsworth will excuse me, if in these circumstances i declined entering the field with his profounder metaphysical strain, and kept my preference to myself.] you startled me every now and then from my reverie by the robust voice, in which you asked the country people (by no means prodigal of their answers)--"if there was any trout fishing in those streams?"--and our dinner at luss set us up for the rest of our day's march. the sky now became overcast; but this, i think, added to the effect of the scene. the road to tarbet is superb. it is on the very verge of the lake--hard, level, rocky, with low stone bridges constantly flung across it, and fringed with birch trees, just then budding into spring, behind which, as through a slight veil, you saw the huge shadowy form of ben lomond. it lifts its enormous but graceful bulk direct from the edge of the water without any projecting lowlands, and has in this respect much the advantage of skiddaw. loch lomond comes upon you by degrees as you advance, unfolding and then withdrawing its conscious beauties like an accomplished coquet. you are struck with the point of a rock, the arch of a bridge, the highland huts (like the first rude habitations of men) dug out of the soil, built of turf, and covered with brown heather, a sheep-cote, some straggling cattle feeding half-way down a precipice; but as you advance farther on, the view expands into the perfection of lake scenery. it is nothing (or your eye is caught by nothing) but water, earth, and sky. ben lomond waves to the right, in its simple majesty, cloud-capt or bare, and descending to a point at the head of the lake, shews the trossacs beyond, tumbling about their blue ridges like woods waving; to the left is the cobler, whose top is like a castle shattered in pieces and nodding to its ruin; and at your side rise the shapes of round pastoral hills, green, fleeced with herds, and retiring into mountainous bays and upland valleys, where solitude and peace might make their lasting home, if peace were to be found in solitude! that it was not always so, i was a sufficient proof; for there was one image that alone haunted me in the midst of all this sublimity and beauty, and turned it to a mockery and a dream! the snow on the mountain would not let us ascend; and being weary of waiting and of being visited by the guide every two hours to let us know that the weather would not do, we returned, you homewards, and i to london-"italiam, italiam!" you know the anxious expectations with which i set out:--now hear the result-as the vessel sailed up the thames, the air thickened with the consciousness of being near her, and i "heaved her name pantingly forth." as i approached the house, i could not help thinking of the lines-"how near am i to a happiness, that earth exceeds not! not another like it. the treasures of the deep are not so precious as are the conceal'd comforts of a man lock'd up in woman's love. i scent the air of blessings when i come but near the house. what a delicious breath true love sends forth! the violet-beds not sweeter. now for a welcome able to draw men's envies upon man: a kiss now that will hang upon my lip, as sweet as morning dew upon a rose, and full as long!" i saw her, but i saw at the first glance that there was something amiss. it was with much difficulty and after several pressing intreaties that she was prevailed on to come up into the room; and when she did, she stood at the door, cold, distant, averse; and when at length she was persuaded by my repeated remonstrances to come and take my hand, and i offered to touch her lips, she turned her head and shrunk from my embraces, as if quite alienated or mortally offended. i asked what it could mean? what had i done in her absence to have incurred her displeasure? why had she not written to me? i could get only short, sullen, disconnected answers, as if there was something labouring in her mind which she either could not or would not impart. i hardly knew how to bear this first reception after so long an absence, and so different from the one my sentiments towards her merited; but i thought it possible it might be prudery (as i had returned without having actually accomplished what i went about) or that she had taken offence at something in my letters. she saw how much i was hurt. i asked her, "if she was altered since i went away?"--"no." "if there was any one else who had been so fortunate as to gain her favourable opinion?"--"no, there was no one else." "what was it then? was it any thing in my letters? or had i displeased her by letting mr. p---know she wrote to me?"--"no, not at all; but she did not apprehend my last letter required any answer, or she would have replied to it." all this appeared to me very unsatisfactory and evasive; but i could get no more from her, and was obliged to let her go with a heavy, foreboding heart. i however found that c---was gone, and no one else had been there, of whom i had cause to be jealous.--"should i see her on the morrow?"--"she believed so, but she could not promise." the next morning she did not appear with the breakfast as usual. at this i grew somewhat uneasy. the little buonaparte, however, was placed in its old position on the mantelpiece, which i considered as a sort of recognition of old times. i saw her once or twice casually; nothing particular happened till the next day, which was sunday. i took occasion to go into the parlour for the newspaper, which she gave me with a gracious smile, and seemed tolerably frank and cordial. this of course acted as a spell upon me. i walked out with my little boy, intending to go and dine out at one or two places, but i found that i still contrived to bend my steps towards her, and i went back to take tea at home. while we were out, i talked to william about sarah, saying that she too was unhappy, and asking him to make it up with her. he said, if she was unhappy, he would not bear her malice any more. when she came up with the tea-things, i said to her, "william has something to say to you--i believe he wants to be friends." on which he said in his abrupt, hearty manner, "sarah, i'm sorry if i've ever said anything to vex you"--so they shook hands, and she said, smiling affably--"then i'll think no more of it!" i added--"i see you've brought me back my little buonaparte"--she answered with tremulous softness--"i told you i'd keep it safe for you!"--as if her pride and pleasure in doing so had been equal, and she had, as it were, thought of nothing during my absence but how to greet me with this proof of her fidelity on my return. i cannot describe her manner. her words are few and simple; but you can have no idea of the exquisite, unstudied, irresistible graces with which she accompanies them, unless you can suppose a greek statue to smile, move, and speak. those lines in tibullus seem to have been written on purpose for her-quicquid agit quoquo vestigil vertit, componit furtim, subsequiturque decor. or what do you think of those in a modern play, which might actually have been composed with an eye to this little trifler---"see with what a waving air she goes along the corridor. how like a fawn! yet statelier. no sound (however soft) nor gentlest echo telleth when she treads, but every motion of her shape doth seem hallowed by silence. so did hebe grow among the gods a paragon! away, i'm grown the very fool of love!" the truth is, i never saw anything like her, nor i never shall again. how then do i console myself for the loss of her? shall i tell you, but you will not mention it again? i am foolish enough to believe that she and i, in spite of every thing, shall be sitting together over a sea-coal fire, a comfortable good old couple, twenty years hence! but to my narrative.-i was delighted with the alteration in her manner, and said, referring to the bust--"you know it is not mine, but yours; i gave it you; nay, i have given you all--my heart, and whatever i possess, is yours! she seemed good-humouredly to decline this carte blanche offer, and waved, like a thing of enchantment, out of the room. false calm!--deceitful smiles!--short interval of peace, followed by lasting woe! i sought an interview with her that same evening. i could not get her to come any farther than the door. "she was busy--she could hear what i had to say there." why do you seem to avoid me as you do? not one five minutes' conversation, for the sake of old acquaintance? well, then, for the sake of the little image!" the appeal seemed to have lost its efficacy; the charm was broken; she remained immoveable. "well, then i must come to you, if you will not run away." i went and sat down in a chair near the door, and took her hand, and talked to her for three quarters of an hour; and she listened patiently, thoughtfully, and seemed a good deal affected by what i said. i told her how much i had felt, how much i had suffered for her in my absence, and how much i had been hurt by her sudden silence, for which i knew not how to account. i could have done nothing to offend her while i was away; and my letters were, i hoped, tender and respectful. i had had but one thought ever present with me; her image never quitted my side, alone or in company, to delight or distract me. without her i could have no peace, nor ever should again, unless she would behave to me as she had done formerly. there was no abatement of my regard to her; why was she so changed? i said to her, "ah! sarah, when i think that it is only a year ago that you were everything to me i could wish, and that now you seem lost to me for ever, the month of may (the name of which ought to be a signal for joy and hope) strikes chill to my heart.--how different is this meeting from that delicious parting, when you seemed never weary of repeating the proofs of your regard and tenderness, and it was with difficulty we tore ourselves asunder at last! i am ten thousand times fonder of you than i was then, and ten thousand times more unhappy!" "you have no reason to be so; my feelings towards you are the same as they ever were." i told her "she was my all of hope or comfort: my passion for her grew stronger every time i saw her." she answered, "she was sorry for it; for that she never could return." i said something about looking ill: she said in her pretty, mincing, emphatic way, "i despise looks!" so, thought i, it is not that; and she says there's no one else: it must be some strange air she gives herself, in consequence of the approaching change in my circumstances. she has been probably advised not to give up till all is fairly over, and then she will be my own sweet girl again. all this time she was standing just outside the door, my hand in hers (would that they could have grown together!) she was dressed in a loose morning-gown, her hair curled beautifully; she stood with her profile to me, and looked down the whole time. no expression was ever more soft or perfect. her whole attitude, her whole form, was dignity and bewitching grace. i said to her, "you look like a queen, my love, adorned with your own graces!" i grew idolatrous, and would have kneeled to her. she made a movement, as if she was displeased. i tried to draw her towards me. she wouldn't. i then got up, and offered to kiss her at parting. i found she obstinately refused. this stung me to the quick. it was the first time in her life she had ever done so. there must be some new bar between us to produce these continued denials; and she had not even esteem enough left to tell me so. i followed her half-way down-stairs, but to no purpose, and returned into my room, confirmed in my most dreadful surmises. i could bear it no longer. i gave way to all the fury of disappointed hope and jealous passion. i was made the dupe of trick and cunning, killed with cold, sullen scorn; and, after all the agony i had suffered, could obtain no explanation why i was subjected to it. i was still to be tantalized, tortured, made the cruel sport of one, for whom i would have sacrificed all. i tore the locket which contained her hair (and which i used to wear continually in my bosom, as the precious token of her dear regard) from my neck, and trampled it in pieces. i then dashed the little buonaparte on the ground, and stamped upon it, as one of her instruments of mockery. i could not stay in the room; i could not leave it; my rage, my despair were uncontrollable. i shrieked curses on her name, and on her false love; and the scream i uttered (so pitiful and so piercing was it, that the sound of it terrified me) instantly brought the whole house, father, mother, lodgers and all, into the room. they thought i was destroying her and myself. i had gone into the bedroom, merely to hide away from myself, and as i came out of it, raging-mad with the new sense of present shame and lasting misery, mrs. f---said, "she's in there! he has got her in there!" thinking the cries had proceeded from her, and that i had been offering her violence. "oh! no," i said, "she's in no danger from me; i am not the person;" and tried to burst from this scene of degradation. the mother endeavoured to stop me, and said, "for god's sake, don't go out, mr. ----! for god's sake, don't!" her father, who was not, i believe, in the secret, and was therefore justly scandalised at such outrageous conduct, said angrily, "let him go! why should he stay?" i however sprang down stairs, and as they called out to me, "what is it?--what has she done to you?" i answered, "she has murdered me!--she has destroyed me for ever!--she has doomed my soul to perdition!" i rushed out of the house, thinking to quit it forever; but i was no sooner in the street, than the desolation and the darkness became greater, more intolerable; and the eddying violence of my passion drove me back to the source, from whence it sprung. this unexpected explosion, with the conjectures to which it would give rise, could not be very agreeable to the precieuse or her family; and when i went back, the father was waiting at the door, as if anticipating this sudden turn of my feelings, with no friendly aspect. i said, "i have to beg pardon, sir; but my mad fit is over, and i wish to say a few words to you in private." he seemed to hesitate, but some uneasy forebodings on his own account, probably, prevailed over his resentment; or, perhaps (as philosophers have a desire to know the cause of thunder) it was a natural curiosity to know what circumstances of provocation had given rise to such an extraordinary scene of confusion. when we reached my room, i requested him to be seated. i said, "it is true, sir, i have lost my peace of mind for ever, but at present i am quite calm and collected, and i wish to explain to you why i have behaved in so extravagant a way, and to ask for your advice and intercession." he appeared satisfied, and i went on. i had no chance either of exculpating myself, or of probing the question to the bottom, but by stating the naked truth, and therefore i said at once, "sarah told me, sir (and i never shall forget the way in which she told me, fixing her dove's eyes upon me, and looking a thousand tender reproaches for the loss of that good opinion, which she held dearer than all the world) she told me, sir, that as you one day passed the door, which stood a-jar, you saw her in an attitude which a good deal startled you; i mean sitting in my lap, with her arms round my neck, and mine twined round her in the fondest manner. what i wished to ask was, whether this was actually the case, or whether it was a mere invention of her own, to enhance the sense of my obligations to her; for i begin to doubt everything?"--"indeed, it was so; and very much surprised and hurt i was to see it." "well then, sir, i can only say, that as you saw her sitting then, so she had been sitting for the last year and a half, almost every day of her life, by the hour together; and you may judge yourself, knowing what a nice modest-looking girl she is, whether, after having been admitted to such intimacy with so sweet a creature, and for so long a time, it is not enough to make any one frantic to be received by her as i have been since my return, without any provocation given or cause assigned for it." the old man answered very seriously, and, as i think, sincerely, "what you now tell me, sir, mortifies and shocks me as much as it can do yourself. i had no idea such a thing was possible. i was much pained at what i saw; but i thought it an accident, and that it would never happen again."--"it was a constant habit; it has happened a hundred times since, and a thousand before. i lived on her caresses as my daily food, nor can i live without them." so i told him the whole story, "what conjurations, and what mighty magic i won his daughter with," to be anything but mine for life. nothing could well exceed his astonishment and apparent mortification. "what i had said," he owned, "had left a weight upon his mind that he should not easily get rid of." i told him, "for myself, i never could recover the blow i had received. i thought, however, for her own sake, she ought to alter her present behaviour. her marked neglect and dislike, so far from justifying, left her former intimacies without excuse; for nothing could reconcile them to propriety, or even a pretence to common decency, but either love, or friendship so strong and pure that it could put on the guise of love. she was certainly a singular girl. did she think it right and becoming to be free with strangers, and strange to old friends?" i frankly declared, "i did not see how it was in human nature for any one who was not rendered callous to such familiarities by bestowing them indiscriminately on every one, to grant the extreme and continued indulgences she had done to me, without either liking the man at first, or coming to like him in the end, in spite of herself. when my addresses had nothing, and could have nothing honourable in them, she gave them every encouragement; when i wished to make them honourable, she treated them with the utmost contempt. the terms we had been all along on were such as if she had been to be my bride next day. it was only when i wished her actually to become so, to ensure her own character and my happiness, that she shrunk back with precipitation and panic-fear. there seemed to me something wrong in all this; a want both of common propriety, and i might say, of natural feeling; yet, with all her faults, i loved her, and ever should, beyond any other human being. i had drank in the poison of her sweetness too long ever to be cured of it; and though i might find it to be poison in the end, it was still in my veins. my only ambition was to be permitted to live with her, and to die in her arms. be she what she would, treat me how she would, i felt that my soul was wedded to hers; and were she a mere lost creature, i would try to snatch her from perdition, and marry her to-morrow if she would have me. that was the question--"would she have me, or would she not?" he said he could not tell; but should not attempt to put any constraint upon her inclinations, one way or other. i acquiesced, and added, that "i had brought all this upon myself, by acting contrary to the suggestions of my friend, mr. ----, who had desired me to take no notice whether she came near me or kept away, whether she smiled or frowned, was kind or contemptuous--all you have to do, is to wait patiently for a month till you are your own man, as you will be in all probability; then make her an offer of your hand, and if she refuses, there's an end of the matter." mr. l. said, "well, sir, and i don't think you can follow a better advice!" i took this as at least a sort of negative encouragement, and so we parted. to the same (in continuation) my dear friend, the next day i felt almost as sailors must do after a violent storm over-night, that has subsided towards daybreak. the morning was a dull and stupid calm, and i found she was unwell, in consequence of what had happened. in the evening i grew more uneasy, and determined on going into the country for a week or two. i gathered up the fragments of the locket of her hair, and the little bronze statue, which were strewed about the floor, kissed them, folded them up in a sheet of paper, and sent them to her, with these lines written in pencil on the outside--"pieces of a broken heart, to be kept in remembrance of the unhappy. farewell." no notice was taken; nor did i expect any. the following morning i requested betsey to pack up my box for me, as i should go out of town the next day, and at the same time wrote a note to her sister to say, i should take it as a favour if she would please to accept of the enclosed copies of the vicar of wakefield, the man of feeling and nature and art, in lieu of three volumes of my own writings, which i had given her on different occasions, in the course of our acquaintance. i was piqued, in fact, that she should have these to shew as proofs of my weakness, and as if i thought the way to win her was by plaguing her with my own performances. she sent me word back that the books i had sent were of no use to her, and that i should have those i wished for in the afternoon; but that she could not before, as she had lent them to her sister, mrs. m----. i said, "very well;" but observed (laughing) to betsey, "it's a bad rule to give and take; so, if sarah won't have these books, you must; they are very pretty ones, i assure you." she curtsied and took them, according to the family custom. in the afternoon, when i came back to tea, i found the little girl on her knees, busy in packing up my things, and a large paper parcel on the table, which i could not at first tell what to make of. on opening it, however, i soon found what it was. it contained a number of volumes which i had given her at different times (among others, a little prayer-book, bound in crimson velvet, with green silk linings; she kissed it twenty times when she received it, and said it was the prettiest present in the world, and that she would shew it to her aunt, who would be proud of it)--and all these she had returned together. her name in the title-page was cut out of them all. i doubted at the instant whether she had done this before or after i had sent for them back, and i have doubted of it since; but there is no occasion to suppose her ugly all over with hypocrisy. poor little thing! she has enough to answer for, as it is. i asked betsey if she could carry a message for me, and she said "yes." "will you tell your sister, then, that i did not want all these books; and give my love to her, and say that i shall be obliged if she will still keep these that i have sent back, and tell her that it is only those of my own writing that i think unworthy of her." what do you think the little imp made answer? she raised herself on the other side of the table where she stood, as if inspired by the genius of the place, and said--"and those are the ones that she prizes the most!" if there were ever words spoken that could revive the dead, those were the words. let me kiss them, and forget that my ears have heard aught else! i said, "are you sure of that?" and she said, "yes, quite sure." i told her, "if i could be, i should be very different from what i was." and i became so that instant, for these casual words carried assurance to my heart of her esteem--that once implied, i had proofs enough of her fondness. oh! how i felt at that moment! restored to love, hope, and joy, by a breath which i had caught by the merest accident, and which i might have pined in absence and mute despair for want of hearing! i did not know how to contain myself; i was childish, wanton, drunk with pleasure. i gave betsey a twenty-shilling note which i happened to have in my hand, and on her asking "what's this for, sir?" i said, "it's for you. don't you think it worth that to be made happy? you once made me very wretched by some words i heard you drop, and now you have made me as happy; and all i wish you is, when you grow up, that you may find some one to love you as well as i do your sister, and that you may love better than she does me!" i continued in this state of delirium or dotage all that day and the next, talked incessantly, laughed at every thing, and was so extravagant, nobody could tell what was the matter with me. i murmured her name; i blest her; i folded her to my heart in delicious fondness; i called her by my own name; i worshipped her: i was mad for her. i told p---i should laugh in her face, if ever she pretended not to like me again. her mother came in and said, she hoped i should excuse sarah's coming up. "oh, ma'am," i said, "i have no wish to see her; i feel her at my heart; she does not hate me after all, and i wish for nothing. let her come when she will, she is to me welcomer than light, than life; but let it be in her own sweet time, and at her own dear pleasure." betsey also told me she was "so glad to get the books back." i, however, sobered and wavered (by degrees) from seeing nothing of her, day after day; and in less than a week i was devoted to the infernal gods. i could hold out no longer than the monday evening following. i sent a message to her; she returned an ambiguous answer; but she came up. pity me, my friend, for the shame of this recital. pity me for the pain of having ever had to make it! if the spirits of mortal creatures, purified by faith and hope, can (according to the highest assurances) ever, during thousands of years of smooth-rolling eternity and balmy, sainted repose, forget the pain, the toil, the anguish, the helplessness, and the despair they have suffered here, in this frail being, then may i forget that withering hour, and her, that fair, pale form that entered, my inhuman betrayer, and my only earthly love! she said, "did you wish to speak to me, sir?" i said, "yes, may i not speak to you? i wanted to see you and be friends." i rose up, offered her an arm-chair which stood facing, bowed on it, and knelt to her adoring. she said (going) "if that's all, i have nothing to say." i replied, "why do you treat me thus? what have i done to become thus hateful to you?" answer, "i always told you i had no affection for you." you may suppose this was a blow, after the imaginary honey-moon in which i had passed the preceding week. i was stunned by it; my heart sunk within me. i contrived to say, "nay, my dear girl, not always neither; for did you not once (if i might presume to look back to those happy, happy times), when you were sitting on my knee as usual, embracing and embraced, and i asked if you could not love me at last, did you not make answer, in the softest tones that ever man heard, 'i could easily say so, whether i did or not; you should judge by my actions!' was i to blame in taking you at your word, when every hope i had depended on your sincerity? and did you not say since i came back, 'your feelings to me were the same as ever?' why then is your behaviour so different?" s. "is it nothing, your exposing me to the whole house in the way you did the other evening?" h. "nay, that was the consequence of your cruel reception of me, not the cause of it. i had better have gone away last year, as i proposed to do, unless you would give some pledge of your fidelity; but it was your own offer that i should remain. 'why should i go?' you said, 'why could we not go on the same as we had done, and say nothing about the word forever?'" s. "and how did you behave when you returned?" h. "that was all forgiven when we last parted, and your last words were, 'i should find you the same as ever' when i came home? did you not that very day enchant and madden me over again by the purest kisses and embraces, and did i not go from you (as i said) adoring, confiding, with every assurance of mutual esteem and friendship?" s. "yes, and in your absence i found that you had told my aunt what had passed between us." h. "it was to induce her to extort your real sentiments from you, that you might no longer make a secret of your true regard for me, which your actions (but not your words) confessed." s. "i own i have been guilty of improprieties, which you have gone and repeated, not only in the house, but out of it; so that it has come to my ears from various quarters, as if i was a light character. and i am determined in future to be guided by the advice of my relations, and particularly of my aunt, whom i consider as my best friend, and keep every lodger at a proper distance." you will find hereafter that her favourite lodger, whom she visits daily, had left the house; so that she might easily make and keep this vow of extraordinary self-denial. precious little dissembler! yet her aunt, her best friend, says, "no, sir, no; sarah's no hypocrite!" which i was fool enough to believe; and yet my great and unpardonable offence is to have entertained passing doubts on this delicate point. i said, whatever errors i had committed, arose from my anxiety to have everything explained to her honour: my conduct shewed that i had that at heart, and that i built on the purity of her character as on a rock. my esteem for her amounted to adoration. "she did not want adoration." it was only when any thing happened to imply that i had been mistaken, that i committed any extravagance, because i could not bear to think her short of perfection. "she was far from perfection," she replied, with an air and manner (oh, my god!) as near it as possible. "how could she accuse me of a want of regard to her? it was but the other day, sarah," i said to her, "when that little circumstance of the books happened, and i fancied the expressions your sister dropped proved the sincerity of all your kindness to me--you don't know how my heart melted within me at the thought, that after all, i might be dear to you. new hopes sprung up in my heart, and i felt as adam must have done when his eve was created for him!" "she had heard enough of that sort of conversation," (moving towards the door). this, i own, was the unkindest cut of all. i had, in that case, no hopes whatever. i felt that i had expended words in vain, and that the conversation below stairs (which i told you of when i saw you) had spoiled her taste for mine. if the allusion had been classical i should have been to blame; but it was scriptural, it was a sort of religious courtship, and miss l. is religious! at once he took his muse and dipt her right in the middle of the scripture. it would not do--the lady could make neither head nor tail of it. this is a poor attempt at levity. alas! i am sad enough. "would she go and leave me so? if it was only my own behaviour, i still did not doubt of success. i knew the sincerity of my love, and she would be convinced of it in time. if that was all, i did not care: but tell me true, is there not a new attachment that is the real cause of your estrangement? tell me, my sweet friend, and before you tell me, give me your hand (nay, both hands) that i may have something to support me under the dreadful conviction." she let me take her hands in mine, saying, "she supposed there could be no objection to that,"--as if she acted on the suggestions of others, instead of following her own will--but still avoided giving me any answer. i conjured her to tell me the worst, and kill me on the spot. any thing was better than my present state. i said, "is it mr. c----?" she smiled, and said with gay indifference, "mr. c---was here a very short time." "well, then, was it mr. ----?" she hesitated, and then replied faintly, "no." this was a mere trick to mislead; one of the profoundnesses of satan, in which she is an adept. "but," she added hastily, "she could make no more confidences." "then," said i, "you have something to communicate." "no; but she had once mentioned a thing of the sort, which i had hinted to her mother, though it signified little." all this while i was in tortures. every word, every half-denial, stabbed me. "had she any tie?" "no, i have no tie!" "you are not going to be married soon?" "i don't intend ever to marry at all!" "can't you be friends with me as of old?" "she could give no promises." "would she make her own terms?" "she would make none."--"i was sadly afraid the little image was dethroned from her heart, as i had dashed it to the ground the other night."--"she was neither desperate nor violent." i did not answer--"but deliberate and deadly,"--though i might; and so she vanished in this running fight of question and answer, in spite of my vain efforts to detain her. the cockatrice, i said, mocks me: so she has always done. the thought was a dagger to me. my head reeled, my heart recoiled within me. i was stung with scorpions; my flesh crawled; i was choked with rage; her scorn scorched me like flames; her air (her heavenly air) withdrawn from me, stifled me, and left me gasping for breath and being. it was a fable. she started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman. she had fascinated, she had stung me, and had returned to her proper shape, gliding from me after inflicting the mortal wound, and instilling deadly poison into every pore; but her form lost none of its original brightness by the change of character, but was all glittering, beauteous, voluptuous grace. seed of the serpent or of the woman, she was divine! i felt that she was a witch, and had bewitched me. fate had enclosed me round about. _i_ was transformed too, no longer human (any more than she, to whom i had knit myself) my feelings were marble; my blood was of molten lead; my thoughts on fire. i was taken out of myself, wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope, of love. i had no natural affection left; she had slain me, but no other thing had power over me. her arms embraced another; but her mock-embrace, the phantom of her love, still bound me, and i had not a wish to escape. so i felt then, and so perhaps shall feel till i grow old and die, nor have any desire that my years should last longer than they are linked in the chain of those amorous folds, or than her enchantments steep my soul in oblivion of all other things! i started to find myself alone--for ever alone, without a creature to love me. i looked round the room for help; i saw the tables, the chairs, the places where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. i could not stay where i was; i had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and falsehood for me, and i went down and (such was my weakness and helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her daughter, and the sweet days we had passed together, and said i thought her a good girl, and believed that if there was no rival, she still had a regard for me at the bottom of her heart; and how i liked her all the better for her coy, maiden airs: and i received the assurance over and over that there was no one else; and that sarah (they all knew) never staid five minutes with any other lodger, while with me she would stay by the hour together, in spite of all her father could say to her (what were her motives, was best known to herself!) and while we were talking of her, she came bounding into the room, smiling with smothered delight at the consummation of my folly and her own art; and i asked her mother whether she thought she looked as if she hated me, and i took her wrinkled, withered, cadaverous, clammy hand at parting, and kissed it. faugh!-i will make an end of this story; there is something in it discordant to honest ears. i left the house the next day, and returned to scotland in a state so near to phrenzy, that i take it the shades sometimes ran into one another. r---met me the day after i arrived, and will tell you the way i was in. i was like a person in a high fever; only mine was in the mind instead of the body. it had the same irritating, uncomfortable effect on the bye-standers. i was incapable of any application, and don't know what i should have done, had it not been for the kindness of ----. i came to see you, to "bestow some of my tediousness upon you," but you were gone from home. everything went on well as to the law business; and as it approached to a conclusion, i wrote to my good friend p---to go to m----, who had married her sister, and ask him if it would be worth my while to make her a formal offer, as soon as i was free, as, with the least encouragement, i was ready to throw myself at her feet; and to know, in case of refusal, whether i might go back there and be treated as an old friend. not a word of answer could be got from her on either point, notwithstanding every importunity and intreaty; but it was the opinion of m---that i might go and try my fortune. i did so with joy, with something like confidence. i thought her giving no positive answer implied a chance, at least, of the reversion of her favour, in case i behaved well. all was false, hollow, insidious. the first night after i got home, i slept on down. in scotland, the flint had been my pillow. but now i slept under the same roof with her. what softness, what balmy repose in the very thought! i saw her that same day and shook hands with her, and told her how glad i was to see her; and she was kind and comfortable, though still cold and distant. her manner was altered from what it was the last time. she still absented herself from the room, but was mild and affable when she did come. she was pale, dejected, evidently uneasy about something, and had been ill. i thought it was perhaps her reluctance to yield to my wishes, her pity for what i suffered; and that in the struggle between both, she did not know what to do. how i worshipped her at these moments! we had a long interview the third day, and i thought all was doing well. i found her sitting at work in the window-seat of the front parlour; and on my asking if i might come in, she made no objection. i sat down by her; she let me take her hand; i talked to her of indifferent things, and of old times. i asked her if she would put some new frills on my shirts?---"with the greatest pleasure." if she could get the little image mended? "it was broken in three pieces, and the sword was gone, but she would try." i then asked her to make up a plaid silk which i had given her in the winter, and which she said would make a pretty summer gown. i so longed to see her in it!--"she had little time to spare, but perhaps might!" think what i felt, talking peaceably, kindly, tenderly with my love,--not passionately, not violently. i tried to take pattern by her patient meekness, as i thought it, and to subdue my desires to her will. i then sued to her, but respectfully, to be admitted to her friendship--she must know i was as true a friend as ever woman had--or if there was a bar to our intimacy from a dearer attachment, to let me know it frankly, as i shewed her all my heart. she drew out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes "of tears which sacred pity had engendered there." was it so or not? i cannot tell. but so she stood (while i pleaded my cause to her with all the earnestness, and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her head stooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution; but without speaking a word, without altering a feature. it was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion. "ah!" i said, "how you look! i have prayed again and again while i was away from you, in the agony of my spirit, that i might but live to see you look so again, and then breathe my last!" i intreated her to give me some explanation. in vain! at length she said she must go, and disappeared like a spirit. that week she did all the little trifling favours i had asked of her. the frills were put on, and she sent up to know if i wanted any more done. she got the buonaparte mended. this was like healing old wounds indeed! how? as follows, for thereby hangs the conclusion of my tale. listen. i had sent a message one evening to speak to her about some special affairs of the house, and received no answer. i waited an hour expecting her, and then went out in great vexation at my disappointment. i complained to her mother a day or two after, saying i thought it so unlike sarah's usual propriety of behaviour, that she must mean it as a mark of disrespect. mrs. l---said, "la! sir, you're always fancying things. why, she was dressing to go out, and she was only going to get the little image you're both so fond of mended; and it's to be done this evening. she has been to two or three places to see about it, before she could get anyone to undertake it." my heart, my poor fond heart, almost melted within me at this news. i answered, "ah! madam, that's always the way with the dear creature. i am finding fault with her and thinking the hardest things of her; and at that very time she's doing something to shew the most delicate attention, and that she has no greater satisfaction than in gratifying my wishes!" on this we had some farther talk, and i took nearly the whole of the lodgings at a hundred guineas a year, that (as i said) she might have a little leisure to sit at her needle of an evening, or to read if she chose, or to walk out when it was fine. she was not in good health, and it would do her good to be less confined. i would be the drudge and she should no longer be the slave. i asked nothing in return. to see her happy, to make her so, was to be so myself.--this was agreed to. i went over to blackheath that evening, delighted as i could be after all i had suffered, and lay the whole of the next morning on the heath under the open sky, dreaming of my earthly goddess. this was sunday. that evening i returned, for i could hardly bear to be for a moment out of the house where she was, and the next morning she tapped at the door--it was opened--it was she--she hesitated and then came forward: she had got the little image in her hand, i took it, and blest her from my heart. she said "they had been obliged to put some new pieces to it." i said "i didn't care how it was done, so that i had it restored to me safe, and by her." i thanked her and begged to shake hands with her. she did so, and as i held the only hand in the world that i never wished to let go, i looked up in her face, and said "have pity on me, have pity on me, and save me if you can!" not a word of answer, but she looked full in my eyes, as much as to say, "well, i'll think of it; and if i can, i will save you!" we talked about the expense of repairing the figure. "was the man waiting?"--"no, she had fetched it on saturday evening." i said i'd give her the money in the course of the day, and then shook hands with her again in token of reconciliation; and she went waving out of the room, but at the door turned round and looked full at me, as she did the first time she beguiled me of my heart. this was the last.-all that day i longed to go down stairs to ask her and her mother to set out with me for scotland on wednesday, and on saturday i would make her my wife. something withheld me. in the evening, however, i could not rest without seeing her, and i said to her younger sister, "betsey, if sarah will come up now, i'll pay her what she laid out for me the other day."--"my sister's gone out, sir," was the answer. what again! thought i, that's somewhat sudden. i told p---her sitting in the window-seat of the front parlour boded me no good. it was not in her old character. she did not use to know there were doors or windows in the house--and now she goes out three times in a week. it is to meet some one, i'll lay my life on't. "where is she gone?"--"to my grandmother's, sir." "where does your grandmother live now?"--"at somers' town." i immediately set out to somers' town. i passed one or two streets, and at last turned up king street, thinking it most likely she would return that way home. i passed a house in king street where i had once lived, and had not proceeded many paces, ruminating on chance and change and old times, when i saw her coming towards me. i felt a strange pang at the sight, but i thought her alone. some people before me moved on, and i saw another person with her. the murder was out. it was a tall, rather well-looking young man, but i did not at first recollect him. we passed at the crossing of the street without speaking. will you believe it, after all that had past between us for two years, after what had passed in the last half-year, after what had passed that very morning, she went by me without even changing countenance, without expressing the slightest emotion, without betraying either shame or pity or remorse or any other feeling that any other human being but herself must have shewn in the same situation. she had no time to prepare for acting a part, to suppress her feelings--the truth is, she has not one natural feeling in her bosom to suppress. i turned and looked--they also turned and looked and as if by mutual consent, we both retrod our steps and passed again, in the same way. i went home. i was stifled. i could not stay in the house, walked into the street and met them coming towards home. as soon as he had left her at the door (i fancy she had prevailed with him to accompany her, dreading some violence) i returned, went up stairs, and requested an interview. tell her, i said, i'm in excellent temper and good spirits, but i must see her! she came smiling, and i said, "come in, my dear girl, and sit down, and tell me all about it, how it is and who it is."--" what," she said, "do you mean mr. c----?" "oh," said i, "then it is he! ah! you rogue, i always suspected there was something between you, but you know you denied it lustily: why did you not tell me all about it at the time, instead of letting me suffer as i have done? but, however, no reproaches. i only wish it may all end happily and honourably for you, and i am satisfied. but," i said, "you know you used to tell me, you despised looks."--"she didn't think mr. c---was so particularly handsome." "no, but he's very well to pass, and a well-grown youth into the bargain." pshaw! let me put an end to the fulsome detail. i found he had lived over the way, that he had been lured thence, no doubt, almost a year before, that they had first spoken in the street, and that he had never once hinted at marriage, and had gone away, because (as he said) they were too much together, and that it was better for her to meet him occasionally out of doors. "there could be no harm in them walking together." "no, but you may go some where afterwards."--" one must trust to one's principle for that." consummate hypocrite! * * * * * * i told her mr. m----, who had married her sister, did not wish to leave the house. i, who would have married her, did not wish to leave it. i told her i hoped i should not live to see her come to shame, after all my love of her; but put her on her guard as well as i could, and said, after the lengths she had permitted herself with me, i could not help being alarmed at the influence of one over her, whom she could hardly herself suppose to have a tenth part of my esteem for her!! she made no answer to this, but thanked me coldly for my good advice, and rose to go. i begged her to sit a few minutes, that i might try to recollect if there was anything else i wished to say to her, perhaps for the last time; and then, not finding anything, i bade her good night, and asked for a farewell kiss. do you know she refused; so little does she understand what is due to friendship, or love, or honour! we parted friends, however, and i felt deep grief, but no enmity against her. i thought c---had pressed his suit after i went, and had prevailed. there was no harm in that--a little fickleness or so, a little over-pretension to unalterable attachment--but that was all. she liked him better than me--it was my hard hap, but i must bear it. i went out to roam the desert streets, when, turning a corner, whom should i meet but her very lover? i went up to him and asked for a few minutes' conversation on a subject that was highly interesting to me and i believed not indifferent to him: and in the course of four hours' talk, it came out that for three months previous to my quitting london for scotland, she had been playing the same game with him as with me--that he breakfasted first, and enjoyed an hour of her society, and then i took my turn, so that we never jostled; and this explained why, when he came back sometimes and passed my door, as she was sitting in my lap, she coloured violently, thinking if her lover looked in, what a denouement there would be. he could not help again and again expressing his astonishment at finding that our intimacy had continued unimpaired up to so late a period after he came, and when they were on the most intimate footing. she used to deny positively to him that there was anything between us, just as she used to assure me with impenetrable effrontery that "mr. c---was nothing to her, but merely a lodger." all this while she kept up the farce of her romantic attachment to her old lover, vowed that she never could alter in that respect, let me go to scotland on the solemn and repeated assurance that there was no new flame, that there was no bar between us but this shadowy love--i leave her on this understanding, she becomes more fond or more intimate with her new lover; he quitting the house (whether tired out or not, i can't say)--in revenge she ceases to write to me, keeps me in wretched suspense, treats me like something loathsome to her when i return to enquire the cause, denies it with scorn and impudence, destroys me and shews no pity, no desire to soothe or shorten the pangs she has occasioned by her wantonness and hypocrisy, and wishes to linger the affair on to the last moment, going out to keep an appointment with another while she pretends to be obliging me in the tenderest point (which c---himself said was too much). . . .what do you think of all this? shall i tell you my opinion? but i must try to do it in another letter. to the same (in conclusion) i did not sleep a wink all that night; nor did i know till the next day the full meaning of what had happened to me. with the morning's light, conviction glared in upon me that i had not only lost her for ever--but every feeling i had ever had towards her--respect, tenderness, pity--all but my fatal passion, was gone. the whole was a mockery, a frightful illusion. i had embraced the false florimel instead of the true; or was like the man in the arabian nights who had married a goul. how different was the idea i once had of her? was this she, --"who had been beguiled--she who was made within a gentle bosom to be laid- to bless and to be blessed--to be heart-bare to one who found his bettered likeness there- to think for ever with him, like a bride- to haunt his eye, like taste personified- to double his delight, to share his sorrow, and like a morning beam, wake to him every morrow? i saw her pale, cold form glide silent by me, dead to shame as to pity. still i seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to my bosom; this lifeless image, which was all that was left of my love, was the only thing to which my sad heart clung. were she dead, should i not wish to gaze once more upon her pallid features? she is dead to me; but what she once was to me, can never die! the agony, the conflict of hope and fear, of adoration and jealousy is over; or it would, ere long, have ended with my life. i am no more lifted now to heaven, and then plunged in the abyss; but i seem to have been thrown from the top of a precipice, and to lie groveling, stunned, and stupefied. i am melancholy, lonesome, and weaker than a child. the worst is, i have no prospect of any alteration for the better: she has cut off all possibility of a reconcilement at any future period. were she even to return to her former pretended fondness and endearments, i could have no pleasure, no confidence in them. i can scarce make out the contradiction to myself. i strive to think she always was what i now know she is; but i have great difficulty in it, and can hardly believe but she still is what she so long seemed. poor thing! i am afraid she is little better off herself; nor do i see what is to become of her, unless she throws off the mask at once, and runs a-muck at infamy. she is exposed and laid bare to all those whose opinion she set a value upon. yet she held her head very high, and must feel (if she feels any thing) proportionably mortified.--a more complete experiment on character was never made. if i had not met her lover immediately after i parted with her, it would have been nothing. i might have supposed she had changed her mind in my absence, and had given him the preference as soon as she felt it, and even shewn her delicacy in declining any farther intimacy with me. but it comes out that she had gone on in the most forward and familiar way with both at once--(she could not change her mind in passing from one room to another)--told both the same barefaced and unblushing falsehoods, like the commonest creature; received presents from me to the very last, and wished to keep up the game still longer, either to gratify her humour, her avarice, or her vanity in playing with my passion, or to have me as a dernier resort, in case of accidents. again, it would have been nothing, if she had not come up with her demure, well-composed, wheedling looks that morning, and then met me in the evening in a situation, which (she believed) might kill me on the spot, with no more feeling than a common courtesan shews, who bilks a customer, and passes him, leering up at her bully, the moment after. if there had been the frailty of passion, it would have been excusable; but it is evident she is a practised, callous jilt, a regular lodging-house decoy, played off by her mother upon the lodgers, one after another, applying them to her different purposes, laughing at them in turns, and herself the probable dupe and victim of some favourite gallant in the end. i know all this; but what do i gain by it, unless i could find some one with her shape and air, to supply the place of the lovely apparition? that a professed wanton should come and sit on a man's knee, and put her arms round his neck, and caress him, and seem fond of him, means nothing, proves nothing, no one concludes anything from it; but that a pretty, reserved, modest, delicate-looking girl should do this, from the first hour to the last of your being in the house, without intending anything by it, is new, and, i think, worth explaining. it was, i confess, out of my calculation, and may be out of that of others. her unmoved indifference and self-possession all the while, shew that it is her constant practice. her look even, if closely examined, bears this interpretation. it is that of studied hypocrisy or startled guilt, rather than of refined sensibility or conscious innocence. "she defied anyone to read her thoughts?" she once told me. "do they then require concealing?" i imprudently asked her. the command over herself is surprising. she never once betrays herself by any momentary forgetfulness, by any appearance of triumph or superiority to the person who is her dupe, by any levity of manner in the plenitude of her success; it is one faultless, undeviating, consistent, consummate piece of acting. were she a saint on earth, she could not seem more like one. her hypocritical high-flown pretensions, indeed, make her the worse: but still the ascendancy of her will, her determined perseverance in what she undertakes to do, has something admirable in it, approaching to the heroic. she is certainly an extraordinary girl! her retired manner, and invariable propriety of behaviour made me think it next to impossible she could grant the same favours indiscriminately to every one that she did to me. yet this now appears to be the fact. she must have done the very same with c----, invited him into the house to carry on a closer intrigue with her, and then commenced the double game with both together. she always "despised looks." this was a favourite phrase with her, and one of the hooks which she baited for me. nothing could win her but a man's behaviour and sentiments. besides, she could never like another--she was a martyr to disappointed affection--and friendship was all she could even extend to any other man. all the time, she was making signals, playing off her pretty person, and having occasional interviews in the street with this very man, whom she could only have taken so sudden and violent a liking to him from his looks, his personal appearance, and what she probably conjectured of his circumstances. her sister had married a counsellor--the miss f----'s, who kept the house before, had done so too--and so would she. "there was a precedent for it." yet if she was so desperately enamoured of this new acquaintance, if he had displaced the little image from her breast, if he was become her second "unalterable attachment" (which i would have given my life to have been) why continue the same unwarrantable familiarities with me to the last, and promise that they should be renewed on my return (if i had not unfortunately stumbled upon the truth to her aunt) and yet keep up the same refined cant about her old attachment all the time, as if it was that which stood in the way of my pretensions, and not her faithlessness to it? "if one swerves from one, one shall swerve from another"--was her excuse for not returning my regard. yet that which i thought a prophecy, was i suspect a history. she had swerved twice from her avowed engagements, first to me, and then from me to another. if she made a fool of me, what did she make of her lover? i fancy he has put that question to himself. i said nothing to him about the amount of the presents; which is another damning circumstance, that might have opened my eyes long before; but they were shut by my fond affection, which "turned all to favour and to prettiness." she cannot be supposed to have kept up an appearance of old regard to me, from a fear of hurting my feelings by her desertion; for she not only shewed herself indifferent to, but evidently triumphed in my sufferings, and heaped every kind of insult and indignity upon them. i must have incurred her contempt and resentment by my mistaken delicacy at different times; and her manner, when i have hinted at becoming a reformed man in this respect, convinces me of it. "she hated it!" she always hated whatever she liked most. she "hated mr. c----'s red slippers," when he first came! one more count finishes the indictment. she not only discovered the most hardened indifference to the feelings of others; she has not shewn the least regard to her own character, or shame when she was detected. when found out, she seemed to say, "well, what if i am? i have played the game as long as i could; and if i could keep it up no longer, it was not for want of good will!" her colouring once or twice is the only sign of grace she has exhibited. such is the creature on whom i had thrown away my heart and soul-one who was incapable of feeling the commonest emotions of human nature, as they regarded herself or any one else. "she had no feelings with respect to herself," she often said. she in fact knows what she is, and recoils from the good opinion or sympathy of others, which she feels to be founded on a deception; so that my overweening opinion of her must have appeared like irony, or direct insult. my seeing her in the street has gone a good way to satisfy me. her manner there explains her manner in-doors to be conscious and overdone; and besides, she looks but indifferently. she is diminutive in stature, and her measured step and timid air do not suit these public airings. i am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagination, as well as worthless in herself. her image seems fast "going into the wastes of time," like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me. alas! thou poor hapless weed, when i entirely lose sight of thee, and for ever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my heart again! transcribed from the 1894 cassell & co. edition by david price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk letters on england by voltaire introduction francois marie arouet, who called himself voltaire, was the son of francois arouet of poitou, who lived in paris, had given up his office of notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the chambre des comptes. voltaire was born in the year 1694. he lived until within ten or eleven years of the outbreak of the great french revolution, and was a chief leader in the movement of thought that preceded the revolution. though he lived to his eighty-fourth year, voltaire was born with a weak body. his brother armand, eight years his senior, became a jansenist. voltaire when ten years old was placed with the jesuits in the college louis-legrand. there he was taught during seven years, and his genius was encouraged in its bent for literature; skill in speaking and in writing being especially fostered in the system of education which the jesuits had planned to produce capable men who by voice and pen could give a reason for the faith they held. verses written for an invalid soldier at the age of eleven won for young voltaire the friendship of ninon l'enclos, who encouraged him to go on writing verses. she died soon afterwards, and remembered him with a legacy of two thousand livres for purchase of books. he wrote in his lively school-days a tragedy that afterwards he burnt. at the age of seventeen he left the college louisle-grand, where he said afterwards that he had been taught nothing but latin and the stupidities. he was then sent to the law schools, and saw life in paris as a gay young poet who, with all his brilliant liveliness, had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one of whose first poems was an "ode on the misfortunes of life." his mother died when he was twenty. voltaire's father thought him a fool for his versifying, and attached him as secretary to the marquis of chateauneuf; when he went as ambassador to the hague. in december, 1713, he was dismissed for his irregularities. in paris his unsteadiness and his addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him housed in a country chateau with m. de caumartin. m. de caumartin's father talked with such enthusiasm of henri iv. and sully that voltaire planned the writing of what became his _henriade_, and his "history of the age of louis xiv.," who died on the 1st of september, 1715. under the regency that followed, voltaire got into trouble again and again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse that satirised the regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of may, 1717--in the bastille. there he wrote the first two books of his _henriade_, and finished a play on oedipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen. he did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of april, 1718, and it was at this time--with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took with work of high attempt in literature--that francois marie arouet, aged twenty-four, first called himself voltaire. voltaire's _oedipe_ was played with success in november, 1718. a few months later he was again banished from paris, and finished the _henriade_ in his retirement, as well as another play, _artemise_, that was acted in february, 1720. other plays followed. in december, 1721, voltaire visited lord bolingbroke, who was then an exile from england, at the chateau of la source. there was now constant literary activity. from july to october, 1722, voltaire visited holland with madame de rupelmonde. after a serious attack of small-pox in november, 1723, voltaire was active as a poet about the court. he was then in receipt of a pension of two thousand livres from the king, and had inherited more than twice as much by the death of his father in january, 1722. but in december, 1725, a quarrel, fastened upon him by the chevalier de rohan, who had him waylaid and beaten, caused him to send a challenge. for this he was arrested and lodged once more, in april, 1726, in the bastille. there he was detained a month; and his first act when he was released was to ask for a passport to england. voltaire left france, reached london in august, 1726, went as guest to the house of a rich merchant at wandsworth, and remained three years in this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five. he was here when george i. died, and george ii. became king. he published here his _henriade_. he wrote here his "history of charles xii." he read "gulliver's travels" as a new book, and might have been present at the first night of _the beggar's opera_. he was here whet sir isaac newton died. in 1731 he published at rouen the _lettres sur les anglais_, which appeared in england in 1733 in the volume from which they are here reprinted. h.m. letters on england letter i.--on the quakers i was of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a people were worthy the attention of the curious. to acquaint myself with them i made a visit to one of the most eminent quakers in england, who, after having traded thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune and to his desires, and was settled in a little solitude not far from london. being come into it, i perceived a small but regularly built house, vastly neat, but without the least pomp of furniture. the quaker who owned it was a hale, ruddy-complexioned old man, who had never been afflicted with sickness because he had always been insensible to passions, and a perfect stranger to intemperance. i never in my life saw a more noble or a more engaging aspect than his. he was dressed like those of his persuasion, in a plain coat without pleats in the sides, or buttons on the pockets and sleeves; and had on a beaver, the brims of which were horizontal like those of our clergy. he did not uncover himself when i appeared, and advanced towards me without once stooping his body; but there appeared more politeness in the open, humane air of his countenance, than in the custom of drawing one leg behind the other, and taking that from the head which is made to cover it. "friend," says he to me, "i perceive thou art a stranger, but if i can do anything for thee, only tell me." "sir," said i to him, bending forwards and advancing, as is usual with us, one leg towards him, "i flatter myself that my just curiosity will not give you the least offence, and that you'll do me the honour to inform me of the particulars of your religion." "the people of thy country," replied the quaker, "are too full of their bows and compliments, but i never yet met with one of them who had so much curiosity as thyself. come in, and let us first dine together." i still continued to make some very unseasonable ceremonies, it not being easy to disengage one's self at once from habits we have been long used to; and after taking part in a frugal meal, which began and ended with a prayer to god, i began to question my courteous host. i opened with that which good catholics have more than once made to huguenots. "my dear sir," said i, "were you ever baptised?" "i never was," replied the quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "zounds!" say i to him, "you are not christians, then." "friend," replies the old man in a soft tone of voice, "swear not; we are christians, and endeavour to be good christians, but we are not of opinion that the sprinkling water on a child's head makes him a christian." "heavens!" say i, shocked at his impiety, "you have then forgot that christ was baptised by st. john." "friend," replies the mild quaker once again, "swear not; christ indeed was baptised by john, but he himself never baptised anyone. we are the disciples of christ, not of john." i pitied very much the sincerity of my worthy quaker, and was absolutely for forcing him to get himself christened. "were that all," replied he very gravely, "we would submit cheerfully to baptism, purely in compliance with thy weakness, for we don't condemn any person who uses it; but then we think that those who profess a religion of so holy, so spiritual a nature as that of christ, ought to abstain to the utmost of their power from the jewish ceremonies." "o unaccountable!" say i: "what! baptism a jewish ceremony?" "yes, my friend," says he, "so truly jewish, that a great many jews use the baptism of john to this day. look into ancient authors, and thou wilt find that john only revived this practice; and that it had been used by the hebrews, long before his time, in like manner as the mahometans imitated the ishmaelites in their pilgrimages to mecca. jesus indeed submitted to the baptism of john, as he had suffered himself to be circumcised; but circumcision and the washing with water ought to be abolished by the baptism of christ, that baptism of the spirit, that ablution of the soul, which is the salvation of mankind. thus the forerunner said, 'i indeed baptise you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier than i, whose shoes i am not worthy to bear: he shall baptise you with the holy ghost and with fire.' likewise paul, the great apostle of the gentiles, writes as follows to the corinthians, 'christ sent me not to baptise, but to preach the gospel;' and indeed paul never baptised but two persons with water, and that very much against his inclinations. he circumcised his disciple timothy, and the other disciples likewise circumcised all who were willing to submit to that carnal ordinance. but art thou circumcised?" added he. "i have not the honour to be so," say i. "well, friend," continues the quaker, "thou art a christian without being circumcised, and i am one without being baptised." thus did this pious man make a wrong but very specious application of four or five texts of scripture which seemed to favour the tenets of his sect; but at the same time forgot very sincerely an hundred texts which made directly against them. i had more sense than to contest with him, since there is no possibility of convincing an enthusiast. a man should never pretend to inform a lover of his mistress's faults, no more than one who is at law, of the badness of his cause; nor attempt to win over a fanatic by strength of reasoning. accordingly i waived the subject. "well," said i to him, "what sort of a communion have you?" "we have none like that thou hintest at among us," replied he. "how! no communion?" said i. "only that spiritual one," replied he, "of hearts." he then began again to throw out his texts of scripture; and preached a most eloquent sermon against that ordinance. he harangued in a tone as though he had been inspired, to prove that the sacraments were merely of human invention, and that the word "sacrament" was not once mentioned in the gospel. "excuse," said he, "my ignorance, for i have not employed a hundredth part of the arguments which might be brought to prove the truth of our religion, but these thou thyself mayest peruse in the exposition of our faith written by robert barclay. it is one of the best pieces that ever was penned by man; and as our adversaries confess it to be of dangerous tendency, the arguments in it must necessarily be very convincing." i promised to peruse this piece, and my quaker imagined he had already made a convert of me. he afterwards gave me an account in few words of some singularities which make this sect the contempt of others. "confess," said he, "that it was very difficult for thee to refrain from laughter, when i answered all thy civilities without uncovering my head, and at the same time said 'thee' and 'thou' to thee. however, thou appearest to me too well read not to know that in christ's time no nation was so ridiculous as to put the plural number for the singular. augustus caesar himself was spoken to in such phrases as these: 'i love thee,' 'i beseech thee,' 'i thank thee;' but he did not allow any person to call him 'domine,' sir. it was not till many ages after that men would have the word 'you,' as though they were double, instead of 'thou' employed in speaking to them; and usurped the flattering titles of lordship, of eminence, and of holiness, which mere worms bestow on other worms by assuring them that they are with a most profound respect, and an infamous falsehood, their most obedient humble servants. it is to secure ourselves more strongly from such a shameless traffic of lies and flattery, that we 'thee' and 'thou' a king with the same freedom as we do a beggar, and salute no person; we owing nothing to mankind but charity, and to the laws respect and obedience. "our apparel is also somewhat different from that of others, and this purely, that it may be a perpetual warning to us not to imitate them. others wear the badges and marks of their several dignities, and we those of christian humility. we fly from all assemblies of pleasure, from diversions of every kind, and from places where gaming is practised; and indeed our case would be very deplorable, should we fill with such levities as those i have mentioned the heart which ought to be the habitation of god. we never swear, not even in a court of justice, being of opinion that the most holy name of god ought not to be prostituted in the miserable contests betwixt man and man. when we are obliged to appear before a magistrate upon other people's account (for law-suits are unknown among the friends), we give evidence to the truth by sealing it with our yea or nay; and the judges believe us on our bare affirmation, whilst so many other christians forswear themselves on the holy gospels. we never war or fight in any case; but it is not that we are afraid, for so far from shuddering at the thoughts of death, we on the contrary bless the moment which unites us with the being of beings; but the reason of our not using the outward sword is, that we are neither wolves, tigers, nor mastiffs, but men and christians. our god, who has commanded us to love our enemies, and to suffer without repining, would certainly not permit us to cross the seas, merely because murderers clothed in scarlet, and wearing caps two foot high, enlist citizens by a noise made with two little sticks on an ass's skin extended. and when, after a victory is gained, the whole city of london is illuminated; when the sky is in a blaze with fireworks, and a noise is heard in the air, of thanksgivings, of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we groan in silence, and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings." letter ii.--on the quakers such was the substance of the conversation i had with this very singular person; but i was greatly surprised to see him come the sunday following and take me with him to the quakers' meeting. there are several of these in london, but that which he carried me to stands near the famous pillar called the monument. the brethren were already assembled at my entering it with my guide. there might be about four hundred men and three hundred women in the meeting. the women hid their faces behind their fans, and the men were covered with their broad-brimmed hats. all were seated, and the silence was universal. i passed through them, but did not perceive so much as one lift up his eyes to look at me. this silence lasted a quarter of an hour, when at last one of them rose up, took off his hat, and, after making a variety of wry faces and groaning in a most lamentable manner, he, partly from his nose and partly from his mouth, threw out a strange, confused jumble of words (borrowed, as he imagined, from the gospel) which neither himself nor any of his hearers understood. when this distorter had ended his beautiful soliloquy, and that the stupid, but greatly edified, congregation were separated, i asked my friend how it was possible for the judicious part of their assembly to suffer such a babbling? "we are obliged," says he, "to suffer it, because no one knows when a man rises up to hold forth whether he will be moved by the spirit or by folly. in this doubt and uncertainty we listen patiently to everyone; we even allow our women to hold forth. two or three of these are often inspired at one and the same time, and it is then that a most charming noise is heard in the lord's house." "you have, then, no priests?" say i to him. "no, no, friend," replies the quaker, "to our great happiness." then opening one of the friends' books, as he called it, he read the following words in an emphatic tone:--"'god forbid we should presume to ordain anyone to receive the holy spirit on the lord's day to the prejudice of the rest of the brethren.' thanks to the almighty, we are the only people upon earth that have no priests. wouldst thou deprive us of so happy a distinction? why should we abandon our babe to mercenary nurses, when we ourselves have milk enough for it? these mercenary creatures would soon domineer in our houses and destroy both the mother and the babe. god has said, 'freely you have received, freely give.' shall we, after these words, cheapen, as it were, the gospel, sell the holy ghost, and make of an assembly of christians a mere shop of traders? we don't pay a set of men clothed in black to assist our poor, to bury our dead, or to preach to the brethren. these offices are all of too tender a nature for us ever to entrust them to others." "but how is it possible for you," said i, with some warmth, "to know whether your discourse is really inspired by the almighty?" "whosoever," says he, "shall implore christ to enlighten him, and shall publish the gospel truths he may feel inwardly, such an one may be assured that he is inspired by the lord." he then poured forth a numberless multitude of scripture texts which proved, as he imagined, that there is no such thing as christianity without an immediate revelation, and added these remarkable words: "when thou movest one of thy limbs, is it moved by thy own power? certainly not; for this limb is often sensible to involuntary motions. consequently he who created thy body gives motion to this earthly tabernacle. and are the several ideas of which thy soul receives the impression formed by thyself? much less are they, since these pour in upon thy mind whether thou wilt or no; consequently thou receivest thy ideas from him who created thy soul. but as he leaves thy affections at full liberty, he gives thy mind such ideas as thy affections may deserve; if thou livest in god, thou actest, thou thinkest in god. after this thou needest only but open thine eyes to that light which enlightens all mankind, and it is then thou wilt perceive the truth, and make others perceive it." "why, this," said i, "is malebranche's doctrine to a tittle." "i am acquainted with thy malebranche," said he; "he had something of the friend in him, but was not enough so." these are the most considerable particulars i learnt concerning the doctrine of the quakers. in my next letter i shall acquaint you with their history, which you will find more singular than their opinions. letter iii.--on the quakers you have already heard that the quakers date from christ, who, according to them, was the first quaker. religion, say these, was corrupted a little after his death, and remained in that state of corruption about sixteen hundred years. but there were always a few quakers concealed in the world, who carefully preserved the sacred fire, which was extinguished in all but themselves, until at last this light spread itself in england in 1642. it was at the time when great britain was torn to pieces by the intestine wars which three or four sects had raised in the name of god, that one george fox, born in leicestershire, and son to a silk-weaver, took it into his head to preach, and, as he pretended, with all the requisites of a true apostle--that is, without being able either to read or write. he was about twenty-five years of age, irreproachable in his life and conduct, and a holy madman. he was equipped in leather from head to foot, and travelled from one village to another, exclaiming against war and the clergy. had his invectives been levelled against the soldiery only he would have been safe enough, but he inveighed against ecclesiastics. fox was seized at derby, and being carried before a justice of peace, he did not once offer to pull off his leathern hat, upon which an officer gave him a great box of the ear, and cried to him, "don't you know you are to appear uncovered before his worship?" fox presented his other cheek to the officer, and begged him to give him another box for god's sake. the justice would have had him sworn before he asked him any questions. "know, friend," says fox to him, "that i never swear." the justice, observing he "thee'd" and "thou'd" him, sent him to the house of correction, in derby, with orders that he should be whipped there. fox praised the lord all the way he went to the house of correction, where the justice's order was executed with the utmost severity. the men who whipped this enthusiast were greatly surprised to hear him beseech them to give him a few more lashes for the good of his soul. there was no need of entreating these people; the lashes were repeated, for which fox thanked them very cordially, and began to preach. at first the spectators fell a-laughing, but they afterwards listened to him; and as enthusiasm is an epidemical distemper, many were persuaded, and those who scourged him became his first disciples. being set at liberty, he ran up and down the country with a dozen proselytes at his heels, still declaiming against the clergy, and was whipped from time to time. being one day set in the pillory, he harangued the crowd in so strong and moving a manner, that fifty of the auditors became his converts, and he won the rest so much in his favour that, his head being freed tumultuously from the hole where it was fastened, the populace went and searched for the church of england clergyman who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing him to this punishment, and set him on the same pillory where fox had stood. fox was bold enough to convert some of oliver cromwell's soldiers, who thereupon quitted the service and refused to take the oaths. oliver, having as great a contempt for a sect which would not allow its members to fight, as sixtus quintus had for another sect, _dove non si chiamava_, began to persecute these new converts. the prisons were crowded with them, but persecution seldom has any other effect than to increase the number of proselytes. these came, therefore, from their confinement more strongly confirmed in the principles they had imbibed, and followed by their gaolers, whom they had brought over to their belief. but the circumstances which contributed chiefly to the spreading of this sect were as follows:--fox thought himself inspired, and consequently was of opinion that he must speak in a manner different from the rest of mankind. he thereupon began to writhe his body, to screw up his face, to hold in his breath, and to exhale it in a forcible manner, insomuch that the priestess of the pythian god at delphos could not have acted her part to better advantage. inspiration soon became so habitual to him that he could scarce deliver himself in any other manner. this was the first gift he communicated to his disciples. these aped very sincerely their master's several grimaces, and shook in every limb the instant the fit of inspiration came upon them, whence they were called quakers. the vulgar attempted to mimic them; they trembled, they spake through the nose, they quaked and fancied themselves inspired by the holy ghost. the only thing now wanting was a few miracles, and accordingly they wrought some. fox, this modern patriarch, spoke thus to a justice of peace before a large assembly of people: "friend, take care what thou dost; god will soon punish thee for persecuting his saints." this magistrate, being one who besotted himself every day with bad beer and brandy, died of an apoplexy two days after, the moment he had signed a _mittimus_ for imprisoning some quakers. the sudden death with which this justice was seized was not ascribed to his intemperance, but was universally looked upon as the effect of the holy man's predictions; so that this accident made more converts to quakerism than a thousand sermons and as many shaking fits could have done. oliver, finding them increase daily, was desirous of bringing them over to his party, and for that purpose attempted to bribe them by money. however, they were incorruptible, which made him one day declare that this religion was the only one he had ever met with that had resisted the charms of gold. the quakers were several times persecuted under charles ii.; not upon a religious account, but for refusing to pay the tithes, for "theeing" and "thouing" the magistrates, and for refusing to take the oaths enacted by the laws. at last robert barclay, a native of scotland, presented to the king, in 1675, his "apology for the quakers," a work as well drawn up as the subject could possibly admit. the dedication to charles ii. is not filled with mean, flattering encomiums, but abounds with bold touches in favour of truth and with the wisest counsels. "thou hast tasted," says he to the king at the close of his epistle dedicatory, "of prosperity and adversity; thou knowest what it is to be banished thy native country; to be overruled as well as to rule and sit upon the throne; and, being oppressed, thou hast reason to know how hateful the oppressor is both to god and man. if, after all these warnings and advertisements, thou dost not turn unto the lord with all thy heart, but forget him who remembered thee in thy distress, and give up thyself to follow lust and vanity, surely great will be thy condemnation. "against which snare, as well as the temptation of those that may or do feed thee and prompt thee to evil, the most excellent and prevalent remedy will be, to apply thyself to that light of christ which shineth in thy conscience, which neither can nor will flatter thee nor suffer thee to be at ease in thy sins, but doth and will deal plainly and faithfully with thee, as those that are followers thereof have plainly done.--thy faithful friend and subject, robert barclay." a more surprising circumstance is, that this epistle, written by a private man of no figure, was so happy in its effects, as to put a stop to the persecution. letter iv.--on the quakers about this time arose the illustrious william penn, who established the power of the quakers in america, and would have made them appear venerable in the eyes of the europeans, were it possible for mankind to respect virtue when revealed in a ridiculous light. he was the only son of vice-admiral penn, favourite of the duke of york, afterwards king james ii. william penn, at twenty years of age, happening to meet with a quaker in cork, whom he had known at oxford, this man made a proselyte of him; and william being a sprightly youth, and naturally eloquent, having a winning aspect, and a very engaging carriage, he soon gained over some of his intimates. he carried matters so far, that he formed by insensible degrees a society of young quakers, who met at his house; so that he was at the head of a sect when a little above twenty. being returned, after his leaving cork, to the vice-admiral his father, instead of falling upon his knees to ask his blessing, he went up to him with his hat on, and said, "friend, i am very glad to see thee in good health." the vice-admiral imagined his son to be crazy, but soon finding he was turned quaker, he employed all the methods that prudence could suggest to engage him to behave and act like other people. the youth made no other answer to his father, than by exhorting him to turn quaker also. at last his father confined himself to this single request, viz., "that he should wait upon the king and the duke of york with his hat under his arm, and should not 'thee' and 'thou' them." william answered, "that he could not do these things, for conscience' sake," which exasperated his father to such a degree, that he turned him out of doors. young pen gave god thanks for permitting him to suffer so early in his cause, after which he went into the city, where he held forth, and made a great number of converts. the church of england clergy found their congregations dwindle away daily; and penn being young, handsome, and of a graceful stature, the court as well as the city ladies flocked very devoutly to his meeting. the patriarch, george fox, hearing of his great reputation, came to london (though the journey was very long) purely to see and converse with him. both resolved to go upon missions into foreign countries, and accordingly they embarked for holland, after having left labourers sufficient to take care of the london vineyard. their labours were crowned with success in amsterdam, but a circumstance which reflected the greatest honour on them, and at the same time put their humility to the greatest trial, was the reception they met with from elizabeth, the princess palatine, aunt to george i. of great britain, a lady conspicuous for her genius and knowledge, and to whom descartes had dedicated his philosophical romance. she was then retired to the hague, where she received these friends, for so the quakers were at that time called in holland. this princess had several conferences with them in her palace, and she at last entertained so favourable an opinion of quakerism, that they confessed she was not far from the kingdom of heaven. the friends sowed likewise the good seed in germany, but reaped very little fruit; for the mode of "theeing" and "thouing" was not approved of in a country where a man is perpetually obliged to employ the titles of "highness" and "excellency." william penn returned soon to england upon hearing of his father's sickness, in order to see him before he died. the vice-admiral was reconciled to his son, and though of a different persuasion, embraced him tenderly. william made a fruitless exhortation to his father not to receive the sacrament, but to die a quaker, and the good old man entreated his son william to wear buttons on his sleeves, and a crape hatband in his beaver, but all to no purpose. william penn inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted in crown debts due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea service. no moneys were at that time more insecure than those owing from the king. penn was obliged to go more than once, and "thee" and "thou" king charles and his ministers, in order to recover the debt; and at last, instead of specie, the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of america, to the south of maryland. thus was a quaker raised to sovereign power. penn set sail for his new dominions with two ships freighted with quakers, who followed his fortune. the country was then called pennsylvania from william penn, who there founded philadelphia, now the most flourishing city in that country. the first step he took was to enter into an alliance with his american neighbours, and this is the only treaty between those people and the christians that was not ratified by an oath, and was never infringed. the new sovereign was at the same time the legislator of pennsylvania, and enacted very wise and prudent laws, none of which have ever been changed since his time. the first is, to injure no person upon a religious account, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one god. he had no sooner settled his government, but several american merchants came and peopled this colony. the natives of the country, instead of flying into the woods, cultivated by insensible degrees a friendship with the peaceable quakers. they loved these foreigners as much as they detested the other christians who had conquered and laid waste america. in a little time a great number of these savages (falsely so called), charmed with the mild and gentle disposition of their neighbours, came in crowds to william penn, and besought him to admit them into the number of his vassals. it was very rare and uncommon for a sovereign to be "thee'd" and "thou'd" by the meanest of his subjects, who never took their hats off when they came into his presence; and as singular for a government to be without one priest in it, and for a people to be without arms, either offensive or defensive; for a body of citizens to be absolutely undistinguished but by the public employments, and for neighbours not to entertain the least jealousy one against the other. william penn might glory in having brought down upon earth the so much boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in pennsylvania. he returned to england to settle some affairs relating to his new dominions. after the death of king charles ii., king james, who had loved the father, indulged the same affection to the son, and no longer considered him as an obscure sectary, but as a very great man. the king's politics on this occasion agreed with his inclinations. he was desirous of pleasing the quakers by annulling the laws made against nonconformists, in order to have an opportunity, by this universal toleration, of establishing the romish religion. all the sectarists in england saw the snare that was laid for them, but did not give into it; they never failing to unite when the romish religion, their common enemy, is to be opposed. but penn did not think himself bound in any manner to renounce his principles, merely to favour protestants to whom he was odious, in opposition to a king who loved him. he had established a universal toleration with regard to conscience in america, and would not have it thought that he intended to destroy it in europe, for which reason he adhered so inviolably to king james, that a report prevailed universally of his being a jesuit. this calumny affected him very strongly, and he was obliged to justify himself in print. however, the unfortunate king james ii., in whom, as in most princes of the stuart family, grandeur and weakness were equally blended, and who, like them, as much overdid some things as he was short in others, lost his kingdom in a manner that is hardly to be accounted for. all the english sectarists accepted from william iii, and his parliament the toleration and indulgence which they had refused when offered by king james. it was then the quakers began to enjoy, by virtue of the laws, the several privileges they possess at this time. penn having at last seen quakerism firmly established in his native country, went back to pennsylvania. his own people and the americans received him with tears of joy, as though he had been a father who was returned to visit his children. all the laws had been religiously observed in his absence, a circumstance in which no legislator had ever been happy but himself. after having resided some years in pennsylvania he left it, but with great reluctance, in order to return to england, there to solicit some matters in favour of the commerce of pennsylvania. but he never saw it again, he dying in ruscombe, in berkshire, in 1718. i am not able to guess what fate quakerism may have in america, but i perceive it dwindles away daily in england. in all countries where liberty of conscience is allowed, the established religion will at last swallow up all the rest. quakers are disqualified from being members of parliament; nor can they enjoy any post or preferment, because an oath must always be taken on these occasions, and they never swear. they are therefore reduced to the necessity of subsisting upon traffic. their children, whom the industry of their parents has enriched, are desirous of enjoying honours, of wearing buttons and ruffles; and quite ashamed of being called quakers they become converts to the church of england, merely to be in the fashion. letter v.--on the church of england england is properly the country of sectarists. _multae sunt mansiones in domo patris mei_ (in my father's house are many mansions). an englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own way. nevertheless, though every one is permitted to serve god in whatever mode or fashion he thinks proper, yet their true religion, that in which a man makes his fortune, is the sect of episcopalians or churchmen, called the church of england, or simply the church, by way of eminence. no person can possess an employment either in england or ireland unless he be ranked among the faithful, that is, professes himself a member of the church of england. this reason (which carries mathematical evidence with it) has converted such numbers of dissenters of all persuasions, that not a twentieth part of the nation is out of the pale of the established church. the english clergy have retained a great number of the romish ceremonies, and especially that of receiving, with a most scrupulous attention, their tithes. they also have the pious ambition to aim at superiority. moreover, they inspire very religiously their flock with a holy zeal against dissenters of all denominations. this zeal was pretty violent under the tories in the four last years of queen anne; but was productive of no greater mischief than the breaking the windows of some meeting-houses and the demolishing of a few of them. for religious rage ceased in england with the civil wars, and was no more under queen anne than the hollow noise of a sea whose billows still heaved, though so long after the storm when the whigs and tories laid waste their native country, in the same manner as the guelphs and ghibelins formerly did theirs. it was absolutely necessary for both parties to call in religion on this occasion; the tories declared for episcopacy, and the whigs, as some imagined, were for abolishing it; however, after these had got the upper hand, they contented themselves with only abridging it. at the time when the earl of oxford and the lord bolingbroke used to drink healths to the tories, the church of england considered those noblemen as the defenders of its holy privileges. the lower house of convocation (a kind of house of commons) composed wholly of the clergy, was in some credit at that time; at least the members of it had the liberty to meet, to dispute on ecclesiastical matters, to sentence impious books from time to time to the flames, that is, books written against themselves. the ministry which is now composed of whigs does not so much as allow those gentlemen to assemble, so that they are at this time reduced (in the obscurity of their respective parishes) to the melancholy occupation of praying for the prosperity of the government whose tranquillity they would willingly disturb. with regard to the bishops, who are twenty-six in all, they still have seats in the house of lords in spite of the whigs, because the ancient abuse of considering them as barons subsists to this day. there is a clause, however, in the oath which the government requires from these gentlemen, that puts their christian patience to a very great trial, viz., that they shall be of the church of england as by law established. there are few bishops, deans, or other dignitaries, but imagine they are so _jure divino_; it is consequently a great mortification to them to be obliged to confess that they owe their dignity to a pitiful law enacted by a set of profane laymen. a learned monk (father courayer) wrote a book lately to prove the validity and succession of english ordinations. this book was forbid in france, but do you believe that the english ministry were pleased with it? far from it. those wicked whigs don't care a straw whether the episcopal succession among them hath been interrupted or not, or whether bishop parker was consecrated (as it is pretended) in a tavern or a church; for these whigs are much better pleased that the bishops should derive their authority from the parliament than from the apostles. the lord bolingbroke observed that this notion of divine right would only make so many tyrants in lawn sleeves, but that the laws made so many citizens. with regard to the morals of the english clergy, they are more regular than those of france, and for this reason. all the clergy (a very few excepted) are educated in the universities of oxford or cambridge, far from the depravity and corruption which reign in the capital. they are not called to dignities till very late, at a time of life when men are sensible of no other passion but avarice, that is, when their ambition craves a supply. employments are here bestowed both in the church and the army, as a reward for long services; and we never see youngsters made bishops or colonels immediately upon their laying aside the academical gown; and besides most of the clergy are married. the stiff and awkward air contracted by them at the university, and the little familiarity the men of this country have with the ladies, commonly oblige a bishop to confine himself to, and rest contented with, his own. clergymen sometimes take a glass at the tavern, custom giving them a sanction on this occasion; and if they fuddle themselves it is in a very serious manner, and without giving the least scandal. that fable-mixed kind of mortal (not to be defined), who is neither of the clergy nor of the laity; in a word, the thing called _abbe_ in france; is a species quite unknown in england. all the clergy here are very much upon the reserve, and most of them pedants. when these are told that in france young fellows famous for their dissoluteness, and raised to the highest dignities of the church by female intrigues, address the fair publicly in an amorous way, amuse themselves in writing tender love songs, entertain their friends very splendidly every night at their own houses, and after the banquet is ended withdraw to invoke the assistance of the holy ghost, and call themselves boldly the successors of the apostles, they bless god for their being protestants. but these are shameless heretics, who deserve to be blown hence through the flames to old nick, as rabelais says, and for this reason i do not trouble myself about them. letter vi.--on the presbyterians the church of england is confined almost to the kingdom whence it received its name, and to ireland, for presbyterianism is the established religion in scotland. this presbyterianism is directly the same with calvinism, as it was established in france, and is now professed at geneva. as the priests of this sect receive but very inconsiderable stipends from their churches, and consequently cannot emulate the splendid luxury of bishops, they exclaim very naturally against honours which they can never attain to. figure to yourself the haughty diogenes trampling under foot the pride of plato. the scotch presbyterians are not very unlike that proud though tattered reasoner. diogenes did not use alexander half so impertinently as these treated king charles ii.; for when they took up arms in his cause in opposition to oliver, who had deceived them, they forced that poor monarch to undergo the hearing of three or four sermons every day, would not suffer him to play, reduced him to a state of penitence and mortification, so that charles soon grew sick of these pedants, and accordingly eloped from them with as much joy as a youth does from school. a church of england minister appears as another cato in presence of a juvenile, sprightly french graduate, who bawls for a whole morning together in the divinity schools, and hums a song in chorus with ladies in the evening; but this cato is a very spark when before a scotch presbyterian. the latter affects a serious gait, puts on a sour look, wears a vastly broad-brimmed hat and a long cloak over a very short coat, preaches through the nose, and gives the name of the whore of babylon to all churches where the ministers are so fortunate as to enjoy an annual revenue of five or six thousand pounds, and where the people are weak enough to suffer this, and to give them the titles of my lord, your lordship, or your eminence. these gentlemen, who have also some churches in england, introduced there the mode of grave and severe exhortations. to them is owing the sanctification of sunday in the three kingdoms. people are there forbidden to work or take any recreation on that day, in which the severity is twice as great as that of the romish church. no operas, plays, or concerts are allowed in london on sundays, and even cards are so expressly forbidden that none but persons of quality, and those we call the genteel, play on that day; the rest of the nation go either to church, to the tavern, or to see their mistresses. though the episcopal and presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in great britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a jansenist damns a jesuit. take a view of the royal exchange in london, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. there the jew, the mahometan, and the christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. there the presbyterian confides in the anabaptist, and the churchman depends on the quaker's word. if one religion only were allowed in england, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace. letter vii.--on the socinians, or arians, or antitrinitarians there is a little sect here composed of clergymen, and of a few very learned persons among the laity, who, though they do not call themselves arians or socinians, do yet dissent entirely from st. athanasius with regard to their notions of the trinity, and declare very frankly that the father is greater than the son. do you remember what is related of a certain orthodox bishop, who, in order to convince an emperor of the reality of consubstantiation, put his hand under the chin of the monarch's son, and took him by the nose in presence of his sacred majesty? the emperor was going to order his attendants to throw the bishop out of the window, when the good old man gave him this handsome and convincing reason: "since your majesty," says he, "is angry when your son has not due respect shown him, what punishment do you think will god the father inflict on those who refuse his son jesus the titles due to him?" the persons i just now mentioned declare that the holy bishop took a very wrong step, that his argument was inconclusive, and that the emperor should have answered him thus: "know that there are two ways by which men may be wanting in respect to me--first, in not doing honour sufficient to my son; and, secondly, in paying him the same honour as to me." be this as it will, the principles of arius begin to revive, not only in england, but in holland and poland. the celebrated sir isaac newton honoured this opinion so far as to countenance it. this philosopher thought that the unitarians argued more mathematically than we do. but the most sanguine stickler for arianism is the illustrious dr. clark. this man is rigidly virtuous, and of a mild disposition, is more fond of his tenets than desirous of propagating them, and absorbed so entirely in problems and calculations that he is a mere reasoning machine. it is he who wrote a book which is much esteemed and little understood, on the existence of god, and another, more intelligible, but pretty much contemned, on the truth of the christian religion. he never engaged in scholastic disputes, which our friend calls venerable trifles. he only published a work containing all the testimonies of the primitive ages for and against the unitarians, and leaves to the reader the counting of the voices and the liberty of forming a judgment. this book won the doctor a great number of partisans, and lost him the see of canterbury; but, in my humble opinion, he was out in his calculation, and had better have been primate of all england than merely an arian parson. you see that opinions are subject to revolutions as well as empires. arianism, after having triumphed during three centuries, and been forgot twelve, rises at last out of its own ashes; but it has chosen a very improper season to make its appearance in, the present age being quite cloyed with disputes and sects. the members of this sect are, besides, too few to be indulged the liberty of holding public assemblies, which, however, they will, doubtless, be permitted to do in case they spread considerably. but people are now so very cold with respect to all things of this kind, that there is little probability any new religion, or old one, that may be revived, will meet with favour. is it not whimsical enough that luther, calvin, and zuinglius, all of them wretched authors, should have founded sects which are now spread over a great part of europe, that mahomet, though so ignorant, should have given a religion to asia and africa, and that sir isaac newton, dr. clark, mr. locke, mr. le clerc, etc., the greatest philosophers, as well as the ablest writers of their ages, should scarcely have been able to raise a little flock, which even decreases daily. this it is to be born at a proper period of time. were cardinal de retz to return again into the world, neither his eloquence nor his intrigues would draw together ten women in paris. were oliver cromwell, he who beheaded his sovereign, and seized upon the kingly dignity, to rise from the dead, he would be a wealthy city trader, and no more. letter viii.--on the parliament the members of the english parliament are fond of comparing themselves to the old romans. not long since mr. shippen opened a speech in the house of commons with these words, "the majesty of the people of england would be wounded." the singularity of the expression occasioned a loud laugh; but this gentleman, so far from being disconcerted, repeated the same words with a resolute tone of voice, and the laugh ceased. in my opinion, the majesty of the people of england has nothing in common with that of the people of rome, much less is there any affinity between their governments. there is in london a senate, some of the members whereof are accused (doubtless very unjustly) of selling their voices on certain occasions, as was done in rome; this is the only resemblance. besides, the two nations appear to me quite opposite in character, with regard both to good and evil. the romans never knew the dreadful folly of religious wars, an abomination reserved for devout preachers of patience and humility. marius and sylla, caesar and pompey, anthony and augustus, did not draw their swords and set the world in a blaze merely to determine whether the flamen should wear his shirt over his robe, or his robe over his shirt, or whether the sacred chickens should eat and drink, or eat only, in order to take the augury. the english have hanged one another by law, and cut one another to pieces in pitched battles, for quarrels of as trifling a nature. the sects of the episcopalians and presbyterians quite distracted these very serious heads for a time. but i fancy they will hardly ever be so silly again, they seeming to be grown wiser at their own expense; and i do not perceive the least inclination in them to murder one another merely about syllogisms, as some zealots among them once did. but here follows a more essential difference between rome and england, which gives the advantage entirely to the latter--viz., that the civil wars of rome ended in slavery, and those of the english in liberty. the english are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise government where the prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil; where the nobles are great without insolence, though there are no vassals; and where the people share in the government without confusion. the house of lords and that of the commons divide the legislative power under the king, but the romans had no such balance. the patricians and plebeians in rome were perpetually at variance, and there was no intermediate power to reconcile them. the roman senate, who were so unjustly, so criminally proud as not to suffer the plebeians to share with them in anything, could find no other artifice to keep the latter out of the administration than by employing them in foreign wars. they considered the plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behoved them to let loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their masters. thus the greatest defect in the government of the romans raised them to be conquerors. by being unhappy at home, they triumphed over and possessed themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them to slavery. the government of england will never rise to so exalted a pitch of glory, nor will its end be so fatal. the english are not fired with the splendid folly of making conquests, but would only prevent their neighbours from conquering. they are not only jealous of their own liberty, but even of that of other nations. the english were exasperated against louis xiv. for no other reason but because he was ambitious, and declared war against him merely out of levity, not from any interested motives. the english have doubtless purchased their liberties at a very high price, and waded through seas of blood to drown the idol of arbitrary power. other nations have been involved in as great calamities, and have shed as much blood; but then the blood they spilt in defence of their liberties only enslaved them the more. that which rises to a revolution in england is no more than a sedition in other countries. a city in spain, in barbary, or in turkey, takes up arms in defence of its privileges, when immediately it is stormed by mercenary troops, it is punished by executioners, and the rest of the nation kiss the chains they are loaded with. the french are of opinion that the government of this island is more tempestuous than the sea which surrounds it, which indeed is true; but then it is never so but when the king raises the storm--when he attempts to seize the ship of which he is only the chief pilot. the civil wars of france lasted longer, were more cruel, and productive of greater evils than those of england; but none of these civil wars had a wise and prudent liberty for their object. in the detestable reigns of charles ix. and henry iii. the whole affair was only whether the people should be slaves to the guises. with regard to the last war of paris, it deserves only to be hooted at. methinks i see a crowd of schoolboys rising up in arms against their master, and afterwards whipped for it. cardinal de retz, who was witty and brave (but to no purpose), rebellious without a cause, factious without design, and head of a defenceless party, caballed for caballing sake, and seemed to foment the civil war merely out of diversion. the parliament did not know what he intended, nor what he did not intend. he levied troops by act of parliament, and the next moment cashiered them. he threatened, he begged pardon; he set a price upon cardinal mazarin's head, and afterwards congratulated him in a public manner. our civil wars under charles vi. were bloody and cruel, those of the league execrable, and that of the frondeurs ridiculous. that for which the french chiefly reproach the english nation is the murder of king charles i., whom his subjects treated exactly as he would have treated them had his reign been prosperous. after all, consider on one side charles i., defeated in a pitched battle, imprisoned, tried, sentenced to die in westminster hall, and then beheaded. and on the other, the emperor henry vii., poisoned by his chaplain at his receiving the sacrament; henry iii. stabbed by a monk; thirty assassinations projected against henry iv., several of them put in execution, and the last bereaving that great monarch of his life. weigh, i say, all these wicked attempts, and then judge. letter ix.--on the government that mixture in the english government, that harmony between king, lords, and commons, did not always subsist. england was enslaved for a long series of years by the romans, the saxons, the danes, and the french successively. william the conqueror particularly, ruled them with a rod of iron. he disposed as absolutely of the lives and fortunes of his conquered subjects as an eastern monarch; and forbade, upon pain of death, the english either fire or candle in their houses after eight o'clock; whether was this to prevent their nocturnal meetings, or only to try, by an odd and whimsical prohibition, how far it was possible for one man to extend his power over his fellow-creatures. it is true, indeed, that the english had parliaments before and after william the conqueror, and they boast of them, as though these assemblies then called parliaments, composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers entitled barons, had been the guardians of the public liberty and happiness. the barbarians who came from the shores of the baltic, and settled in the rest of europe, brought with them the form of government called states or parliaments, about which so much noise is made, and which are so little understood. kings, indeed, were not absolute in those days; but then the people were more wretched upon that very account, and more completely enslaved. the chiefs of these savages, who had laid waste france, italy, spain, and england, made themselves monarchs. their generals divided among themselves the several countries they had conquered, whence sprung those margraves, those peers, those barons, those petty tyrants, who often contested with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations. these were birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the victorious was to suck. every nation, instead of being governed by one master, was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants. the priests soon played a part among them. before this it had been the fate of the gauls, the germans, and the britons, to be always governed by their druids and the chiefs of their villages, an ancient kind of barons, not so tyrannical as their successors. these druids pretended to be mediators between god and man. they enacted laws, they fulminated their excommunications, and sentenced to death. the bishops succeeded, by insensible degrees, to their temporal authority in the goth and vandal government. the popes set themselves at their head, and armed with their briefs, their bulls, and reinforced by monks, they made even kings tremble, deposed and assassinated them at pleasure, and employed every artifice to draw into their own purses moneys from all parts of europe. the weak ina, one of the tyrants of the saxon heptarchy in england, was the first monarch who submitted, in his pilgrimage to rome, to pay st. peter's penny (equivalent very near to a french crown) for every house in his dominions. the whole island soon followed his example; england became insensibly one of the pope's provinces, and the holy father used to send from time to time his legates thither to levy exorbitant taxes. at last king john delivered up by a public instrument the kingdom of england to the pope, who had excommunicated him; but the barons, not finding their account in this resignation, dethroned the wretched king john and seated louis, father to st. louis, king of france, in his place. however, they were soon weary of their new monarch, and accordingly obliged him to return to france. whilst that the barons, the bishops, and the popes, all laid waste england, where all were for ruling the most numerous, the most useful, even the most virtuous, and consequently the most venerable part of mankind, consisting of those who study the laws and the sciences, of traders, of artificers, in a word, of all who were not tyrants--that is, those who are called the people: these, i say, were by them looked upon as so many animals beneath the dignity of the human species. the commons in those ages were far from sharing in the government, they being villains or peasants, whose labour, whose blood, were the property of their masters who entitled themselves the nobility. the major part of men in europe were at that time what they are to this day in several parts of the world--they were villains or bondsmen of lords--that is, a kind of cattle bought and sold with the land. many ages passed away before justice could be done to human nature--before mankind were conscious that it was abominable for many to sow, and but few reap. and was not france very happy, when the power and authority of those petty robbers was abolished by the lawful authority of kings and of the people? happily, in the violent shocks which the divisions between kings and the nobles gave to empires, the chains of nations were more or less heavy. liberty in england sprang from the quarrels of tyrants. the barons forced king john and king henry iii. to grant the famous magna charta, the chief design of which was indeed to make kings dependent on the lords; but then the rest of the nation were a little favoured in it, in order that they might join on proper occasions with their pretended masters. this great charter, which is considered as the sacred origin of the english liberties, shows in itself how little liberty was known. the title alone proves that the king thought he had a just right to be absolute; and that the barons, and even the clergy, forced him to give up the pretended right, for no other reason but because they were the most powerful. magna charta begins in this style: "we grant, of our own free will, the following privileges to the archbishops, bishops, priors, and barons of our kingdom," etc. the house of commons is not once mentioned in the articles of this charter--a proof that it did not yet exist, or that it existed without power. mention is therein made, by name, of the freemen of england--a melancholy proof that some were not so. it appears, by article xxxii., that these pretended freemen owed service to their lords. such a liberty as this was not many removes from slavery. by article xxi., the king ordains that his officers shall not henceforward seize upon, unless they pay for them, the horses and carts of freemen. the people considered this ordinance as a real liberty, though it was a greater tyranny. henry vii., that happy usurper and great politician, who pretended to love the barons, though he in reality hated and feared them, got their lands alienated. by this means the villains, afterwards acquiring riches by their industry, purchased the estates and country seats of the illustrious peers who had ruined themselves by their folly and extravagance, and all the lands got by insensible degrees into other hands. the power of the house of commons increased every day. the families of the ancient peers were at last extinct; and as peers only are properly noble in england, there would be no such thing in strictness of law as nobility in that island, had not the kings created new barons from time to time, and preserved the body of peers, once a terror to them, to oppose them to the commons, since become so formidable. all these new peers who compose the higher house receive nothing but their titles from the king, and very few of them have estates in those places whence they take their titles. one shall be duke of d-, though he has not a foot of land in dorsetshire; and another is earl of a village, though he scarce knows where it is situated. the peers have power, but it is only in the parliament house. there is no such thing here as _haute_, _moyenne_, and _basse justice_--that is, a power to judge in all matters civil and criminal; nor a right or privilege of hunting in the grounds of a citizen, who at the same time is not permitted to fire a gun in his own field. no one is exempted in this country from paying certain taxes because he is a nobleman or a priest. all duties and taxes are settled by the house of commons, whose power is greater than that of the peers, though inferior to it in dignity. the spiritual as well as temporal lords have the liberty to reject a money bill brought in by the commons; but they are not allowed to alter anything in it, and must either pass or throw it out without restriction. when the bill has passed the lords and is signed by the king, then the whole nation pays, every man in proportion to his revenue or estate, not according to his title, which would be absurd. there is no such thing as an arbitrary subsidy or poll-tax, but a real tax on the lands, of all which an estimate was made in the reign of the famous king william iii. the land-tax continues still upon the same foot, though the revenue of the lands is increased. thus no one is tyrannised over, and every one is easy. the feet of the peasants are not bruised by wooden shoes; they eat white bread, are well clothed, and are not afraid of increasing their stock of cattle, nor of tiling their houses, from any apprehension that their taxes will be raised the year following. the annual income of the estates of a great many commoners in england amounts to two hundred thousand livres, and yet these do not think it beneath them to plough the lands which enrich them, and on which they enjoy their liberty. letter x.--on trade as trade enriched the citizens in england, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the state. trade raised by insensible degrees the naval power, which gives the english a superiority over the seas, and they now are masters of very near two hundred ships of war. posterity will very probably be surprised to hear that an island whose only produce is a little lead, tin, fuller's-earth, and coarse wool, should become so powerful by its commerce, as to be able to send, in 1723, three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanced parts of the globe. one before gibraltar, conquered and still possessed by the english; a second to portobello, to dispossess the king of spain of the treasures of the west indies; and a third into the baltic, to prevent the northern powers from coming to an engagement. at the time when louis xiv. made all italy tremble, and that his armies, which had already possessed themselves of savoy and piedmont, were upon the point of taking turin; prince eugene was obliged to march from the middle of germany in order to succour savoy. having no money, without which cities cannot be either taken or defended, he addressed himself to some english merchants. these, at an hour and half's warning, lent him five millions, whereby he was enabled to deliver turin, and to beat the french; after which he wrote the following short letter to the persons who had disbursed him the above-mentioned sums: "gentlemen, i have received your money, and flatter myself that i have laid it out to your satisfaction." such a circumstance as this raises a just pride in an english merchant, and makes him presume (not without some reason) to compare himself to a roman citizen; and, indeed, a peer's brother does not think traffic beneath him. when the lord townshend was minister of state, a brother of his was content to be a city merchant; and at the time that the earl of oxford governed great britain, a younger brother was no more than a factor in aleppo, where he chose to live, and where he died. this custom, which begins, however, to be laid aside, appears monstrous to germans, vainly puffed up with their extraction. these think it morally impossible that the son of an english peer should be no more than a rich and powerful citizen, for all are princes in germany. there have been thirty highnesses of the same name, all whose patrimony consisted only in their escutcheons and their pride. in france the title of marquis is given gratis to any one who will accept of it; and whosoever arrives at paris from the midst of the most remote provinces with money in his purse, and a name terminating in _ac_ or _ille_, may strut about, and cry, "such a man as i! a man of my rank and figure!" and may look down upon a trader with sovereign contempt; whilst the trader on the other side, by thus often hearing his profession treated so disdainfully, is fool enough to blush at it. however, i need not say which is most useful to a nation; a lord, powdered in the tip of the mode, who knows exactly at what o'clock the king rises and goes to bed, and who gives himself airs of grandeur and state, at the same time that he is acting the slave in the ante-chamber of a prime minister; or a merchant, who enriches his country, despatches orders from his countinghouse to surat and grand cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world. letter xi.--on inoculation it is inadvertently affirmed in the christian countries of europe that the english are fools and madmen. fools, because they give their children the small-pox to prevent their catching it; and madmen, because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children, merely to prevent an uncertain evil. the english, on the other side, call the rest of the europeans cowardly and unnatural. cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or other of the smallpox. but that the reader may be able to judge whether the english or those who differ from them in opinion are in the right, here follows the history of the famed inoculation, which is mentioned with so much dread in france. the circassian women have, from time immemorial, communicated the smallpox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule, taken carefully from the body of another child. this pustule produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough; it ferments, and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated. the pustules of the child in whom the artificial small-pox has been thus inoculated are employed to communicate the same distemper to others. there is an almost perpetual circulation of it in circassia; and when unhappily the small-pox has quite left the country, the inhabitants of it are in as great trouble and perplexity as other nations when their harvest has fallen short. the circumstance that introduced a custom in circassia, which appears so singular to others, is nevertheless a cause common to all nations, i mean maternal tenderness and interest. the circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed, it is in them they chiefly trade. they furnish with beauties the seraglios of the turkish sultan, of the persian sophy, and of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. these maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. these unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their mothers, in the same manner as little girls among us repeat their catechism without understanding one word they say. now it often happened that, after a father and mother had taken the utmost care of the education of their children, they were frustrated of all their hopes in an instant. the small-pox getting into the family, one daughter died of it, another lost an eye, a third had a great nose at her recovery, and the unhappy parents were completely ruined. even, frequently, when the small-pox became epidemical, trade was suspended for several years, which thinned very considerably the seraglios of persia and turkey. a trading nation is always watchful over its own interests, and grasps at every discovery that may be of advantage to its commerce. the circassians observed that scarce one person in a thousand was ever attacked by a small-pox of a violent kind. that some, indeed, had this distemper very favourably three or four times, but never twice so as to prove fatal; in a word, that no one ever had it in a violent degree twice in his life. they observed farther, that when the small-pox is of the milder sort, and the pustules have only a tender, delicate skin to break through, they never leave the least scar in the face. from these natural observations they concluded, that in case an infant of six months or a year old should have a milder sort of small-pox, he would not die of it, would not be marked, nor be ever afflicted with it again. in order, therefore, to preserve the life and beauty of their children, the only thing remaining was to give them the small-pox in their infant years. this they did by inoculating in the body of a child a pustule taken from the most regular and at the same time the most favourable sort of small-pox that could be procured. the experiment could not possibly fail. the turks, who are people of good sense, soon adopted this custom, insomuch that at this time there is not a bassa in constantinople but communicates the small-pox to his children of both sexes immediately upon their being weaned. some pretend that the circassians borrowed this custom anciently from the arabians; but we shall leave the clearing up of this point of history to some learned benedictine, who will not fail to compile a great many folios on this subject, with the several proofs or authorities. all i have to say upon it is that, in the beginning of the reign of king george i., the lady wortley montague, a woman of as fine a genius, and endued with as great a strength of mind, as any of her sex in the british kingdoms, being with her husband, who was ambassador at the porte, made no scruple to communicate the small-pox to an infant of which she was delivered in constantinople. the chaplain represented to his lady, but to no purpose, that this was an unchristian operation, and therefore that it could succeed with none but infidels. however, it had the most happy effect upon the son of the lady wortley montague, who, at her return to england, communicated the experiment to the princess of wales, now queen of england. it must be confessed that this princess, abstracted from her crown and titles, was born to encourage the whole circle of arts, and to do good to mankind. she appears as an amiable philosopher on the throne, having never let slip one opportunity of improving the great talents she received from nature, nor of exerting her beneficence. it is she who, being informed that a daughter of milton was living, but in miserable circumstances, immediately sent her a considerable present. it is she who protects the learned father courayer. it is she who condescended to attempt a reconciliation between dr. clark and mr. leibnitz. the moment this princess heard of inoculation, she caused an experiment of it to be made on four criminals sentenced to die, and by that means preserved their lives doubly; for she not only saved them from the gallows, but by means of this artificial small-pox prevented their ever having that distemper in a natural way, with which they would very probably have been attacked one time or other, and might have died of in a more advanced age. the princess being assured of the usefulness of this operation, caused her own children to be inoculated. a great part of the kingdom followed her example, and since that time ten thousand children, at least, of persons of condition owe in this manner their lives to her majesty and to the lady wortley montague; and as many of the fair sex are obliged to them for their beauty. upon a general calculation, threescore persons in every hundred have the small-pox. of these threescore, twenty die of it in the most favourable season of life, and as many more wear the disagreeable remains of it in their faces so long as they live. thus, a fifth part of mankind either die or are disfigured by this distemper. but it does not prove fatal to so much as one among those who are inoculated in turkey or in england, unless the patient be infirm, or would have died had not the experiment been made upon him. besides, no one is disfigured, no one has the smallpox a second time, if the inoculation was perfect. it is therefore certain, that had the lady of some french ambassador brought this secret from constantinople to paris, the nation would have been for ever obliged to her. then the duke de villequier, father to the duke d'aumont, who enjoys the most vigorous constitution, and is the healthiest man in france, would not have been cut off in the flower of his age. the prince of soubise, happy in the finest flush of health, would not have been snatched away at five-and-twenty, nor the dauphin, grandfather to louis xv., have been laid in his grave in his fiftieth year. twenty thousand persons whom the small-pox swept away at paris in 1723 would have been alive at this time. but are not the french fond of life, and is beauty so inconsiderable an advantage as to be disregarded by the ladies? it must be confessed that we are an odd kind of people. perhaps our nation will imitate ten years hence this practice of the english, if the clergy and the physicians will but give them leave to do it; or possibly our countrymen may introduce inoculation three months hence in france out of mere whim, in case the english should discontinue it through fickleness. i am informed that the chinese have practised inoculation these hundred years, a circumstance that argues very much in its favour, since they are thought to be the wisest and best governed people in the world. the chinese, indeed, do not communicate this distemper by inoculation, but at the nose, in the same manner as we take snuff. this is a more agreeable way, but then it produces the like effects; and proves at the same time that had inoculation been practised in france it would have saved the lives of thousands. letter xii.--on the lord bacon not long since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in a very polite and learned company, viz., who was the greatest man, caesar, alexander, tamerlane, cromwell, &c.? somebody answered that sir isaac newton excelled them all. the gentleman's assertion was very just; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a mighty genius, and in having employed it to enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like sir isaac newton, whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man. and those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were generally so many illustrious wicked men. that man claims our respect who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of truth, not those who enslave their fellow-creatures: he who is acquainted with the universe, not they who deface it. since, therefore, you desire me to give you an account of the famous personages whom england has given birth to, i shall begin with lord bacon, mr. locke, sir isaac newton, &c. afterwards the warriors and ministers of state shall come in their order. i must begin with the celebrated viscount verulam, known in europe by the name of bacon, which was that of his family. his father had been lord keeper, and himself was a great many years lord chancellor under king james i. nevertheless, amidst the intrigues of a court, and the affairs of his exalted employment, which alone were enough to engross his whole time, he yet found so much leisure for study as to make himself a great philosopher, a good historian, and an elegant writer; and a still more surprising circumstance is that he lived in an age in which the art of writing justly and elegantly was little known, much less true philosophy. lord bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death than in his lifetime. his enemies were in the british court, and his admirers were foreigners. when the marquis d'effiat attended in england upon the princess henrietta maria, daughter to henry iv., whom king charles i. had married, that minister went and visited the lord bacon, who, being at that time sick in his bed, received him with the curtains shut close. "you resemble the angels," says the marquis to him; "we hear those beings spoken of perpetually, and we believe them superior to men, but are never allowed the consolation to see them." you know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a philosopher: i mean bribery and extortion. you know that he was sentenced by the house of lords to pay a fine of about four hundred thousand french livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of chancellor; but in the present age the english revere his memory to such a degree, that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty. in case you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, i shall answer you in the words which i heard the lord bolingbroke use on another occasion. several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice with which the late duke of marlborough had been charged, some examples whereof being given, the lord bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "he was so great a man," replied his lordship, "that i have forgot his vices." i shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained lord bacon the esteem of all europe. the most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read, i mean his _novum scientiarum organum_. this is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service. the lord bacon was not yet acquainted with nature, but then he knew, and pointed out, the several paths that lead to it. he had despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion. he is the father of experimental philosophy. it must, indeed, be confessed that very surprising secrets had been found out before his time--the sea-compass, printing, engraving on copper plates, oil-painting, looking-glasses; the art of restoring, in some measure, old men to their sight by spectacles; gunpowder, &c., had been discovered. a new world had been fought for, found, and conquered. would not one suppose that these sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest philosophers, and in ages much more enlightened than the present? but it was far otherwise; all these great changes happened in the most stupid and barbarous times. chance only gave birth to most of those inventions; and it is very probable that what is called chance contributed very much to the discovery of america; at least, it has been always thought that christopher columbus undertook his voyage merely on the relation of a captain of a ship which a storm had driven as far westward as the caribbean islands. be this as it will, men had sailed round the world, and could destroy cities by an artificial thunder more dreadful than the real one; but, then, they were not acquainted with the circulation of the blood, the weight of the air, the laws of motion, light, the number of our planets, &c. and a man who maintained a thesis on aristotle's "categories," on the universals _a parte rei_, or such-like nonsense, was looked upon as a prodigy. the most astonishing, the most useful inventions, are not those which reflect the greatest honour on the human mind. it is to a mechanical instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy, that most arts owe their origin. the discovery of fire, the art of making bread, of melting and preparing metals, of building houses, and the invention of the shuttle, are infinitely more beneficial to mankind than printing or the sea-compass: and yet these arts were invented by uncultivated, savage men. what a prodigious use the greeks and romans made afterwards of mechanics! nevertheless, they believed that there were crystal heavens, that the stars were small lamps which sometimes fell into the sea, and one of their greatest philosophers, after long researches, found that the stars were so many flints which had been detached from the earth. in a word, no one before the lord bacon was acquainted with experimental philosophy, nor with the several physical experiments which have been made since his time. scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work, and he himself had made several. he made a kind of pneumatic engine, by which he guessed the elasticity of the air. he approached, on all sides as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained it, but some time after torricelli seized upon this truth. in a little time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a sudden in most parts of europe. it was a hidden treasure which the lord bacon had some notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises, endeavoured to dig up. but that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to sir isaac newton. we must search, says lord bacon, whether there may not be a kind of magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between the moon and the ocean, between the planets, &c. in another place he says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth, or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case it is evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth, the stronger they will attract one another. we must, says he, make an experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; whether the strength of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine. it is probable that the earth has a true attractive power. this forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writer, an historian, and a wit. his moral essays are greatly esteemed, but they were drawn up in the view of instructing rather than of pleasing; and, as they are not a satire upon mankind, like rochefoucauld's "maxims," nor written upon a sceptical plan, like montaigne's "essays," they are not so much read as those two ingenious authors. his history of henry vii. was looked upon as a masterpiece, but how is it possible that some persons can presume to compare so little a work with the history of our illustrious thuanus? speaking about the famous impostor perkin, son to a converted jew, who assumed boldly the name and title of richard iv., king of england, at the instigation of the duchess of burgundy, and who disputed the crown with henry vii., the lord bacon writes as follows:-"at this time the king began again to be haunted with sprites, by the magic and curious arts of the lady margaret, who raised up the ghost of richard, duke of york, second son to king edward iv., to walk and vex the king. "after such time as she (margaret of burgundy) thought he (perkin warbeck) was perfect in his lesson, she began to cast with herself from what coast this blazing star should first appear, and at what time it must be upon the horizon of ireland; for there had the like meteor strong influence before." methinks our sagacious thuanus does not give in to such fustian, which formerly was looked upon as sublime, but in this age is justly called nonsense. letter xiii.--on mr. locke perhaps no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genius, or was a more acute logician than mr. locke, and yet he was not deeply skilled in the mathematics. this great man could never subject himself to the tedious fatigue of calculations, nor to the dry pursuit of mathematical truths, which do not at first present any sensible objects to the mind; and no one has given better proofs than he, that it is possible for a man to have a geometrical head without the assistance of geometry. before his time, several great philosophers had declared, in the most positive terms, what the soul of man is; but as these absolutely knew nothing about it, they might very well be allowed to differ entirely in opinion from one another. in greece, the infant seat of arts and of errors, and where the grandeur as well as folly of the human mind went such prodigious lengths, the people used to reason about the soul in the very same manner as we do. the divine anaxagoras, in whose honour an altar was erected for his having taught mankind that the sun was greater than peloponnesus, that snow was black, and that the heavens were of stone, affirmed that the soul was an aerial spirit, but at the same time immortal. diogenes (not he who was a cynical philosopher after having coined base money) declared that the soul was a portion of the substance of god: an idea which we must confess was very sublime. epicurus maintained that it was composed of parts in the same manner as the body. aristotle, who has been explained a thousand ways, because he is unintelligible, was of opinion, according to some of his disciples, that the understanding in all men is one and the same substance. the divine plato, master of the divine aristotle,--and the divine socrates, master of the divine plato--used to say that the soul was corporeal and eternal. no doubt but the demon of socrates had instructed him in the nature of it. some people, indeed, pretend that a man who boasted his being attended by a familiar genius must infallibly be either a knave or a madman, but this kind of people are seldom satisfied with anything but reason. with regard to the fathers of the church, several in the primitive ages believed that the soul was human, and the angels and god corporeal. men naturally improve upon every system. st. bernard, as father mabillon confesses, taught that the soul after death does not see god in the celestial regions, but converses with christ's human nature only. however, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles. afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose, such as the irrefragable doctor, the subtile doctor, the angelic doctor, the seraphic doctor, and the cherubic doctor, who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that one would conclude they were resolved no one should understand a word in their writings. our descartes, born to discover the errors of antiquity, and at the same time to substitute his own, and hurried away by that systematic spirit which throws a cloud over the minds of the greatest men, thought he had demonstrated that the soul is the same thing as thought, in the same manner as matter, in his opinion, is the same as extension. he asserted, that man thinks eternally, and that the soul, at its coming into the body, is informed with the whole series of metaphysical notions: knowing god, infinite space, possessing all abstract ideas--in a word, completely endued with the most sublime lights, which it unhappily forgets at its issuing from the womb. father malebranche, in his sublime illusions, not only admitted innate ideas, but did not doubt of our living wholly in god, and that god is, as it were, our soul. such a multitude of reasoners having written the romance of the soul, a sage at last arose, who gave, with an air of the greatest modesty, the history of it. mr. locke has displayed the human soul in the same manner as an excellent anatomist explains the springs of the human body. he everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide. he sometimes presumes to speak affirmatively, but then he presumes also to doubt. instead of concluding at once what we know not, he examines gradually what we would know. he takes an infant at the instant of his birth; he traces, step by step, the progress of his understanding; examines what things he has in common with beasts, and what he possesses above them. above all, he consults himself: the being conscious that he himself thinks. "i shall leave," says he, "to those who know more of this matter than myself, the examining whether the soul exists before or after the organisation of our bodies. but i confess that it is my lot to be animated with one of those heavy souls which do not think always; and i am even so unhappy as not to conceive that it is more necessary the soul should think perpetually than that bodies should be for ever in motion." with regard to myself, i shall boast that i have the honour to be as stupid in this particular as mr. locke. no one shall ever make me believe that i think always: and i am as little inclined as he could be to fancy that some weeks after i was conceived i was a very learned soul; knowing at that time a thousand things which i forgot at my birth; and possessing when in the womb (though to no manner of purpose) knowledge which i lost the instant i had occasion for it; and which i have never since been able to recover perfectly. mr. locke, after having destroyed innate ideas; after having fully renounced the vanity of believing that we think always; after having laid down, from the most solid principles, that ideas enter the mind through the senses; having examined our simple and complex ideas; having traced the human mind through its several operations; having shown that all the languages in the world are imperfect, and the great abuse that is made of words every moment, he at last comes to consider the extent or rather the narrow limits of human knowledge. it was in this chapter he presumed to advance, but very modestly, the following words: "we shall, perhaps, never be capable of knowing whether a being, purely material, thinks or not." this sage assertion was, by more divines than one, looked upon as a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal. some englishmen, devout after their way, sounded an alarm. the superstitious are the same in society as cowards in an army; they themselves are seized with a panic fear, and communicate it to others. it was loudly exclaimed that mr. locke intended to destroy religion; nevertheless, religion had nothing to do in the affair, it being a question purely philosophical, altogether independent of faith and revelation. mr. locke's opponents needed but to examine, calmly and impartially, whether the declaring that matter can think, implies a contradiction; and whether god is able to communicate thought to matter. but divines are too apt to begin their declarations with saying that god is offended when people differ from them in opinion; in which they too much resemble the bad poets, who used to declare publicly that boileau spake irreverently of louis xiv., because he ridiculed their stupid productions. bishop stillingfleet got the reputation of a calm and unprejudiced divine because he did not expressly make use of injurious terms in his dispute with mr. locke. that divine entered the lists against him, but was defeated; for he argued as a schoolman, and locke as a philosopher, who was perfectly acquainted with the strong as well as the weak side of the human mind, and who fought with weapons whose temper he knew. if i might presume to give my opinion on so delicate a subject after mr. locke, i would say, that men have long disputed on the nature and the immortality of the soul. with regard to its immortality, it is impossible to give a demonstration of it, since its nature is still the subject of controversy; which, however, must be thoroughly understood before a person can be able to determine whether it be immortal or not. human reason is so little able, merely by its own strength, to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, that it was absolutely necessary religion should reveal it to us. it is of advantage to society in general, that mankind should believe the soul to be immortal; faith commands us to do this; nothing more is required, and the matter is cleared up at once. but it is otherwise with respect to its nature; it is of little importance to religion, which only requires the soul to be virtuous, whatever substance it may be made of. it is a clock which is given us to regulate, but the artist has not told us of what materials the spring of this chock is composed. i am a body, and, i think, that's all i know of the matter. shall i ascribe to an unknown cause, what i can so easily impute to the only second cause i am acquainted with? here all the school philosophers interrupt me with their arguments, and declare that there is only extension and solidity in bodies, and that there they can have nothing but motion and figure. now motion, figure, extension and solidity cannot form a thought, and consequently the soul cannot be matter. all this so often repeated mighty series of reasoning, amounts to no more than this: i am absolutely ignorant what matter is; i guess, but imperfectly, some properties of it; now i absolutely cannot tell whether these properties may be joined to thought. as i therefore know nothing, i maintain positively that matter cannot think. in this manner do the schools reason. mr. locke addressed these gentlemen in the candid, sincere manner following: at least confess yourselves to be as ignorant as i. neither your imaginations nor mine are able to comprehend in what manner a body is susceptible of ideas; and do you conceive better in what manner a substance, of what kind soever, is susceptible of them? as you cannot comprehend either matter or spirit, why will you presume to assert anything? the superstitious man comes afterwards and declares, that all those must be burnt for the good of their souls, who so much as suspect that it is possible for the body to think without any foreign assistance. but what would these people say should they themselves be proved irreligious? and indeed, what man can presume to assert, without being guilty at the same time of the greatest impiety, that it is impossible for the creator to form matter with thought and sensation? consider only, i beg you, what a dilemma you bring yourselves into, you who confine in this manner the power of the creator. beasts have the same organs, the same sensations, the same perceptions as we; they have memory, and combine certain ideas. in case it was not in the power of god to animate matter, and inform it with sensation, the consequence would be, either that beasts are mere machines, or that they have a spiritual soul. methinks it is clearly evident that beasts cannot be mere machines, which i prove thus. god has given to them the very same organs of sensation as to us: if therefore they have no sensation, god has created a useless thing; now according to your own confession god does nothing in vain; he therefore did not create so many organs of sensation, merely for them to be uninformed with this faculty; consequently beasts are not mere machines. beasts, according to your assertion, cannot be animated with a spiritual soul; you will, therefore, in spite of yourself, be reduced to this only assertion, viz., that god has endued the organs of beasts, who are mere matter, with the faculties of sensation and perception, which you call instinct in them. but why may not god, if he pleases, communicate to our more delicate organs, that faculty of feeling, perceiving, and thinking, which we call human reason? to whatever side you turn, you are forced to acknowledge your own ignorance, and the boundless power of the creator. exclaim therefore no more against the sage, the modest philosophy of mr. locke, which so far from interfering with religion, would be of use to demonstrate the truth of it, in case religion wanted any such support. for what philosophy can be of a more religious nature than that, which affirming nothing but what it conceives clearly, and conscious of its own weakness, declares that we must always have recourse to god in our examining of the first principles? besides, we must not be apprehensive that any philosophical opinion will ever prejudice the religion of a country. though our demonstrations clash directly with our mysteries, that is nothing to the purpose, for the latter are not less revered upon that account by our christian philosophers, who know very well that the objects of reason and those of faith are of a very different nature. philosophers will never form a religious sect, the reason of which is, their writings are not calculated for the vulgar, and they themselves are free from enthusiasm. if we divide mankind into twenty parts, it will be found that nineteen of these consist of persons employed in manual labour, who will never know that such a man as mr. locke existed. in the remaining twentieth part how few are readers? and among such as are so, twenty amuse themselves with romances to one who studies philosophy. the thinking part of mankind is confined to a very small number, and these will never disturb the peace and tranquillity of the world. neither montaigne, locke, bayle, spinoza, hobbes, the lord shaftesbury, collins, nor toland lighted up the firebrand of discord in their countries; this has generally been the work of divines, who being at first puffed up with the ambition of becoming chiefs of a sect, soon grew very desirous of being at the head of a party. but what do i say? all the works of the modern philosophers put together will never make so much noise as even the dispute which arose among the franciscans, merely about the fashion of their sleeves and of their cowls. letter xiv.--on descartes and sir isaac newton a frenchman who arrives in london, will find philosophy, like everything else, very much changed there. he had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. at paris the universe is seen composed of vortices of subtile matter; but nothing like it is seen in london. in france, it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides; but in england it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon; so that when you think that the moon should make it flood with us, those gentlemen fancy it should be ebb, which very unluckily cannot be proved. for to be able to do this, it is necessary the moon and the tides should have been inquired into at the very instant of the creation. you will observe farther, that the sun, which in france is said to have nothing to do in the affair, comes in here for very near a quarter of its assistance. according to your cartesians, everything is performed by an impulsion, of which we have very little notion; and according to sir isaac newton, it is by an attraction, the cause of which is as much unknown to us. at paris you imagine that the earth is shaped like a melon, or of an oblique figure; at london it has an oblate one. a cartesian declares that light exists in the air; but a newtonian asserts that it comes from the sun in six minutes and a half. the several operations of your chemistry are performed by acids, alkalies and subtile matter; but attraction prevails even in chemistry among the english. the very essence of things is totally changed. you neither are agreed upon the definition of the soul, nor on that of matter. descartes, as i observed in my last, maintains that the soul is the same thing with thought, and mr. locke has given a pretty good proof of the contrary. descartes asserts farther, that extension alone constitutes matter, but sir isaac adds solidity to it. how furiously contradictory are these opinions! "non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites." virgil, eclog. iii. "'tis not for us to end such great disputes." this famous newton, this destroyer of the cartesian system, died in march, anno 1727. his countrymen honoured him in his lifetime, and interred him as though he had been a king who had made his people happy. the english read with the highest satisfaction, and translated into their tongue, the elogium of sir isaac newton, which m. de fontenelle spoke in the academy of sciences. m. de fontenelle presides as judge over philosophers; and the english expected his decision, as a solemn declaration of the superiority of the english philosophy over that of the french. but when it was found that this gentleman had compared descartes to sir isaac, the whole royal society in london rose up in arms. so far from acquiescing with m. fontenelle's judgment, they criticised his discourse. and even several (who, however, were not the ablest philosophers in that body) were offended at the comparison; and for no other reason but because descartes was a frenchman. it must be confessed that these two great men differed very much in conduct, in fortune, and in philosophy. nature had indulged descartes with a shining and strong imagination, whence he became a very singular person both in private life and in his manner of reasoning. this imagination could not conceal itself even in his philosophical works, which are everywhere adorned with very shining, ingenious metaphors and figures. nature had almost made him a poet; and indeed he wrote a piece of poetry for the entertainment of christina, queen of sweden, which however was suppressed in honour to his memory. he embraced a military life for some time, and afterwards becoming a complete philosopher, he did not think the passion of love derogatory to his character. he had by his mistress a daughter called froncine, who died young, and was very much regretted by him. thus he experienced every passion incident to mankind. he was a long time of opinion that it would be necessary for him to fly from the society of his fellow creatures, and especially from his native country, in order to enjoy the happiness of cultivating his philosophical studies in full liberty. descartes was very right, for his contemporaries were not knowing enough to improve and enlighten his understanding, and were capable of little else than of giving him uneasiness. he left france purely to go in search of truth, which was then persecuted by the wretched philosophy of the schools. however, he found that reason was as much disguised and depraved in the universities of holland, into which he withdrew, as in his own country. for at the time that the french condemned the only propositions of his philosophy which were true, he was persecuted by the pretended philosophers of holland, who understood him no better; and who, having a nearer view of his glory, hated his person the more, so that he was obliged to leave utrecht. descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a god, was suspected to believe there was no such being. such a persecution from all sides, must necessarily suppose a most exalted merit as well as a very distinguished reputation, and indeed he possessed both. reason at that time darted a ray upon the world through the gloom of the schools, and the prejudices of popular superstition. at last his name spread so universally, that the french were desirous of bringing him back into his native country by rewards, and accordingly offered him an annual pension of a thousand crowns. upon these hopes descartes returned to france; paid the fees of his patent, which was sold at that time, but no pension was settled upon him. thus disappointed, he returned to his solitude in north holland, where he again pursued the study of philosophy, whilst the great galileo, at fourscore years of age, was groaning in the prisons of the inquisition, only for having demonstrated the earth's motion. at last descartes was snatched from the world in the flower of his age at stockholm. his death was owing to a bad regimen, and he expired in the midst of some literati who were his enemies, and under the hands of a physician to whom he was odious. the progress of sir isaac newton's life was quite different. he lived happy, and very much honoured in his native country, to the age of fourscore and five years. it was his peculiar felicity, not only to be born in a country of liberty, but in an age when all scholastic impertinences were banished from the world. reason alone was cultivated, and mankind could only be his pupil, not his enemy. one very singular difference in the lives of these two great men is, that sir isaac, during the long course of years he enjoyed, was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor ever had any commerce with women--a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments. we may admire sir isaac newton on this occasion, but then we must not censure descartes. the opinion that generally prevails in england with regard to these new philosophers is, that the latter was a dreamer, and the former a sage. very few people in england read descartes, whose works indeed are now useless. on the other side, but a small number peruse those of sir isaac, because to do this the student must be deeply skilled in the mathematics, otherwise those works will be unintelligible to him. but notwithstanding this, these great men are the subject of everyone's discourse. sir isaac newton is allowed every advantage, whilst descartes is not indulged a single one. according to some, it is to the former that we owe the discovery of a vacuum, that the air is a heavy body, and the invention of telescopes. in a word, sir isaac newton is here as the hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all the feats of ancient heroes. in a critique that was made in london on mr. de fontenelle's discourse, the writer presumed to assert that descartes was not a great geometrician. those who make such a declaration may justly be reproached with flying in their master's face. descartes extended the limits of geometry as far beyond the place where he found them, as sir isaac did after him. the former first taught the method of expressing curves by equations. this geometry which, thanks to him for it, is now grown common, was so abstruse in his time, that not so much as one professor would undertake to explain it; and schotten in holland, and format in france, were the only men who understood it. he applied this geometrical and inventive genius to dioptrics, which, when treated of by him, became a new art. and if he was mistaken in some things, the reason of that is, a man who discovers a new tract of land cannot at once know all the properties of the soil. those who come after him, and make these lands fruitful, are at least obliged to him for the discovery. i will not deny but that there are innumerable errors in the rest of descartes' works. geometry was a guide he himself had in some measure fashioned, which would have conducted him safely through the several paths of natural philosophy. nevertheless, he at last abandoned this guide, and gave entirely into the humour of forming hypotheses; and then philosophy was no more than an ingenious romance, fit only to amuse the ignorant. he was mistaken in the nature of the soul, in the proofs of the existence of a god, in matter, in the laws of motion, and in the nature of light. he admitted innate ideas, he invented new elements, he created a world; he made man according to his own fancy; and it is justly said, that the man of descartes is, in fact, that of descartes only, very different from the real one. he pushed his metaphysical errors so far, as to declare that two and two make four for no other reason but because god would have it so. however, it will not be making him too great a compliment if we affirm that he was valuable even in his mistakes. he deceived himself; but then it was at least in a methodical way. he destroyed all the absurd chimeras with which youth had been infatuated for two thousand years. he taught his contemporaries how to reason, and enabled them to employ his own weapons against himself. if descartes did not pay in good money, he however did great service in crying down that of a base alloy. i indeed believe that very few will presume to compare his philosophy in any respect with that of sir isaac newton. the former is an essay, the latter a masterpiece. but then the man who first brought us to the path of truth, was perhaps as great a genius as he who afterwards conducted us through it. descartes gave sight to the blind. these saw the errors of antiquity and of the sciences. the path he struck out is since become boundless. rohault's little work was, during some years, a complete system of physics; but now all the transactions of the several academies in europe put together do not form so much as the beginning of a system. in fathoming this abyss no bottom has been found. we are now to examine what discoveries sir isaac newton has made in it. letter xv.--on attraction the discoveries which gained sir isaac newton so universal a reputation, relate to the system of the world, to light, to geometrical infinities; and, lastly, to chronology, with which he used to amuse himself after the fatigue of his severer studies. i will now acquaint you (without prolixity if possible) with the few things i have been able to comprehend of all these sublime ideas. with regard to the system of our world, disputes were a long time maintained, on the cause that turns the planets, and keeps them in their orbits: and on those causes which make all bodies here below descend towards the surface of the earth. the system of descartes, explained and improved since his time, seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities. but in philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand. gravity, the falling of accelerated bodies on the earth, the revolution of the planets in their orbits, their rotations round their axis, all this is mere motion. now motion cannot perhaps be conceived any otherwise than by impulsion; therefore all those bodies must be impelled. but by what are they impelled? all space is full, it therefore is filled with a very subtile matter, since this is imperceptible to us; this matter goes from west to east, since all the planets are carried from west to east. thus from hypothesis to hypothesis, from one appearance to another, philosophers have imagined a vast whirlpool of subtile matter, in which the planets are carried round the sun: they also have created another particular vortex which floats in the great one, and which turns daily round the planets. when all this is done, it is pretended that gravity depends on this diurnal motion; for, say these, the velocity of the subtile matter that turns round our little vortex, must be seventeen times more rapid than that of the earth; or, in case its velocity is seventeen times greater than that of the earth, its centrifugal force must be vastly greater, and consequently impel all bodies towards the earth. this is the cause of gravity, according to the cartesian system. but the theorist, before he calculated the centrifugal force and velocity of the subtile matter, should first have been certain that it existed. sir isaac newton, seems to have destroyed all these great and little vortices, both that which carries the planets round the sun, as well as the other which supposes every planet to turn on its own axis. first, with regard to the pretended little vortex of the earth, it is demonstrated that it must lose its motion by insensible degrees; it is demonstrated, that if the earth swims in a fluid, its density must be equal to that of the earth; and in case its density be the same, all the bodies we endeavour to move must meet with an insuperable resistance. with regard to the great vortices, they are still more chimerical, and it is impossible to make them agree with kepler's law, the truth of which has been demonstrated. sir isaac shows, that the revolution of the fluid in which jupiter is supposed to be carried, is not the same with regard to the revolution of the fluid of the earth, as the revolution of jupiter with respect to that of the earth. he proves, that as the planets make their revolutions in ellipses, and consequently being at a much greater distance one from the other in their aphelia, and a little nearer in their perihelia; the earth's velocity, for instance, ought to be greater when it is nearer venus and mars, because the fluid that carries it along, being then more pressed, ought to have a greater motion; and yet it is even then that the earth's motion is slower. he proves that there is no such thing as a celestial matter which goes from west to east since the comets traverse those spaces, sometimes from east to west, and at other times from north to south. in fine, the better to resolve, if possible, every difficulty, he proves, and even by experiments, that it is impossible there should be a plenum; and brings back the vacuum, which aristotle and descartes had banished from the world. having by these and several other arguments destroyed the cartesian vortices, he despaired of ever being able to discover whether there is a secret principle in nature which, at the same time, is the cause of the motion of all celestial bodies, and that of gravity on the earth. but being retired in 1666, upon account of the plague, to a solitude near cambridge; as he was walking one day in his garden, and saw some fruits fall from a tree, he fell into a profound meditation on that gravity, the cause of which had so long been sought, but in vain, by all the philosophers, whilst the vulgar think there is nothing mysterious in it. he said to himself; that from what height soever in our hemisphere, those bodies might descend, their fall would certainly be in the progression discovered by galileo; and the spaces they run through would be as the square of the times. why may not this power which causes heavy bodies to descend, and is the same without any sensible diminution at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth, or on the summits of the highest mountains, why, said sir isaac, may not this power extend as high as the moon? and in case its influence reaches so far, is it not very probable that this power retains it in its orbit, and determines its motion? but in case the moon obeys this principle (whatever it be) may we not conclude very naturally that the rest of the planets are equally subject to it? in case this power exists (which besides is proved) it must increase in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. all, therefore, that remains is, to examine how far a heavy body, which should fall upon the earth from a moderate height, would go; and how far in the same time, a body which should fall from the orbit of the moon, would descend. to find this, nothing is wanted but the measure of the earth, and the distance of the moon from it. thus sir isaac newton reasoned. but at that time the english had but a very imperfect measure of our globe, and depended on the uncertain supposition of mariners, who computed a degree to contain but sixty english miles, whereas it consists in reality of near seventy. as this false computation did not agree with the conclusions which sir isaac intended to draw from them, he laid aside this pursuit. a half-learned philosopher, remarkable only for his vanity, would have made the measure of the earth agree, anyhow, with his system. sir isaac, however, chose rather to quit the researches he was then engaged in. but after mr. picard had measured the earth exactly, by tracing that meridian which redounds so much to the honour of the french, sir isaac newton resumed his former reflections, and found his account in mr. picard's calculation. a circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic. the circumference of the earth is 123,249,600 feet. this, among other things, is necessary to prove the system of attraction. the instant we know the earth's circumference, and the distance of the moon, we know that of the moon's orbit, and the diameter of this orbit. the moon performs its revolution in that orbit in twenty-seven days, seven hours, forty-three minutes. it is demonstrated, that the moon in its mean motion makes an hundred and fourscore and seven thousand nine hundred and sixty feet (of paris) in a minute. it is likewise demonstrated, by a known theorem, that the central force which should make a body fall from the height of the moon, would make its velocity no more than fifteen paris feet in a minute of time. now, if the law by which bodies gravitate and attract one another in an inverse ratio to the squares of the distances be true, if the same power acts according to that law throughout all nature, it is evident that as the earth is sixty semi-diameters distant from the moon, a heavy body must necessarily fall (on the earth) fifteen feet in the first second, and fifty-four thousand feet in the first minute. now a heavy body falls, in reality, fifteen feet in the first second, and goes in the first minute fifty-four thousand feet, which number is the square of sixty multiplied by fifteen. bodies, therefore, gravitate in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances; consequently, what causes gravity on earth, and keeps the moon in its orbit, is one and the same power; it being demonstrated that the moon gravitates on the earth, which is the centre of its particular motion, it is demonstrated that the earth and the moon gravitate on the sun which is the centre of their annual motion. the rest of the planets must be subject to this general law; and if this law exists, these planets must follow the laws which kepler discovered. all these laws, all these relations are indeed observed by the planets with the utmost exactness; therefore, the power of attraction causes all the planets to gravitate towards the sun, in like manner as the moon gravitates towards our globe. finally, as in all bodies re-action is equal to action, it is certain that the earth gravitates also towards the moon; and that the sun gravitates towards both. that every one of the satellites of saturn gravitates towards the other four, and the other four towards it; all five towards saturn, and saturn towards all. that it is the same with regard to jupiter; and that all these globes are attracted by the sun, which is reciprocally attracted by them. this power of gravitation acts proportionably to the quantity of matter in bodies, a truth which sir isaac has demonstrated by experiments. this new discovery has been of use to show that the sun (the centre of the planetary system) attracts them all in a direct ratio of their quantity of matter combined with their nearness. from hence sir isaac, rising by degrees to discoveries which seemed not to be formed for the human mind, is bold enough to compute the quantity of matter contained in the sun and in every planet; and in this manner shows, from the simple laws of mechanics, that every celestial globe ought necessarily to be where it is placed. his bare principle of the laws of gravitation accounts for all the apparent inequalities in the course of the celestial globes. the variations of the moon are a necessary consequence of those laws. moreover, the reason is evidently seen why the nodes of the moon perform their revolutions in nineteen years, and those of the earth in about twenty-six thousand. the several appearances observed in the tides are also a very simple effect of this attraction. the proximity of the moon, when at the full, and when it is new, and its distance in the quadratures or quarters, combined with the action of the sun, exhibit a sensible reason why the ocean swells and sinks. after having shown by his sublime theory the course and inequalities of the planets, he subjects comets to the same law. the orbit of these fires (unknown for so great a series of years), which was the terror of mankind and the rock against which philosophy split, placed by aristotle below the moon, and sent back by descartes above the sphere of saturn, is at last placed in its proper seat by sir isaac newton. he proves that comets are solid bodies which move in the sphere of the sun's activity, and that they describe an ellipsis so very eccentric, and so near to parabolas, that certain comets must take up above five hundred years in their revolution. the learned dr. halley is of opinion that the comet seen in 1680 is the same which appeared in julius caesar's time. this shows more than any other that comets are hard, opaque bodies; for it descended so near to the sun, as to come within a sixth part of the diameter of this planet from it, and consequently might have contracted a degree of heat two thousand times stronger than that of red-hot iron; and would have been soon dispersed in vapour, had it not been a firm, dense body. the guessing the course of comets began then to be very much in vogue. the celebrated bernoulli concluded by his system that the famous comet of 1680 would appear again the 17th of may, 1719. not a single astronomer in europe went to bed that night. however, they needed not to have broke their rest, for the famous comet never appeared. there is at least more cunning, if not more certainty, in fixing its return to so remote a distance as five hundred and seventy-five years. as to mr. whiston, he affirmed very seriously that in the time of the deluge a comet overflowed the terrestrial globe. and he was so unreasonable as to wonder that people laughed at him for making such an assertion. the ancients were almost in the same way of thinking with mr. whiston, and fancied that comets were always the forerunners of some great calamity which was to befall mankind. sir isaac newton, on the contrary, suspected that they are very beneficent, and that vapours exhale from them merely to nourish and vivify the planets, which imbibe in their course the several particles the sun has detached from the comets, an opinion which, at least, is more probable than the former. but this is not all. if this power of gravitation or attraction acts on all the celestial globes, it acts undoubtedly on the several parts of these globes. for in case bodies attract one another in proportion to the quantity of matter contained in them, it can only be in proportion to the quantity of their parts; and if this power is found in the whole, it is undoubtedly in the half; in the quarters in the eighth part, and so on in _infinitum_. this is attraction, the great spring by which all nature is moved. sir isaac newton, after having demonstrated the existence of this principle, plainly foresaw that its very name would offend; and, therefore, this philosopher, in more places than one of his books, gives the reader some caution about it. he bids him beware of confounding this name with what the ancients called occult qualities, but to be satisfied with knowing that there is in all bodies a central force, which acts to the utmost limits of the universe, according to the invariable laws of mechanics. it is surprising, after the solemn protestations sir isaac made, that such eminent men as mr. sorin and mr. de fontenelle should have imputed to this great philosopher the verbal and chimerical way of reasoning of the aristotelians; mr. sorin in the memoirs of the academy of 1709, and mr. de fontenelle in the very eulogium of sir isaac newton. most of the french (the learned and others) have repeated this reproach. these are for ever crying out, "why did he not employ the word _impulsion_, which is so well understood, rather than that of _attraction_, which is unintelligible?" sir isaac might have answered these critics thus:--"first, you have as imperfect an idea of the word impulsion as of that of attraction; and in case you cannot conceive how one body tends towards the centre of another body, neither can you conceive by what power one body can impel another. "secondly, i could not admit of impulsion; for to do this i must have known that a celestial matter was the agent. but so far from knowing that there is any such matter, i have proved it to be merely imaginary. "thirdly, i use the word attraction for no other reason but to express an effect which i discovered in nature--a certain and indisputable effect of an unknown principle--a quality inherent in matter, the cause of which persons of greater abilities than i can pretend to may, if they can, find out." "what have you, then, taught us?" will these people say further; "and to what purpose are so many calculations to tell us what you yourself do not comprehend?" "i have taught you," may sir isaac rejoin, "that all bodies gravitate towards one another in proportion to their quantity of matter; that these central forces alone keep the planets and comets in their orbits, and cause them to move in the proportion before set down. i demonstrate to you that it is impossible there should be any other cause which keeps the planets in their orbits than that general phenomenon of gravity. for heavy bodies fall on the earth according to the proportion demonstrated of central forces; and the planets finishing their course according to these same proportions, in case there were another power that acted upon all those bodies, it would either increase their velocity or change their direction. now, not one of those bodies ever has a single degree of motion or velocity, or has any direction but what is demonstrated to be the effect of the central forces. consequently it is impossible there should be any other principle." give me leave once more to introduce sir isaac speaking. shall he not be allowed to say? "my case and that of the ancients is very different. these saw, for instance, water ascend in pumps, and said, 'the water rises because it abhors a vacuum.' but with regard to myself; i am in the case of a man who should have first observed that water ascends in pumps, but should leave others to explain the cause of this effect. the anatomist, who first declared that the motion of the arm is owing to the contraction of the muscles, taught mankind an indisputable truth. but are they less obliged to him because he did not know the reason why the muscles contract? the cause of the elasticity of the air is unknown, but he who first discovered this spring performed a very signal service to natural philosophy. the spring that i discovered was more hidden and more universal, and for that very reason mankind ought to thank me the more. i have discovered a new property of matter--one of the secrets of the creator--and have calculated and discovered the effects of it. after this, shall people quarrel with me about the name i give it?" vortices may be called an occult quality, because their existence was never proved. attraction, on the contrary, is a real thing, because its effects are demonstrated, and the proportions of it are calculated. the cause of this cause is among the _arcana_ of the almighty. "precedes huc, et non amplius." (thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.) letter xvi.--on sir isaac newton's optics the philosophers of the last age found out a new universe; and a circumstance which made its discovery more difficult was that no one had so much as suspected its existence. the most sage and judicious were of opinion that it was a frantic rashness to dare so much as to imagine that it was possible to guess the laws by which the celestial bodies move and the manner how light acts. galileo, by his astronomical discoveries, kepler, by his calculation, descartes (at least, in his dioptrics), and sir isaac newton, in all his works, severally saw the mechanism of the springs of the world. the geometricians have subjected infinity to the laws of calculation. the circulation of the blood in animals, and of the sap in vegetables, have changed the face of nature with regard to us. a new kind of existence has been given to bodies in the air-pump. by the assistance of telescopes bodies have been brought nearer to one another. finally, the several discoveries which sir isaac newton has made on light are equal to the boldest things which the curiosity of man could expect after so many philosophical novelties. till antonio de dominis the rainbow was considered as an inexplicable miracle. this philosopher guessed that it was a necessary effect of the sun and rain. descartes gained immortal fame by his mathematical explication of this so natural a phenomenon. he calculated the reflections and refractions of light in drops of rain. and his sagacity on this occasion was at that time looked upon as next to divine. but what would he have said had it been proved to him that he was mistaken in the nature of light; that he had not the least reason to maintain that it is a globular body? that it is false to assert that this matter, spreading itself through the whole, waits only to be projected forward by the sun, in order to be put in action, in like manner as a long staff acts at one end when pushed forward by the other. that light is certainly darted by the sun; in fine, that light is transmitted from the sun to the earth in about seven minutes, though a cannonball, which were not to lose any of its velocity, could not go that distance in less than twenty-five years. how great would have been his astonishment had he been told that light does not reflect directly by impinging against the solid parts of bodies, that bodies are not transparent when they have large pores, and that a man should arise who would demonstrate all these paradoxes, and anatomise a single ray of light with more dexterity than the ablest artist dissects a human body. this man is come. sir isaac newton has demonstrated to the eye, by the bare assistance of the prism, that light is a composition of coloured rays, which, being united, form white colour. a single ray is by him divided into seven, which all fall upon a piece of linen, or a sheet of white paper, in their order, one above the other, and at unequal distances. the first is red, the second orange, the third yellow, the fourth green, the fifth blue, the sixth indigo, the seventh a violet-purple. each of these rays, transmitted afterwards by a hundred other prisms, will never change the colour it bears; in like manner, as gold, when completely purged from its dross, will never change afterwards in the crucible. as a superabundant proof that each of these elementary rays has inherently in itself that which forms its colour to the eye, take a small piece of yellow wood, for instance, and set it in the ray of a red colour; this wood will instantly be tinged red. but set it in the ray of a green colour, it assumes a green colour, and so of all the rest. from what cause, therefore, do colours arise in nature? it is nothing but the disposition of bodies to reflect the rays of a certain order and to absorb all the rest. what, then, is this secret disposition? sir isaac newton demonstrates that it is nothing more than the density of the small constituent particles of which a body is composed. and how is this reflection performed? it was supposed to arise from the rebounding of the rays, in the same manner as a ball on the surface of a solid body. but this is a mistake, for sir isaac taught the astonished philosophers that bodies are opaque for no other reason but because their pores are large, that light reflects on our eyes from the very bosom of those pores, that the smaller the pores of a body are the more such a body is transparent. thus paper, which reflects the light when dry, transmits it when oiled, because the oil, by filling its pores, makes them much smaller. it is there that examining the vast porosity of bodies, every particle having its pores, and every particle of those particles having its own, he shows we are not certain that there is a cubic inch of solid matter in the universe, so far are we from conceiving what matter is. having thus divided, as it were, light into its elements, and carried the sagacity of his discoveries so far as to prove the method of distinguishing compound colours from such as are primitive, he shows that these elementary rays, separated by the prism, are ranged in their order for no other reason but because they are refracted in that very order; and it is this property (unknown till he discovered it) of breaking or splitting in this proportion; it is this unequal refraction of rays, this power of refracting the red less than the orange colour, &c., which he calls the different refrangibility. the most reflexible rays are the most refrangible, and from hence he evinces that the same power is the cause both of the reflection and refraction of light. but all these wonders are merely but the opening of his discoveries. he found out the secret to see the vibrations or fits of light which come and go incessantly, and which either transmit light or reflect it, according to the density of the parts they meet with. he has presumed to calculate the density of the particles of air necessary between two glasses, the one flat, the other convex on one side, set one upon the other, in order to operate such a transmission or reflection, or to form such and such a colour. from all these combinations he discovers the proportion in which light acts on bodies and bodies act on light. he saw light so perfectly, that he has determined to what degree of perfection the art of increasing it, and of assisting our eyes by telescopes, can be carried. descartes, from a noble confidence that was very excusable, considering how strongly he was fired at the first discoveries he made in an art which he almost first found out; descartes, i say, hoped to discover in the stars, by the assistance of telescopes, objects as small as those we discern upon the earth. but sir isaac has shown that dioptric telescopes cannot be brought to a greater perfection, because of that refraction, and of that very refrangibility, which at the same time that they bring objects nearer to us, scatter too much the elementary rays. he has calculated in these glasses the proportion of the scattering of the red and of the blue rays; and proceeding so far as to demonstrate things which were not supposed even to exist, he examines the inequalities which arise from the shape or figure of the glass, and that which arises from the refrangibility. he finds that the object glass of the telescope being convex on one side and flat on the other, in case the flat side be turned towards the object, the error which arises from the construction and position of the glass is above five thousand times less than the error which arises from the refrangibility; and, therefore, that the shape or figure of the glasses is not the cause why telescopes cannot be carried to a greater perfection, but arises wholly from the nature of light. for this reason he invented a telescope, which discovers objects by reflection, and not by refraction. telescopes of this new kind are very hard to make, and their use is not easy; but, according to the english, a reflective telescope of but five feet has the same effect as another of a hundred feet in length. letter xvii.--on infinites in geometry, and sir isaac newton's chronology the labyrinth and abyss of infinity is also a new course sir isaac newton has gone through, and we are obliged to him for the clue, by whose assistance we are enabled to trace its various windings. descartes got the start of him also in this astonishing invention. he advanced with mighty steps in his geometry, and was arrived at the very borders of infinity, but went no farther. dr. wallis, about the middle of the last century, was the first who reduced a fraction by a perpetual division to an infinite series. the lord brouncker employed this series to square the hyperbola. mercator published a demonstration of this quadrature; much about which time sir isaac newton, being then twenty-three years of age, had invented a general method, to perform on all geometrical curves what had just before been tried on the hyperbola. it is to this method of subjecting everywhere infinity to algebraical calculations, that the name is given of differential calculations or of fluxions and integral calculation. it is the art of numbering and measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived. and, indeed, would you not imagine that a man laughed at you who should declare that there are lines infinitely great which form an angle infinitely little? that a right line, which is a right line so long as it is finite, by changing infinitely little its direction, becomes an infinite curve; and that a curve may become infinitely less than another curve? that there are infinite squares, infinite cubes, and infinites of infinites, all greater than one another, and the last but one of which is nothing in comparison of the last? all these things, which at first appear to be the utmost excess of frenzy, are in reality an effort of the subtlety and extent of the human mind, and the art of finding truths which till then had been unknown. this so bold edifice is even founded on simple ideas. the business is to measure the diagonal of a square, to give the area of a curve, to find the square root of a number, which has none in common arithmetic. after all, the imagination ought not to be startled any more at so many orders of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at that other, namely, that matter is divisible in _infinitum_. these two truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less incomprehensible than the things we have been speaking of. for many years the invention of this famous calculation was denied to sir isaac newton. in germany mr. leibnitz was considered as the inventor of the differences or moments, called fluxions, and mr. bernouilli claimed the integral calculus. however, sir isaac is now thought to have first made the discovery, and the other two have the glory of having once made the world doubt whether it was to be ascribed to him or them. thus some contested with dr. harvey the invention of the circulation of the blood, as others disputed with mr. perrault that of the circulation of the sap. hartsocher and leuwenhoek disputed with each other the honour of having first seen the _vermiculi_ of which mankind are formed. this hartsocher also contested with huygens the invention of a new method of calculating the distance of a fixed star. it is not yet known to what philosopher we owe the invention of the cycloid. be this as it will, it is by the help of this geometry of infinites that sir isaac newton attained to the most sublime discoveries. i am now to speak of another work, which, though more adapted to the capacity of the human mind, does nevertheless display some marks of that creative genius with which sir isaac newton was informed in all his researches. the work i mean is a chronology of a new kind, for what province soever he undertook he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by the rest of men. accustomed to unravel and disentangle chaos, he was resolved to convey at least some light into that of the fables of antiquity which are blended and confounded with history, and fix an uncertain chronology. it is true that there is no family, city, or nation, but endeavours to remove its original as far backward as possible. besides, the first historians were the most negligent in setting down the eras: books were infinitely less common than they are at this time, and, consequently, authors being not so obnoxious to censure, they therefore imposed upon the world with greater impunity; and, as it is evident that these have related a great number of fictitious particulars, it is probable enough that they also gave us several false eras. it appeared in general to sir isaac that the world was five hundred years younger than chronologers declare it to be. he grounds his opinion on the ordinary course of nature, and on the observations which astronomers have made. by the course of nature we here understand the time that every generation of men lives upon the earth. the egyptians first employed this vague and uncertain method of calculating when they began to write the beginning of their history. these computed three hundred and forty-one generations from menes to sethon; and, having no fixed era, they supposed three generations to consist of a hundred years. in this manner they computed eleven thousand three hundred and forty years from menes's reign to that of sethon. the greeks before they counted by olympiads followed the method of the egyptians, and even gave a little more extent to generations, making each to consist of forty years. now, here, both the egyptians and the greeks made an erroneous computation. it is true, indeed, that, according to the usual course of nature, three generations last about a hundred and twenty years; but three reigns are far from taking up so many. it is very evident that mankind in general live longer than kings are found to reign, so that an author who should write a history in which there were no dates fixed, and should know that nine kings had reigned over a nation; such an historian would commit a great error should he allow three hundred years to these nine monarchs. every generation takes about thirty-six years; every reign is, one with the other, about twenty. thirty kings of england have swayed the sceptre from william the conqueror to george i., the years of whose reigns added together amount to six hundred and forty-eight years; which, being divided equally among the thirty kings, give to every one a reign of twenty-one years and a half very near. sixty-three kings of france have sat upon the throne; these have, one with another, reigned about twenty years each. this is the usual course of nature. the ancients, therefore, were mistaken when they supposed the durations in general of reigns to equal that of generations. they, therefore, allowed too great a number of years, and consequently some years must be subtracted from their computation. astronomical observations seem to have lent a still greater assistance to our philosopher. he appears to us stronger when he fights upon his own ground. you know that the earth, besides its annual motion which carries it round the sun from west to east in the space of a year, has also a singular revolution which was quite unknown till within these late years. its poles have a very slow retrograde motion from east to west, whence it happens that their position every day does not correspond exactly with the same point of the heavens. this difference, which is so insensible in a year, becomes pretty considerable in time; and in threescore and twelve years the difference is found to be of one degree, that is to say, the three hundred and sixtieth part of the circumference of the whole heaven. thus after seventy-two years the colure of the vernal equinox which passed through a fixed star, corresponds with another fixed star. hence it is that the sun, instead of being in that part of the heavens in which the ram was situated in the time of hipparchus, is found to correspond with that part of the heavens in which the bull was situated; and the twins are placed where the bull then stood. all the signs have changed their situation, and yet we still retain the same manner of speaking as the ancients did. in this age we say that the sun is in the ram in the spring, from the same principle of condescension that we say that the sun turns round. hipparchus was the first among the greeks who observed some change in the constellations with regard to the equinoxes, or rather who learnt it from the egyptians. philosophers ascribed this motion to the stars; for in those ages people were far from imagining such a revolution in the earth, which was supposed to be immovable in every respect. they therefore created a heaven in which they fixed the several stars, and gave this heaven a particular motion by which it was carried towards the east, whilst that all the stars seemed to perform their diurnal revolution from east to west. to this error they added a second of much greater consequence, by imagining that the pretended heaven of the fixed stars advanced one degree eastward every hundred years. in this manner they were no less mistaken in their astronomical calculation than in their system of natural philosophy. as for instance, an astronomer in that age would have said that the vernal equinox was in the time of such and such an observation, in such a sign, and in such a star. it has advanced two degrees of each since the time that observation was made to the present. now two degrees are equivalent to two hundred years; consequently the astronomer who made that observation lived just so many years before me. it is certain that an astronomer who had argued in this manner would have mistook just fifty-four years; hence it is that the ancients, who were doubly deceived, made their great year of the world, that is, the revolution of the whole heavens, to consist of thirty-six thousand years. but the moderns are sensible that this imaginary revolution of the heaven of the stars is nothing else than the revolution of the poles of the earth, which is performed in twenty-five thousand nine hundred years. it may be proper to observe transiently in this place, that sir isaac, by determining the figure of the earth, has very happily explained the cause of this revolution. all this being laid down, the only thing remaining to settle chronology is to see through what star the colure of the equinoxes passes, and where it intersects at this time the ecliptic in the spring; and to discover whether some ancient writer does not tell us in what point the ecliptic was intersected in his time, by the same colure of the equinoxes. clemens alexandrinus informs us, that chiron, who went with the argonauts, observed the constellations at the time of that famous expedition, and fixed the vernal equinox to the middle of the ram; the autumnal equinox to the middle of libra; our summer solstice to the middle of cancer, and our winter solstice to the middle of capricorn. a long time after the expedition of the argonauts, and a year before the peloponnesian war, methon observed that the point of the summer solstice passed through the eighth degree of cancer. now every sign of the zodiac contains thirty degrees. in chiron's time, the solstice was arrived at the middle of the sign, that is to say to the fifteenth degree. a year before the peloponnesian war it was at the eighth, and therefore it had retarded seven degrees. a degree is equivalent to seventy-two years; consequently, from the beginning of the peloponnesian war to the expedition of the argonauts, there is no more than an interval of seven times seventy-two years, which make five hundred and four years, and not seven hundred years as the greeks computed. thus in comparing the position of the heavens at this time with their position in that age, we find that the expedition of the argonauts ought to be placed about nine hundred years before christ, and not about fourteen hundred; and consequently that the world is not so old by five hundred years as it was generally supposed to be. by this calculation all the eras are drawn nearer, and the several events are found to have happened later than is computed. i do not know whether this ingenious system will be favourably received; and whether these notions will prevail so far with the learned, as to prompt them to reform the chronology of the world. perhaps these gentlemen would think it too great a condescension to allow one and the same man the glory of having improved natural philosophy, geometry, and history. this would be a kind of universal monarchy, with which the principle of self-love that is in man will scarce suffer him to indulge his fellow-creature; and, indeed, at the same time that some very great philosophers attacked sir isaac newton's attractive principle, others fell upon his chronological system. time that should discover to which of these the victory is due, may perhaps only leave the dispute still more undetermined. letter xviii.--on tragedy the english as well as the spaniards were possessed of theatres at a time when the french had no more than moving, itinerant stages. shakspeare, who was considered as the corneille of the first-mentioned nation, was pretty nearly contemporary with lopez de vega, and he created, as it were, the english theatre. shakspeare boasted a strong fruitful genius. he was natural and sublime, but had not so much as a single spark of good taste, or knew one rule of the drama. i will now hazard a random, but, at the same time, true reflection, which is, that the great merit of this dramatic poet has been the ruin of the english stage. there are such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful scenes in this writer's monstrous farces, to which the name of tragedy is given, that they have always been exhibited with great success. time, which alone gives reputation to writers, at last makes their very faults venerable. most of the whimsical gigantic images of this poet, have, through length of time (it being a hundred and fifty years since they were first drawn) acquired a right of passing for sublime. most of the modern dramatic writers have copied him; but the touches and descriptions which are applauded in shakspeare, are hissed at in these writers; and you will easily believe that the veneration in which this author is held, increases in proportion to the contempt which is shown to the moderns. dramatic writers don't consider that they should not imitate him; and the ill-success of shakspeare's imitators produces no other effect, than to make him be considered as inimitable. you remember that in the tragedy of _othello, moor of venice_, a most tender piece, a man strangles his wife on the stage, and that the poor woman, whilst she is strangling, cries aloud that she dies very unjustly. you know that in _hamlet, prince of denmark_, two grave-diggers make a grave, and are all the time drinking, singing ballads, and making humorous reflections (natural indeed enough to persons of their profession) on the several skulls they throw up with their spades; but a circumstance which will surprise you is, that this ridiculous incident has been imitated. in the reign of king charles ii., which was that of politeness, and the golden age of the liberal arts; otway, in his _venice preserved_, introduces antonio the senator, and naki, his courtesan, in the midst of the horrors of the marquis of bedemar's conspiracy. antonio, the superannuated senator plays, in his mistress's presence, all the apish tricks of a lewd, impotent debauchee, who is quite frantic and out of his senses. he mimics a bull and a dog, and bites his mistress's legs, who kicks and whips him. however, the players have struck these buffooneries (which indeed were calculated merely for the dregs of the people) out of otway's tragedy; but they have still left in shakspeare's _julius caesar_ the jokes of the roman shoemakers and cobblers, who are introduced in the same scene with brutus and cassius. you will undoubtedly complain, that those who have hitherto discoursed with you on the english stage, and especially on the celebrated shakspeare, have taken notice only of his errors; and that no one has translated any of those strong, those forcible passages which atone for all his faults. but to this i will answer, that nothing is easier than to exhibit in prose all the silly impertinences which a poet may have thrown out; but that it is a very difficult task to translate his fine verses. all your junior academical sophs, who set up for censors of the eminent writers, compile whole volumes; but methinks two pages which display some of the beauties of great geniuses, are of infinitely more value than all the idle rhapsodies of those commentators; and i will join in opinion with all persons of good taste in declaring, that greater advantage may be reaped from a dozen verses of homer of virgil, than from all the critiques put together which have been made on those two great poets. i have ventured to translate some passages of the most celebrated english poets, and shall now give you one from shakspeare. pardon the blemishes of the translation for the sake of the original; and remember always that when you see a version, you see merely a faint print of a beautiful picture. i have made choice of part of the celebrated soliloquy in _hamlet_, which you may remember is as follows:- "to be, or not to be? that is the question! whether 't is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them? to die! to sleep! no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to! 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. to die! to sleep! to sleep; perchance to dream! o, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life: for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the poor man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin. who would fardels bear to groan and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of? thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought: and enterprises of great weight and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action--" my version of it runs thus:- "demeure, il faut choisir et passer a l'instant de la vie, a la mort, ou de l'etre au neant. dieux cruels, s'il en est, eclairez mon courage. faut-il vieillir courbe sous la main qui m'outrage, supporter, ou finir mon malheur et mon sort? qui suis je? qui m'arrete! et qu'est-ce que la mort? c'est la fin de nos maux, c'est mon unique asile apres de longs transports, c'est un sommeil tranquile. on s'endort, et tout meurt, mais un affreux reveil doit succeder peut etre aux douceurs du sommeil! on nous menace, on dit que cette courte vie, de tourmens eternels est aussi-tot suivie. o mort! moment fatal! affreuse eternite! tout coeur a ton seul nom se glace epouvante. eh! qui pourroit sans toi supporter cette vie, de nos pretres menteurs benir l'hypocrisie: d'une indigne maitresse encenser les erreurs, ramper sous un ministre, adorer ses hauteurs; et montrer les langueurs de son ame abattue, a des amis ingrats qui detournent la vue? la mort seroit trop douce en ces extremitez, mais le scrupule parle, et nous crie, arretez; il defend a nos mains cet heureux homicide et d'un heros guerrier, fait un chretien timide," &c. do not imagine that i have translated shakspeare in a servile manner. woe to the writer who gives a literal version; who by rendering every word of his original, by that very means enervates the sense, and extinguishes all the fire of it. it is on such an occasion one may justly affirm, that the letter kills, but the spirit quickens. here follows another passage copied from a celebrated tragic writer among the english. it is dryden, a poet in the reign of charles ii.--a writer whose genius was too exuberant, and not accompanied with judgment enough. had he written only a tenth part of the works he left behind him, his character would have been conspicuous in every part; but his great fault is his having endeavoured to be universal. the passage in question is as follows:- "when i consider life, 't is all a cheat, yet fooled by hope, men favour the deceit; trust on and think, to-morrow will repay; to-morrow's falser than the former day; lies more; and whilst it says we shall be blest with some new joy, cuts off what we possessed; strange cozenage! none would live past years again, yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, and from the dregs of life think to receive what the first sprightly running could not give. i'm tired with waiting for this chymic gold, which fools us young, and beggars us when old." i shall now give you my translation:- "de desseins en regrets et d'erreurs en desirs les mortals insenses promenent leur folie. dans des malheurs presents, dans l'espoir des plaisirs nous ne vivons jamais, nous attendons la vie. demain, demain, dit-on, va combler tous nos voeux. demain vient, et nous laisse encore plus malheureux. quelle est l'erreur, helas! du soin qui nous devore, nul de nous ne voudroit recommencer son cours. de nos premiers momens nous maudissons l'aurore, et de la nuit qui vient nous attendons encore, ce qu'ont en vain promis les plus beaux de nos jours," &c. it is in these detached passages that the english have hitherto excelled. their dramatic pieces, most of which are barbarous and without decorum, order, or verisimilitude, dart such resplendent flashes through this gleam, as amaze and astonish. the style is too much inflated, too unnatural, too closely copied from the hebrew writers, who abound so much with the asiatic fustian. but then it must be also confessed that the stilts of the figurative style, on which the english tongue is lifted up, raises the genius at the same time very far aloft, though with an irregular pace. the first english writer who composed a regular tragedy, and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it, was the illustrious mr. addison. his "cato" is a masterpiece, both with regard to the diction and to the beauty and harmony of the numbers. the character of cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of cornelia in the "pompey" of corneille, for cato is great without anything like fustian, and cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast. mr. addison's cato appears to me the greatest character that was ever brought upon any stage, but then the rest of them do not correspond to the dignity of it, and this dramatic piece, so excellently well writ, is disfigured by a dull love plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it. the custom of introducing love at random and at any rate in the drama passed from paris to london about 1660, with our ribbons and our perruques. the ladies who adorn the theatrical circle there, in like manner as in this city, will suffer love only to be the theme of every conversation. the judicious mr. addison had the effeminate complaisance to soften the severity of his dramatic character, so as to adapt it to the manners of the age, and, from an endeavour to please, quite ruined a masterpiece in its kind. since his time the drama is become more regular, the audience more difficult to be pleased, and writers more correct and less bold. i have seen some new pieces that were written with great regularity, but which, at the same time, were very flat and insipid. one would think that the english had been hitherto formed to produce irregular beauties only. the shining monsters of shakspeare give infinite more delight than the judicious images of the moderns. hitherto the poetical genius of the english resembles a tufted tree planted by the hand of nature, that throws out a thousand branches at random, and spreads unequally, but with great vigour. it dies if you attempt to force its nature, and to lop and dress it in the same manner as the trees of the garden of marli. letter xix.--on comedy i am surprised that the judicious and ingenious mr. de muralt, who has published some letters on the english and french nations, should have confined himself; in treating of comedy, merely to censure shadwell the comic writer. this author was had in pretty great contempt in mr. de muralt's time, and was not the poet of the polite part of the nation. his dramatic pieces, which pleased some time in acting, were despised by all persons of taste, and might be compared to many plays which i have seen in france, that drew crowds to the playhouse, at the same time that they were intolerable to read; and of which it might be said, that the whole city of paris exploded them, and yet all flocked to see them represented on the stage. methinks mr. de muralt should have mentioned an excellent comic writer (living when he was in england), i mean mr. wycherley, who was a long time known publicly to be happy in the good graces of the most celebrated mistress of king charles ii. this gentleman, who passed his life among persons of the highest distinction, was perfectly well acquainted with their lives and their follies, and painted them with the strongest pencil, and in the truest colours. he has drawn a misanthrope or man-hater, in imitation of that of moliere. all wycherley's strokes are stronger and bolder than those of our misanthrope, but then they are less delicate, and the rules of decorum are not so well observed in this play. the english writer has corrected the only defect that is in moliere's comedy, the thinness of the plot, which also is so disposed that the characters in it do not enough raise our concern. the english comedy affects us, and the contrivance of the plot is very ingenious, but at the same time it is too bold for the french manners. the fable is this:--a captain of a man-of-war, who is very brave, open-hearted, and inflamed with a spirit of contempt for all mankind, has a prudent, sincere friend, whom he yet is suspicious of; and a mistress that loves him with the utmost excess of passion. the captain so far from returning her love, will not even condescend to look upon her, but confides entirely in a false friend, who is the most worthless wretch living. at the same time he has given his heart to a creature, who is the greatest coquette and the most perfidious of her sex, and he is so credulous as to be confident she is a penelope, and his false friend a cato. he embarks on board his ship in order to go and fight the dutch, having left all his money, his jewels, and everything he had in the world to this virtuous creature, whom at the same time he recommends to the care of his supposed faithful friend. nevertheless the real man of honour, whom he suspects so unaccountably, goes on board the ship with him, and the mistress, on whom he would not bestow so much as one glance, disguises herself in the habit of a page, and is with him the whole voyage, without his once knowing that she is of a sex different from that she attempts to pass for, which, by the way, is not over natural. the captain having blown up his own ship in an engagement, returns to england abandoned and undone, accompanied by his page and his friend, without knowing the friendship of the one or the tender passion of the other. immediately he goes to the jewel among women, who he expected had preserved her fidelity to him and the treasure he had left in her hands. he meets with her indeed, but married to the honest knave in whom he had reposed so much confidence, and finds she had acted as treacherously with regard to the casket he had entrusted her with. the captain can scarce think it possible that a woman of virtue and honour can act so vile a part; but to convince him still more of the reality of it, this very worthy lady falls in love with the little page, and will force him to her embraces. but as it is requisite justice should be done, and that in a dramatic piece virtue ought to be rewarded and vice punished, it is at last found that the captain takes his page's place, and lies with his faithless mistress, cuckolds his treacherous friend, thrusts his sword through his body, recovers his casket, and marries his page. you will observe that this play is also larded with a petulant, litigious old woman (a relation of the captain), who is the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage. wycherley has also copied from moliere another play, of as singular and bold a cast, which is a kind of _ecole des femmes_, or, _school for married women_. the principal character in this comedy is one homer, a sly fortune hunter, and the terror of all the city husbands. this fellow, in order to play a surer game, causes a report to be spread, that in his last illness, the surgeons had found it necessary to have him made a eunuch. upon his appearing in this noble character, all the husbands in town flock to him with their wives, and now poor homer is only puzzled about his choice. however, he gives the preference particularly to a little female peasant, a very harmless, innocent creature, who enjoys a fine flush of health, and cuckolds her husband with a simplicity that has infinitely more merit than the witty malice of the most experienced ladies. this play cannot indeed be called the school of good morals, but it is certainly the school of wit and true humour. sir john vanbrugh has written several comedies, which are more humorous than those of mr. wycherley, but not so ingenious. sir john was a man of pleasure, and likewise a poet and an architect. the general opinion is, that he is as sprightly in his writings as he is heavy in his buildings. it is he who raised the famous castle of blenheim, a ponderous and lasting monument of our unfortunate battle of hochstet. were the apartments but as spacious as the walls are thick, this castle would be commodious enough. some wag, in an epitaph he made on sir john vanbrugh, has these lines:- "earth lie light on him, for he laid many a heavy load on thee." sir john having taken a tour into france before the glorious war that broke out in 1701, was thrown into the bastille, and detained there for some time, without being ever able to discover the motive which had prompted our ministry to indulge him with this mark of their distinction. he wrote a comedy during his confinement; and a circumstance which appears to me very extraordinary is, that we don't meet with so much as a single satirical stroke against the country in which he had been so injuriously treated. the late mr. congreve raised the glory of comedy to a greater height than any english writer before or since his time. he wrote only a few plays, but they are all excellent in their kind. the laws of the drama are strictly observed in them; they abound with characters all which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we don't meet with so much as one low or coarse jest. the language is everywhere that of men of honour, but their actions are those of knaves--a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature, and frequented what we call polite company. he was infirm and come to the verge of life when i knew him. mr. congreve had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean an idea of his first profession (that of a writer), though it was to this he owed his fame and fortune. he spoke of his works as of trifles that were beneath him; and hinted to me, in our first conversation, that i should visit him upon no other footing than that of a gentleman who led a life of plainness and simplicity. i answered, that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman, i should never have come to see him; and i was very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity. mr. congreve's comedies are the most witty and regular, those of sir john vanbrugh most gay and humorous, and those of mr. wycherley have the greatest force and spirit. it may be proper to observe that these fine geniuses never spoke disadvantageously of moliere; and that none but the contemptible writers among the english have endeavoured to lessen the character of that great comic poet. such italian musicians as despise lully are themselves persons of no character or ability; but a buononcini esteems that great artist, and does justice to his merit. the english have some other good comic writers living, such as sir richard steele and mr. cibber, who is an excellent player, and also poet laureate--a title which, how ridiculous soever it may be thought, is yet worth a thousand crowns a year (besides some considerable privileges) to the person who enjoys it. our illustrious corneille had not so much. to conclude. don't desire me to descend to particulars with regard to these english comedies, which i am so fond of applauding; nor to give you a single smart saying or humorous stroke from wycherley or congreve. we don't laugh in rending a translation. if you have a mind to understand the english comedy, the only way to do this will be for you to go to england, to spend three years in london, to make yourself master of the english tongue, and to frequent the playhouse every night. i receive but little pleasure from the perusal of aristophanes and plautus, and for this reason, because i am neither a greek nor a roman. the delicacy of the humour, the allusion, the _a propos_--all these are lost to a foreigner. but it is different with respect to tragedy, this treating only of exalted passions and heroical follies, which the antiquated errors of fable or history have made sacred. oedipus, electra, and such-like characters, may with as much propriety be treated of by the spaniards, the english, or us, as by the greeks. but true comedy is the speaking picture of the follies and ridiculous foibles of a nation; so that he only is able to judge of the painting who is perfectly acquainted with the people it represents. letter xx.--on such of the nobility as cultivate the belles lettres there once was a time in france when the polite arts were cultivated by persons of the highest rank in the state. the courtiers particularly were conversant in them, although indolence, a taste for trifles, and a passion for intrigue, were the divinities of the country. the court methinks at this time seems to have given into a taste quite opposite to that of polite literature, but perhaps the mode of thinking may be revived in a little time. the french are of so flexible a disposition, may be moulded into such a variety of shapes, that the monarch needs but command and he is immediately obeyed. the english generally think, and learning is had in greater honour among them than in our country--an advantage that results naturally from the form of their government. there are about eight hundred persons in england who have a right to speak in public, and to support the interest of the kingdom; and near five or six thousand may in their turns aspire to the same honour. the whole nation set themselves up as judges over these, and every man has the liberty of publishing his thoughts with regard to public affairs, which shows that all the people in general are indispensably obliged to cultivate their understandings. in england the governments of greece and rome are the subject of every conversation, so that every man is under a necessity of perusing such authors as treat of them, how disagreeable soever it may be to him; and this study leads naturally to that of polite literature. mankind in general speak well in their respective professions. what is the reason why our magistrates, our lawyers, our physicians, and a great number of the clergy, are abler scholars, have a finer taste, and more wit, than persons of all other professions? the reason is, because their condition of life requires a cultivated and enlightened mind, in the same manner as a merchant is obliged to be acquainted with his traffic. not long since an english nobleman, who was very young, came to see me at paris on his return from italy. he had written a poetical description of that country, which, for delicacy and politeness, may vie with anything we meet with in the earl of rochester, or in our chaulieu, our sarrasin, or chapelle. the translation i have given of it is so inexpressive of the strength and delicate humour of the original, that i am obliged seriously to ask pardon of the author and of all who understand english. however, as this is the only method i have to make his lordship's verses known, i shall here present you with them in our tongue:- "qu'ay je donc vu dans l'italie? orgueil, astuce, et pauvrete, grands complimens, peu de bonte et beaucoup de ceremonie. "l'extravagante comedie que souvent l'inquisition vent qu'on nomme religion mais qu'ici nous nommons folie. "la nature en vain bienfaisante vent enricher ses lieux charmans, des pretres la main desolante etouffe ses plus beaux presens. "les monsignors, soy disant grands, seuls dans leurs palais magnifiques y sont d'illustres faineants, sans argent, et sans domestiques. "pour les petits, sans liberte, martyrs du joug qui les domine, ils ont fait voeu de pauvrete, priant dieu par oisivete et toujours jeunant par famine. "ces beaux lieux du pape benis semblent habitez par les diables; et les habitans miserables sont damnes dans le paradis." letter xxi.--on the earl of rochester and mr. waller the earl of rochester's name is universally known. mr. de st. evremont has made very frequent mention of him, but then he has represented this famous nobleman in no other light than as the man of pleasure, as one who was the idol of the fair; but, with regard to myself, i would willingly describe in him the man of genius, the great poet. among other pieces which display the shining imagination, his lordship only could boast he wrote some satires on the same subjects as those our celebrated boileau made choice of. i do not know any better method of improving the taste than to compare the productions of such great geniuses as have exercised their talent on the same subject. boileau declaims as follows against human reason in his "satire on man:" "cependant a le voir plein de vapeurs legeres, soi-meme se bercer de ses propres chimeres, lui seul de la nature est la baze et l'appui, et le dixieme ciel ne tourne que pour lui. de tous les animaux il est ici le maitre; qui pourroit le nier, poursuis tu? moi peut-etre. ce maitre pretendu qui leur donne des loix, ce roi des animaux, combien a-t'il de rois?" "yet, pleased with idle whimsies of his brain, and puffed with pride, this haughty thing would fain be think himself the only stay and prop that holds the mighty frame of nature up. the skies and stars his properties must seem, * * * of all the creatures he's the lord, he cries. * * * and who is there, say you, that dares deny so owned a truth? that may be, sir, do i. * * * this boasted monarch of the world who awes the creatures here, and with his nod gives laws this self-named king, who thus pretends to be the lord of all, how many lords has he?" oldham, _a little altered_. the lord rochester expresses himself, in his "satire against man," in pretty near the following manner. but i must first desire you always to remember that the versions i give you from the english poets are written with freedom and latitude, and that the restraint of our versification, and the delicacies of the french tongue, will not allow a translator to convey into it the licentious impetuosity and fire of the english numbers:- "cet esprit que je hais, cet esprit plein d'erreur, ce n'est pas ma raison, c'est la tienne, docteur. c'est la raison frivole, inquiete, orgueilleuse des sages animaux, rivale dedaigneuse, qui croit entr'eux et l'ange, occuper le milieu, et pense etre ici bas l'image de son dieu. vil atome imparfait, qui croit, doute, dispute rampe, s'eleve, tombe, et nie encore sa chute, qui nous dit je suis libre, en nous montrant ses fers, et dont l'oeil trouble et faux, croit percer l'univers. allez, reverends fous, bienheureux fanatiques, compilez bien l'amas de vos riens scholastiques, peres de visions, et d'enigmes sacres, auteurs du labirinthe, ou vous vous egarez. allez obscurement eclaircir vos misteres, et courez dans l'ecole adorer vos chimeres. il est d'autres erreurs, il est de ces devots condamne par eux memes a l'ennui du repos. ce mystique encloitre, fier de son indolence tranquille, au sein de dieu. que peut il faire? il pense. non, tu ne penses point, miserable, tu dors: inutile a la terre, et mis au rang des morts. ton esprit enerve croupit dans la molesse. reveille toi, sois homme, et sors de ton ivresse. l'homme est ne pour agir, et tu pretens penser?" &c. the original runs thus:- "hold mighty man, i cry all this we know, and 'tis this very reason i despise, this supernatural gift that makes a mite think he's the image of the infinite; comparing his short life, void of all rest, to the eternal and the ever blest. this busy, puzzling stirrer up of doubt, that frames deep mysteries, then finds them out, filling, with frantic crowds of thinking fools, those reverend bedlams, colleges, and schools; borne on whose wings each heavy sot can pierce the limits of the boundless universe. so charming ointments make an old witch fly, and bear a crippled carcase through the sky. 'tis this exalted power, whose business lies in nonsense and impossibilities. this made a whimsical philosopher before the spacious world his tub prefer; and we have modern cloistered coxcombs, who retire to think, 'cause they have naught to do. but thoughts are given for action's government, where action ceases, thought's impertinent." whether these ideas are true or false, it is certain they are expressed with an energy and fire which form the poet. i shall be very far from attempting to examine philosophically into these verses, to lay down the pencil, and take up the rule and compass on this occasion; my only design in this letter being to display the genius of the english poets, and therefore i shall continue in the same view. the celebrated mr. waller has been very much talked of in france, and mr. de la fontaine, st. evremont, and bayle have written his eulogium, but still his name only is known. he had much the same reputation in london as voiture had in paris, and in my opinion deserved it better. voiture was born in an age that was just emerging from barbarity; an age that was still rude and ignorant, the people of which aimed at wit, though they had not the least pretensions to it, and sought for points and conceits instead of sentiments. bristol stones are more easily found than diamonds. voiture, born with an easy and frivolous, genius, was the first who shone in this aurora of french literature. had he come into the world after those great geniuses who spread such a glory over the age of louis xiv., he would either have been unknown, would have been despised, or would have corrected his style. boileau applauded him, but it was in his first satires, at a time when the taste of that great poet was not yet formed. he was young, and in an age when persons form a judgment of men from their reputation, and not from their writings. besides, boileau was very partial both in his encomiums and his censures. he applauded segrais, whose works nobody reads; he abused quinault, whose poetical pieces every one has got by heart; and is wholly silent upon la fontaine. waller, though a better poet than voiture, was not yet a finished poet. the graces breathe in such of waller's works as are writ in a tender strain; but then they are languid through negligence, and often disfigured with false thoughts. the english had not in his time attained the art of correct writing. but his serious compositions exhibit a strength and vigour which could not have been expected from the softness and effeminacy of his other pieces. he wrote an elegy on oliver cromwell, which, with all its faults, is nevertheless looked upon as a masterpiece. to understand this copy of verses you are to know that the day oliver died was remarkable for a great storm. his poem begins in this manner:- "il n'est plus, s'en est fait, soumettons nous au sort, le ciel a signale ce jour par des tempetes, et la voix des tonnerres eclatant sur nos tetes vient d'annoncer sa mort. "par ses derniers soupirs il ebranle cet ile; cet ile que son bras fit trembler tant de fois, quand dans le cours de ses exploits, il brisoit la tete des rois, et soumettoit un peuple a son joug seul docile. "mer tu t'en es trouble; o mer tes flots emus semblent dire en grondant aux plus lointains rivages que l'effroi de la terre et ton maitre n'est plus. "tel au ciel autrefois s'envola romulus, tel il quitta la terre, au milieu des orages, tel d'un peuple guerrier il recut les homages; obei dans sa vie, sa mort adore, son palais fut un temple," &c. * * * * * "we must resign! heaven his great soul does claim in storms as loud as his immortal fame; his dying groans, his last breath shakes our isle, and trees uncut fall for his funeral pile: about his palace their broad roots are tost into the air; so romulus was lost! new rome in such a tempest missed her king, and from obeying fell to worshipping. on oeta's top thus hercules lay dead, with ruined oaks and pines about him spread. nature herself took notice of his death, and, sighing, swelled the sea with such a breath, that to remotest shores the billows rolled, th' approaching fate of his great ruler told." waller. it was this elogium that gave occasion to the reply (taken notice of in bayle's dictionary), which waller made to king charles ii. this king, to whom waller had a little before (as is usual with bards and monarchs) presented a copy of verses embroidered with praises, reproached the poet for not writing with so much energy and fire as when he had applauded the usurper (meaning oliver). "sir," replied waller to the king, "we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth." this answer was not so sincere as that which a dutch ambassador made, who, when the same monarch complained that his masters paid less regard to him than they had done to cromwell. "ah, sir!" says the ambassador, "oliver was quite another man--" it is not my intent to give a commentary on waller's character, nor on that of any other person; for i consider men after their death in no other light than as they were writers, and wholly disregard everything else. i shall only observe that waller, though born in a court, and to an estate of five or six thousand pounds sterling a year, was never so proud or so indolent as to lay aside the happy talent which nature had indulged him. the earls of dorset and roscommon, the two dukes of buckingham, the lord halifax, and so many other noblemen, did not think the reputation they obtained of very great poets and illustrious writers, any way derogatory to their quality. they are more glorious for their works than for their titles. these cultivated the polite arts with as much assiduity as though they had been their whole dependence. they also have made learning appear venerable in the eyes of the vulgar, who have need to be led in all things by the great; and who, nevertheless, fashion their manners less after those of the nobility (in england i mean) than in any other country in the world. letter xxii.--on mr. pope and some other famous poets i intended to treat of mr. prior, one of the most amiable english poets, whom you saw plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary at paris in 1712. i also designed to have given you some idea of the lord roscommon's and the lord dorset's muse; but i find that to do this i should be obliged to write a large volume, and that, after much pains and trouble, you would have but an imperfect idea of all those works. poetry is a kind of music in which a man should have some knowledge before he pretends to judge of it. when i give you a translation of some passages from those foreign poets, i only prick down, and that imperfectly, their music; but then i cannot express the taste of their harmony. there is one english poem especially which i should despair of ever making you understand, the title whereof is "hudibras." the subject of it is the civil war in the time of the grand rebellion, and the principles and practice of the puritans are therein ridiculed. it is don quixote, it is our "satire menippee" blended together. i never found so much wit in one single book as in that, which at the same time is the most difficult to be translated. who would believe that a work which paints in such lively and natural colours the several foibles and follies of mankind, and where we meet with more sentiments than words, should baffle the endeavours of the ablest translator? but the reason of this is, almost every part of it alludes to particular incidents. the clergy are there made the principal object of ridicule, which is understood but by few among the laity. to explain this a commentary would be requisite, and humour when explained is no longer humour. whoever sets up for a commentator of smart sayings and repartees is himself a blockhead. this is the reason why the works of the ingenious dean swift, who has been called the english rabelais, will never be well understood in france. this gentleman has the honour (in common with rabelais) of being a priest, and, like him, laughs at everything; but, in my humble opinion, the title of the english rabelais which is given the dean is highly derogatory to his genius. the former has interspersed his unaccountablyfantastic and unintelligible book with the most gay strokes of humour; but which, at the same time, has a greater proportion of impertinence. he has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid raillery. an agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes of nonsense. there are but few persons, and those of a grotesque taste, who pretend to understand and to esteem this work; for, as to the rest of the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are found in rabelais and despise his book. he is looked upon as the prince of buffoons. the readers are vexed to think that a man who was master of so much wit should have made so wretched a use of it; he is an intoxicated philosopher who never wrote but when he was in liquor. dean swift is rabelais in his senses, and frequenting the politest company. the former, indeed, is not so gay as the latter, but then he possesses all the delicacy, the justness, the choice, the good taste, in all which particulars our giggling rural vicar rabelais is wanting. the poetical numbers of dean swift are of a singular and almost inimitable taste; true humour, whether in prose or verse, seems to be his peculiar talent; but whoever is desirous of understanding him perfectly must visit the island in which he was born. it will be much easier for you to form an idea of mr. pope's works. he is, in my opinion, the most elegant, the most correct poet; and, at the same time, the most harmonious (a circumstance which redounds very much to the honour of this muse) that england ever gave birth to. he has mellowed the harsh sounds of the english trumpet to the soft accents of the flute. his compositions may be easily translated, because they are vastly clear and perspicuous; besides, most of his subjects are general, and relative to all nations. his "essay on criticism" will soon be known in france by the translation which l'abbe de resnel has made of it. here is an extract from his poem entitled the "rape of the lock," which i just now translated with the latitude i usually take on these occasions; for, once again, nothing can be more ridiculous than to translate a poet literally:- "umbriel, a l'instant, vieil gnome rechigne, va d'une aile pesante et d'un air renfrogne chercher en murmurant la caverne profonde, ou loin des doux raions que repand l'oeil du monde la deesse aux vapeurs a choisi son sejour, les tristes aquilons y sifflent a l'entour, et le souffle mal sain de leur aride haleine y porte aux environs la fievre et la migraine. sur un riche sofa derriere un paravent loin des flambeaux, du bruit, des parleurs et du vent, la quinteuse deesse incessamment repose, le coeur gros de chagrin, sans en savoir la cause. n'aiant pense jamais, l'esprit toujours trouble, l'oeil charge, le teint pale, et l'hypocondre enfle. la medisante envie, est assise aupres d'elle, vieil spectre feminin, decrepite pucelle, avec un air devot dechirant son prochain, et chansonnant les gens l'evangile a la main. sur un lit plein de fleurs negligemment panchee une jeune beaute non loin d'elle est couchee, c'est l'affectation qui grassaie en parlant, ecoute sans entendre, et lorgne en regardant. qui rougit sans pudeur, et rit de tout sans joie, de cent maux differens pretend qu'elle est la proie; et pleine de sante sous le rouge et le fard, se plaint avec molesse, et se pame avec art." "umbriel, a dusky, melancholy sprite as ever sullied the fair face of light, down to the central earth, his proper scene, repairs to search the gloomy cave of spleen. swift on his sooty pinions flits the gnome, and in a vapour reached the dismal dome. no cheerful breeze this sullen region knows, the dreaded east is all the wind that blows. here, in a grotto, sheltered close from air, and screened in shades from day's detested glare, she sighs for ever on her pensive bed, pain at her side, and megrim at her head, two handmaids wait the throne. alike in place, but differing far in figure and in face, here stood ill-nature, like an ancient maid, her wrinkled form in black and white arrayed; with store of prayers for mornings, nights, and noons, her hand is filled; her bosom with lampoons. there affectation, with a sickly mien, shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen, practised to lisp, and hang the head aside, faints into airs, and languishes with pride; on the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, wrapt in a gown, for sickness and for show." this extract, in the original (not in the faint translation i have given you of it), may be compared to the description of _la molesse_ (softness or effeminacy), in boileau's "lutrin." methinks i now have given you specimens enough from the english poets. i have made some transient mention of their philosophers, but as for good historians among them, i don't know of any; and, indeed, a frenchman was forced to write their history. possibly the english genius, which is either languid or impetuous, has not yet acquired that unaffected eloquence, that plain but majestic air which history requires. possibly too, the spirit of party which exhibits objects in a dim and confused light may have sunk the credit of their historians. one half of the nation is always at variance with the other half. i have met with people who assured me that the duke of marlborough was a coward, and that mr. pope was a fool; just as some jesuits in france declare pascal to have been a man of little or no genius, and some jansenists affirm father bourdaloue to have been a mere babbler. the jacobites consider mary queen of scots as a pious heroine, but those of an opposite party look upon her as a prostitute, an adulteress, a murderer. thus the english have memorials of the several reigns, but no such thing as a history. there is, indeed, now living, one mr. gordon (the public are obliged to him for a translation of tacitus), who is very capable of writing the history of his own country, but rapin de thoyras got the start of him. to conclude, in my opinion the english have not such good historians as the french have no such thing as a real tragedy, have several delightful comedies, some wonderful passages in certain of their poems, and boast of philosophers that are worthy of instructing mankind. the english have reaped very great benefit from the writers of our nation, and therefore we ought (since they have not scrupled to be in our debt) to borrow from them. both the english and we came after the italians, who have been our instructors in all the arts, and whom we have surpassed in some. i cannot determine which of the three nations ought to be honoured with the palm; but happy the writer who could display their various merits. letter xxiii.--on the regard that ought to be shown to men of letters neither the english nor any other people have foundations established in favour of the polite arts like those in france. there are universities in most countries, but it is in france only that we meet with so beneficial an encouragement for astronomy and all parts of the mathematics, for physic, for researches into antiquity, for painting, sculpture, and architecture. louis xiv. has immortalised his name by these several foundations, and this immortality did not cost him two hundred thousand livres a year. i must confess that one of the things i very much wonder at is, that as the parliament of great britain have promised a reward of 20,000 pounds sterling to any person who may discover the longitude, they should never have once thought to imitate louis xiv. in his munificence with regard to the arts and sciences. merit, indeed, meets in england with rewards of another kind, which redound more to the honour of the nation. the english have so great a veneration for exalted talents, that a man of merit in their country is always sure of making his fortune. mr. addison in france would have been elected a member of one of the academies, and, by the credit of some women, might have obtained a yearly pension of twelve hundred livres, or else might have been imprisoned in the bastile, upon pretence that certain strokes in his tragedy of _cato_ had been discovered which glanced at the porter of some man in power. mr. addison was raised to the post of secretary of state in england. sir isaac newton was made master of the royal mint. mr. congreve had a considerable employment. mr. prior was plenipotentiary. dr. swift is dean of st. patrick in dublin, and is more revered in ireland than the primate himself. the religion which mr. pope professes excludes him, indeed, from preferments of every kind, but then it did not prevent his gaining two hundred thousand livres by his excellent translation of homer. i myself saw a long time in france the author of _rhadamistus_ ready to perish for hunger. and the son of one of the greatest men our country ever gave birth to, and who was beginning to run the noble career which his father had set him, would have been reduced to the extremes of misery had he not been patronised by monsieur fagon. but the circumstance which mostly encourages the arts in england is the great veneration which is paid them. the picture of the prime minister hangs over the chimney of his own closet, but i have seen that of mr. pope in twenty noblemen's houses. sir isaac newton was revered in his lifetime, and had a due respect paid to him after his death; the greatest men in the nation disputing who should have the honour of holding up his pall. go into westminster abbey, and you will find that what raises the admiration of the spectator is not the mausoleums of the english kings, but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to perpetuate the memory of those illustrious men who contributed to its glory. we view their statues in that abbey in the same manner as those of sophocles, plato, and other immortal personages were viewed in athens; and i am persuaded that the bare sight of those glorious monuments has fired more than one breast, and been the occasion of their becoming great men. the english have even been reproached with paying too extravagant honours to mere merit, and censured for interring the celebrated actress mrs. oldfield in westminster abbey, with almost the same pomp as sir isaac newton. some pretend that the english had paid her these great funeral honours, purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the barbarity and injustice which they object to us, for having buried mademoiselle le couvreur ignominiously in the fields. but be assured from me, that the english were prompted by no other principle in burying mrs. oldfield in westminster abbey than their good sense. they are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with infamy an art which has immortalised a euripides and a sophocles; or to exclude from the body of their citizens a set of people whose business is to set off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the nation is proud of. under the reign of charles i. and in the beginning of the civil wars raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to it; a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows, which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and his queen, daughter to henry i. of france, were passionately fond of them. one mr. prynne, a man of most furiously scrupulous principles, who would have thought himself damned had he worn a cassock instead of a short cloak, and have been glad to see one-half of mankind cut the other to pieces for the glory of god, and the _propaganda fide_; took it into his head to write a most wretched satire against some pretty good comedies, which were exhibited very innocently every night before their majesties. he quoted the authority of the rabbis, and some passages from st. bonaventure, to prove that the oedipus of sophocles was the work of the evil spirit; that terence was excommunicated _ipso facto_; and added, that doubtless brutus, who was a very severe jansenist, assassinated julius caesar for no other reason but because he, who was pontifex maximus, presumed to write a tragedy the subject of which was oedipus. lastly, he declared that all who frequented the theatre were excommunicated, as they thereby renounced their baptism. this was casting the highest insult on the king and all the royal family; and as the english loved their prince at that time, they could not bear to hear a writer talk of excommunicating him, though they themselves afterwards cut his head off. prynne was summoned to appear before the star chamber; his wonderful book, from which father le brun stole his, was sentenced to be burnt by the common hangman, and himself to lose his ears. his trial is now extant. the italians are far from attempting to cast a blemish on the opera, or to excommunicate signor senesino or signora cuzzoni. with regard to myself, i could presume to wish that the magistrates would suppress i know not what contemptible pieces written against the stage. for when the english and italians hear that we brand with the greatest mark of infamy an art in which we excel; that we excommunicate persons who receive salaries from the king; that we condemn as impious a spectacle exhibited in convents and monasteries; that we dishonour sports in which louis xiv. and louis xv., performed as actors; that we give the title of the devil's works to pieces which are received by magistrates of the most severe character, and represented before a virtuous queen; when, i say, foreigners are told of this insolent conduct, this contempt for the royal authority, and this gothic rusticity which some presume to call christian severity, what an idea must they entertain of our nation? and how will it be possible for them to conceive, either that our laws give a sanction to an art which is declared infamous, or that some persons dare to stamp with infamy an art which receives a sanction from the laws, is rewarded by kings, cultivated and encouraged by the greatest men, and admired by whole nations? and that father le brun's impertinent libel against the stage is seen in a bookseller's shop, standing the very next to the immortal labours of racine, of corneille, of moliere, &c. letter xxiv.--on the royal society and other academies the english had an academy of sciences many years before us, but then it is not under such prudent regulations as ours, the only reason of which very possibly is, because it was founded before the academy of paris; for had it been founded after, it would very probably have adopted some of the sage laws of the former and improved upon others. two things, and those the most essential to man, are wanting in the royal society of london, i mean rewards and laws. a seat in the academy at paris is a small but secure fortune to a geometrician or a chemist; but this is so far from being the case at london, that the several members of the royal society are at a continual, though indeed small expense. any man in england who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and natural philosophy, and expresses an inclination to be a member of the royal society, is immediately elected into it. but in france it is not enough that a man who aspires to the honour of being a member of the academy, and of receiving the royal stipend, has a love for the sciences; he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them; and is obliged to dispute the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as they are fired by a principle of glory, by interest, by the difficulty itself; and by that inflexibility of mind which is generally found in those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study, the mathematics. the academy of sciences is prudently confined to the study of nature, and, indeed, this is a field spacious enough for fifty or threescore persons to range in. that of london mixes indiscriminately literature with physics; but methinks the founding an academy merely for the polite arts is more judicious, as it prevents confusion, and the joining, in some measure, of heterogeneals, such as a dissertation on the head-dresses of the roman ladies with a hundred or more new curves. as there is very little order and regularity in the royal society, and not the least encouragement; and that the academy of paris is on a quite different foot, it is no wonder that our transactions are drawn up in a more just and beautiful manner than those of the english. soldiers who are under a regular discipline, and besides well paid, must necessarily at last perform more glorious achievements than others who are mere volunteers. it must indeed be confessed that the royal society boast their newton, but then he did not owe his knowledge and discoveries to that body; so far from it, that the latter were intelligible to very few of his fellow members. a genius like that of sir isaac belonged to all the academies in the world, because all had a thousand things to learn of him. the celebrated dean swift formed a design, in the latter end of the late queen's reign, to found an academy for the english tongue upon the model of that of the french. this project was promoted by the late earl of oxford, lord high treasurer, and much more by the lord bolingbroke, secretary of state, who had the happy talent of speaking without premeditation in the parliament house with as much purity as dean swift wrote in his closet, and who would have been the ornament and protector of that academy. those only would have been chosen members of it whose works will last as long as the english tongue, such as dean swift, mr. prior, whom we saw here invested with a public character, and whose fame in england is equal to that of la fontaine in france; mr. pope, the english boileau, mr. congreve, who may be called their moliere, and several other eminent persons whose names i have forgot; all these would have raised the glory of that body to a great height even in its infancy. but queen anne being snatched suddenly from the world, the whigs were resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy, a circumstance that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature. the members of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who first formed that of the french, for swift, prior, congreve, dryden, pope, addison, &c. had fixed the english tongue by their writings; whereas chapelain, colletet, cassaigne, faret, perrin, cotin, our first academicians, were a disgrace to their country; and so much ridicule is now attached to their very names, that if an author of some genius in this age had the misfortune to be called chapelain or cotin, he would be under a necessity of changing his name. one circumstance, to which the english academy should especially have attended, is to have prescribed to themselves occupations of a quite different kind from those with which our academicians amuse themselves. a wit of this country asked me for the memoirs of the french academy. i answered, they have no memoirs, but have printed threescore or fourscore volumes in quarto of compliments. the gentleman perused one or two of them, but without being able to understand the style in which they were written, though he understood all our good authors perfectly. "all," says he, "i see in these elegant discourses is, that the member elect having assured the audience that his predecessor was a great man, that cardinal richelieu was a very great man, that the chancellor seguier was a pretty great man, that louis xiv. was a more than great man, the director answers in the very same strain, and adds, that the member elect may also be a sort of great man, and that himself, in quality of director, must also have some share in this greatness." the cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so little honour to this body is evident enough. _vitium est temporis potius quam hominis_ (the fault is owing to the age rather than to particular persons). it grew up insensibly into a custom for every academician to repeat these elogiums at his reception; it was laid down as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time the sullen satisfaction of yawning over these productions. if the reason should afterwards be sought, why the greatest geniuses who have been incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst speeches, i answer, that it is wholly owing to a strong propension, the gentlemen in question had to shine, and to display a thread-bare, worn-out subject in a new and uncommon light. the necessity of saying something, the perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire of being witty, are three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest writer ridiculous. these gentlemen, not being able to strike out any new thoughts, hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves without thinking at all: in like manner as people who should seem to chew with great eagerness, and make as though they were eating, at the same time that they were just starved. it is a law in the french academy, to publish all those discourses by which only they are known, but they should rather make a law never to print any of them. but the academy of the _belles lettres_ have a more prudent and more useful object, which is, to present the public with a collection of transactions that abound with curious researches and critiques. these transactions are already esteemed by foreigners; and it were only to be wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined, and that others had not been treated at all. as, for instance, we should have been very well satisfied, had they omitted i know not what dissertation on the prerogative of the right hand over the left; and some others, which, though not published under so ridiculous a title, are yet written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly. the academy of sciences, in such of their researches as are of a more difficult kind and a more sensible use, embrace the knowledge of nature and the improvements of the arts. we may presume that such profound, such uninterrupted pursuits as these, such exact calculations, such refined discoveries, such extensive and exalted views, will, at last, produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe. hitherto, as we have observed together, the most useful discoveries have been made in the most barbarous times. one would conclude that the business of the most enlightened ages and the most learned bodies, is, to argue and debate on things which were invented by ignorant people. we know exactly the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to its sailing better; and yet columbus discovered america without having the least idea of the property of this angle: however, i am far from inferring from hence that we are to confine ourselves merely to a blind practice, but happy it were, would naturalists and geometricians unite, as much as possible, the practice with the theory. strange, but so it is, that those things which reflect the greatest honour on the human mind are frequently of the least benefit to it! a man who understands the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, aided by a little good sense, shall amass prodigious wealth in trade, shall become a sir peter delme, a sir richard hopkins, a sir gilbert heathcote, whilst a poor algebraist spends his whole life in searching for astonishing properties and relations in numbers, which at the same time are of no manner of use, and will not acquaint him with the nature of exchanges. this is very nearly the case with most of the arts: there is a certain point beyond which all researches serve to no other purpose than merely to delight an inquisitive mind. those ingenious and useless truths may be compared to stars which, by being placed at too great a distance, cannot afford us the least light. with regard to the french academy, how great a service would they do to literature, to the language, and the nation, if, instead of publishing a set of compliments annually, they would give us new editions of the valuable works written in the age of louis xiv., purged from the several errors of diction which are crept into them. there are many of these errors in corneille and moliere, but those in la fontaine are very numerous. such as could not be corrected might at least be pointed out. by this means, as all the europeans read those works, they would teach them our language in its utmost purity--which, by that means, would be fixed to a lasting standard; and valuable french books being then printed at the king's expense, would prove one of the most glorious monuments the nation could boast. i have been told that boileau formerly made this proposal, and that it has since been revived by a gentleman eminent for his genius, his fine sense, and just taste for criticism; but this thought has met with the fate of many other useful projects, of being applauded and neglected. by al haines. the upton letters by arthur christopher benson aedae muri' eseidon oneirata, koudepo aos. 1905 preface these letters were returned to me, shortly after the death of the friend to whom they were written, by his widow. it seems that he had been sorting and destroying letters and papers a few days before his wholly unexpected end. "we won't destroy these," he had said to her, holding the bulky packet of my letters in his hand; "we will keep them together. t---ought to publish them, and, some day, i hope he will." this was not, of course, a deliberate judgement; but his sudden death, a few days later, gives the unconsidered wish a certain sanctity, and i have determined to obey it. moreover, she who has the best right to decide, desires it. a few merely personal matters and casual details have been omitted; but the main substance is there, and the letters are just as they were written. such hurried compositions, of course, abound in literary shortcomings, but perhaps they have a certain spontaneity which more deliberate writings do not always possess. i wrote my best, frankest, and liveliest in the letters, because i knew that herbert would value both the thought and the expression of the thought. and, further, if it is necessary to excuse so speedy a publication, i feel that they are not letters which would gain by being kept. their interest arises from the time, the circumstance, the occasion that gave them birth, from the books read and criticised, the educational problems discussed; and thus they may form a species of comment on a certain aspect of modern life, and from a definite point of view. but, after all, it is enough for me that he appreciated them, and, if he wished that they should go out to the world, well, let them go! in publishing them i am but obeying a last message of love. t. b. monk's orchard, upton, feb. 20, 1905. the upton letters monk's orchard, upton, jan. 23, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have just heard the disheartening news, and i write to say that i am sorry toto corde. i don't yet know the full extent of the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the conditions under which you will have to live. perhaps you or nelly can find time to let me have a few lines about it all? but i suppose there is a good side to it. i imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be able to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to live in england, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. if you can find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and you will be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so often interrupted here. of course there will be drawbacks. books, society, equal talk, the english countryside which you love so well, and, if i may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have to be foregone in a measure. but fortunately there is no difficulty about money, and money will give you back some of these delights. you will still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the intention of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not in the purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. you will be able, too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a real advantage; for i have sometimes thought that your literary work has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. your love of characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. when you have once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the secret of their charm, as you have done here. you will be able, too, to live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents which distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of ties. i declare i did not know i was so good a rhetorician; i shall end by convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except in expatriation! seriously, my dear herbert, i do understand the sadness of the change; but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will be times, i know, of depression. when one lies awake in the morning, before the nerves are braced by contact with the wholesome day; when one has done a tiring piece of work, and is alone, and in that frame of mind when one needs occupation but yet is not brisk enough to turn to the work one loves; in those dreary intervals between one's work, when one is off with the old and not yet on with the new--well i know all the corners of the road, the shadowy cavernous places where the demons lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. but you are not inexperienced or weak. you have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws, and the old thrill comes back. that is one of the real compensations of middle age. when one is young, one imagines that any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary, uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to the dark valley. but later on one can believe that "the roadside dells of rest" are there, even if one cannot see them; and, after all, you have a home which goes with you; and it would seem to be fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared, that you have only daughters--a son, who would have to go back to england to be educated, would be a source of anxiety. yet i find myself even wishing that you had a son, that i might have the care of him over here. you don't know the heart-hunger i sometimes have for young things of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness. you would say that i had plenty of opportunities in my profession; it is true in a sense, and i think i am perhaps a better schoolmaster for being unmarried. but these boys are not one's own; they drift away; they come back dutifully and affectionately to talk to their old tutor; and we are both of us painfully conscious that we have lost hold of the thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed exists no more. well, i did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows, but rather to try and help you to bear your own. tell me as soon as you can what your plans are, and i will come down and see you for the last time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier. god bless you, my old friend! perhaps the light which has hitherto shone (though fitfully) on your life will now begin to shine through it instead; and let me add one word. my assurance grows firmer, from day to day, that we are in stronger hands than our own. it is true that i see things in other lives which look as if those hands were wantonly cruel, hard, unloving; but i reflect that i cannot see all the conditions; i can only humbly fall back upon my own experience, and testify that even the most daunting and humiliating things have a purifying effect; and i can perceive enough at all events to encourage me to send my heart a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that a deep and urgent love is there.--ever affectionately yours, t. b. upton, jan. 26, 1904. dear herbert,--so it is to be madeira at present? well, i know madeira a little, and i can honestly congratulate you. i had feared it might be switzerland. i could not live in switzerland. it does me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. but the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their immemorial patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high hamlets, perched on their lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees, with their indomitable strength--all these depress me. of course there is much homely beauty among the lower slopes; the thickets, the falling streams, the flowers. but the grim black peaks look over everywhere; and there is seldom a feeling of the rich and comfortable peace such as one gets in england. madeira is very different. i have been there, and must truthfully confess that it does not suit me altogether--the warm air, the paradisal luxuriance, the greenhouse fragrance, are not a fit setting for a blond, lymphatic man, who pants for northern winds. but it will suit you; and you will be one of those people, spare and compact as you are, who find themselves vigorous and full of energy there. i have many exquisite vignettes from madeira which linger in my mind. the high hill-villages, full of leafy trees; the grassy downs at the top; the droop of creepers, full of flower and fragrance, over white walls; the sapphire sea, under huge red cliffs. you will perhaps take one of those embowered quintas high above the town, in a garden full of shelter and fountains. and i am much mistaken if you do not find yourself in a very short time passionately attached to the place. then the people are simple, courteous, unaffected, full of personal interest. housekeeping has few difficulties and no terrors. i can't get away for a night; but i will come and dine with you one day this week, if you can keep an evening free. and one thing i will promise--when you are away, i will write to you as often as i can. i shall not attempt any formal letters, but i shall begin with anything that is in my mind, and stop when i feel disposed; and you must do the same. we won't feel bound to answer each other's letters; one wastes time over that. what i shall want to know is what you are thinking and doing, and i shall take for granted you desire the same. you will be happier, now that you know; i need not add that if i can be of any use to you in making suggestions, it will be a real pleasure.--ever yours, t. b. upton, feb. 3, 1904. my dear herbert,--it seems ages since we said good-bye--yet it is not a week ago. and now i have been at work all day correcting exercises, teaching, talking. i have had supper with the boys, and i have been walking about since and talking to them--the nicest part of my work. they are at this time of the day, as a rule, in good spirits, charitable, sensible. what an odd thing it is that boys are so delightful when they are alone, and so tiresome (not always) when they are together. they seem, in public, to want to show their worst side, to be ashamed of being supposed to be good, or interested, or thoughtful, or tender-hearted. they are so afraid of seeming better than they are, and pleased to appear worse than they are. i wonder why this is? it is the same more or less with most people; but one sees instincts at their nakedest among boys. as i go on in life, the one thing i desire is simplicity and reality; pose is the one fatal thing. the dullest person becomes interesting if you feel that he is really himself, that he is not holding up some absurd shield or other in front of his shivering soul. and yet how hard it is, even when one appreciates the benefits and beauty of sincerity, to say what one really thinks, without reference to what one supposes the person one is talking to would like or expect one to think--and to do it, too, without brusqueness or rudeness or self-assertion. boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about each other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be popular, and pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to popularity is to see the good points in every one and not to shrink from mentioning them. i once had a pupil, a simple-minded, serene, ordinary creature, who attained to extraordinary popularity. i often wondered why; after he had left, i asked a boy to tell me; he thought for a moment, and then he said, "i suppose, sir, it was because when we were all talking about other chaps--and one does that nearly all the time--he used to be as much down on them as any one else, and he never jawed--but he always had something nice to say about them, not made up, but as if it just came into his head." well, i must stop; i suppose you are forging out over the bay, and sleeping, i hope, like a top. there is no sleep like the sleep on a steamer--profound, deep, so that one wakes up hardly knowing where or who one is, and in the morning you will see the great purple league-long rollers. i remember them; i generally felt very unwell; but there was something tranquillising about them, all the same--and then the mysterious steamers that used to appear alongside, pitching and tumbling, with the little people moving about on the decks; and a mile away in a minute. then the water in the wake, like marble, with its white-veined sapphire, and the hiss and smell of the foam; all that is very pleasant. good night, herbert!--ever yours, t. b. upton, feb. 9, 1904. my dear herbert,--i hope you have got lockhart's life of scott with you; if not, i will send it out to you. i have been reading it lately, and i have a strong wish that you should do the same. it has not all the same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years, is rather tiresome in places. there is something boisterous, undignified--even, i could think, vulgar--about the aims and ambitions depicted. it suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled table, and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite. the desire to stand well with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place in the county, is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace ambition. there is a charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike zest of the man; but there is nothing great about it. then comes the crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted with the spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with splendid courage to an almost intolerable task. the energy displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of debt that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. we see him completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows, ill-health, all closing in upon him. the quality of the work he thus did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down. but the spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine courage is one that goes straight to the heart. it is then that one realises that the earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but gifts from the very hand of the father--to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example. i do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years. the simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. there are no illusions about himself or his work. he hears that southey has been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console. again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition." he adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "i have been no sigher in shades--no writer of songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays framed on fancies and whistled on reeds." a few days later, speaking of thomas campbell, the poet, he says that "he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work." that is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that methods differ. what, for instance, could be more extraordinary than the contrast between scott and wordsworth--scott with his "you know i don't care a curse about what i write;" and wordsworth, whose chief reading in later days was his own poetry. whenever the two are brought into actual juxtaposition, wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption; scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. wordsworth staying at abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at home with his daughter. when the party return, they find wordsworth sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own excursion. a party of travellers arrive, and wordsworth steals down to the chaise, to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have with them. when the two are together, scott is all courteous deference; he quotes wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows. but, during the whole of the time, wordsworth never lets fall a single syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host had ever put pen to paper. yet, while one desires to shake wordsworth to get some of his pomposity out of him, one half desires that scott had felt a little more deeply the dignity of his vocation. one would wish to have infused wordsworth with a little of scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a little stiffening into scott. he ought to have felt--and he did not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a sham seigneur. but through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together, and tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining and undaunted on his way: "i did not like them to think that i could ever be beaten by anything," he says. but at length the hand, tired with the pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind. i paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to abbotsford. i don't think i ever described it to you. my first feeling was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place, testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. but the sight of the rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the little staircase by which, early or late, scott could steal back to his hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it were, a sense of the very shape and stature of the man--these brought the whole thing up with a strange reality. of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected objects--all these reveal the childish side of scott, the superficial self which slipped from him so easily when he entered into the cloud. and then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so deeply embowered in trees that the three dim eildon peaks are invisible; the birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined cloisters--all this made a parable, and brought before one with an intensity of mystery the wonder of it all. the brief life, so full of plans for permanence; the sombre valley of grief; the quiet end, when with failing lips he murmured that the only comfort for the dying heart was the thought that it had desired goodness, however falteringly, above everything. i can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder. the very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again, the brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of life as much as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy as he had feared, is a very noble and beautiful thing. i can conceive of no book more likely to make a spirit in the grip of sorrow and failure more gentle, hopeful, and brave; because it brings before one, with quiet and pathetic dignity, the fact that no fame, no success, no recognition, can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those simple qualities of human nature which the humblest being may admire, win, and display.--ever yours, t. b. upton, shrove tuesday, feb. 16, 1904. dear herbert,--one of those incredible incidents has just happened here, an incident that makes one feel how little one knows of human beings, and that truth, in spite of the conscientious toil of mr. h. g. wells, does still continue to keep ahead of fiction. here is the story. some money is missed in a master's house; circumstances seem to point to its having been abstracted by one of the boys. a good-natured, flighty boy is suspected, absolutely without reason, as it turns out; though he is the sort of boy to mislay his own books and other portable property to any extent, and to make no great difficulty under pressure of immediate need, and at the last moment, about borrowing some one else's chattels. on this occasion the small boys in the house, of whom he is one, solemnly accuse him of the theft, and the despoiled owner entreats that the money may be returned. he protests that he has not taken it. the matter comes to the ears of the house-master, who investigates the matter in the course of the evening, and interviews the supposed culprit. the boy denies it again quite unconcernedly and frankly, goes away from the interview, and wandering about, finds the small boys of the house assembled in one of the studies discussing a matter with great interest. "what has happened?" says our suspected friend. "haven't you heard?" says one of them; "campbell's grandmother" (campbell is another of the set) "has sent him a tip of l2." "oh, has she?" says the boy, with a smile of intense meaning; "i shall have to go my rounds again." this astonishing confession of his guilt is received with the interest it deserves, and campbell is advised to lock up his money, or to hand it over to the custody of the house-master. in the course of the evening another amazing event occurs; the boy whose money was stolen finds the whole of it, quite intact, in the pocket of his cricketing flannels, where he now remembers having put it. the supposed culprit is restored to favour, and becomes a reliable member of society. one of the small boys tells the matron the story of our hero's amazing remark on the subject, in his presence. the matron stares at him, bewildered, and asks him what made him say it. "oh, only to rag them," says the boy; "they were all so excited about it." "but don't you see, you silly boy," says the kind old dame, "that if the money had not been found, you would have been convicted out of your own mouth of having been the thief?" "oh yes," says the boy cheerfully; "but i couldn't help it--it came into my head." of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious thing about boys--i mentioned it the other day--which is, their extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than they are. even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if they were not only not particular, but positively vicious. they don't like aspersions on their moral character to be made by others, but they rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the most virtuous boys can bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to be what is called "pi." this does not happen when boys are by themselves; they will then talk unaffectedly about their principles and practice, if their interlocutor is also unaffected. but when they are together, a kind of disease of self-accusation attacks them. i suppose that it is the perversion of a wholesome instinct, the desire not to be thought better than they are; but part of the exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral tone of public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming to a public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as is often the case, they are wholly untainted by it. the same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. the old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in the master of ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of drink, bears himself like a christian martyr, has gone out; just as the kind of pride is extinct against which the early victorian books used to warn children, and which was manifested by sitting in a carriage surveying a beggar with a curling lip--a course of action which was invariably followed by the breaking of a bank, or by some mysterious financial operation involving an entire loss of fortune and respectability. nowadays the parable of the pharisee and the publican is reversed. the pharisee tells his friends that he is in reality far worse than the publican, while the publican thanks god that he is not a pharisee. it is only, after all, a different kind of affectation, and perhaps even more dangerous, because it passes under the disguise of a virtue. we are all miserable sinners, of course; but it is no encouragement to goodness if we try to reduce ourselves all to the same level of conscious corruption. the only advantage would be if, by our humility, we avoided censoriousness. let us frankly admit that our virtues are inherited, and that any one who had had our chances would have done as well or better than ourselves; neither ought we to be afraid of expressing our admiration of virtue, and, if necessary, our abhorrence of vice, so long as that abhorrence is genuine. the cure for the present state of things is a greater naturalness. perhaps it would end in a certain increase of priggishness; but i honestly confess that nowadays our horror of priggishness, and even of seriousness, has grown out of all proportion; the command not to be a prig has almost taken its place in the decalogue. after all, priggishness is often little more than a failure in tact, a breach of good manners; it is priggish to be superior, and it is vulgar to let a consciousness of superiority escape you. but it is not priggish to be virtuous, or to have a high artistic standard, or to care more for masterpieces of literature than for second-rate books, any more than it is priggish to be rich or well-connected. the priggishness comes in when you begin to compare yourself with others, and to draw distinctions. the pharisee in the parable was a prig; and just as i have known priggish hunting men, and priggish golfers, and even priggish card-players, so i have known people who were priggish about having a low standard of private virtue, because they disapproved of people whose standard was higher. the only cure is frankness and simplicity; and one should practise the art of talking simply and directly among congenial people of what one admires and believes in. how i run on! but it is a comfort to write about these things to some one who will understand; to "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart." by the way, how careless the repetition of "stuff'd" "stuff" is in that line! and yet it can't be unintentional, i suppose? i enjoy your letters very much; and i am glad to hear that you are beginning to "take interest," and are already feeling better. your views of the unchangeableness of personality are very surprising; but i must think them over for a little; i will write about them before long. meanwhile, my love to you all.--ever yours, t. b. upton, feb. 25, 1904. dear herbert,--you ask what i have been reading. well, i have been going through newman's apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in newman's case, i think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. i oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. there is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet naive egotism as of a child. it was written, as newman himself said, in tears; but i do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses, viewed from a quiet haven. i have no sympathy whatever with the intellectual attitude it reveals, but as roderick hudson says, i don't always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great church which drew him quietly in, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. and what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses. then it is distressing to see his horror of liberalism, of speculation, of development, of all the things that constitute the primal essence of the very religion that he blindly followed. one cannot help feeling that had newman been a pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of christ. for the spirit of christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality. newman would have upheld in the sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith delivered by abraham and moses to the saints. newman was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. it is rather pathetic than distressing to see newman again and again deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to be the very voice of god. the struggle with newman was not the struggle of faith with scepticism, but the struggle between two kinds of loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past and his own friends and the church of his nativity, and the loyalty to the infinitely more ancient and venerable tradition of the roman church. it was, as i have said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the mind of a poet, and the particular kind of beauty which appealed to him was not the beauty of nature or art, but the beauty of old tradition and the far-off dim figures of saints and prelates reaching back into the dark and remote past. he had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. his own salvation--"shall i be safe if i die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the thought which eventually outweighed all others. he had little of the priestly hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted him, confided in him, watched his movements, followed him, was always something of a terror to him, and yet in another mood it ministered to his self-absorption. he had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, i would think, his own egotism from himself. again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. he had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. it is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry. to revert to newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of the few masters of english prose. i used to think, in old university days, that newman's style was best tested by the fact that if one had a piece of his writing to turn into latin prose, the more one studied it, turned it over, and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become; because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. bunyan had the same gift; of later authors ruskin had it very strongly, and matthew arnold in a lesser degree. there is another species of beautiful prose, the prose of jeremy taylor, of pater, even of stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of stately persons in seemly and resplendent dress, with magnificently wrought backgrounds of great buildings and curious gardens. but the work of newman and of ruskin is a white art, like the art of sculpture. i find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity and purity more and more. it seems to me that the only function of a writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily. but there are writers, like browning and george meredith, who seem to hold it a virtue to express simple thoughts obscurely. such writers have a wide vogue, because so many people do not value a thought unless they can feel a certain glow of satisfaction in having grasped it; and to have disentangled a web of words, and to find the bright thing lying within, gives them a pleasing feeling of conquest, and, moreover, stamps the thought in their memory. but such readers have not the root of the matter in them; the true attitude is the attitude of desiring to apprehend, to progress, to feel. the readers who delight in obscurity, to whom obscurity seems to enhance the value of the thing apprehended, are mixing with the intellectual process a sort of acquisitive and commercial instinct very dear to the british heart. these bewildering and bewildered browning societies who fling themselves upon sordello, are infected unconsciously with a virtuous craving for "taking higher ground." sordello contains many beautiful things, but by omitting the necessary steps in argument, and by speaking of one thing allusively in terms of another, and by a profound desultoriness of thought, the poet produces a blurred and tangled impression. the beauties of sordello would not lose by being expressed coherently and connectedly. this is the one thing that i try with all my might to impress on boys; that the essence of all style is to say what you mean as forcibly as possible; the bane of classical teaching is that the essence of successful composition is held to be to "get in" words and phrases; it is not a bad training, so long as it is realised to be only a training, in obtaining a rich and flexible vocabulary, so that the writer has a choice of words and the right word comes at call. but this is not made clear in education, and the result on many minds is that they suppose that the essence of good writing is to search diligently for sparkling words and sonorous phrases, and then to patch them into a duller fabric. but i stray from my point: all paths in a schoolmaster's mind lead out upon the educational plain. all that you tell me of your new surroundings is intensely interesting. i am thankful that you feel the characteristic charm of the place, and that the climate seems to suit you. you say nothing of your work; but i suppose that you have had no time as yet. the mere absorbing of new impressions is a fatiguing thing, and no good work can be done until a scene has become familiar. i will discharge your commissions punctually; don't hesitate to tell me what you want. i don't do it from a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything to do for you. i long for letters; as soon as possible send me photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places, but be sure that you make a part of them yourself. i want to see you standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and detailed account of your day, please; the food you eat, the clothes you wear; you know my insatiable appetite for trifles.--ever yours, t. b. upton, march 5, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have been thinking over your last letter: and by the merest chance i stumbled yesterday on an old diary; it was in 1890--a time, do you remember, when our paths had drifted somewhat apart; you had just married, and i find a rather bitter entry, which it amuses me to tell you of now, to the effect that the marriage of a friend, which ought to give one a new friend, often simply deprives one of an old one--"nec carus aeque nec superstes integer," i add. then i was, i suppose, hopelessly absorbed in my profession; it was at the time when i had just taken a boarding-house, and suffered much from the dejection which arises from feeling unequal to the new claims. it amuses me now to think that i could ever have thought of losing your friendship; and it was only temporary; it was only that we were fully occupied; you had to learn camaraderie with your wife, for want of which one sees dryness creep into married lives, when the first divine ardours of passion have died away, and when life has to be lived in the common light of day. well, all that soon adjusted itself; and then i, too, found in your wife a true and congenial friend, so that i can honestly say that your marriage has been one of the most fortunate events of my life. but that was not what i meant to write to you about; the point is this. you say that personality is a stubborn thing. it is indeed. i find myself reflecting and considering how much one's character really changes as life goes on; in reading this diary of fourteen years ago, though i have altered in some superficial respects, i was confronted with my unalterable self. i have acquired certain aptitudes; i have learnt, for instance, to understand boys better, to sympathise with them, to put myself in their place, to manage them. i don't think i could enunciate my technique, such as it is. if a young master, just entering upon the work of a boarding-house, asked my advice, i could utter several maxims which he would believe (and rightly) to be the flattest and most obvious truisms; but the value of them to me is that they are deduced from experience, and not stated as assumptions. the whole secret lies in the combination of them, the application of them to a particular case; it is not that one sees a thing differently, but that one knows instinctively the sort of thing to say, the kind of line to pursue, the kind of statement that appeals to a boy as sensible and memorable, the sort of precautions to take, the delicate adjustment of principles to a particular case, and so forth. it is, i suppose, something like the skill of an artist; he does not see nature more clearly, if indeed as clearly, as he did when he began, but he knows better what kind of stroke and what kind of tint will best produce the effect which he wishes to record. of course both artist and schoolmaster get mannerised; and i should be inclined to say in the latter case that a schoolmaster's success (in the best sense) depends almost entirely upon his being able to arrive at sound principles and at the same time to avoid mannerism in applying them. for instance, it is of no use to hold up for a boy's consideration a principle which is quite outside his horizon; what one has to do is to try and give him a principle which is just a little ahead of his practice, which he can admire and also believe to be within his reach. besides this experience which i have acquired, i have acquired a similar experience in the direction of teaching--i know now the sort of statement which arrests the attention and arouses the interest of boys; i know how to put a piece of knowledge so that it appears both intelligible and also desirable to acquire. then i have learnt, in literary matters, the art of expression to a certain extent. i can speak to you with entire frankness and unaffectedness, and i will say that i am conscious that i can now express lucidly, and to a certain extent attractively, an idea. my deficiency is now in ideas and not in the power of expressing them. i have quality though not quantity. it amuses me to read this old diary and see how impossible i found it to put certain thoughts into words. but apart from these definite acquirements, i cannot see that my character has altered in the smallest degree. i detect the same little, hard, repellent core of self, sitting enthroned, cold, unchanging, and unchanged, "like a toad within a stone," to borrow rossetti's great simile. i see exactly the same weaknesses, the same pitiful ambitions, the same faults. i have learnt, i think, to conceal them a little better; but they are not eradicated, nor even modified. even with regard to their concealment, i have a terrible theory. i believe that the faults of which one is conscious, which one admits, and even the faults of which one faintly suspects oneself, and yet supposes that one conceals from the world at large, are the very faults that are absolutely patent to every one else. if one dimly suspects that one is a liar, a coward, or a snob, and gratefully believes that one has not been placed in a position which inevitably reveals these characteristics in their full nakedness, one may be fairly certain that other people know that one is so tainted. the discouraging point is that one is not similarly conscious of one's virtues. i take for granted that i have some virtues, because i see that most of the people whom i meet have some sprinkling of them, but i declare that i am quite unable to say what they are. a fault is patent and unmistakable. the old temptation comes upon one, and one yields as usual; but with one's virtues, if they ever manifest themselves, one's own feeling is that one might have done better. moreover, if one tries deliberately to take stock of one's good points, they seem to be only natural and instinctive ways of behaving; to which no credit can possibly attach, because by temperament one is incapable of acting otherwise. another melancholy fact which i believe to be true is this--that the only good work one does is work which one finds easy and likes. i have one or two patiently acquired virtues which are not natural to me, such as a certain methodical way of dealing with business; but i never find myself credited with it by others, because it is done, i suppose, painfully and with effort, and therefore unimpressively. i look round, and the same phenomenon meets me everywhere. i do not know any instance among my friends where i can trace any radical change of character. "sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum." indeed the only line upon which improvement is possible seems to me to be this--that a man shall definitely commit himself to a course of life in which he shall be compelled to exercise virtues which are foreign to his character, and any lapses of which will be penalised in a straightforward, professional way. if a man, for instance, is irritable, impatient, unpunctual, let him take up some line where he is bound to be professionally bland, patient, methodical. that would be the act of a philosopher; but, alas, how few of us choose our profession from philosophical motives! and even so i should fear that the tendencies of temperament are only temporarily imprisoned, and not radically cured; after all, it fits in with the darwinian theory. the bird of paradise, condemned to live in a country of marshes, cannot hope to become a heron. the most he can hope is that, by meditating on the advantages which a heron would enjoy, and by pressing the same consideration on his offspring, the time may come in the dim procession of years when the beaks of his descendants will grow long and sharp, their necks pliant, their legs attenuated. and anyhow, one is bound in honour to have a try; and the hopefulness of my creed (you may be puzzled to detect it) lies in the fact that one has a sense of honour about it all; that one's faults are repugnant, and that missing virtues are desirable--possunt quia posse videntur! thank you for the photographs. i begin to realise your house; but i want some interiors as well; and let me have the view from your terrace, though i daresay it is only sea and sky.--ever yours, t. b. upton, march 15, 1904. dear herbert,--you say i am not ambitious enough; well, i wish i could make up my mind clearly on the subject of ambition; it has been brought before me rather acutely lately. a post here has just fallen vacant--a post to which i should have desired to succeed. i have no doubt that if i had frankly expressed my wishes on the subject, if i had even told a leaky, gossipy colleague what i desired, and begged him to keep it to himself, the thing would have got out, and the probability is that the post would have been offered to me. but i held my tongue, not, i confess, from any very high motive, but merely from a natural dislike of being importunate--it does not seem to me consistent with good manners. well, i made no sign; and another man was appointed. i have no doubt that a man of the world would say frankly that i was a fool, and, though i am rather inclined to agree with him, i don't think i could have acted otherwise. i am inclined to encourage ambition of every kind among the boys. i think it is an appropriate virtue for their age and temperament. it is not a christian virtue; for it is certain that, if one person succeeds in an ambitious prospect, there must be a dozen who are disappointed. but though i don't approve of it on abstract grounds, yet i think it is so tremendous a motive for activity and keenness that it seems to me that boys are the better for it. i don't believe that in education the highest motive is always the best; indeed, the most effective motive, in dealing with immature minds, is the thing which we have to discover and use. i mean, for instance, that i think it is probably more effective to say to a boy who is disposed to be physically indolent, "you have a chance of getting your colours this half, and i should like to see you get them," than to say, "i don't want you to think about colours. i want you to play football for the glory of god, because it makes you into a stronger, more wholesome, more cheerful man." it seems to me that boys should learn for themselves that there are often better and bigger reasons for having done a thing than the reason that made them do it. what makes an object seem desirable to a boy is that others desire to have it too, and that he should be the fortunate person to get it. i don't see how the sense of other people's envy and disappointment can be altogether subtracted from the situation--it certainly is one of the elements which makes success seem desirable to many boys--though a generous nature will not indulge the thought. but i am equally sure that, as one gets older, one ought to put aside such thoughts altogether. that one ought to trample down ambitious desires and even hopes. that glory, according to the old commonplace, ought to follow and not to be followed. i think one ought to pursue one's own line, to do one's own business to the best of one's ability, and leave the rest to god. if he means one to be in a big place, to do a big work, it will be clearly enough indicated; and the only chance of doing it in a big way is to be simple-minded, sincere, generous, and contented. the worst of that theory is this. one sees people in later life who have just missed big chances; some over-subtle delicacy of mind, some untimely reticence or frankness, some indolent hanging-back, some scrupulousness, has just checked them from taking a bold step forward when it was needed. and one sees them with large powers, noble capacities, wise thoughts, relegated to the crowd of unconsidered and inconsiderable persons whose opinion has no weight, whose suggestions have no effectiveness. are they to be blamed? or has one humbly and faithfully to take it as an indication that they are just not fit, from some secret weakness, some fibre of feebleness, to take the tiller? i am speaking with entire sincerity when i say to you that i think i am myself rather cast in that mould. i have always just missed getting what used to be called "situations of dignity and emolument," and i have often been condoled with as the person who ought to have had them. well, i expect that this is probably a very wholesome discipline for me, but i cannot say that it is pleasant, or that use has made it easier. the worst of it is that i have an odd mixture of practicality and mysticism within me, and i have sometimes thought that one has damaged the other. my mysticism has pulled me back when i ought to have taken a decided step, urging "leave it to god"--and then, when i have failed to get what i wanted, my mysticism has failed to comfort me, and the practical side of me has said, "the decided step was what god clearly indicated to you was needed; and you were lazy and would not take it." i have a highly practical friend, the most absolutely and admirably worldly person i know. in talk he sometimes lets fall very profound maxims. we were talking the other day about this very point, and he said musingly, "it is a very good rule in this world not to ask for anything unless you are pretty sure to get it." that is the cream of the worldly attitude. such a man is not going to make himself tiresome by importunity. he knows what he desires, he works for it, and, when the moment comes, he just gives the little push that is needed, and steps into his kingdom. that is exactly what i cannot do. it is not a sign of high-mindedness, for i am by nature greedy, acquisitive, and ambitious. but it is a want of firmness, i suppose. anyhow, there it is, and one cannot alter one's temperament. the conclusion which i come to for myself and for all like-minded persons--not a very happy class, i fear--is that one should absolutely steel oneself against disappointment, not allow oneself to indulge in pleasing visions, not form plans or count chickens, but try to lay hold of the things which do bring one tranquillity, the simple joys of ordinary and uneventful life. one may thus arrive at a certain degree of independence. and though the heart may ache a little at the chances missed, yet one may console oneself by thinking that it is happier not to realise an ambition and be disappointed, than to realise it and be disappointed. it all comes from over-estimating one's own powers, after all. if one is decently humble, no disappointment is possible; and such little successes as one does attain are like gleams of sunlight on a misty day.--ever yours, t. b. upton, march 25, 1904. dear herbert,--you are quite right about conventionality in education. one of my perennial preoccupations here is how to encourage originality and independence among my boys. the great danger of public-school education nowadays, as you say, is the development of a type. it is not at all a bad type in many ways; the best specimens of the public-school type are young men who are generous, genial, unembarrassed, courageous, sensible, and active; but our system all tends to level character, and i do not feel sure whether it levels it up or levels it down. in old days the masters concerned themselves with the work of the boys only, and did not trouble their heads about how the boys amused themselves out of school. vigorous boys organised games for themselves, and indolent boys loafed. then it came home to school authorities that there was a good deal of danger in the method; that lack of employment was an undesirable thing. thereupon work was increased, and, at the same time, the masters laid hands upon athletics and organised them. side by side with this came a great increase of wealth and leisure in england, and there sprang up that astonishing and disproportionate interest in athletic matters, which is nowadays a real problem for all sensible men. but the result of it all has been that there has grown up a stereotyped code among the boys as to what is the right thing to do. they are far less wilful and undisciplined than they used to be; they submit to work, as a necessary evil, far more cheerfully than they used to do; and they base their ideas of social success entirely on athletics. and no wonder! they find plenty of masters who are just as serious about games as they are themselves; who spend all their spare time in looking on at games, and discuss the athletic prospects of particular boys in a tone of perfectly unaffected seriousness. the only two regions which masters have not organised are the intellectual and moral regions. the first has been tacitly and inevitably extruded. a good deal more work is required from the boys, and unless a boy's ability happens to be of a definite academical order--in which case he is well looked after--there is no loop-hole through which intellectual interest can creep in. a boy's time is so much occupied by definite work and definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed, vigour left to follow his own pursuits. life is lived so much more in public that it becomes increasingly difficult for sets to exist; small associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good deal in the direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life; the net result is, that there is now far less interest abroad in intellectual things, and such interests as do exist, exist in a solitary way, and generally mean an intellectual home in the background. in the moral region, i think we have much to answer for; there is a code of morals among boys which, if it is not actively corrupting, is at least undeniably low. the standard of purity is low; a vicious boy doesn't find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social success. then the code of honesty is low; a boy who is habitually dishonest in the matter of work is not in the least reprobated. i do not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. and then comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be universally scouted. this is a horrible fact to contemplate; yet it cannot be cured by enactment, only from within. it is strange that in this respect it is entirely unlike the code of the world. no girl or woman would be scouted for appealing to police protection in similar circumstances; no man would be required to submit to violence or even to burglary; no reprobation would fall upon him if he appealed to the law to help him. is it not possible to encourage something of this feeling in a school? is it not possible, without violating schoolboy honour, which is in many ways a fine and admirable thing, to allow the possibility of an appeal to protection for the young and weak against vile temptations? it seems to me that it would be best if we could get the boys to organise such a system among themselves. but to take no steps to arrive at such an organisation, and to leave matters severely alone, is a very dark responsibility to bear. it is curious to note that in the matter of bullying and cruelty, which used to be so rife at schools, public opinion among boys does seem to have undergone a change. the vice has practically disappeared, and the good feeling of a school would be generally against any case of gross bullying; but the far more deadly and insidious temptation of impurity has, as far as one can learn, increased. one hears of simply heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what he endures. then, too, a boy's relations will tend to encourage him to hold out, rather than to invoke a master's aid, because they are afraid of the boy falling under the social ban. this is the heaviest burden a schoolmaster has to bear; to be responsible for his boys, and to be held responsible, and yet to be probably the very last person to whom the information of what is happening can possibly come. one great difficulty seems to be that boys will only, as a rule, combine for purposes of evil. in matters of virtue a boy has to act for himself; and i confess, too, with a sigh, that a set of virtuous boys banding themselves together to resist evil and put it down has an alarmingly priggish sound. the most that a man can do at present, it seems to me, is to have good sensible servants; to be vigilant and discreet; to try and cultivate a paternal relation with all his boys; to try and make the bigger boys feel some responsibility in the matter; but the worst of it is that the subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it at all; and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put ideas into boys' heads. i cannot conscientiously believe that a man who has been through a big public school himself can honestly be afraid of that. but we all seem to be so much afraid of each other, of public opinion, of possible unpopularity, that we find excuses for letting a painful thing alone. but to leave this part of the subject, which is often a kind of nightmare to me, and to return to my former point; i do honestly think it a great misfortune that we tend to produce a type. it seems to me that to aim at independence, to know one's own mind, to form one's own ideas--liberty, in short--is one of the most sacred duties in life. it is not only a luxury in which a few can indulge, it ought to be a quality which every one should be encouraged to cultivate. i declare that it makes me very sad sometimes to see these well-groomed, well-mannered, rational, manly boys all taking the same view of things, all doing the same things, smiling politely at the eccentricity of any one who finds matter for serious interest in books, in art or music: all splendidly reticent about their inner thoughts, with a courteous respect for the formalities of religion and the formalities of work; perfectly correct, perfectly complacent, with no irregularities or angular preferences of their own; with no admiration for anything but athletic success, and no contempt for anything but originality of ideas. they are so nice, so gentlemanly, so easy to get on with; and yet, in another region, they are so dull, so unimaginative, so narrow-minded. they cannot all, of course, be intellectual or cultivated; but they ought to be more tolerant, more just, more wise. they ought to be able to admire vigour and enthusiasm in every department instead of in one or two; and it is we who ought to make them feel so, and we have already got too much to do--though i am afraid that you will think, after reading this vast document, that i, at all events, have plenty of spare time. but it is not the case; only the end of the half is at hand; we have finished our regular work, and i have done my reports, and am waiting for a paper. when you next hear i shall be a free man. i shall spend easter quietly here; but i have so much to do and clear off that i probably shall not be able to write until i have set off on my travels.--ever yours, t. b. the red dragon, compton fereday, april 10, 1904. dear herbert,--i was really too busy to write last week, but i am going to try and make up for it. this letter is going to be a diary. expect more of it.--t. b. april 7.--i find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour alone. at the last moment murchison has thrown me over. his father is ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home. i do not altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and arrange for another companion. i had rather, however, go by myself than with some one who is not absolutely congenial. one requires on these occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one's own. i daresay i could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into line. then, too, i have had a very busy term; besides my form work, i have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the army class boys. it is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes. yet it matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys believe in the usefulness of what they are doing. but the result is that i am tired out. i have lived with boys from morning to night, and my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects. i have had hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep. now i mean to have both. i shall spend my days in the open air, and i shall sleep, i hope, like a top at nights. gradually i shall recover my power of enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as i have been passing through is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things. i hear a thrush sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and i say to myself, "that is very beautiful if only i could feel it to be so!" boys are exhausting companions--they are so restless, so full-blooded, so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow round of school life; and i have the sort of temperament that will efface itself to any extent, if only the people that i am concerned with will be content. i suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys interested in the master's subjects, or at least hypnotises them into an appearance of interest. i cannot do that. it is like a leaden weight upon me if i feel that a class is bored; the result is that i arrive at the same end in my own way. i have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys; i know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome thing in an interesting way. but i shudder to think how sick i am of it all! i want a long bath of silence and recollection and repose. i want to fill my cistern again with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy waters of irrigation. i don't think my colleagues are like that. i sate with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. they were full of all they meant to do. two of the most energetic were going off to play golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that it was possible to get a round on sundays; they were going to fill the evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction, "i am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the other on bridge--and i am going to cure some of my radical faults." i thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of his books, one might have supposed that they would be a thomas-a-kempis and a taylor's holy living, and then how well it would have seemed! two more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for assistant masters. that seemed to me to be almost more depressing. they were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone. still, i suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. they will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, god help us, picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a thucydides lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of delphi to boys beginning the eumenides. it is very right and proper, no doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. the arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of the whole affair! my two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at brighton--which he said was very bracing at easter, adding that he expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. they will all stroll on the parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of billiards. no doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to me enlivening. but walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and serenely content. the sixth and last is going to surbiton to spend the holidays with a mother and three sisters, and i think he is the most virtuously employed of all. he will walk out alone, with a terrier dog, before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and perhaps the vicar will come to tea. but then it will be home, and the girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he likes, and he will have his father's old study to smoke in. i am not sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only pursuing his own happiness. but i have no such duties before me. i might, i suppose, go down to my sister helen at the somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a life. but the house is small, there are four children, and not much money, and i should only be in the way. charles would do his best to welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his easter services; and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke. this is all very sordid, no doubt, but i am confronted with sordid things to-day. the boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning to sweep out the schoolrooms. the inky, dreary desks, the ragged books, the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls: this is not a place for a self-respecting person to be in. i want to be mooning about country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley. i want to be holding slow converse with leisurely rustic persons, to be surveying from the side of a high grassy hill the rich plain below, to hear the song of birds in the thickets, to try and feel myself one with the life of the world instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it. this is all very ungrateful to my profession, which i love, but it is a necessary reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful to it is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a liberal scale, without thinking of small economies. i may give pennies to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a church. i may travel what class i choose, and put up at a hotel without counting the cost; and oh! the blessedness of that. i would rather have a three-days' holiday thus than three weeks with an anxious calculation of resources. april 8.--i am really off to the cotswolds. i packed my beloved knapsack yesterday afternoon. i put in it--precision is the essence of diarising--a spare shirt, which will have to serve if necessary as a nightgown, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, a toothbrush, a small comb, and a sponge; that is sufficient for a philosopher. a pocket volume of poetry--matthew arnold this time--and a map completed my outfit. and i sent a bag containing a more liberal wardrobe to a distant station, which i calculated it would take me three days to reach. then i went off by an afternoon train, and, by sunset, i found myself in a little town, hinton perevale, of stone-built houses, with an old bridge. i had no sense of freedom as yet, only a blessed feeling of repose. i took an early supper in a small low-roofed parlour with mullioned windows. by great good fortune i found myself the only guest at the inn, and had the room to myself; then i went early and gratefully to bed, utterly sleepy and content, with just enough sense left to pray for a fine day. my prayer is answered this morning. i slept a dreamless sleep, and was roused by the cheerful crowing of cocks, which picked about the back yard of the inn. i dressed quickly, only suspending my task to watch the little dramas of the inn yard--the fowls on the pig-sty wall; the horse waiting meekly, with knotted traces hanging round it, to be harnessed; the cat, on some grave business of its own, squeezing gracefully under a closed barn door; the weary, flat-footed duck, nuzzling the mud of a small pool as delicately as though it were a rich custard. i was utterly free; i might go and come as i liked. time had ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as i finished my simple breakfast, that i should under professional conditions have been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of latin prose. the incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. half the boys that i teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. but they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called the liberal professions, to retire at the age of sixty with a poor digestion, a peevish wife, and a family of impossible children. but it is only in such inconsequent moments that i allow myself to think thus slightingly of latin prose. it is a valuable accomplishment, and, when i have repaired the breaches made by professional work in the mental equilibrium, i shall rejoin my colleagues with a full sense of its paramount importance. i scribble this diary with a vile pen, and ink like blacking, on the corner of my breakfast-table. i have packed my knapsack, and in a few minutes i shall set out upon my march. april 9.--i spent an almost perfect day yesterday. it was a cool bright day, with a few clouds like cotton-wool moving sedately in a blue sky. i first walked quietly about my little town, which was full of delicate beauties. the houses are all built of a soft yellow stone, which weathers into a species of rich orange. heaven knows where the designers came from, but no two houses seem alike; some of them are gabled, buttressed, stone-mullioned, irregular in outline, but yet with a wonderful sense of proportion. some are georgian, with classical pilasters and pediments. yet they are all for use and not for show; and the weak modern shop-windows, which some would think disfigure the delicate house-fronts, seem to me just to give the requisite sense of contrast. at the end of the street stands the church, with a stately perpendicular tower, and a resonant bell which tells the hour. this overlooks a pile of irregular buildings, now a farm, but once a great manor-house, with a dovecote and pavilions; but the old terrace is now an orchard, and the fine oriel of the house looks straight into the byre. inside the church--it is open and well-kept--you can trace the history of the manor and its occupants, from job best, a rich mercer of london, whose monument, with marble pillars and obelisks, adorns the south aisle; his son was ennobled, whose effigy--more majestic still, robed and coroneted, with his viscountess by his side, and her dog (with his name, jakke, engraven on his shoulder)--lies smiling, the slender hands crossed in prayer. but the house was not destined to survive. the viscount's only daughter, the lady penelope, looks down from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race, who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a mayd." i cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was; and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks upon your gentle face, sends a wondering message of tenderness behind the veil to your pure spirit, regret for your vanished charm, and the fragrance of your soft bloom, and sadness for all sweet things that fade. the manor, so i learn, was burnt wantonly by the roundheads--there was a battle hereabouts--on the charge that it had harboured some followers of the king; and so our dreams of greatness and permanence are fulfilled. the whole church was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. the walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. the altar is fairly draped with good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak stalls and seats, all as neat as a new pin. as i lingered in the church, reading the simple monuments, a rosy, burly vicar came briskly in, and seeing me there, courteously showed me all the treasures of his house, like hezekiah. he took me into the belfry, and there, piled up against the wall, were some splendid georgian columns and architraves, richly carved in dark brown wood. i asked what it was. "oh, a horrible pompous thing," he said; "it was behind the altar--most pagan and unsuitable; we had it all out as soon as i came. the first moment i entered the church, i said to myself, 'that must go,' and i have succeeded, though it was hard enough to collect the money, and actually some of the old people here objected." i did not feel it was worth while to cast cold water on the good man's satisfaction--but the pity of it! i do not suppose that a couple of thousand pounds could have reproduced it; and it is simply heart-rending to see such a noble monument of piety and careful love sacrificed to a wave of so-called ecclesiastical taste. the vicar's chief pride was a new window, by a fashionable modern firm; quite unobjectionable in design, and with good colour, but desperately uninteresting. it represented some mild, unemphatic, attenuated saints, all exactly alike, languidly and decorously conversing together, weighed down by heavy drapery, as though wrapped in bales of carpets. in the lower compartments knelt some dignified persons, similarly habited, in face exactly like the saints above, except that they were fitted out with unaccountable beards--all pretty and correct, but with no character or force. i suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as impossible too. there can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their perfect work. it is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they were; history, tradition, association, are not considered. the old builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a norman choir to build a decorated one; but at all events they were advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries. about noon i left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to the hills. the copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then i heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the thickets. presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and tranquil in the golden noon; and soon i came to the top. it was grassy, open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the horizon. in the middle distance i saw the red roofs of a great town, the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a crescent of silver. it was england indeed--tranquil, healthy, prosperous england. the rest of the day i need not record. it was full of delicate impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through a gap, the purple, wealthy plain. i write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under the hill. the name alone, wenge grandmain, is worth a shilling. it is very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. and so, in a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, i sit while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street. the crossfoxes inn, bourton-on-the-wold, april 16, 1904. dear herbert,--i have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last week i have pitched my moving tent at bourton. do you shudder with the fear that i am going to give you pages of description of scenery? it is not a shudder with me when i get a landscape-letter; it is merely that leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with statements which produce no impression upon the mind. i always, for instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the grand tour after taking his degree. but imagine this: a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights, with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs. there, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill, sits the little village, with a stately perpendicular church tower. the village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character; gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre--some standing back, some on the street. intermingled with these are fine georgian houses, with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see through great iron gates. the whole scene incredibly romantic, exquisitely beautiful. my favourite walk is this. i leave the little town by a road which winds along the base of the hill. i pass round a shoulder, wooded and covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing shrilly. i turn up to the left into a kind of "combe." at the very farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews. on one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no less ancient rectory, with a large perpendicular window, anciently a chapel, in the gable. in the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled dovecote. the roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a slumberous sound. i wind up the hill by a little path, now among thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture. i emerge on the top of a down; in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses. here on a spur stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it. turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a glint of water, where the slow-moving avon wanders. hamlets, roads, towers lie out like a map at my feet--all wearing that secluded, peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden light and lengthening shadows. i find myself wondering in these quiet hours--i walk alone as a rule--what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is. is it a mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being; or has it an absolute existence? it comes and goes like the wind. some days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it--painfully, because it makes such constant and insistent demands upon one's attention. some days, again, it is almost unheeded, and one passes through it blind and indifferent. it is an expression, i cannot help feeling, of the very mind of god; and yet the ancient earthwork in which i stand, bears witness to the fact that in far-off days men lived in danger and anxiety, fighting and striving for bare existence. we have established by law and custom a certain personal security nowadays; is our sense of beauty born of that security? i cannot help wondering whether the old warriors who built this place cared at all for the beauty of the earth; and yet over it all hangs the gentle sadness of all sweet things that have an end. all those warriors are dust; the boys and girls who wandered a century ago where i wander to-day, they are at rest too in the little churchyard that lies at my feet; and my heart goes out to all who have loved and suffered, and to those who shall hereafter love and suffer here. an idle sympathy, perhaps, but none the less strong and real. but now for a little human experience that befell me here. i found the other day, not far from the church, an old artist sketching. a refined, sad-looking old fellow, sunburned and active, with white hair and pointed beard, and a certain pathetic attempt, of a faded kind, to dress for his part--low collar, a red tie, rough shooting-jacket, and so forth. he seemed in a sociable mood, and i sate down beside him. how it came about i hardly know, but he was soon telling me the story of his life. he was the tenant, i found, of the old manor-house, which he held at a ridiculous rent, and he had lived here nearly forty years. he had found the place as a young man, wandering about in search of the picturesque. i gathered that he had bright dreams and wide ambitions. he had a small independence, and he had meant to paint great pictures and make a name for himself. he had married; his wife was long dead, his children out in the world, and he was living on alone, painting the same pictures, bought, so far as i could make out, mostly by american visitors. his drawing was old-fashioned and deeply mannerised. he was painting not what was there, but some old and faded conception of his own as to what it was like--missing, i think, half the beauty of the place. he seemed horribly desolate. i tried, for his consolation and my own, to draw out a picture of the beautiful refined life he led; and the old fellow began to wear a certain jaunty air of dignity and distinction, which would have amused me if it had not made me feel inclined to cry. but he soon fell back into what is, i suppose, a habitual melancholy. "ah, if you had known what my dreams were!" he said once. he went on to say that he now wished that he had taken up some simple and straightforward profession, had made money, and had his grandchildren about him. "i am more ghost than man," he said, shaking his dejected head. i despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his regretful memories. where was the mistake he made? i suppose that he over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of futility. he set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby, irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors! and yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little. to live as he does might be a serene and beautiful thing. if such a man had large reserves of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his eyes, it would be a life to be envied. it has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise one's heart and spirit for the closing hours. in the case of successful men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities. how many people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of evening. i earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race. and yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. there comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine. there ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity, a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations, which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated reminiscences, a "weary, day-long chirping." this is a harder task, i suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father of children. i have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks, of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart. of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one's sight and ken. i have no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of jowett--and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence--that once a man's tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became grey-headed and a grandfather. one must do the best for the boys and look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the schoolmaster who craves for it is lost. well, it is time to stop. i sit in a little, low raftered parlour of the old inn; the fire in the big hearth flickers into ash, and my candles flare to their sockets. i leave the place to-morrow; and such is the instinct for permanence in the human mind, that i feel depressed and melancholy, as though i were leaving home.--ever your affectionate, t. b. the blue boar, stanton hardwick, april 21, 1904. dear herbert,--i have made a pilgrimage to stratford-on-avon. i now feel overwhelmed with shame to reflect that, though my chief preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, i have never visited the sacred place before. for an englishman who cares for literature not to have been to stratford-on-avon is as gross a neglect as for an englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have visited westminster abbey. and now that i have been there and returned, and have leisure to think it all over, i feel that i have been standing on the threshold of a mystery. who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man? what were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the world? if shakespeare was shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. here we have the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman--who eventually indeed came to grief in trade--of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common name. his mother could not write her own signature. of his youth we hear little that is not disreputable. he married under unpleasant circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal pursuit of other people's game. then he drifts up to london and joins a theatrical company--then a rascally kind of trade--deserting his wife and family. his life in london is full of secrets. he is a man of mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. he writes plays of incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional feelings. but here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer of the sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point, should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul that the plays reveal. the notices of his talk and character are few and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit, but no more. before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and "facetious"--a singular combination. then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he is a successful, well-to-do man. and then his ambition, if he had any, seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal position. he buys the biggest house in his native place; from the proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with grants of arms. still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives the magnificent sum of l10 (l100 of our money). he writes easily and never corrects. he seems to set no store on his writings, which stream from him like light from the sun. he adapts, collaborates, and has no idea of what would be called a high vocation. at forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously in his native town, with occasional visits to london. at fifty-two his health fails. he makes business-like arrangements in the event of death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good citizen. who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? who can conceive the likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to the very highest platform of literature--so lofty and unattainable a place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the thrones where homer, virgil, and dante sit? and yet his mind is set, not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and investments. he seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of that high and solemn pride which made keats say, with faltering lips, that he believed he would be among the english poets after his death. i came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of the busy town. everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the laurel and the throne. i groaned in spirit over the monstrous playhouse, with its pretentious teutonic air; i walked through the churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church, full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. i do not like to confess the breathless awe with which i drew near to the chancel and gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the sacred dust. i cannot say what my thoughts were, but i was lost in a formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. there beneath my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived hamlet and macbeth, and the hand that had traced the sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed the depths of life. that was a solemn moment, and i do not think i ever experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. i could not tear myself away; i could only wonder and desire. presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, i did more. i mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust in the monument. i cannot share in the feelings of those who would consider it formal or perfunctory. there was the high-domed forehead, like that of pericles and walter scott; there were the steady eyes, the clear-cut nose; and as for the lips--i never for an instant doubted the truth of what i saw--i am as certain as i can be that they are the lips of a corpse, drawn up in the stiff tension of death, showing the teeth below. i am absolutely convinced that here we get as near to the man as we can get, and that the head is taken from a death-mask. what injures the dignity and beauty of the face is the plumpness of the chin that testifies to the burgher prosperity, the comfortable life, the unexercised brain of the later days. i saw afterwards the various portraits; i suppose it is a matter of evidence, but nothing convinced me of truth, not even the bilious, dilapidated, dyspeptic, white face of the folio engraving, with the horrible hydrocephalous development of skull. that is a caricature only. the others seem mere fancies. then i saw patiently the other relics, the foundations of new place, the schoolhouse--but all without emotion, except a deep sense of shame that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room in which the boy shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. the ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic craze of england, drew from me a despairing smile; but i think that shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and even amusement. but most of these relics, like anne hathaway's cottage, are restored out of all interest, and only testify to the silly and frivolous demands of trippers. but, my dear herbert, the treasure is mine. feeble as the confession is, i do not think i ever realised before the humanity of shakespeare. he seemed to me before to sit remote, enshrined aloof, the man who could tell all the secrets of humanity that could be told, and whose veriest hints still seem to open doors into mysteries both high and sweet and terrible. but now i feel as if i had been near him, had been able to love what i had only admired. i feel somehow that it extends the kingdom of humanity to have realised shakespeare; and yet i am baffled. but i seem to trace in the later and what some would call the commonplace features of the man's life, a desire to live and be; to taste life itself, not merely to write of what life seemed to be, and of what lay behind it. i am sure that some such allegory was in his mind when he wrote of prospero, who so willingly gave up the isle full of noises, the power over the dreaming, sexless spirits of air and wood, to go back to his tiresome dukedom, and his petty court, and all the dull chatter and business of life. i am sure that shakespeare thought of his art as an ariel--that dainty, delicate spirit, out of the reach of love and desire, that slept in cowslip-bells and chased the flying summer on the bat's back, and that yet had such power to delude and bemuse the human spirit. after all, ariel could not come near the more divine inheritance of the human heart, sorrow and crying, love and hate. ariel was but a merry child, lost in passionless delights, yearning to be free, to escape; and prospero felt, and shakespeare felt, that life, with all its stains and dreariness and disease and darkness, was something better and truer than the fragrant dusk of the copse, and the soulless laughter of the summer sea. ariel could sing the heartless, exquisite song of the sea-change that could clothe the bones and eyes of the doomed king; but prospero could see a fairer change in the eyes and heart of his lonely darling. and i am glad that even so shakespeare could be silent, and buy and sell, and go in and out among his fellow-townsmen, and make merry. that is better than to sit arid and prosperous, when the brain stiffens with stupor, and the hand has lost its cunning, and to read old newspaper-cuttings, and long for adequate recognition. god give me and all uneasy natures grace to know when to hold our tongues; and to take the days that remain with patience and wonder and tenderness; not making haste to depart, but yet not fearing the shadow out of which we come and into which we must go; to live wisely and bravely and sweetly, and to close our eyes in faith, with a happy sigh, like a child after a long summer day of life and delight.--ever yours, t. b. the blue boar, stanton hardwick, april 25, 1904. dear herbert,--since i last wrote i have been making pious pilgrimages to some of the great churches hereabouts: to gloucester, worcester, tewkesbury, malvern, pershore. it does me good to see these great poems in stone, beautiful in their first conception, and infinitely more beautiful from the mellowing influences of age, and from the human tradition that is woven into them and through them. there are few greater pleasures than to make one's way into a cathedral city, with the grey towers visible for miles across the plain, rising high above the house roofs and the smoke. at first one is in the quiet country; then the roads begin to have a suburban air--new cottages rise by the wayside, comfortable houses, among shrubberies and plantations. then the street begins; the houses grow taller and closer, and one has a glimpse of some stately georgian front, with pediment and cornice; perhaps there is a cluster of factories, high, rattling buildings overtopped by a tall chimney, with dusty, mysterious gear, of which one cannot guess the purport, travelling upwards into some tall, blank orifice. then suddenly one is in the close, with trees and flowers and green grass, with quaint prebendal houses of every style and date, breathing peace and prosperity. a genial parson or two pace gravely about; and above you soars the huge church, with pinnacle and parapet, the jackdaws cheerily hallooing from the lofty ledges. you are a little weary of air and sun; you push open the great door, and you are in the cool, dark nave with its holy smell; you sit for a little and let the spirit of the place creep into your mind; you walk hither and thither, read the epitaphs, mourn with the bereaved, give thanks for the record of long happy lives, and glow with mingled pain and admiration for some young life nobly laid down. the monuments of soldiers, the sight of dusty banners moving faintly in the slow-stirring air, always move me inexpressibly; the stir and fury of war setting hither, like a quiet tide, to find its last abiding-place. then there is the choir to visit. i do not really like the fashion which now generally prevails of paying a small sum, writing your name in a book, and being handed over to the guidance of some verger, a pompous foolish person, who has learnt his lesson, delivers it like a machine, and is put out by any casual question. i do not want to be lectured; i want to wander about, ask a question if i desire it, and just have pointed out to me anything of which the interest is not patent and obvious. the tombs of old knights, the chantries of silent abbots and bishops, are all very affecting; they stand for so much hope and love and recollection. then sometimes one has a glow at seeing some ancient and famous piece of history presented to one's gaze. the figure of the grim saxon king, with his archaic beard and shaven upper-lip, for all the world like some calvinistic tradesman; or edward the second, with his weak, handsome face and curly locks; or the mailed statue of robert of normandy, with scarlet surcoat, starting up like a warrior suddenly aroused. such tombs send a strange thrill through one, a thrill of wonder and pity and awe. what of them now? sleepest thou, son of atreus? dost thou sleep, and dream perchance of love and war, of the little life that seemed so long, and over which the slow waves of time have flowed? little by little, in the holy walls, so charged with faith and tenderness and wistful love, the pathetic vision of mortality creeps across the mind, and one loses oneself in a dream of wonder at the brief days so full of life, the record left for after time, and the silence of the grave. then, when i have drunk my fill of sweet sights, i love to sit silent, while the great bell hums in the roof, and gathering footsteps of young and old patter through the echoing aisles. there is a hush of expectation. a few quiet worshippers assemble; the western light grows low, and lights spring to life, one after another, in the misty choir. then murmurs a voice, an amen rises in full concord, and as it dies away the slumberous thunder of a pedal note rolls on the air; the casements whirr, the organ speaks. that fills, as it were, to the brim, as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content into the flowing, the aspiring tide, satisfied as with some heavenly answer to its sad questionings. then the stately pomp moves slowly to its place--so familiar, perhaps trivial an act to those who perform it, so grave and beautiful a thing to those who see it. the holy service proceeds with a sense of exquisite deliberation, leading one, as by a ladder, through the ancient ways, up to the message of to-day. through psalm and canticle and anthem the solemnity passes on; and perhaps some single slender voice, some boyish treble, unconscious of its beauty and pathos, thrown into relief, like a fountain springing among dark rocks, by the slow thunders of the organ, comes to assure the heart that it can rest, if but for a moment, upon a deep and inner peace, can be gently rocked, as it were, in a moving boat, between the sky and translucent sea. then falls the rich monotone of prayer; and the organ wakes again for one last message, pouring a flood of melody from its golden throats, and dying away by soft gradations into the melodious bourdon of its close. does this seem to you very unreal and fantastic? i do not know; it is very real to me. sometimes, in dreary working hours, my spirit languishes under an almost physical thirst for such sweetness of sound and sight. i cannot believe that it is other than a pure and holy pleasure, because in such hours the spirit soars into a region in which low and evil thoughts, ugly desires, and spiteful ambitions, die, like poisonous flowers in a clear and wholesome air. i do not say that it inspires one with high and fierce resolution, that it fits one for battling with the troublesome world; but it is more like the green pastures and waters of comfort; it is pleasure in which there is no touch of sensual appetite or petty desire; it is a kind of heavenly peace in which the spirit floats in a passionate longing for what is beautiful and pure. it is not that i would live my life in such reveries; even while the soft sound dies away, the calling of harsher voices makes itself heard in the mind. but it refreshes, it calms, it pacifies; it tells the heart that there is a peace into which it is possible to enter, and where it may rest for a little and fold its weary wings. yet even as i write, as the gentle mood lapses and fades, i find myself beset with uneasy and bewildering thoughts about the whole. what was the power that raised these great places as so essential and vital a part of life? we have lost it now, whatever it was. churches like these were then an obvious necessity; kings and princes vied with each other in raising them, and no one questioned their utility. they are now a mere luxury for ecclesiastically minded persons, built by slow accretion, and not by some huge single gift, to please the pride of a county or a city; and this in days when england is a thousandfold richer than she was. they are no longer a part of the essence of life; life has flowed away from their portals, and left them a beautiful shadow, a venerable monument, a fragrant sentiment. no doubt it was largely superstition that constructed them, a kind of insurance paid for heavenly security. no one now seriously thinks that to endow a college of priests to perform services would affect his spiritual prospects in the life to come. the church itself does not countenance the idea. moreover, there is little demand in the world at large for the kind of beauty which they can and do minister to such as myself. the pleasure for which people spend money nowadays has to have a stirring, exciting, physical element in it to be acceptable. if it were otherwise, then our cathedrals could take their place in the life of the nation; but they are out of touch with railways, and newspapers, and the furious pursuit of athletics. they are on the side of peace and delicate impressions and quiet emotions. i wish it were not so; but it would be faithless to believe that we are not in the hand of god still, and that our restless energies develop against his will. and then there falls a darker, more bewildering thought. suppose that one could bring one of the rough galilean fishermen who sowed the seed of the faith, into a place like this, and say to him, "this is the fruit of your teaching; you, whose master never spoke a word of art or music, who taught poverty and simplicity, bareness of life, and an unclouded heart, you are honoured here; these towers and bells are called after your names; you stand in gorgeous robes in these storied windows." would they not think and say that it was all a terrible mistake? would they not say that the desire of the world, the lust of the eye and ear, had laid subtle and gentle hands on a stern and rugged creed, and bade it serve and be bound? "thy nakedness involves thy spouse in the soft sanguine stuff she wears." so says an eager and vehement poet, apostrophising the tortured limbs, the drooping eye of the crucified lord; and is it true that these stately and solemn houses, these sweet strains of unearthly music, serve his purpose and will? nay, is it not rather true that the serpent is here again aping the mildness of the dove, and using all the delicate, luxurious accessories of life to blind us to the truth? i do not know; it leaves me in a sad and bewildered conflict of spirit. and yet i somehow feel that god is in these places, and that, if only the heart is pure and the will strong, such influences can minister to the growth of the meek and loving spirit.--ever yours, t. b. i don't know what has happened to your letters. perhaps you have not been able to write? i go back to work to-morrow. upton, may 2, 1904. my dear herbert,--my holidays are over, and i am back at work again. i have got your delightful letter; it was silly to be anxious. . . . to-day i was bicycling; i was horribly preoccupied, as, alas, i often am, with my own plans and thoughts. i was worrying myself about my work, fretting about the thousand little problems that beset a schoolmaster, trying to think out a chapter of a book which i am endeavouring to write, my mind beating and throbbing like a feverish pulse. i kept telling myself that the copses were beautiful, that the flowers were enchanting, that the long line of distant hills seen across the wooded valleys and the purple plain were ravishingly tranquil and serene; but it was of no use; my mind ran like a mill-race, a stream of thoughts jostling and hurrying on, in spite of my efforts to shut the sluice. suddenly i turned a corner by a little wood, and found myself looking over into the garden of a small, picturesque cottage, which has been smartened up lately, and has become, i suppose, the country retreat of some well-to-do people. it was a pretty garden; a gentle slope of grass, borders full of flowers, and an orchard behind, whitening into bloom, with a little pool in the shady heart of it. on the lawn were three people, obviously and delightfully idle; an elderly man sate in a chair, smiling, smoking, reading a paper. the other two, a younger man and a young woman, were walking side by side, their heads close together, laughing quietly at some gentle jest. a perambulator stood by the porch. both the men looked like prosperous professional people, clean-shaven, healthy, and contented. i inferred, for no particular reason, that the young pair were man and wife, lately married, and that the elder man was the father-in-law. i had this passing glimpse, no more, of an interior; and then i was riding among the spring woods again. of course it was only an impression, but this happy, sunshiny scene, so suddenly opened to my gaze, so suddenly closed again, was like a parable. i felt as if i should have liked to stop, to take off my hat, and thank my unknown friends for making so simple, pleasant, and sweet a picture. i dare say they were as preoccupied in professional matters, as careful and troubled as myself, if i had known more about them. but in that moment they were finding leisure simply to taste and enjoy the wholesome savours of life, and were neither looking backward in regret nor forward in anticipation. i dare say the jokes that amused them were mild enough, and that i should have found their conversation tedious and tiresome if i had been made one of the party. but they were symbolical; they stood for me, and will stand, as a type of what we ought to aim at more; and that is simply living. it is a lesson which you yourself are no doubt learning in your fragrant, shady garden. you have no need to make money, and your only business is to get better. but for myself, i know that i work and think and hope and fear too much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions and dreams and fancies, i am constantly in danger of hardly living at all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs, without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking. yet this is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short one. it is at such moments as these that i wake as from a dream, and think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its essence i am. my head is full from morning to night of everything except living. for a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent inevitable. but where i am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves, and the sharp briny savours of the air. why do i not do this? because, to continue my confession, it bores me. i must, it seems, be always in a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or some shadowy object that i have in view; and the moment i have reached it, i must fix upon another, and begin the process over again. it is this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the ruin of me and many others. after all, when it is done, what worth has it? i am not a particularly successful man, and i can't delude myself into thinking that my work has any very supreme value. and meanwhile all the real experiences of life pass me by. i have never, god forgive me, had time to be in love! that is a pitiful confession. sometimes one comes across a person with none of these uneasy ambitions, with whom living is a fine art; then one realises what a much more beautiful creation it is than books and pictures. it is a kind of sweet and solemn music. such a man or woman has time to read, to talk, to write letters, to pay calls, to walk about the farm, to go and sit with tiresome people, to spend long hours with children, to sit in the open air, to keep poultry, to talk to servants, to go to church, to remember what his or her relations are doing, to enjoy garden parties and balls, to like to see young people enjoying themselves, to hear confessions, to do other people's business, to be a welcome presence everywhere, and to leave a fragrant memory, watered with sweet tears. that is to live. and such lives, one is tempted to think, were more possible, more numerous, a hundred years ago. but now one expects too much, and depends too much on exciting pleasures, whether of work or play. well, my three persons in a garden must be a lesson to me; and, whatever may really happen to them, in my mind they shall walk for ever between the apple-trees and the daffodils, looking lovingly at each other, while the elder man shall smile as he reads in the chronicle of heaven, which does not grow old.--ever yours, t. b. upton, may 9, 1904. my dear herbert,--i am going back to the subject of ambition--do you mind? yesterday in chapel one of my colleagues preached rather a fine sermon on activity. the difficulty under which he laboured is a common one in sermons; it is simply this--how far is a christian teacher justified in recommending ambition to christian hearers? i think that, if one reads the gospel, it is clear that ambition is not a christian motive. the root of the teaching of christ seems to me to be that one should have or acquire a passion for virtue; love it for its beauty, as an artist loves beauty of form or colour; and the simplicity which is to be the distinguishing mark of a christian seems to me to be inconsistent with personal ambition. i do not see that there is any hint of a christian being allowed to wish to do, what is called in domestic language "bettering" himself. the idea rather is that the all-wise and all-loving father puts a man into the world where he intends him to be; and that a man is to find his highest pleasure in trying to serve the father's will, with a heart full of love for all living things. a rich man is to disembarrass himself of his riches, or at least be sure that they are no hindrance to him; a poor man is not to attempt to win them. of course it may be possible that the original christians were intended to take a special line while the faith was leavening the world, and that a different economy was to prevail when society had been christianised. this is a point of view which can be subtly defended, but i think it is hard to find any justification for it in the gospel. ambition practically means that, if one is to shoulder to the front, one must push other people out of the way; one must fight for one's own hand. to succeed at no one's expense is only possible to people of very high character and genius. but it is difficult to see what motive to set before boys in the matter; the ideas of fame and glory, the hope of getting what all desire and what all cannot have, are deeply rooted in the childish mind. moreover, we encourage ambition so frankly, both in work and play, that it is difficult to ascend the school pulpit and take quite a different line. to tell boys that they must simply do their best for the sake of doing their best, without any thought of the rewards of success--it is a very fine ideal, but is it a practical one? if we gave prizes to the stupid boys who work without hope of success, and if we gave colours to the boys who played games hard without attaining competence in them, we might then dare to speak of the rewards of virtue. but boys despise unsuccessful conscientiousness, and all the rewards we distribute are given to aptitude. some preachers think they get out of the difficulty by pointing to examples of lives that battled nobly and unsuccessfully against difficulties; but the point always is the ultimate recognition. the question is not whether we can provide a motive for the unsuccessful; but whether we ought not to discourage ambition in every form? yet it is the highest motive power in the case of most generous and active-minded boys. in the course of the sermon the preacher quoted some lines of omar khayyam in order to illustrate the shamefulness of the indolent life. that is a very dangerous thing to do. the lovely stanzas, sweet as honey, flowed out upon the air in all their stately charm. the old sinner stole my heart away with his gentle, seductive, epicurean grace. i am afraid that i felt like paolo as he sate beside francesca. i heard no more of the sermon that day; i repeated to myself many of the incomparable quatrains, and felt the poem to be the most beautiful presentment of pure agnosticism that has ever been given to the world. the worst of it is that the delicate traitor makes it so beautiful that one does not feel the shame and the futility of it. this evening i have been reading the new life of fitzgerald, so you may guess what was the result of the sermon for me. it is not a wholly pleasing book, but it is an interesting one; it gives a better picture of the man than any other book or article, simply by the great minuteness with which it enters into details. and now i find myself confronted by the problem in another shape. was fitzgerald's life an unworthy one? he had great literary ambitions, but he made nothing of them. he lived a very pure, innocent, secluded life, delighting in nature and in the company of simple people; loving his friends with a passion that reminds one of newman; doing endless little kindnesses to all who came within his circle; and tenderly loved by several great-hearted men of genius. he felt himself that he was to blame; he urged others to the activities which he could not practise. and yet the results of his life are such as many other more busy, more conscientious men have not achieved. he has left a large body of good literary work, and one immortal poem of incomparable beauty. he also left, quite unconsciously, i believe, many of the most beautiful, tender, humorous, wise letters in the english tongue; and i find myself wondering whether all this could have been brought to pass in any other way. yet i could not conscientiously advise any one to take fitzgerald's life as a model it was shabby, undecided, futile; he did many silly, almost fatuous things; he was deplorably idle and unstrung. at the same time a terrible suspicion creeps upon me that many busy men are living worse lives. i don't mean men who give themselves to activities, however dusty, which affect other people. i will grant at once that doctors, teachers, clergymen, philanthropists, even members of parliament are justified in their lives; then, too, men who do the necessary work of the world--farmers, labourers, workmen, fishermen, are justifiable. but business men who make fortunes for their children; lawyers, artists, writers, who work for money and for praise--are these after all so much nobler than our indolent friend? to begin with, fitzgerald's life was one of extraordinary simplicity. he lived on almost nothing, he had no luxuries; he was like a lily of the field. if he had been a merely selfish man it would have been different; but he loved his fellow-men deeply and tenderly, and he showered unobtrusive kindness on all round him. i find it very hard to make up my mind; it is true that the fabric of the world would fall to pieces if we were all fitzgeralds. but so, too, as has often been pointed out, would it fall to pieces if we all lived literally on the lines of the sermon on the mount. activities are for many people a purely selfish thing, to fill the time because they are otherwise bored; and it is hard to see why a man who can fill his life with less strenuous pleasures, books, music, strolling, talking, should not be allowed to do so. solve me the riddle, if you can! the simplicity of the gospel seems to me to be inconsistent with the expansion of england; and i dare not say off-hand that the latter is the finer ideal.--ever yours, t. b. upton, may 15, 1904. my dear herbert,--you ask if i have read anything lately? well, i have been reading stalky & co. with pain, and, i hope, profit. it is an amazing book; the cleverness, the freshness, the incredible originality of it all; the careless ease with which scene after scene is touched off and a picture brought before one at a glance, simply astounds me, and leaves me gasping. but i don't want now to discourse about the literary merits of the book, great as they are. i want to relieve my mind of the thoughts that disquiet me. i think, to start with, it is not a fair picture of school life at all. if it is really reminiscent--and the life-likeness and verisimilitude of the book is undeniable--the school must have been a very peculiar one. in the first place, the interest is concentrated upon a group of very unusual boys. the firm of stalky is, i humbly thank god, a combination of boys of a rare species. the other figures of boys in the book form a mere background, and the deeds of the central heroes are depicted like the deeds of the warriors of the iliad. they dart about, slashing and hewing, while the rank and file run hither and thither like sheep, their only use being in the numerical tale of heads that they can afford to the flashing blades of the protagonists; and even so the chief figures, realistic though they are, remind me not so much of spirited pictures as of gillray's caricatures. they are highly coloured, fantastic, horribly human and yet, somehow, grotesque. everything is elongated, widened, magnified, exaggerated. the difficulty is, to my mind, to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously wholesome-minded and manly. i can only humbly say that it is my belief, confirmed by experience, that boys of so unconventional and daring a type would not be content without dipping into darker pleasures. but kipling is a great magician, and, in reading the book, one can thankfully believe that in this case it was not so; just as one can also believe that, in this particular case, the boys were as mature and shrewd, and of as complete and trenchant a wit as they appear. my own experience here again is that no boys could keep so easily on so high a level of originality and sagacity. the chief characteristic of all the boys i have ever known is that they are so fitful, so unfinished. a clever boy will say incredibly acute things, but among a dreary tract of wonderfully silly ones. the most original boys will have long lapses into conventionality, but the heroes of kipling's book are never conventional, never ordinary; and then there is an absence of restfulness which is one of the greatest merits of tom brown. but what has made the book to me into a kind of lenten manual is the presentation of the masters. here i see, portrayed with remorseless fidelity, the faults and foibles of my own class; and i am sorry to say that i feel deliberately, on closing the book, that schoolmastering must be a dingy trade. my better self cries out against this conclusion, and tries feebly to say that it is one of the noblest of professions; and then i think of king and prout, and all my highest aspirations die away at the thought that i may be even as these. i suppose that kipling would reply that he has done full justice to the profession by giving us the figures of the headmaster and the chaplain. the headmaster is obviously a figure which his creator regards with respect. he is fair-minded, human, generous; it is true that he is enveloped with a strange awe and majesty; he moves in a mysterious way, and acts in a most inconsequent and unexpected manner. but he generally has the best of a situation; and though there is little that is pastoral about him, yet he is obviously a wholesome-minded, manly sort of person, who whips the right person at the right time, and generally scores in the end. but he is a roman father, at best. he has little compassion and no tenderness; he is acute, brisk, and sensible; but he has (at least to me) neither grace nor wisdom; or, if he has, he keeps them under a polished metallic dish-cover, and only lifts it in private. i do not feel that the headmaster has any religion, except the religion of all sensible men. in seeming to despise all sentiment, kipling seems to me to throw aside several beautiful flowers, tied carelessly up in the same bundle. there should be a treasure in the heart of a wise schoolmaster; not to be publicly displayed nor drearily recounted; but at the right moment, and in the right way, he ought to be able to show a boy that there are sacred and beautiful things which rule or ought to rule the heart. if the head has such a treasure he keeps it at the bank and only visits it in the holidays. the "padre" is a very human figure--to me the most attractive in the book; he has some wisdom and tenderness, and his little vanities are very gently touched. but (i daresay i am a very pedantic person) i don't really like his lounging about and smoking in the boys' studies. i think that what he would have called tolerance is rather a deplorable indolence, a desire to be above all things acceptable. he earns his influence by giving his colleagues away, and he seems to me to think more of the honour of the boys than of the honour of the place. but king and prout, the two principal masters--it is they who spoil the taste of my food and mingle my drink with ashes. they are, in their way, well-meaning and conscientious men. but is it not possible to love discipline without being a pedant, and to be vigilant without being a sneak? i fear in the back of my heart that kipling thinks that the trade of a schoolmaster is one which no generous or self-respecting man can adopt. and yet it is a useful and necessary trade; and we should be in a poor way if it came to be regarded as a detestable one. i wish with all my heart that kipling had used his genius to make our path smoother instead of rougher. the path of the schoolmaster is indeed set round with pitfalls. a man who is an egotist and a bully finds rich pasturage among boys who are bound to listen to him, and over whom he can tyrannise. but, on the other hand, a man who is both brave and sensitive--and there are many such--can learn as well as teach abundance of wholesome lessons, if he comes to his task with some hope and love. king is, of course, a verbose bully; he delights in petty triumphs; he rejoices in making himself felt; he is a cynic as well, a greedy and low-minded man; he takes a disgusting pleasure in detective work; he begins by believing the worst of boys; he is vain, shy, irritable; he is cruel, and likes to see his victim writhe. i have known many schoolmasters and i have never known a mr. king, except perhaps at a private school. but even king has done me good; he has confirmed me in my belief that more can be done by courtesy and decent amiability than can ever be done by discipline enforced by hard words. he teaches me not to be pompous, and not to hunger and thirst after finding things out. he makes me feel sure that the object of detection is to help boys to be better, and not to have the satisfaction of punishing them. prout is a feeble sentimentalist, with a deep belief in phrases. he is a better fellow than king, and is only an intolerable goose. both the men make me wish to burst upon the scene, when they are grossly mishandling some simple situation; but while i want to kick king, when he is retreating with dignity, my only desire is to explain to prout as patiently as i can what an ass he is. he is a perfect instance of absolutely ineffective virtue, a plain dish unseasoned with salt. there are, of course, other characters in the book, each of them grotesque and contemptible in his own way, each of them a notable example of what not to be. but i would pardon this if the book were not so unjust; if kipling had included in his gathering of masters one kindly, serious gentleman, whose sense of vocation did not make him a prig. and if he were to reply that the headmaster fulfils these conditions, i would say that the headmaster is a prig in this one point, that he is so desperately afraid of priggishness. the manly man, to my mind, is the man who does not trouble his head as to whether he is manly or not, not the man who wears clothes too big for him, and heavy boots, treads like an ox, and speaks gruffly; that is a pose, not better or worse than other poses. and what i want in the book is a man of simple and direct character, interested in his work, and not ashamed of his interest; attached to the boys, and not ashamed of seeming to care. my only consolation is that i have talked to a good many boys who have read the book; they have all been amused, interested, delighted. but they say frankly that the boys are not like any boys they ever knew, and, when i timidly inquire about the masters, they laugh rather sheepishly, and say that they don't know about that. i am sure that we schoolmasters have many faults; but we are really trying to do better, and, as i said before, i only wish that a man of kipling's genius had held out to us a helping hand, instead of giving us a push back into the ugly slough of usherdom, out of which many good fellows, my friends and colleagues, have, however feebly, been struggling to emerge.--ever yours, t. b. upton, may 21, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have been wondering since i wrote last whether i could possibly write a school story. i have often desired to try. the thing has hardly ever been well done. tom brown remains the best. dean farrar's books, vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental. stalky & co., as i said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing cleverness of insight, is not typical. gilkes' books are excellent studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; tim is an interesting book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; a day of my life at eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it has great verisimilitude. in the first place the plot is a difficulty; the incidents of school life do not lend themselves to dramatic situations. then, too, the trivialities of which school life is so much composed, the minuteness of the details involved, make the subject a singularly complicated one; another great difficulty is to give any idea of the conversations of boys, which are mainly concerned with small concrete facts and incidents, and are lacking in humour and flexibility. again, to speak frankly, there is a rabelaisian plainness of speech on certain subjects, which one must admit to be apt to characterise boys' conversation, which it is impossible to construct or include, and yet the omission of which subtracts considerable reality from the picture. genius might triumph over all these obstacles, of course, but even a genius would find it very difficult to put himself back into line with the immaturity and narrow views of boys; their credulity, their preoccupations, their conventionality, their inarticulateness--all these qualities are very hard to indicate. only a boy could formulate these things, and no boy has sufficient ease of expression to do so, or sufficient detachment both to play the part and describe it. a very clever undergraduate, with a gift of language, might write a truthful school-book; but yet the task seems to require a certain mellowness and tolerance which can only be given by experience; and then the very experience would tend to blunt the sharpness of the impressions. as a rule, in such books, the whole conception of boyhood seems at fault; a boy is generally represented as a generous, heedless, unworldly creature. my experience leads me to think that this is very wide of the mark. boys are the most inveterate tories. they love monopoly and privilege, they are deeply subservient, they have little idea of tolerance or justice or fair-play, they are intensely and narrowly ambitious; they have a certain insight into character, but there are some qualities, like vulgarity, which they seem incapable of detecting. they have a great liking for jobs and small indications of power. they are not, as a rule, truthful; they have no compassion for weakness. it is generally supposed that they have a strong sense of liberty, but this is not the case; they are, indeed, tenacious of their rights, or what they suppose to be their rights, but they have little idea of withstanding tyranny, they are incapable of democratic combination, and submit blindly to custom and tradition. neither do i think them notably affectionate or grateful; everything that is done for them within the limits of a prescribed and habitual system they accept blindly and as a matter of course, while at the same time they are profoundly affected by any civility or sympathy shown them outside the ordinary course of life. i mean that they do not differentiate between a master who takes immense trouble over his work, and discharges his duties with laborious conscientiousness, and a master who saves himself all possible trouble; they are not grateful for labour expended on them, and they do not resent neglect. but a master who asks boys to breakfast, talks politely to them, takes an interest in them in a sociable way, will win a popularity which a laborious and inarticulate man cannot attain to. they are extremely amenable to any indications of personal friendship, while they are blind to the virtues of a master who only studies their best interests. they will work, for instance, with immense vigour for a man who praises and appreciates industry; but a man who grimly insists on hard and conscientious work is looked upon as a person who finds enjoyment in a kind of slave-driving. boys are, in fact, profound egoists and profound individualists. of course there are exceptions to all this; there are boys of deep affection, scrupulous honesty, active interests, keen and far-reaching ambitions; but i am trying to sketch not the exception but the rule. you will ask what there is left? what there is that makes boys interesting and attractive to deal with? i will tell you. there is, of course, the mere charm of youthfulness and simplicity. and the qualities that i have depicted above are really the superficial qualities, the conventions that boys adopt from the society about them. the nobler qualities of human nature are latent in many boys; but they are for the most part superficially ruled by an intensely strong mauvaise honte, which leads them to live in two worlds, and to keep the inner life very sharply and securely ruled off from the outer. they must be approached tactfully and gently as individuals. it is possible to establish a personal and friendly relation with many boys, so long as they understand that it is a kind of secret understanding, and will not be paraded or traded upon in public. in their inner hearts there are the germs of many high and beautiful things, which tend, unless a boy has some wise and tender older friend--a mother, a father, a sister, even a master--to be gradually obscured under the insistent demands of his outer life. boys are very diffident about these matters, and require to be encouraged and comforted about them. the danger of public schools, with overworked masters, is that the secret life is apt to get entirely neglected, and then these germs of finer qualities get neither sunshine or rain. public spirit, responsibility, intellectual interests, unconventional hopes, virtuous dreams--a boy is apt to think that to speak of such things is to incur the reproach of priggishness; but a man who can speak of them naturally and without affectation, who can show that they are his inner life too, and are not allowed to flow in a sickly manner into his outer life, who has a due and wise reserve, can have a very high and simple power for good. but to express all this in the pages of a book is an almost impossible task; what one wants is to get the outer life briskly and sharply depicted, and to speak of the inner in hints and flashes. unfortunately, the man who really knows boys is apt to get so penetrated with the pathos, the unrealised momentousness, the sad shipwrecks of boy life that he is not light-hearted enough to depict the outer side of it all, and a book becomes morbid and sentimental. then, too, to draw a boy correctly would often be to produce a sense of contrast which would almost give a feeling of hypocrisy, because there are boys--and not unfrequently the most interesting--who, if fairly drawn, would appear frivolous, silly, conventional in public, even coarse, who yet might have very fine things behind, though rarely visible. moreover, the natural, lively, chattering boys, whom it would be a temptation to try and draw, are not really the most interesting. they tend to develop into bores of the first water in later life. but the boy who develops into a fine man is often ungainly, shy, awkward, silent in early life, acutely sensitive, and taking refuge in bluntness or dumbness. the most striking instances that have come under my own experience, where a boy has really revealed the inside of his mind and spirit, are absolutely incapable of being expressed in words. if i were to write down what boys have said to me, on critical occasions, the record would be laughed at as impossible and unnatural. so you see that the difficulties are well-nigh insuperable. narrative would be trivial, conversation affected, motives inexplicable; for, indeed, the crucial difficulty is the absolute unaccountableness of boys' actions and words. a schoolmaster gets to learn that nothing is impossible; a boy of apparently unblemished character will behave suddenly in a manner that makes one despair of human nature, a black sheep will act and speak like an angel of light. the interest is the mystery and the impenetrability of it all; it is so impossible to foresee contingencies or to predict conduct. this impulsiveness, as a rule, diminishes in later life under the influence of maturity and material conditions. but the boy remains insoluble, now a demon, now an angel; and thus the only conclusion is that it is better to take things as they come, and not to attempt to describe the indescribable.--ever yours, t. b. upton, may 28, 1904. dear herbert,--i am bursting with news. i am going to tell you a secret. i have been offered an important academical post; that is to say, i received a confidential intimation that i should be elected if i stood. the whole thing is confidential, so that i must not even tell you what the offer was. i should have very much liked to talk it over with you, but i had to make up my mind quickly; there was no time to write, and, moreover, i feel sure that when i had turned out the pros and cons of my own feelings for your inspection, you would have decided as i did. you will say at once that you do not know how i reconciled my refusal with the cardinal article of my faith, that our path is indicated to us by providence, and that we ought to go where we are led. well, i confess that i felt this to be a strong reason for accepting. the invitation came to me as a complete surprise, absolutely unsought, and from a body of electors who know the kind of man they want and have a large field to choose from; there was no question of private influence or private friendship. i hardly know one of the committee; and they took a great deal of trouble in making inquiries about men. but, to use a detestable word, there is a strong difference between an outward call and an inward call. it is not the necessary outcome of a belief in providence that one accepts all invitations, and undertakes whatever one may be asked to do. there is such a thing as temptation; and there is another kind of summons, sent by god, which seems to come in order that one may take stock of one's own position and capacities and realise what one's line ought to be. it is like a passage in a labyrinth which strikes off at right angles from the passage one is following; the fact that one may take a sudden turn to the left is not necessarily a clear indication that one is meant to do so. it may be only sent to make one consider the reasons which induce one to follow the path on which one is embarked. i had no instantaneous corresponding sense that it was my duty to follow this call. i was (i will confess it) a little dazzled; but, as soon as that wore off, i felt an indescribable reluctance to undertake the task, a consciousness of not being equal to it, a strong sense that i was intended for other things. i don't mean to say that there was not much that was attractive about the offer in a superficial way. it meant money, power, position, and consequence--all good things, and good things which i unreservedly like. i am like every one else in that respect; i should like a large house, and a big income, and professional success, and respect and influence as much as any one--more, indeed, than many people. but i soon saw that this would be a miserable reason for being tempted by the offer, the delight of being called rabbi. i don't pretend to be high-minded, but even i could see that, unless there was a good deal more than that in my mind, i should be a wretched creature to be influenced by such considerations. these are merely the conveniences; the real point was the work, the power, the possibility of carrying out certain educational reforms which i have very much at heart, and doing something towards raising the general intellectual standard, which i believe to be lower than it need be. now, on thinking it out carefully, i came to the conclusion that i was not strong enough for this role. i am no atlas; i have no deep store of moral courage; i am absurdly sensitive, ill-fitted to cope with unpopularity and disapproval. bitter, vehement, personal hostility would break my spirit. a fervent christian might say that one had no right to be faint-hearted, and that strength would be given one; that is perfectly true in certain conditions, and i have often experienced it when some intolerable and inevitable calamity had to be faced. but it is an evil recklessness not to weigh one's own deficiencies. no one would say that a man ignorant of music ought to undertake to play the organ, if the organist failed to appear, believing that power would be given him. christ himself warned his disciples against embarking in an enterprise without counting the cost. but here i confess was the darkest point of my dilemma--was it cowardice and indolence to refuse to attempt what competent persons believed i could do? or was it prudent and wise to refuse to attempt what i, knowing my own temperament better, felt i could not attempt successfully? now in my present work it is different. i know that my strength is equal to the responsibility; i know that i can do what i undertake. the art of dealing with boys is very different from the art of dealing with men, the capacity for subordinate command is very different from the capacity for supreme command. of course, it is a truism to say that if a man can obey thoroughly and loyally he can probably command. but then, again, there is a large class of people, to which i believe myself to belong, who are held to be, in the words of tacitus, capax imperii, nisi imperasset. then, too, i felt that a great task must be taken up in a certain buoyancy and cheerfulness of spirit, not in heaviness and diffidence. there are, of course, instances where a work reluctantly undertaken has been crowned with astonishing success. but one has no business to think that reluctance and diffidence to undertake a great work are a proof that god intends one to do it. i am quite aware of the danger which a temperament like my own runs, of dealing with such a situation in too complex and subtle a way. that is the hardest thing of all to get rid of, because it is part of the very texture of one's mind. i have tried, however, to see the whole thing in as simple a light as possible, and to ask myself whether acceptance was in any sense a plain duty. if the offer had been a constraining appeal, i should have doubted. but it was made in an easy, complimentary way, as if there was no doubt that i should fall in with it. well, i had a very anxious day; but i simply (i may say that to you) prayed that my way might be made clear; and the result was a conviction, which rose like a star and then, as it were, waxed into a sun, that the quest was not for me. and so i refused; and i am thankful to say that i have had, ever since, the blessed and unalterable conviction that i have done right. even the conveniences have ceased to appeal to me; they have not even, like the old adam in the pilgrim's progress, pinched hold of me and given me a deadly twitch. though the picturesque mind of one who, like myself, is very sensitive to "the attributes of awe and majesty," takes a certain peevish pleasure in continuing to depict my unworthy self clothed upon with majesty, and shaking all olympus with my nod. but if olympus had refused to shake, even though i had nodded like a mandarin? i am sure that i shall not regret it; and i do not even think that my conscience will reproach me; nor do i think that (on this ground alone) i shall be relegated to the dark circle of the inferno with those who had a great opportunity given them and would not use it. please confirm me if you can! comfort me with apples, as the song says. i am afraid you will only tell me that it proves that you are right, and that i have no ambition.--ever yours, t. b. upton, june 4, 1904. dear herbert,--i have nothing to write about. the summer is come, and with it i enter into purgatory; i am poured out like water, and my heart is like melting wax; i have neither courage nor kindness, except in the early morning or the late evening. i cannot work, and i cannot be lazy. the only consolation i have--and i wish it were a more sustaining one--is that most people like hot weather better. i will put down for you in laborious prose what if i were an artist i would do in half-a-dozen strokes. there is a big place near here, rushton park. i was bicycling with randall past the lodge, blaming the fair summer, like the fisherman in theocritus, when he asked if i should like to ride through. the owner, mr. payne, is a friend of his, and laid a special injunction on him to go through whenever he liked. we were at once admitted, and in a moment we were in a paradise. payne is famed for his gardeners, and i think i never saw a more beautiful place of its kind. the ground undulates very gracefully, and we passed by velvety lawns, huge towering banks of rhododendron all ablaze with flower, exquisite vistas and glades, with a view of far-off hills. it seemed to me to be an enchanted pleasaunce, like the great palace in the princess. now and then we could see the huge facade of the house above us, winking through its sunblinds. there was not a soul to be seen; and this added enormously to the magical charm of the place, as though it were the work of a genie, not made with hands. we passed a huge fountain dripping into a blue-tiled pool, over a great cockleshell of marble; then took a path which wound into the wood, all a mist of fresh green, and in a moment we were in a long old-fashioned garden, with winding box hedges, and full of bright flowers. to the left, where the garden was bordered by the wood, was set a row of big marble urns, grey with age, on high pedestals, all dripping with flowering creepers. it was very rococo, like an old french picture, but enchanting for all that. to the right was a long, mellow brick wall, under which stood some old marble statues, weather-stained and soft of hue. the steady sun poured down on the sweet, bright place, and the scent of the flowers filled the air with fragrance, while a dove, hidden in some green towering tree, roo-hooed delicately, as though her little heart was filled with an indolent contentment. the statue that stood nearest us attracted my attention. i cannot conceive what it was meant to represent. it was the figure of an old, bearded man, with a curious brimless hat on his head, and a flowing robe; in his hands he held and fingered some unaccountable object of a nondescript shape; and he had an unpleasant fixed smile, which he seemed to turn on us, as though he knew a secret connected with the garden which he might not reveal, and which if revealed would fill the hearers with a secret horror. i do not think that i have often seen a figure which affected me so disagreeably. he seemed to be saying that within this bright and fragrant place lay some tainted mystery which it were ill to tamper with. it was as though we opened a door out of some stately corridor, and found a strange, beast-like thing running to and fro in a noble room. well, i do not know! but it seems to me a type of many things, and i doubt not that the wise-hearted patrician, the former owner, who laid out the garden and set the statue in its place, did so with a purpose. it is for us to see that there lies no taint behind our pleasures; but even if this be not the message, the heart of the mystery, may not the figure stand perhaps for the end, the bitter end, which lies ahead of all, when the lip is silent and the eye shut, and the heart is stilled at last? the quiet figure with its secret, wicked smile, somehow slurred for me the sunshine and the pleasant flowers, and i was glad when we turned away.--ever yours, t. b. upton, june 11, 1904. dear herbert,--yes, i am sure you are right. the thing i get more and more impatient of every year is conventionality in every form. it is rather foolish, i am well aware, to be impatient about anything; and great conventionality of mind is not inconsistent with entire sincerity, for the simple reason that conventionality is what ninety-nine hundredths of the human race enjoy. most people have no wish to make up their own minds about anything; they do not care to know what they like or why they like it. this is often the outcome of a deep-seated modesty. the ordinary person says to himself, "who am i that i should set up a standard? if all the people that i know like certain occupations and certain amusements, they are probably right, and i will try to like them too." i don't mean that this feeling is often put into words, but it is there; and there is for most people an immense power in habit. people grow to like what they do, and seldom inquire if they really like it, or why they like it. of course, to a certain extent, conventionality is a useful, peaceful thing. i am not here recommending eccentricity of any kind. people ought to fall in simply and quietly with ordinary modes of life, dress, and behaviour; it saves time and trouble; it sets the mind free. but what i rather mean is that, when the ordinary usages of life have been complied with, all sensible people ought to have a line of their own about occupation, amusements, friends, and not run to and fro like sheep just where the social current sets. what i mean is best explained by a couple of instances. i met at dinner last night our old acquaintance, foster, who was at school with us. he was in my house; i don't think you ever knew much of him. he was a pleasant, good-humoured boy enough; but his whole mind was set on discovering the exact code of social school life. he wanted to play the right games, to wear the right clothes, to know the right people. he liked being what he called "in the swim." he never made friends with an obscure or unfashionable boy. he was quite pleasant to his associates when he was himself obscure; but he waited quietly for his opportunity to recommend himself to prominent boys, and, when the time came, he gently threw over all his old companions and struck out into more distinguished regions. he was never disagreeable or conceited; he merely dropped his humble friends until they too were approved as worthy of greater distinction, and then he took them up again. he succeeded in his ambitions, as most cool and clear-headed persons do. he became what would be called very popular; he gave himself no airs; he was always good company; he was never satirical or critical. the same thing has gone on ever since. he married a nice wife; he secured a good official position. last night, as i say, i met him here. he came into the room with the same old pleasant smile, beautifully dressed, soberly appointed. his look and gestures were perfectly natural and appropriate. he has never made any attempt to see me or keep up old acquaintance; but here, where i have a certain standing and position, it was obviously the right thing to treat me with courteous deference. he came up to me with a genial welcome, and, but for a little touch of prosperous baldness, i could have imagined that he was hardly a day older than when he was a boy. he reminded me of some cheerful passages of boyhood; he asked with kindly interest after my work; he paid me exactly the right compliments; and i became aware that i was, for the moment, one of the pawns in his game, to be delicately pushed about where it suited him. we talked of other matters; he held exactly the right political opinions, a mild and cautious liberalism; he touched on the successes of certain politicians and praised them appropriately; he deplored the failure of certain old friends in political life. "a very good fellow," he said of hughes, "but just a little--what shall i say?--impracticable?" he had seen all the right plays, heard the right music, read the right books. he deplored the obscurity of george meredith, but added that he was an undoubted genius. he confessed himself to be an ardent admirer of wagner; he thought elgar a man of great power; but he had not made up his mind about strauss. i found that "not making up his mind about" a person was one of his favourite expressions. if he sees that some man is showing signs of vigour and originality in any department of life, he keeps his eye upon him; if he passes safely through the shallows, he praises him, saying that he has watched his rise; if he fails, our friend will be ready with the reasons for his failure, adding that he always feared that so-and-so was a little unpractical. i can't describe to you the dreariness and oppression that fell upon me. the total absence of generosity, of independent interest, weighed on my soul. the one quality that this equable and judicious critic was on the look-out for was the power of being approved. foster's view seemed to knock the bottom out of life, to deprive everything equally of charm and individuality. the conversation turned on golf, and one of the guests, whom i am shortly about to describe, said bluffly that he considered golf and drink to be the two curses of the country. our polite friend turned courteously towards him, treated the remark as an excellent sally, and then said that he feared he must himself plead guilty to a great devotion to golf. "you see all kinds of pleasant people," he said, "in such a pleasant way; and then it tempts one into the open air; and it is such an excellent investment, in the way of exercise, for one's age; a man can play a very decent game till he is sixty--though, of course, it is no doubt a little overdone." we all felt that he was right; he took the rational, the sensible view; but it tempted me, though i successfully resisted the temptation, to express an exaggerated dislike of golf which i do not feel. the guest whose remark had occasioned this discourse is one of my colleagues, murchison by name--you don't know him--a big, rugged, shy, sociable fellow, who is in many ways one of the best masters here. he is always friendly, amusing, courteous. he holds strong opinions, which he does not produce unless the occasion demands it. he keeps a good deal to himself, follows his own pursuits, and knows his own mind. he is very tolerant, and can get on with almost everybody. the boys respect him, like his teaching, think him clever, sensible, and amusing. there are a great many things about which he knows nothing, and is always ready to confess his ignorance. but whenever he does understand a subject, and he has a strong taste for art and letters, you always feel that his thoughts and opinions are fresh and living. they are not produced like sardines from a tin, with a painful similarity and regularity. he has strong prejudices, for which he can always give a reason; but he is always ready to admit that it is a matter of taste. he does not tilt in a quixotic manner at established things, but he goes along trying to do his work in the best manner attainable. he is no genius, and his character is by no means a perfect one; he has pronounced faults, of which he is perfectly conscious, and which he never attempts to disguise. but he is simple, straightforward, affectionate, and sincere. if he were more courageous, more fiery, he would be, i think, a really great man; but this he somehow misses. the two men, foster and murchison, are as great a contrast as can well be imagined. they serve to illustrate exactly what i mean. our friend foster is perfectly correct and admirably pleasant. you would never think of confiding in him, or saying to him what you really felt; but, on the other hand, there is no one whom i would more willingly consult in a small and delicate point of practical conduct--and his advice would be excellent. but murchison is a real man; he knows his limitations, but he takes nothing second-hand. he brings his own mind and character to bear on every problem, and judges people and things on their own merits. of course one does not desire that conventional people should strive after unconventionality. that produces the most sickening conventionality of all, because it is merely an attempt to construct a pose that shall be accepted as unconventional. the only thing is to be natural; and, after all, if one merely desires to see how the cat jumps and then to jump after it, it is better to do so frankly and make no pretence about it. but i am sure that it is one's duty as a teacher to try and show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. i suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this. i found--i am now speaking of intellectual things--that certain authors were held up to me as models which i was unfortunate enough to dislike. instead of making up my own mind about it, instead of trying to see what i did admire and why i admired it, i tried feebly for years to admire what i was told was admirable. the result was waste of time and confusion of thought. in the same way i followed feebly, as a boy, after the social code. i tried to like the regulation arrangements, and thought dimly that i was in some way to blame because i did not. not until i went up to cambridge did the conception of mental liberty steal upon me--and then only partly. of course if i had had more originality i should have perceived this earlier. but the world appeared to me a great, organised, kindly conspiracy, which must be joined, in however feeble a spirit. i have learnt gradually that, after a decent compliance with superficial conventionalities, there are not only no penalties attached to independence, but that there, and there alone, is happiness to be found; and that the rewards of a free judgement and an authentic admiration are among the best and highest things that the world has to bestow. . . .--ever yours, t. b. upton, june 18, 1904. dear herbert,--i am sick at heart. i received one of those letters this morning which are the despair of most schoolmasters. i have in my house a boy aged seventeen, who is absolutely alone in the world. he has neither father or mother, brother or sister. he spends his holidays with an aunt, a clever and charming person, but a sad invalid (by the way, in passing, what a wretched thing in english it is that there is no female of the word "man"; "woman" means something quite different, and always sounds slightly disrespectful; "lady" is impossible, except in certain antique phrases). the boy is frail, intellectual, ungenial. he is quite incapable of playing games decently, having neither strength or aptitude; he finds it hard to make friends, and the consequence is that, like all clever people who don't meet with any success, he takes refuge in a kind of contemptuous cynicism. his aunt is devoted to him and to his best interests, but she is too much of an invalid to be able to look after him; the result is that he is allowed practically to do exactly as he likes in the holidays; he hates school cordially, and i don't wonder. he fortunately has one taste, and that is for science, and it is more than a taste, it is a real passion. he does not merely dabble about with chemicals, or play tricks with electricity; but he reads dry, hard, abstruse science, and writes elaborate monographs, which i read with more admiration than comprehension. this is almost his only hold on ordinary life, and i encourage it with all my might; i ask about his work, make such suggestions as i can, and praise his successful experiments and his treatises, so far as i can understand them, loudly and liberally. this morning one of his guardians writes to me about him. he is a country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my pupil. he is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position that saves him from the plainest retorts. he writes to say that he is much exercised about his ward's progress. the boy, he says, is fanciful and delicate, and has much too good an opinion of himself. that is true; and he goes on to lay down the law as to what he "needs." he must be thrown into the society of active and vigorous boys; he must play games; he must go to the gymnasium. and then he must learn self-reliance; he must not be waited upon; he must be taught that it is his business to be considerate of others; he must learn to be obliging, and to look after other people. he goes on to say that all he wants is the influence of a strong and sensible man (that is a cut at me), and he will be obliged if i will kindly attend to the matter. well, what does he want me to do? does he expect me to run races with the boy? to introduce him to the captain of the eleven? to have him thrust into teams of cricket and football from which his incapacity for all games naturally excludes him? when our bumble-bee friend was at school himself--and a horrid boy he must have been--what would he have said if a master had told him to put a big, clumsy, and incapable boy into a house cricket eleven in order to bring him out? then as to teaching him to be considerate, the mischief is all done in the holidays; the boy is not waited on here, and he has plenty of vigorous discipline in the kind of barrack life the boys lead. does he expect me to march into the boy's home, and request that the boy may black his own boots and carry up the coals! the truth is that the man has no real policy; he sees the boy's deficiencies, and liberates his mind by requesting me, as if i were a kind of tradesman, to see that they are corrected. of course the temptation is to write the man an acrimonious letter, and to point out the idiotic character of his suggestions. but that is worse than useless. what i have done is to write and say that i have received his kind and sensible letter, that he has laid his finger on the exact difficulties, and that naturally i am anxious to put them straight. i then added that his own recollection of his school-days will show that one cannot help a boy in athletic or social matters beyond a certain point, that one can only see that a boy has a fair chance, and is not overlooked, but that other boys would not tolerate (and i know that he does not mean to suggest this) that a boy should be included in a team for which he is unfit, simply in order that his social life should be encouraged. i then point out that as to discipline there is no lack of it here; and that it is only at home that he is spoilt; and that i hope he will use his influence, in a region where i cannot do more than make suggestions, to minimise the evil. the man will approve of the letter; he will think me sensible and himself extraordinarily wise. does that seem to you to be cynical? i don't think it is. the man is sincerely anxious for the boy's welfare, just as i am, and we had better agree than disagree. the fault of his letter is that it is stupid, and that it is offensive. the former quality i can forgive, and the latter is only stupidity in another form. he thinks in his own mind that if i am paid to educate the boy i ought to be glad of advice, that i ought to be grateful to have things that i am not likely to detect for myself pointed out by an enlightened and benevolent man. meanwhile i shall proceed to treat the boy on my own theory. i don't expect him to play games; i don't think that it is, humanly speaking, possible to expect a sensitive, frail boy to continue to play a game in which he only makes himself ridiculous and contemptible from first to last. of course if a boy who is incapable of success in athletics does go on playing games perseveringly and good-humouredly, he gets a splendid training, and, as a rule, conciliates respect. but this boy could not do that. then i shall try to encourage the boy in any taste he may exhibit, and try to build up a real structure on these slender lines. the great point is that he shall have some absorbing and wholesome instinct. he will be wealthy, and in a position to gratify any whim. he is not in the least likely to do anything foolish or vicious--he has not got the animal spirits for that. i shall encourage him to take up politics; and i shall try to put into his head a desire to do something for his fellow-creatures, and not to live an entirely lonely and self-absorbed life. i have a theory that in education it is better to encourage aptitudes than to try merely to correct deficiencies. one can't possibly extirpate weaknesses by trying to crush them. one must build up vitality and interest and capacity. it is like the parable of the evil spirits. it is of no use simply to cast them out and leave the soul empty and swept; one must encourage some strong, good spirit to take possession; one must build on the foundations that are there. the boy is delicate-minded, able and intelligent; he is an interesting companion, when he is once at his ease. if only this busy, fussy, hearty old bore would leave him alone! what i am afraid of his doing is of his getting the boy to stay with him, making him go out hunting, and laughing mercilessly at his tumbles. the misery that a stupid, genial man can inflict upon a sensitive boy like this is dreadful to contemplate. at the end of the half i shall write a letter about the boy's work, and delicately hint that, if he is encouraged in his subject, he may attain high distinction and eventually rise to political or scientific eminence. the old bawler will take the fly with a swirl--see if he does not! and, if i can secure an interview with him, i will wager that my triumph will be complete. does this all seem very dingy to you, my dear herbert? you have never had to deal with tiresome, stupid people in a professional capacity, you see. there is a distinct pleasure in getting one's own way, in triumphing over an awkward situation, in leading an old buffer by the nose to do the thing which you think right, and to make him believe that you are all the time following his advice and treasuring up his precepts. but i can honestly say that my chief desire is not to amuse myself with this kind of diplomacy, but the real welfare of the child. i know you will believe that.--ever yours, t. b. upton, june 25, 1904. dear herbert,--this is not a letter; it is a sketch, an aquarelle out of my portfolio. yesterday was a hot, heavy, restless day, with thunder brewing in the dark heart of huge inky clouds; a day when one craves for light, and brisk airs, and cold bare hill-tops; when one desires to get away from one's kind, away from close rooms and irritable persons. so i went off on my patient and uncomplaining bicycle, along a country road; and then crossing a wide common, like the field, i thought, in the pilgrim's progress across which evangelist pointed an improving finger, i turned down to the left to the waterside in the still air, that seemed to listen, the blue wooded hills across the river had a dim, rich beauty. how mysterious are the fields and heights from which one is separated by a stream, the fields in which one knows every tree and sloping lawn by sight, and where one sets foot so rarely! the road came to an end in a little grassy space among high-branching elms. on my left was a farm, with barns and byres, overhung by stately walnut trees; on the right a grange among its great trees, a low tiled house, with white casements, in a pleasant garden, full of trellised roses, a big dovecote, with a clattering flight of wheeling pigeons circling round and round. hard by, close to the river, stands a little ancient church, with a timbered spire, the trees growing thickly about it, dreaming forgotten dreams. here all was still and silent; the very children moved languidly about, not knowing what ailed them. far off across the wide-watered plain came a low muttering of thunder, and a few big drops pattered in the great elms. this secluded river hamlet has an old history; the church, which is served from a distant parish, stands in a narrow strip of land which runs down across the fields to the river, and dates from the time when the river was a real trade-highway, and when neighbouring parishes, which had no frontages on the stream, found it convenient to have a wharf to send their produce, timber or bricks, away by water. but the wharf has long since perished, though a few black stakes show where it stood; and the village, having no landing-place and no inn, has dropped out of the river life, and minds its own quiet business. a few paces from the church the river runs silently and strongly to the great weir below. to-day it was swollen with rain and turbid, and plucked steadily at the withies. to-day the stream, which is generally full of life, was almost deserted. but it came into my head what an allegory it made. here through the unvisited meadows, with their huge elms, runs this thin line of glittering vivid life; you hear, hidden in dark leaves, the plash of oars, the grunt of rowlocks, and the chatter of holiday folk, to whom the river-banks are but a picture through which they pass, and who know nothing of the quiet fields that surround them. that, i thought, following a train of reflection, is like life itself, moving in its bright, familiar channel, so unaware of the broad tracts of mystery that hem it in. may there not be presences, unseen, who look down wondering--as i look to-day through my screen of leafy boughs--on the busy-peopled stream that runs so merrily between its scarped banks of clay? i know not; yet it seems as though it might be so. beneath the weir, with its fragrant, weedy scent, where the green river plunges and whitens through the sluices, lies a deep pool, haunted by generations of schoolboys, who wander, flannelled and straw-hatted, up through the warm meadows to bathe. in such sweet memories i have my part, when one went riverwards with some chosen friend, speaking with the cheerful frankness of boyhood of all our small concerns, and all we meant to do; and then the cool grass under the naked feet, the delicious recoil of the fresh, tingling stream, and the quiet stroll back into the ordered life so full of simple happiness. "ah! happy fields, ah! pleasing shade, ah! fields beloved in vain!" sang the sad poet of eton--but not in vain, i think, for these old beautiful memories are not sad; the good days are over and gone, and they cannot be renewed; but they are like a sweet spring of youth, whose waters fail not, in which a tired soul may bathe and be clean again. they may bring back "the times when i remember to have been joyful, and free from blame." to be pensive, not sentimental, is the joy of later life. the thought of the sweet things that have had an end, of life lived out and irrevocable, is not a despairing thought, unless it is indulged with an unavailing regret. it is rather to me a sign that, whatever we may be or become, we are surrounded with the same quiet beauty and peace, if we will but stretch out our hands and open our hearts to it. to grow old patiently and bravely, even joyfully--that is the secret; and it is as idle to repine for the lost joys as it would have been in the former days to repine because we were not bigger and stronger and more ambitious. life, if it does not become sweeter, becomes more interesting; fresh ties are formed, fresh paths open out; and there should come, too, a simple serenity of living, a certainty that, whatever befall, we are in wise and tender hands. so i reasoned with myself beside the little holy church, not far from the moving stream. but the time warned me to be going. the thunder had drawn off to the west; a faint breeze stirred and whispered in the elms. the day declined. but i had had my moment, and my heart was full; for it is such moments as these that are the pure gold of life, when the scene and the mood move together to some sweet goal in perfect unison. sometimes the scene is there without the mood, or the mood comes and finds no fitting pasturage; but to-day, both were mine; and the thought, echoing like a strain of rich sad music, passed beyond the elms, beyond the blue hills, back to its mysterious home. . . . there, that is the end of my sketch; a little worked up, but substantially true. tell me if you like the kind of thing; if you do, it is rather a pleasure to write thus occasionally. but it may seem to you to be affected, and, in that case, i won't send you any more of such reveries. you seem very happy and prosperous; but then you like heat, and enjoy it like a lizard. my love to all of you.--ever yours, t. b. upton, july 1, 1904. dear herbert,--what you say about forming habits is very interesting. it is quite true that one gets very little done without a certain method; and it is equally true that, if one does manage to arrive at a certain definite programme for one's life and work, it is very easy to get a big task done. just reflect on this fact; it would not be difficult, in any life, to so arrange things that one could write a short passage every day, say enough to fill a page of an ordinary octavo. well, if one stuck to it, that would mean that in the course of a year one would have a volume finished. sometimes my colleagues express surprise that i can find time for so much literary work; and on the other hand if i tell them how much time i am able to devote to it they are equally surprised that i can get anything done, because it seems so little. this is the fact; i can get an hour--possibly two--on tuesday, two hours on thursday, one on friday, two on saturday, and one or two on sunday--nine hours a week under favourable circumstances, and never a moment more. but writing being to me the purest pleasure and refreshment, i never lose a minute in getting to work, and i use every moment of the time. that does not include reading; but by dint of having books about, and by working carefully, so that i do not need to go over the same ground twice, i get through a good deal in the week. i have trained myself, too, to be able to write at full speed when i am at work, and i can count on writing three octavo pages in an hour, or even four. the result is, as you will see, that in a term of twelve weeks, i can turn out between three and four hundred pages. the curious thing is that i do better original work in the term-time than in the holidays. i think the pressure of a good deal of mechanical work, not of an exhausting kind, clears the brain and makes it vigorous. of course it is rather scrappy work; but i lay my plans in the holidays, make my skeleton, and work up my authorities; and so i can go ahead at full steam. but i have strayed away from the subject of habits; and the moral of the above is only that habits are easy enough if you like the task enough. if i did not care for writing, i should find abundance of excellent reasons why i should not do it. pater says somewhere that forming habits is failure in life; by which i suppose he means that if one gets tied down to a petty routine of one's own, it generally ends in one's becoming petty too--narrow-minded and conventional. i don't suppose he referred to method, because he was one of the most methodical of men. he wrote down sentences that came into his mind, scattered ideas, on small cards; when he had a sufficient store of these, he sorted them and built up his essay out of them. but i am equally aware that habit is apt to become very tyrannical indeed, if it is acquired. in my own case i have got into the habit of writing only between tea and dinner, owing to its being the only time at my disposal, so that i can hardly write at any other time; and that is inconvenient in the holidays. moreover, i like writing so much, enjoy the shaping of sentences so intensely, that i tend to arrange my day in the holidays entirely with a view to having these particular hours free for writing; and thus for a great part of the year i lose the best and most enjoyable part of the day, the sweet summer evenings, when the tired world grows fragrant and cool. one ought to have a routine for home life certainly; but it is not wholesome when one begins to grudge the slightest variation from the programme. i speak philosophically, because i am in the grip of the evil myself. the reason why i care so little for staying anywhere, and even for travelling, is because it disarranges my plan of the day, and i don't feel certain of being able to secure the time for writing which i love. but this is wrong; it is vivendi perdere causas, and i think we ought resolutely to court a difference of life at intervals, and to learn to bear with equanimity the suspension of one's daily habits. you are certainly wise, if you find it suits you, to secure the morning for writing. personally my mind is not at its best then; it is dulled and weakened by sleep, and it requires the tonic of routine work and bodily exercise before it expands and flourishes. another grievous tendency which grows on me is an incapacity for idleness. that will amuse you, when you remember the long evenings at eton which we used to spend in vacant talk. i remember so well your saying after tea one evening, in that poky room of yours with the barred windows at the end of the upper passage, "how delightful to think that there are four hours with nothing whatever to do!" do you remember, too, that night when we sate at tea, blissfully, wholesomely tired after a college match? john and ellen, those strange, gruff beings, came in to wash up, carrying that horrible, steaming can of tea-dregs in which our cups were plunged: they cleared the table as we sate; it was over before six, and it was not till the prayer-bell rang at 9.30 that we became aware we had sate the whole evening with the table between us. what did we talk about? i wish to heaven i could sit and talk like that now! that is another thing which grows upon me, my dislike of mere chatting: it is not priggish to say it, because i regret and abominate my stupidity in that respect. but there is nothing now which induces more rapid and more desperate physical fatigue than to sit still and know i have to pump up talk for an hour. the moral of all this is that you must take good care to form habits, and _i_ must take care to unform them. you must resist the temptation to read the papers, to stroll, to talk to your children; and _i_ must try to cultivate leisurely propensities. i think that, as a schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker. i have a big garden here--to think that you have never seen it!--with a great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks. i never enter it, i am afraid. but if in the pleasant summer i could learn the art of sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the boys some pleasant memories. i don't think there is anything gives me a pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times i spent as a boy in old hayward's garden. he told me and francis howard that we might go and sit there if we liked. you were not invited, and i never dared to ask him. it was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees, and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it--now built over. howard and i used at one time to go there a good deal, to read and talk. i remember him reading shakespeare's sonnets aloud, though i had not an idea what they were all about--but his rich, resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a ms. book of his own poems. ye gods, how great i thought them! i copied many of them out and have them still. hayward used to come strolling about; i can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was. "don't get up, boys," he used to say. once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about some book we were reading. he never took any trouble to entertain us, but i used to feel that we were welcome, and that it really pleased him that we cared to come. now he lives in a suburb, on a pension: why do i never go to see him? "la, perry, how yer do run on!" as the homely warden's wife said to the voluble chaplain. i never meant to write you such a letter; but i am glad indeed to find you really settling down. we must cultivate our garden, as voltaire said; and i only wish that the garden of my own spirit were more full of "shelter and fountains," and less stocked with long rows of humble vegetables; but there are a few flowers here and there.--ever yours, t. b. monk's orchard, upton, july 11, 1904. my dear herbert,--i am going to pour out a pent-up woe. i have just escaped from a very fatiguing experience. i said good-bye this morning, with real cordiality, to a thoroughly uncongenial and disagreeable visitor. you will probably be surprised when i tell you his name, because he is a popular, successful, and, many people hold, a very agreeable man. it is that ornament of the bar, mr. william welbore, k.c. his boy is in my house; and mr. welbore (who is a widower) invited himself to stay a sunday with me in the tone of one who, if anything, confers a favour. i had no real reason for refusing, and, to speak truth, any evasion on my part would have been checked by the boy. it is a fearful bore here to have any one staying in the house at all, unless he is so familiar an old friend that you can dispense with all ceremony. i have no guest-rooms to speak of; and a guest is always in my study when i want to be there, talking when i want to work, or wanting to smoke at inconvenient times. one's study is also one's office; boys keep dropping in, and, when i have an unperceptive guest, i have to hold interviews with boys wherever i can--in passages and behind doors. what made it worse was that it was a wet sunday, so that my visitor sate with me all day, and i have no doubt thought he was enlivening a dull professional man with some full-flavoured conversation. then one has to arrange for separate meals; when i am alone i never, as you know, have dinner, but go in to the boys' supper and have a slice of cold meat. but on this occasion i had to have a dinner-party on saturday and another on sunday; and the breakfast hour, when i expect to read letters and the paper, was taken up with general conversation. i am ashamed to think how much discomposed i was; but a schoolmaster is practically always on duty. i wonder how mr. welbore would have enjoyed the task of entertaining me for a day or two in his chambers! but one ought not, i confess, to be so wedded to one's own habits; and i feel, when i complain, rather like the rich gentleman who said to john wesley, when his fire smoked, "these are some of the crosses, mr. wesley, that i have to bear." i could have stood it with more equanimity if only mr. welbore had been a congenial guest. but even in the brief time at my disposal i grew to dislike him with an intensity of which i am ashamed. i hated his clothes, his boots, his eye-glass, the way he cleared his throat, the way he laughed. he is a successful, downright, blunt, worldly man, and is generally called a good fellow by his friends. he arrived in time for tea on saturday; he talked about his boy a little; the man is in this case, unlike wordsworth's hero, the father of the child; and the boy will grow up exactly like him. young welbore does his work punctually and without interest; he plays games respectably; he likes to know the right boys; he is not exactly disagreeable, but he derides all boys who are in the least degree shy, stupid, or unconventional. he is quite a little man of the world, in fact. well, i don't like that type of creature, and i tried to indicate to the father that i thought the boy was rather on the wrong lines. he heard me with impatience, as though i was bothering him about matters which belonged to my province; and he ended by laughing, not very agreeably, and saying: "well, you don't seem to have much of a case against charlie; he appears to be fairly popular. i confess that i don't much go in for sentiment in education; if a boy does his work, and plays his games, and doesn't get into trouble, i think he is on the right lines." and then he paid me an offensive compliment: "i hear you make the boys very comfortable, and i am sure i am obliged to you for taking so much interest in him." he then went off for a little to see the boy. he appeared at dinner, and i had invited two or three of the most intelligent of my colleagues. mr. welbore simply showed off. he told stories; he made mirthless legal jokes. one of my colleagues, patrick, a man of some originality, ventured to dispute an opinion of mr. welbore's, and mr. welbore turned him inside out, by a series of questions, as if he was examining a witness, in a good-natured, insolent way, and ended by saying: "well, mr. patrick, that sort of thing wouldn't do in a law-court, you know; you would have to know your subject better than that." i was not surprised, after dinner, at the alacrity with which my colleagues quitted the scene, on all sorts of professional excuses. then mr. welbore sate up till midnight, smoking strong cigars, and giving me his ideas on the subject of education. that was a bitter pill, for he worsted me in every argument i undertook. sunday was a nightmare day; every spare moment was given up to mr. welbore. i breakfasted with him, took him to chapel, took him to the boys' luncheon, walked with him, sate with him, talked with him. the strain was awful. the man sees everything from a different point of view to my own. one ought to be able to put up with that, of course, and i don't at all pretend that i consider my point of view better than his; but i had to endure the consciousness that he thought his own point of view in all respects superior to mine. he thought me a slow-coach, an old maid, a sentimentalist; and i had, too, the galling feeling that on the whole he approved of a drudge like myself taking a rather priggish point of view, and that he did not expect a schoolmaster to be a man of the world, any more than he would have expected a curate or a gardener to be. i felt that the man was in his way a worse prig even than i was, and even more of a pharisee, because he judged everything by a certain conventional standard. his idea of life was a place where you found out what was the right thing to do; and that if you did that, money and consideration, the only two things worth having, followed as a matter of course. "of course he's not my sort," was the way in which he dismissed almost the only person we discussed whom i thoroughly admired. so we went on; and i can only say that the relief i felt when i saw him drive away on monday morning was so great as almost to make it worth while having endured his visit. i think he rather enjoyed himself--at least he threatened to pay me another visit; and i am sure he had the benevolent consciousness of having brought a breath of the big world into a paltry life. the big world! what a terrible place it would be if it was peopled by welbores! my only consolation is that men of his type don't achieve the great successes. they are very successful up to a certain point; they get what they want. welbore will be a judge before long, and he has already made a large fortune. but there is a demand for more wisdom and generosity in the great places--at least i hope so. welbore's idea of the world is a pleasant place where such men as he can make money and have a good time. he thinks art, religion, beauty, poetry, music, all stuff. i would not mind that if only he did not know it was stuff. god forbid that we should pretend to enjoy such things if we do not--and, after all, the man is not a hypocrite. but his view is that any one who is cut in a different mould is necessarily inferior; and what put the crowning touch to my disgust was that on sunday afternoon we met a cabinet minister, who is a great student of literature. he talked about books to mr. welbore, and mr. welbore heard him with respect, because the minister was in the swim. he said afterwards to me that people's foibles were very odd; but he so far respected the minister's success as to think that he had a right to a foible. he would have crushed one of my colleagues who had battled in the same way, with a laugh and a few ugly words. well, let me dismiss mr. welbore from my mind. the worst of it is that, though i don't agree with him, he has cast a sort of blight on my mind. it is as though i had seen him spit on the face of a statue that i loved. i don't like vice in any shape; but i equally dislike a person who has a preference for manly vices over sentimental ones; and the root of mr. welbore's dislike of vice is simply that it tends to interfere with the hard sort of training which is necessary for success. mr. welbore, as a matter of fact, seems to me really to augur worse for the introduction of the kingdom of heaven upon earth than any number of drunkards and publicans. one feels that the world is so terribly strong, stronger even than sin; and what is worse, there seems to be so little in the scheme of things that could ever give mr. welbore the lie.--ever yours, t. b upton, july 16, 1904. dear herbert,--i declare that the greatest sin there is in the world is stupidity. the character that does more harm in the world than any other is the character in which stupidity and virtue are combined. i grow every day more despondent about the education we give at our so-called classical schools. here, you know, we are severely classical; and to have to administer such a system is often more than i can bear with dignity or philosophy. one sees arrive here every year a lot of brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelligence, and quite disposed to work; and at the other end one sees depart a corresponding set of young gentlemen who know nothing, and can do nothing, and are profoundly cynical about all intellectual things. and this is the result of the meal of chaff we serve out to them week after week; we collect it, we chop it up, we tie it up in packets; we spend hours administering it in teaspoons, and this is the end. i am myself the victim of this kind of education; i began latin at seven and greek at nine, and, when i left cambridge, i did not know either of them well. i could not sit in an arm-chair and read either a greek or a latin book, and i had no desire to do it. i knew a very little french, a very little mathematics, a very little science; i knew no history, no german, no italian. i knew nothing of art or music; my ideas of geography were childish. and yet i am decidedly literary in my tastes, and had read a lot of english for myself. it is nothing short of infamous that any one should, after an elaborate education, have been so grossly uneducated. my only accomplishment was the writing of rather pretty latin verse. and yet this preposterous system continues year after year. i had an animated argument with some of the best of my colleagues the other day about it. i cannot tell you how profoundly irritating these wiseacres were. they said all the stock things--that one must lay a foundation, and that it could only be laid by using the best literatures; that latin was essential because it lay at the root of so many other languages; and greek, because there the human intellect had reached its high-water mark,--"and it has such a noble grammar," one enthusiastic grecian said; that an active-minded person could do all the rest for himself. it was in vain to urge that in many cases the whole foundation was insecure; and that all desire to raise a superstructure was eliminated. my own belief is that greek and latin are things to be led up to, not begun with; that they are hard, high literatures, which require an initiation to comprehend; and that one ought to go backwards in education, beginning with what one knows. it seems to me, to use a similitude, that the case is thus. if one lives in a plain and wishes to reach a point upon a hill, one must make a road from the plain upwards. it will be a road at the base, it will be a track higher up, and a path at last, used only by those who have business there. but the classical theorists seem to me to make an elaborate section of macadamised road high in the hills, and, having made it, to say that the people who like can make their own road in between. how would i mend all this? well, i would change methods in the first place. if one wanted to teach a boy french or german effectively, so that he would read and appreciate, one would dispense with much of the grammar, except what was absolutely necessary. in the case of classics it is all done the other way; grammar is a subject in itself; boys have to commit to memory long lists of words and forms which they never encounter; they have to acquire elaborate analyses of different kinds of usages, which are of no assistance in dealing with the language itself. it is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. grammar is the scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an interesting and valuable study for a mind of strong calibre, but it does not help one to understand an author or to appreciate a style. then, too, i would sweep away for all but boys of special classical ability most kinds of composition. fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of german or french to compose german and french verse, heroic, alexandrine, or lyrical! the idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. i would teach boys to write latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the english copy. but i would abolish all latin verse composition, and all greek composition of every kind for mediocre boys. not only would they learn the languages much faster, but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. then i would abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and i would at all hazards push on till they could read fluently. of course the above improvement of methods is sketched on the hypothesis that both greek and latin are retained. personally i would retain latin for most, but give up greek altogether in the majority of cases. i would teach all boys french thoroughly. i would try to make them read and write it easily, and that should be the linguistic staple of their education. then i would teach them history, mainly modern english history, and modern geography; a very little mathematics and elementary science. such boys would be, in my belief, well-educated; and they would never be tempted to disbelieve in the usefulness of their education. when i propound these ideas, my colleagues talk of soft options, and of education without muscle or nerve. my retort is that the majority of boys educated on classical lines are models of intellectual debility as it is. they are uninterested, cynical, and they cannot even read or write the languages which they have been so carefully taught. what i want is experiment of every kind; but my cautious friends say that one would only get something a great deal worse. that i deny. i maintain that it is impossible to have anything worse, and that the majority of the boys we turn out are intellectually in so negative a condition that any change would be an improvement. but i effect nothing; nothing is attempted, nothing done. i do my best--fortunately our system admits of that--to teach my private pupils a little history, and i make them write essays. the results are decidedly encouraging; but meanwhile my colleagues go on in the old ways, quite contented, pathetically conscientious, laboriously slaving away, and apparently not disquieted by results. i am very near the end of my tether--one cannot go on for ever administering a system in which one has lost all faith. if there were signs of improvement i should be content. if our headmaster would even insist upon the young men whom he appoints obtaining a competent knowledge of french and german before they come here it would be something, because then, when the change is made, there would be less friction. but even a new headmaster with liberal ideas would now be hopelessly hampered by the fact that he would have a staff who could not teach modern subjects at all, who knew nothing but classics, and classics only for teaching purposes. it does me good to pour out my woes to you; i feel my position most acutely at this time of year, when the serious business of the place is cricket. in cricket the boys are desperately and profoundly interested, not so much in the game, as in the social rewards of playing it well. and my worthy colleagues give themselves to athletics with an earnestness which depresses me into real dejection. one meets a few of these beloved men at dinner; a few half-hearted remarks are made about politics and books; a good deal of vigorous gossip is talked; but if a question as to the best time for net-practice, or the erection of a board for the purpose of teaching slip-catches is mentioned, a profound seriousness falls on the group. a man sits up in his chair and speaks with real conviction and heat, with grave gestures. "the afternoon," he says, "is not a good time for nets; the boys are not at their best, and the pros. are less vigorous after their dinner. whatever arrangements are made as to the times for school, the evening must be given up to nets." the result is a pedantry, a priggishness, a solemnity about games which is simply deplorable. the whole thing seems to me to be distorted and out of proportion. i am one of those feeble people to whom exercise is only a pleasure and a recreation. if i don't like a game i don't play it. i do not see why i should be bored by my recreations. an immense number of boys are bored by their games, but they dare not say so because public opinion is so strong. as the summer goes on they avail themselves of every excuse to give up the regular games; and almost the only boys who persevere are boys who are within reach of some coveted "colour," which gives them social importance. what i desire is that boys should be serious about their work in a practical, business-like way, and amused by their games. as a matter of fact they are serious about games and profoundly bored by their work. the work is a relief from the tension of games, and if it were wholly given up, and games were played from morning to night, many boys would break down under the strain. i don't expect all the boys to be enthusiastic about their work; all healthily constituted people prefer play to work, i myself not least. but i want them to believe in it and to be interested in it, in the way that a sensible professional man is interested in his work. what produces the cynicism about work so common in classical schools is that the work is of a kind which does not seem to lead anywhere, and classics are a painful necessity which the boys intend to banish from their mind as soon as they possibly can. this is a melancholy jeremiad, i am well aware; but it is also a frame of mind which grows upon me; and, to come back to my original proposition, it is the stupidity of virtuous men which is responsible for the continuance of this arid, out-of-joint system.--ever yours, t. b. upton, july 22, 1904. my dear herbert,--. . . i took a lonely walk to-day, and returned through a new quarter of the town. when i first knew it, thirty years ago, there was a single house here--an old farm, with a pair of pretty gables of mellow brick, and a weathered, solid, brick garden-wall that ran along the road; an orchard below; all round were quiet fields; a fine row of elms stood at the end of the wall. it was a place of no great architectural merit, but it had grown old there, having been built with solidity and dignity, and having won a simple grace from the quiet influences of rain and wind and sun. very gradually it became engulphed. first a row of villas came down to the farm, badly planned and coarsely coloured; then a long row of yellow-brick houses appeared on the other side, and the house began to wear a shy, regretful air, like a respectable and simple person who has fallen into vulgar company. to-day i find that the elms have been felled; the old wall, so strongly and firmly built, is half down; the little garden within is full of planks and heaps of brick, the box hedges trodden down, the flowers trampled underfoot; the house itself is marked for destruction. it made me perhaps unreasonably sad. i know that population must increase, and that people had better live in convenient houses near their work. the town is prosperous enough; there is work in plenty and good wages. there is nothing over which a philanthropist and a social reformer ought not to rejoice. but i cannot help feeling the loss of a simple and beautiful thing, though i know it appealed to few people, and though the house was held to be inconvenient and out of date. i feel as if the old place must have acquired some sort of personality, and must be suffering the innocent pangs of disembodiment. i know that there is abundance of the same kind of simple beauty everywhere; and yet i feel that a thing which has taken so long to mature, and which has drunk in and appropriated so much sweetness from the gentle hands of nature, ought not so ruthlessly and yet so inevitably to suffer destruction. but it brought home to me a deeper and a darker thing still--the sad change and vicissitude of things, the absence of any permanence in this life of ours. we enter it so gaily, and, as a child, one feels that it is eternal. that is in itself so strange--that the child himself, who is so late an inmate of the family home, so new a care to his parents, should feel that his place in the world is so unquestioned, and that the people and things that surround him are all part of the settled order of life. it was, indeed, to me as a child a strange shock to discover, as i did from old schoolroom books, that my mother herself had been a child so short a time before my own birth. then life begins to move on, and we become gradually, very gradually, conscious of the swift rush of things. people round us begin to die, and drop out of their places. we leave old homes that we have loved. we hurry on ourselves from school to college; we enter the world. then, in such a life as my own has been, the lesson comes insistently near. boys come under our care, little tender creatures; a few days seem to pass and they are young and dignified men; a few years later they return as parents, to see about placing boys of their own; and one can hardly trace the boyish lineaments in the firm-set, bearded faces of manhood. then our own friends begin to be called away; faster and faster runs the stream; anniversaries return with horrible celerity; and soon we know that we must die. what is one to hold on to in such a swift flux of things? the pleasures we enjoy at first fade; we settle down by comfortable firesides; we pile the tables with beloved books; friends go and come; we acquire habits; we find out our real tastes. we learn the measure of our powers. and yet, however simple and clear our routine becomes, we are warned every now and then by sharp lessons that it is all on sufferance, that we have no continuing city; and we begin to see, some later, some earlier, that we must find something to hold on to, something eternal and everlasting in which we can rest. there must be some anchor of the soul. and then i think that many of us take refuge in a mere stoical patience; we drink our glass when it is filled, and if it stands empty we try not to complain. now i am turning out, so to speak, the very lining of my mind to you. the anchor cannot be a material one, for there is no security there; it cannot be purely intellectual, for that is a shifting thing too. the well of the spirit is emptied, gradually and tenderly; we must find out what the spring is that can fill it up. some would say that one's faith could supply the need, and i agree in so far as i believe that it must be a species of faith, in a life where our whole being and ending is such an impenetrable mystery. but it must be a deeper faith even than the faith of a dogmatic creed; for that is shifting, too, every day, and the simplest creed holds some admixture of human temperament and human error. to me there are but two things that seem to point to hope. the first is the strongest and deepest of human things, the power of love--not, i think, the more vehement and selfish forms of love, the desire of youth for beauty, the consuming love of the mother for the infant--for these have some physical admixture in them. but the tranquil and purer manifestations of the spirit, the love of a father for a son, of a friend for a friend; that love which can light up a face upon the edge of the dark river, and can smile in the very throes of pain. that seems to me the only thing which holds out a tender defiance against change and suffering and death. and then there is the faith in the vast creative mind that bade us be; mysterious and strange as are its manifestations, harsh and indifferent as they sometimes seem, yet at worst they seem to betoken a loving purpose thwarted by some swift cross-current, like a mighty river contending with little obstacles. why the obstacles should be there, and how they came into being, is dark indeed. but there is enough to make us believe in a will that does its utmost, and that is assured of some bright and far-off victory. a faith in god and a faith in love; and here seems to me to lie the strength and power of the christian revelation. it is to these two things that christ pointed men. though overlaid with definition, with false motive, with sophistry, with pedantry, this is the deep secret of the christian creed; and if we dare to link our will with the will of god, however feebly, however complainingly, if we desire and endeavour not to sin against love, not to nourish hate or strife, to hold out the hand again and again to any message of sympathy or trust, not to struggle for our own profit, not to reject tenderness, to believe in the good faith and the good-will of men, we are then in the way. we may make mistakes, we may fail a thousand times, but the key of heaven is in our hands. . . .--ever yours, t. b. upton, july 29, 1904. dear herbert,--you must forgive me if this is a very sentimental letter, but this is the day that, of all days in the year, is to me most full of pathos--the last day of the summer half. my heart is like a full sponge and must weep a little. the last few days have been full to the brim of work and bustle--reports to be written, papers to be looked over. yesterday was a day of sad partings. half-a-dozen boys are leaving; and i have tried my best to tell them the truth about themselves; to say something that would linger in their minds, and yet to do it in a tender and affectionate way. and some of these boys' hearts are full to bursting too. i remember as if it were yesterday the last meeting at eton of a debating society of which i was a member. we were electing new members and passing votes of thanks. scott, who was then president and, as you remember, captain of the eleven, sate in his high chair above the table; opposite him, with his minute-book, was riddell, then secretary--that huge fellow in the eight, you recollect. the vote of thanks to the president was carried; he said a few words in a broken voice, and sate down; the secretary's vote of thanks was proposed, and he, too, rose to make acknowledgment. in the middle of his speech we were attracted by a movement of the president. he put his head in his hands and sobbed aloud. riddell stopped, faltered, looked round, and leaving his sentence unfinished, sate down, put his face on the book and cried like a child. i don't think there was a dry eye in the room. and these boys were not sentimental, but straightforward young men of the world, honest, and, if anything, rather contemptuous, i had thought, of anything emotional. i have never forgotten that scene, and have interpreted many things in the light of it. well, this morning i woke early and heard all the bustle of departure. depression fell on me; soon i got up, with a blessed sense of leisure, breakfasted at my ease, saw one or two boys, special friends, who came to me very grave and wistful. then i wrote letters and did business; and this afternoon--it is fearfully hot--i have been for a stroll through the deserted fields and street. so another of these beautiful things which we call the summer half is over, never to be renewed. there has been some evil, of course. i wish i could think otherwise. but the tone is good, and there have been none of those revelations of darkness that poison the mind. there has been idleness (i don't much regret that), and of course the usual worries. but the fact remains that a great number of happy, sensible boys have been living perhaps the best hours of their life, with equal, pleasant friendships, plenty of games, some wholesome work and discipline to keep all sweet, with this exquisite background of old towers and high-branching elms, casting their shade over rich meadow-grass; the scene will come back to these boys in weary hours, perhaps in sun-baked foreign lands, perhaps in smoky offices--nay, even on aching deathbeds, parched with fever. the whole place has an incredibly wistful air, as though it missed the young life that circulated all about it; as though it spread its beauties out to be used and enjoyed, and wondered why none came to claim them. as a counterpoise to this i like to think of all the happiness flowing into hundreds of homes; the father and mother waiting for the sound of the wheels that bring the boy back; the children who have gone down to the lodge to welcome the big brothers with shouts and kisses; and the boy himself, with all the dear familiar scene and home faces opening out before him. we ought not to grudge the loneliness here before the thought of all those old and blessed joys of life that are being renewed elsewhere. but i am here, a lonely man, wondering and doubting and desiring i hardly know what. some nearness of life, some children of my own. you are apt to think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet, after all, you have the real thing--wife, children, and home. but, in my case, these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me already. disguise it as i will, i am part of the sordid furniture of life that they have so gladly left behind, the crowded corridor, the bare-walled schoolroom, the ink-stained desk. they are glad to think that they have not to assemble to-morrow to listen to my prosing, to bear the blows of the uncle's tongue, as horace says. they like me well enough--for a schoolmaster; i know some of them would even welcome me, with a timorous joy, to their own homes. i have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately in a special way. there is a boy in my house that i have tried hard to make friends with. he is a big, overgrown creature, with a perfectly simple manner. he has innumerable acquaintances in the school, but only a very few friends. he is amiable with every one, but guards his heart. he is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of books, and, being brought up in a cultivated home, he can talk more unaffectedly and with a more genuine interest about books than any boy i have ever met. well, i have done my best, as i say, to make friends with him. i have lent him books; i have tried to make him come and see me; i have talked my best with him, and he has received it all with polite indifference; i can't win his confidence, somehow. i feel that if i were only not in the tutorial relation, it would be easy work. but perhaps i frightened him as a little boy, perhaps i bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which i cannot break. sometimes i have thought it is simply a case of "crabbed age and youth," and that i can't put myself sufficiently in line with him. i missed seeing him last night--he was out at some school festivity, and this morning he has gone without a word or a sign. i have made friends a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and i suppose it is just because i find this child so difficult to approach that i fret myself over the failure; and all the more because i know in my heart that he is a really congenial nature, and that we do think the same about many things. of course, most sensible people would not care a brass farthing about such an episode, and would succeed where i have failed, because i think it is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young person resents. i must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very thing which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed. well, i must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates about my tired brain. but books and art and the beauties of nature, i begin to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy consolations for the truer stuff of life--for friendships and loves and dearer things. i sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent. the evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather heavy on my heart--the wonder what it all means, why we should have these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short days that god gives us. "what a world it is for sorrow," wrote a wise and tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; "and how dull it would be if there were no sorrow." i suppose that this is true; but to be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire and not to attain, and to go down to darkness in the end, like the shadow of a dream--what can heal and sustain one in the grip of such a mood?--ever yours, t. b. upton, aug. 4, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have just been over to woodcote; i have had a few days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and lazy this morning that i put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off on a bicycle for the day. it is only fifteen miles from here, so that i had two or three hours to spend there. you know i was born at woodcote and lived there till i was ten years old. i don't know the present owner of the lodge, where we lived; but if i had written and asked to go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all my sense of freedom would have gone. it is thirty years since we left, and i have not been there, near as it is, for twenty years. i did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for the old days--i can't describe it or analyse it. it seemed somehow as if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if i could only find it; as if i could have peeped over the palings and seen myself going gravely about some childish business in the shrubberies. i find that my memory is curiously accurate in some respects, and curiously at fault in others. the scale is all wrong. what appears to me in memory to be an immense distance, from woodcote to dewhurst, for instance, is now reduced to almost nothing; and places which i can see quite accurately in my mind's eye are now so different that i can hardly believe that they were ever like what i recollect of them. of course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have become woods, and woods have disappeared. i spent my time in wandering about, retracing the childish walks we used to take, looking at the church, the old houses, the village green, and the mill-pool. one thing came home to me very much. when i was born my father had only been settled at woodcote for two years; but, as i grew up, it seemed to me we must have lived there for all eternity; now i see that he was only one in a long procession of human visitants who have inhabited and loved the place. another thing that has gone is the mystery of it all. then, every road was a little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the unknown; all the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths were wonderful secret places, not to be visited. i find i had no idea of the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, i don't seem ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place now abounds. i suppose that when one is a small creature, palings and hedges are lofty obstacles; and i suppose also that the little busy eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to find, and do not concern themselves with what is far. the sight of the lodge itself, with its long white front among the shrubberies and across the pastures was almost too much for me; the years seemed all obliterated in a flash, and i felt as if it was all there unchanged. i suppose i had a very happy childhood; but i certainly was not in the least conscious of it at the time. i was a very quiet, busy child, with all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend to, to which lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions; but now it seems to me like a golden, unruffled time full of nothing but pleasure. curiously enough, i can't remember anything but the summer days there; i have no remembrance of rain or cold or winter or leafless trees--except days of snow when the ponds were frozen and there was the wild excitement of skating. my recollections are all of flowers, and roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden. in the very hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden, and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round; i can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the things being removed as i sank into sleep. it is a great mystery, that faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if memory remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of sordid misery and hopeless pain. then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of things. all our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our experience points to swift and ceaseless change. i cannot fathom it. as i wandered about woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and the lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken up to meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are silent--all these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad bewilderment. one feels so independent, so much the master of one's fate; and yet when one returns to an old home one begins to wonder whether one has any power of choice at all. there is this strange fence of self and identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all that is outside of it has no existence for me apart from consciousness. these are fruitless thoughts, but one cannot always resist them; and why one is here, what these vivid feelings mean, what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world and for beloved people means--all this is dark and secret; and the strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbour of childhood into unknown seas. dear woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of the past, old trees and fields! i cannot tell what you mean and what you are; but i can hardly believe that, if i have a life beyond, it will not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my own for ever; you are myself, whatever that self may be.--ever yours, t. b. p.s.--by the way, i want you to do something for me; i want a map of your house and of the sitting-rooms. i want to see where you usually sit, to read or write. and more than that, i want a map of the roads and paths round about, with your ordinary walks and strolls marked in red. i don't feel i quite realise the details enough. sennicotts, honey hill, east grinstead, aug. 9, 1904. dear herbert,--i am making holiday, with the voice of praise and thanksgiving, like the people in the psalm, and working, oh! how gratefully, at one of my eternal books. depend upon it, for simple pleasure, there is nothing like writing. i am staying with bradby, who has taken a cottage in sussex. he has had his holiday, so that he goes up to town every day; it does not sound very friendly to say that this arrangement exactly suits me, but so it is. i work and write in the morning, walk or bicycle in the afternoon, and then we dine together, and spend peaceful evenings, reading or talking. but this is not the point. i came in yesterday to tea, saw an unfamiliar hat in the hall, and found to my surprise james cooper, whom you remember at eton as a boy. i knew him a little there, and saw a good deal of him at cambridge; and we have kept up a very fitful correspondence at long intervals ever since. i am ashamed to confess that i was bored, though i trust to heaven i did not show it; i had come back from my ride brimming over with ideas, and was in the condition of a person who is holding his breath, dying to blow it all out. cooper said that he had heard that i was in the neighbourhood, and he had accordingly come over, a considerable distance, to see me. he is in business, and appears to be prospering. we had tea, and there was a good deal to talk about; but cooper showed no signs of moving, and said at last that he thought he would stay and see bradby--perhaps dine with us. so we walked about the garden, and i gradually became aware, with regret and misery, that i was in the presence of a bore. yes, james cooper is a bore! he had a great deal to say, mostly on subjects with which i was not acquainted. he has become a botanist, and seemed full to the brim of uninteresting information. he stayed till bradby came, he dined, he talked. at last he decided he must go; but he talked in the hall, he talked in the porch. he pressed us to come over and see him, and it was evidently a great pleasure to him to meet us again. since his visit i have been pondering deeply. what is one's duty in these matters? how far ought loyalty to old friends to go? i confess that i am somewhat vexed and dissatisfied with myself for not being more simply pleased to see an old comrade--actae non alio rege puertiae, and all that. but what if the old comrade is a bore? what are the claims of friendship on busy men? i have a good many old friends in all parts of england--ought i to use my holidays in touring about to see them? i am inclined to think that i am not bound to do so. but suppose that cooper goes away, and says to another friend that i am a man who forgets old ties; that he took some trouble to see me, and found me absorbed, and not particularly glad to see him? i hope, indeed, that this was not his impression; but boredom is a subtle thing, and it is difficult to keep it out of one's manner, however religiously one tries to be cheerful. well, if he does feel thus, is he right and am i wrong? his whole life lies on different lines to my own, and though we had much in common in the old pleasant days, we have not much in common now. it is quite possible that he thinks i am a bore; and it is even possible that he is right there too. but, que faire? que penser? i can honestly say that if cooper wanted my help, my advice, my sympathy, i would give it him without grudging. but is it a part of loyalty that i must desire to see him, and even to be bored by him? i am inclined to think that if i had a simpler, more affectionate nature, i should probably not be bored, but that in my gladness at the sight of an old friend and the reviving of old memories, the idea of criticism would die a natural death. what i have suffered from all my life is making friends too easily. it is so painful to me being with a person who seems to be dull, that i have always instinctively tried to be interested in, and to interest my companion. the result has been--i am making a very barefaced confession--that i have been often supposed to be more friendly than i really am, and to allow a certain claim of loyalty to be established which i could not sincerely sustain.--ever yours, t. b. knapstead vicarage, baldock, aug. 14, 1904. my dear herbert,--a curious little incident occurred to me yesterday--so curious, so inexplicable, that i cannot refrain from telling it to you, though it has no solution and no moral so far as i can see. i am staying with an old family friend, duncan by name--you don't know him--who is a parson near hitchin. we were to have gone for a bicycle ride together, but he was called away on sudden business, and as the only other member of the party is my friend's wife, who is much of an invalid, i went out alone. i went off through baldock and ashwell. and i must interrupt my story for a moment to tell you about the latter. above a large hamlet of irregularly built and scattered white houses, many of them thatched, most of them picturesque, rises one of the most beautiful, mouldering church towers i have ever seen. it is more like a weather-worn crag-pinnacle than a tower; it is of great height, and the dim and blurred outlines of its arched windows and buttresses communicate a singular grace of underlying form to the broken and fretted stone. i fear that it must before long be restored, if it is to hold together much longer; all i can say is that i am thankful to have seen it in its hour of decay. it is infinitely patient and pathetic. its solemn, ruinous dignity, its tender grace, make it like some aged and sanctified spirit that has borne calamity and misfortune with a sweet and gentle trust. a little farther on in the village is another extraordinarily beautiful thing. the road, while still almost in the street, passes across a little embankment; and on the left hand you look down into a pit, like a quarry, full of ash-trees, and with a thick undergrowth of bushes and tall plants. from a dozen little excavations leap and bicker crystal rivulets of water, hurrying down stony channels, uniting in a pool, and then moving off, a full-fed stream, among quiet water-meadows. it is one of the sources of the cam. the water is deliciously cool and clear, running as it does straight off the chalk. no words of mine can do justice to the wonderful purity and peace of the place. i found myself murmuring over those perfect lines of marvell--you know them?- "might a soul bathe there and be clean, and slake its drought?" these two sights, the tower and the well-head, put my mind into tune; and i went on my way rejoicing, with that delicate elation of spirit that rarely visits one. everything i saw had an airy quality, a flavour, an aroma, i know not how to describe it. now i caught the sunlight on the towering greenness of an ancient elm; now a wide view over flat pastures, with a pool fringed deep in rushes, came in sight; now an old manorial farm held up its lichened chimneys above a row of pollarded elms. i came at last, by lanes and byways, to a silent village that seemed entirely deserted. the men, i suppose, were all working in the fields; the cottage doors stood open; near the little common rose an old high-shouldered church, much overgrown with ivy. the sun lay pleasantly upon its leaded roof, and among the grass-grown graves. i left my bicycle by the porch, and at first could not find an entrance; but at last i discovered that a low, priest's door that led into the chancel, was open. the church had an ancient and holy smell. it was very cool in there out of the sun. i turned into the nave, and wandered about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. i read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then i went back to the altar. on a broad slab of slate, immediately below the altar steps, lay something dark; i bent down to look at it, and then realised, with a curious sense of horror, that it was a little pool of blood; beside it lay two large jagged stones, also stained with blood, which had dried into a viscous paste upon them. it seemed as if the stoning of some martyr had taken place, and that, the first horrible violence done, the deed had been transferred to the open air. what made it still stranger to me was that in the east window was a rude representation of the stoning of stephen; and i have since discovered that the church is dedicated to him. i cannot give you the smallest hint of explanation. indeed, pondering over it, i cannot conceive of any circumstances which can in any way account for what i saw. i wandered out into the churchyard--for the sight gave me a curious chill of horror--and i could see nothing that could further enlighten me. a few yards beyond stood the rectory, embowered in thickets. it seemed to be deserted; the windows were dark and undraped; no smoke went up from the chimneys. it suddenly appeared to me that i must be the victim of some strange hallucination, so i stepped again within the church to see if my senses had played me false. but no! there were the stones, and the blood beside them. the sun began to decline to his setting; the shadows lengthened and darkened, as i rode slowly away, with a shadow on my spirit. i felt i had somehow seen a type, a mystery. these incidents do not befall one by chance, and i was sure, in some remote way, that i had looked, as it were, for a moment into a dark avenue of the soul; that i was bidden to think, to ponder. these tokens of violence and death, the blood outpoured, in witness of pain, in the heart of the quiet sanctuary, before the very altar of the god of peace and love. what is it that we do that is like that? what is it that _i_ do? i will not tell you how the message shaped itself for me; perhaps you can guess; but it came, it formed itself out of the dark, and in that silent hour a voice called sharply in my spirit. but i must not end thus. i came home; i told my tale; i found my friend returned. he nodded gravely and wonderingly, and i think he half understood. but his wife was full of curiosity. she made me tell and retell the incident. "was there no one you could ask?" she said; "i would not have rested till i had solved it." she even bade me tell her the name of the place, but i refused. "do you mean to say you don't want to know?" she said. "no," i said; "i had rather not know." to which, rather petulantly, she said, "oh, you men!" that evening a neighbouring parson, his wife, and daughter, came to dine. i was bidden to tell my story again, and the same scene was re-enacted. "was there no one you could find to ask?" said the girl. i laughed and said, "i daresay i could have found some one, but i did not want to know. i had rather have my little mystery," i added; and then we men interchanged a nod, while the women looked sharply at each other. "is it not quite incredible?" my friend's wife said. and the daughter added, "i, for one, will not rest till i have discovered." that, i suppose, is the difference between the masculine and the feminine mind. you will understand me; but read the story to your wife and daughters, and they will say, "was there no one he could have asked?" and "i would not rest till i had discovered." meanwhile i only hope that my maiden's efforts will prove unavailing.--ever yours, t. b. greenhowe, sedbergh, aug. 21, 1904. my dear herbert,--i suppose i am very early victorian in my tastes; but i have just been reading jane eyre again with intense satisfaction. (i will tell you presently why i have been reading it.) i read it first as a boy at eton, and i must have read it twenty times since. i know that much of it is grotesque, but it seems to me that its grotesqueness is not absurd, any more than the stiff animals and trees or hills in the early italian pictures are absurd; one smiles, not contemptuously, but tenderly at it all. again, there are two ways of treating a work of art. if a portrait, for instance, is intensely realistic and true to its original, one says, "how lifelike!" if it is widely unlike the original, one can always say, "how symbolical!" of the first kind of portrait one may say that it brings the man before you; of the latter you may say that the artist has striven to paint the soul rather than the body. well, i think it is fair to call jane eyre symbolical. some of the people depicted are very true to life. the old, comfortable, good-humoured housekeeper, mrs. fairfax; bessie the nursemaid; adele, the little french girl, mr. rochester's ward; the two rivers sisters--they are admirable portraits. but mr. rochester, the haughty baroness ingram of ingram park, miss ingram, who says to the footman, "leave that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding," st. john rivers, the blue-eyed fanatic--these are caricatures or types, according as you like to view them. to me they are types: characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because charlotte bronte had never mixed with people of that species in ordinary life. but i think that one can see into the souls of these people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and behaviour which disfigure them. yet it is not primarily for the character-drawing that i value the book. what attracts me is the romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through them. the love scenes have the same strange glow that i always feel in tennyson's "come into the garden, maud," where the pulse of the lover thrills under one's hand with the love that beats from the heart of the world. and then, too, charlotte bronte seems to me to have had an incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human emotions. the frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath, when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery ice, in that hour when jane eyre first sees mr. rochester; and again the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when mr. rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the flower chalice. such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to me as scenes upon which my own eyes have rested. again, i know no writer who has caught the poetry of the hearth like charlotte bronte. the evening hours, when the fire leaps in the chimney, and the lamp is lit, and the homeless wind moans outside, and the contented mind possesses its dreams--i know nothing like that in any book. indeed, i do not know any books which give me quite the sense of genius that charlotte bronte's bring me. i find it difficult to define where the genius lies; but the love which she dares to depict seems to me to have a different quality to any other love; it is the passionate ardour of a pure soul; it embraces body, mind, and heart alike; it is a love that pierces through all disguises, and is the worship of spirit for spirit at the very root of being; such love is not lightly conceived or easily given; it is not born of chance companionship, of fleshly desire, of a craving to share the happiness of a buoyant spirit of sunshine and sweetness; it is rather nurtured in gloom and sadness, it demands a corresponding depth and intensity, it requires to discern in its lover a deep passion for the beauty of virtue. it is one of the triumphs of jane eyre that the love she feels for mr. rochester pierces through those very superficial vices which would be most abhorrent to the pure nature, if it were not for the certainty that such vice was the disguise and not the essence of the soul. and here lies, i think, the uplifting hopefulness of jane eyre, the christ-like power of recognising the ardent spirit of love behind gross faults of both the animal and the intellectual nature. i do not know if you ever came across a book--i must send it you if you have not seen it--which moves me and feeds my spirit more than almost any book i know--the letters and journals of william cory. he was a master at eton, you know, but before our time; and his life was rather a disappointed one; but he had that remarkable union of qualities which i think is very rare--hard intellectual force with passionate tenderness. i suppose that, as far as mental ability went, he was one of the very foremost men of his day. he had a faultless memory, great clearness and vigour of thought, and perfect lucidity of expression. but he valued these gifts very little in comparison with feeling, which was his real life. it always interests me deeply to find that he had the same opinion of charlotte bronte that i hold; and indeed i have always thought that, allowing for a difference of nationality, he was very much the kind of man whom she depicted in villette as paul emmanuel. personality is, after all, the ultimate foundation of art, and i think that what i value most of all in charlotte bronte's books is the revelation of herself that they afford. the shy, frail, indomitable, ardent creature, inured to poverty and hardness, without illusions, without material temptations, but all aglow with the sacred fire--such is the character that here emerges. charlotte bronte as a writer seems to me like a burning-glass which concentrates on one intense point the fiercest fire of the soul. i would humbly believe that there is much of this spirit in the world, but that it seldom co-exists with the artistic power, the intellectual force, that enables it to express itself. and now i will tell you what has made me take up jane eyre again at this time. i was bicycling a day or two ago in a secluded valley under the purple heights of ingleboro'. i passed a little village, with a big building standing by a stream below the road, called lowood. it came into my head as a pleasant thought that some place like this might have been the scene of the schooldays of jane eyre; but i thought no more of it, till a little while after i saw a tablet in the wall of a house by the wayside. i dismounted, and behold! it was the very place, the very building where charlotte bronte spent her schooldays. it was a low, humble building, now divided into cottages. but you can still see the windows of the dormitory, the little kitchen garden, the brawling stream, the path across the meadows, and, beyond all, the long line of the moor. in a house just opposite was a portrait of mr. brocklehurst himself (his real name was carus-wilson), so sternly, and i expect unjustly, gibbetted in the book. that was a very sacred hour for me. i thought of miss temple and helen burns; i thought of the cold, the privation, the rigour of that comfortless place. but i felt that it was good to be there. i drew nearer in that hour to the unquenched spirit that battled so gloriously with life and with its worst terrors and sorrows, and that wrote so firmly and truly its pure hopes and immortal dreams. . . .--ever yours, t. b. ashfield, settle, aug. 27, 1904. dear herbert,--you ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put me in a difficulty. it seems hardly worth while sending out books which will just be read once or twice in a lazy mood and then thrown aside; yet i can find no others. it seems to me that our novelists are at the present moment affected by the same wave which seems to be passing over the whole of our national life; we have in every department a large number of almost first-rate people, men of talent and ability; but very few geniuses, very few people of undisputed pre-eminence. in literature this is particularly the case; poets, historians, essayists, dramatists, novelists; there are so many that reach a high level of accomplishment, and do excellent work; but there are no giants, or they are very small ones. personally, i do not read a great many novels; and i find myself tending to revert again and again to my old favourites. of course there are some conspicuous novelists. there is george meredith, though he has now almost ceased to write; to speak candidly, though i recognise his genius, his creative power, his noble and subtle conception of character, yet i do not feel the reality of his books; or rather i feel that the reality is there, but disguised from me by a veil--a dim and rich veil, it is true--which is hung between me and the scene. the veil is george meredith's personality. i confess that it is a dignified personality enough, the spirit of a grand seigneur. but i feel in reading his books as if i were staying with a magnificent person in a stately house; but that, when i wanted to go about and look at things for myself, my host, with splendid urbanity, insisted on accompanying me, pointed out objects that interested himself, and translated the remarks of the guests and the other people who appeared upon the scene into his own peculiar diction. the characters do not talk as i think they would have talked, but as george meredith would have talked under the given circumstances. there is no repose about his books; there is a sense not only of intellectual but actually of moral effort about reading them; and further, i do not like the style; it is highly mannerised, and permeated, so to speak, with a kind of rich perfume, a perfume which stupefies rather than enlivens. even when the characters are making what are evidently to them perfectly natural and straightforward remarks, i do not feel sure what they mean; and i suffer from paroxysms of rage as i read, because i feel that i cannot get at what is there without a mental agility which seems to me unnecessarily fatiguing. a novel ought to be like a walk; george meredith makes it into an obstacle race. then, again, henry james is an indubitably great writer; though you amused me once by saying that you felt you really had not time to read his later books. well, for myself, i confess that his earlier books, such as roderick hudson and the portrait of a lady, are books that i recur to again and again. they are perfectly proportioned and admirably lucid. if they have a fault, and i do not readily admit it, it is that the characters are not quite full-blooded enough. still, there is quite enough of what is called "virility" about in literature; and it is refreshing to find oneself in the company of people who preserve at all events the conventional decencies of life. but henry james has in his later books taken a new departure; he is infinitely subtle and extraordinarily delicate; but he is obscure where he used to be lucid, and his characters now talk in so allusive and birdlike a way, hop so briskly from twig to twig, that one cannot keep the connection in one's mind. he seems to be so afraid of anything that is obvious or plain-spoken, that his art conceals not art but nature. i declare that in his conversations i have not unfrequently to reckon back to see who has got the ball; then, too, those long, closely printed pages, such as one sees in the wings of a dove, without paragraphs, without breathing places, pages of minute and refined analysis--there is a high intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as well. it is as though one wandered in tortuous passages, full of beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the house. what i want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a situation. with henry james i do not feel certain what the situation is. at the same time his books are full of fine things; he has learnt a splendid use of metaphor, when the whole page seems, as it were, stained with some poetical thought, as though one had shut a fruit into the book, and its juice had tinted the whole of a page. but that is not sufficient; and i confess i close one of his later volumes in a condition of admiring mystification. i do not know what it has all been about; the characters have appeared, have nodded and smiled inscrutably, have let fall sentences which seem like sparkling fragments of remarks; i feel that there is a great conception behind, but i am still in the dark as to what it is. there are two or three other authors whose books i read with interest. one of these is john oliver hobbes. her books do not seem to me to be exactly natural; it is all of the nature of a scenic display. but there is abundance of nobility and even of passion; and the style is original, nervous, and full of fine aphorisms. there is a feeling of high and chivalrous courage about her characters; they breathe perhaps too lofty an air, and are, if anything, too true to themselves. but it is a dignified romance, rather mediaeval than modern, and penetrated with a pungent aromatic humour which has a quality of its own. mrs. humphry ward is another writer whose books i always read. i am constantly aware of a great conscientiousness in the background. the scenery, the people, are all studied with the most sedulous and patient care; but i somehow feel, at all events in the earlier works, that the moral attitude of the writer, a kind of puritan agnosticism, interferes with the humanity of the books; they seem to me to be as saturated with principle as miss yonge's books, written from a very different standpoint, were. i feel that i am not to be allowed my own preferences, and that to enjoy the books i must be in line with the authoress. mrs. ward's novels, in fact, seem to me the high-water mark of what great talent, patient observation, and faithful work can do; but the light does not quite shine through. yet it is only just to say that every book mrs. ward writes seems an improvement on the last. there is a wider, larger, freer conception of life; more reality, more humanity, as well as more artistic handling; and they are worth careful reading; i shall certainly include one or two in my consignment. george moore seems to me to be one of the best writers on the stage. esther waters, evelyn innes, and sister theresa, are books of the highest quality. i have a sense in these books of absolute reality. i may think the words and deeds of the characters mysterious, surprising, and even sometimes disgusting; but they surprise and disgust me just as the anomalies of human beings affect me. i may not like them, but i do not question the fact that the characters spoke and behaved as they are supposed to behave. moreover, evelyn innes and sister theresa are written in a style of matchless lucidity and precision; they have passages of high poetry. old mr. innes, with his tiresome preoccupations, his pedantic taste, his mediaeval musical instruments, affects me exactly as an unrelenting idealist does in actual life. the mystical ulick has a profound charm; the sisters in the convent, all preoccupied with the same or similar ideas, have each a perfectly distinct individuality. evelyn herself, even with all her frank and unashamed sensuality, is a deeply attractive figure; and i know no books which so render the evasive charm of the cloistered life. but george moore has two grave faults; he is sometimes vulgar and he is sometimes brutal. evelyn's worldly lover is a man who makes one's flesh creep, and yet one feels he is intended to represent the fascination of the world. then it does not seem to me to be true realism to depict scenes of frank animalism. such things may occur; but the actors in such a carnival could not speak of them, even to each other; it may be prudish, but i cannot help feeling that one ought not to have represented in a book what could not be repeated in conversation or depicted in a picture. one may be plain-spoken enough in art, but one ought not to have the feeling that one would be ashamed, in certain passages, to catch the author's eye. if it were not for these lapses, i should put george moore at the head of all contemporary novelists; and i am not sure that i do not do so as it is. do give them another trial; i always thought you were too easily discouraged in your attempt to grapple with his books; probably my admiration for them only aroused your critical sense; and i admit that there is much to criticise. then there is another writer, lately dead, alas, whose books i used to read with absorbing interest, george gissing. they had, when he treated of his own peculiar stratum, the same quality of hard reality which i value most of all in a work of fiction. the actors were not so much vulgar as underbred; their ambitions and tastes were often deplorable. but one felt that they were real people. the wall of the suburban villa was gently removed, and the life was before your eyes. the moment he strayed from that milieu, the books became fantastic and unreal. but in the last two books, by the ionian sea and the papers of henry rycroft, gissing stepped into a new province, and produced exquisitely beautiful and poetical idealistic literature. thomas hardy is a poetical writer. but his rustic life, dreamy, melancholy, and beautiful as it is, with the wind blowing fragrant out of the heart of the wood, or the rain falling on the down, seems to me to be no more real than the scenes in as you like it or the tempest. the figures are actors playing a part. and then there is through his books so strong a note of sex, and people under the influence of passion seem to me to behave in so incomprehensible a way, in a manner so foreign to my own experience, that though i would not deny the truth of the picture, i would say that it is untrue for me, and therefore unmeaning. i have never fallen under the sway of rudyard kipling. whenever i read his stories i feel myself for the time in the grip of a strong mind, and it becomes a species of intoxication. but i am naturally sober by inclination, and though i can unreservedly admire the strength, the vigour, the splendid imaginativeness of his conceptions, yet the whole note of character is distasteful to me. i don't like his male men; i should dislike them and be ill at ease with them in real life, and i am ill at ease with them in his books. this is purely a matter of taste; and as to the animal stories, terrifically clever as they are, they appear to me to be no more true to life than landseer's pictures of dogs holding a coroner's inquest or smoking pipes. the only book of his that i re-read is the light that failed, for its abundant vitality and tragicalness; but the same temperamental repugnance overcomes me even there. for pure imagination i should always fly to a book by h. g. wells. he has that extraordinary power of imagining the impossible, and working it out in a hard literal way which is absolutely convincing. but he is a teller of tales and not a dramatist. well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. but what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. for one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. the moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. few living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that would not spoil a genius if we had him. these writers whom i have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own. but what one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great flood of humanity like scott, or with a leaping cataract of irrepressible humour like dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion like charlotte bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and zest, such as stevenson showed. well, we must wait and hope. meanwhile i will write to my great book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a line. i will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you. the one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. the only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--ever yours, t. b. ashfield, settle, sept. 4, 1904. dear herbert,--i have been reading fitzgerald's pretty essay euphranor. it is platonic both in form and treatment, but i never feel that it is wholly successful. most of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of jesus. but the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. however, it is not of that that i wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from digby's godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of youth. "they [the young] are easily put to shame" (so runs the script), "for they have no resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low, and they are unacquainted with necessity; they prefer honour to advantage, virtue to expediency; for they live by affection rather than by reason, and reason is concerned with expediency, but affection with honour." all very beautiful and noble, no doubt; but is it real? was i, were you, creatures of this make? could these fine things have been truthfully said of us? perhaps you may think it of yourself, but i can only regretfully say that i do not recognise it. my boyhood and youth were, it seems to me, very faulty things. my age is faulty still, more's the pity. but without any vain conceit, and with all the humility which is given by a knowledge of weakness, i can honestly say that in particular points i have improved a little. i am not generous or noble-hearted now; but i have not lost these qualities, for i never had them. as a boy and a young man i distinctly preferred advantage to honour; i was the prey of expediency, and seldom gave virtue a thought. but since i have known more of men, i have come to know that these fine powers, honour and virtue, do bloom in some men's souls, and in the hearts of many women. i have perceived their fragrance; i have seen honour raise its glowing face like a rose, and virtue droop its head like a pure snowdrop; and i hope that some day, as in an early day of spring, i may find some such tender green thing budding in the ugly soil of my own poor spirit. life would be a feeble business if it were otherwise; but the one ray of hope is not that one steadily declines in brightness from those early days, but that one may learn by admiration the beauty of the great qualities one never had by instinct. i see myself as a boy, greedy, mean-spirited, selfish, dull. i see myself as a young man, vain, irritable, self-absorbed, unbalanced. i have not eradicated these weeds; but i have learnt to believe in beauty and honour, even in truth. . . .--ever yours, t. b. monk's orchard, upton, sept. 13, 1904. dear herbert,--i have just come back after a long, vague holiday, feeling well and keen about my work. the boys are not back yet, and i have returned to put things ready for next half. but my serene mood has received a shock this morning. i wonder if you ever get disagreeable letters? i suppose that a schoolmaster is peculiarly liable to receive them. the sort of letter i mean is this. i come down to breakfast in good spirits; i pick up a letter and open it, and, all of a sudden, it is as if a snake slipped out and bit me. i close it and put it away, thinking i will read it later; there it lies close by my plate, and takes away the taste of food, and blots the sunshine. i take it upstairs, saying that it will want consideration. i finish my other letters, and then i take it out again. out comes the snake again with a warning hiss; but i resist temptation this time, read it through, and sit staring out of the window. a disagreeable letter from a disagreeable man, containing anxious information, of a kind that i cannot really test. what is the best way to deal with it? i know by experience; answer it at once, as dispassionately as one can; extract from it the few grains of probable truth it holds, and keep them in mind for possible future use; then deliberately try and forget all about it. i know now by experience that the painful impression will gradually fade, and, meanwhile, one must try to interpret the whole matter rightly. what is there in one's conduct which needs the check? is it that one grows confident and careless? probably! but the wholesome thing to do is to deal with it at once; otherwise it means anxious and feverish hours, when one composes a long and epigrammatic answer, point by point. the letter is over-stated, gossipy, malicious; if one lets it soak into the mind, it makes one suspicious of every one, miserable, cowardly. it is useless in the first hours, when the sting is yet tingling, to remind oneself philosophically that the suggestion is exaggerated and malignant; one does not get any comfort that way. no, the only thing is to plunge into detail, to work, to read--anything to recover the tone of the mind. it is a comfort to write to you about it, for to-day i am in the sore and disquieted condition which is just as unreal and useless as though i were treating the matter with indifference. indifference indeed would be criminal, but morbidity is nearly as bad. i once saw a very dramatic thing take place in church. it was in a town parish near my old home. the clergyman was a friend of mine, a wonderfully calm and tranquil person. he went up to the pulpit while a hymn was being sung. when the hymn concluded, he did not give out his text, but remained for a long time silent, so long that i thought he was feeling ill; the silence became breathless, and the attention of every one in the church became rivetted on the pulpit. then he slowly took up a letter from the cushion, and said in a low, clear voice: "a fortnight ago i found, on entering the pulpit, a letter addressed to me in an unknown hand; i took it out and read it afterwards; it was anonymous, and its contents were scandalous. last sunday i found another, which i burnt unread. to-day there is another, which i do not intend to read"--he tore the letter across as he said the words, in the sight of the congregation--"and i give notice that, if any further communications of the kind reach me, i shall put the matter into the hands of the police. i am willing to receive, if necessary, verbal communications on such subjects, though i do not think that any good purpose can be served by them. but to make vague and libellous accusations against members of the congregation in this way is cowardly, dishonourable, and un-christian. i have a strong suspicion"--he looked steadily down the church--"of the quarter from which these letters emanate; and i solemnly warn the writer that, if i have to take action in the matter, i shall take measures to make that action effective." i never saw a thing better done; it was said without apparent excitement or agitation; he presently gave out his text and preached as usual. it seemed to me a supremely admirable way of dealing with the situation. need i add that he was practical enough to take the pieces of the letter away with him? i once received an anonymous letter, not about myself, but about a friend. i took it to a celebrated lawyer, and we discovered the right way to deal with it. i remember that, when we had finished, he took up the letter--a really vile document--and said musingly: "i have often wondered what the pleasure of sending such things consists in! i always fancy the sender taking out his watch, and saying, with malicious glee, 'i suppose so-and-so will be receiving my letter about now!' it must be a perverted sense of power, i think." i said, "yes, and don't you think that there is also something of the pleasure of saying 'bo' to a goose?" the great man smiled, and said, "perhaps." well, i must try to forget, but i don't know anything that so takes the courage and the cheerfulness out of one's mind as one of these secret, dastardly things. my letter this morning was not anonymous; but it was nearly as bad, because it was impossible to use or to rely upon the information; and it was, moreover, profoundly disquieting. tell me what you think! i suppose it is good for one to know how weak one's armour is and how vulnerable is one's feeble self.--ever yours, t. b. upton, sept. 20, 1904. dear herbert,--i have been reading lately, not for the first time, but with increased interest, the memoir of mark pattison. it was, you will remember, dictated by himself towards the end of his life, and published after his death with a few omissions. it was not favourably received, and was called cowardly, cynical, bitter, a "cry in the dark," treacherous, and so forth. it is very difficult not to be influenced by current opinion in one's view of a book; one comes to it prepared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach one's mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect frankness. but i have read the book several times, and my admiration for it increases. it does not reveal a generous or particularly attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are undoubtedly painful. but it is essentially a just, courageous, and candid book. he is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks. he shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but he is quite as severe on himself. what i value in the book is its absolute sincerity. he does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his own life and character at the expense of other people. one sees him develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded, crabbed, ungracious student. if he had adopted a pose he might have sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. he does none of these things. he shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of others. he has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that his readers should have any. the sadness of the book comes from his failure, or rather his constitutional inability, to see other people whole. after all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature of a sum. there is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person concerned. but with mark pattison the process of subtraction was more congenial than the process of addition. he saw and felt the weakness of those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their good qualities. this comes out very clearly when he deals with newman and pusey. pattison was a member for a time of the tractarian set, but he must have been always at heart a liberal and a rationalist, and the spell which newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply submitted. certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part in the tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading. indeed the reminiscences of newman's conversation in particular, the pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an extraordinary testimony to the charm with which newman must have invested all he did or said. pattison is even more severe on pusey, and charges him with having betrayed a secret which he had confided to him in confession. it does not seem to occur to pattison to consider whether he did not himself mention the fact, whatever it was, to some other friend. on the other hand the book reveals an extraordinary intellectual ideal. it holds up a standard for the student which is profoundly impressive; and i know no other book which displays in a more single-minded and sincere way the passionate desire of the savant for wide, deep, and perfect knowledge, which is to be untainted by any admixture of personal ambition. indeed, pattison speaks of literary ambition as being for the student not an amiable weakness, but a defiling and polluting sin. of course it is natural to feel that there is a certain selfish aridity about such a point of view. the results of mark pattison's devotion are hardly commensurate with his earnestness. he worked on a system which hardly permitted him to put the results at the disposal of others; but there is at the same time something which is both dignified and stately in the idea of the lonely, laborious life, without hope and without reward, sustained only by the pursuit of an impossible perfection. it is not, however, as if this was all that mark pattison did. he was a great intellectual factor at oxford, especially in early days; in later days he was a venerable and splendid monument. but as tutor of his college, before his great disappointment--his failure to be elected to the rectorship--he evidently lived a highly practical and useful life. there is something disarming about the naive way in which he records that he became aware that he was the possessor of a certain magnetic influence to which gradually every one in the place, including the old rector himself, submitted. the story of his failure to be elected rector is deeply pathetic. pattison reveals with terrible realism the dingy and sordid intrigues which put an unworthy man in the place which he himself had earned. but it may be doubted whether there was so much malignity about the whole matter as he thought; and, at all events, it may be said that men do not commonly make enemies without reason. it does not seem to occur to him to question whether his own conduct and his own remarks may not have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained. his depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly. he was an over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his constitution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe. what is ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it all turned out for the best. he recognises the fact somewhat grudgingly. yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life. he gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was consolidated, the rectorship came to him--when it might have seemed that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it. in another respect the book is admirable. mark pattison attained high and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the consideration that the completed work might have been so much better both in conception and execution than it actually was. i feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me realise the nobility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the intellectual life. one may regret that in pattison's case this was not mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help rather than to pursue. but here, again, one cannot have everything, and the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of thought. here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any could sympathise. he writes pathetically: "i am fairly entitled to say that, since the year 1851, i have lived wholly for study. there can be no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a university ostensibly endowed for the cultivation of science and letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one." the practical effect of such a book on me is to make me realise the high virtue of thoroughness. it is not wholly encouraging, because at a place like this one must do a good deal of one's work sloppily and sketchily; but it makes me ashamed of my sketchiness; i make good resolutions to get up my subjects better, and, even if i know that i shall relapse, something will have been gained. but that is a side-issue. the true gain is to have been confronted with a real man, to have looked into the depth of his spirit, to realise differences of temperament, to be initiated into a high and noble ambition. and at the same time, alas! to learn by his failures to value tact and sympathy and generosity still more; and to learn that noble purpose is ineffective if it is secluded; to try resolutely to see the strong points of other workers, rather than their feeblenesses; and to end by feeling that we have all of us abundant need to forgive and to be forgiven--ever yours, t. b. upton, sept. 26, 1904. dear herbert,--i am much exercised in my mind about school sermons. it seems to me that we ought to make more of them than we do. we have our sermons here, very wisely, i think, at the evening service. the boys are more alert, the preacher is presumably in a more genial mood, the chapel is warm and brightly lighted, the music has had a comforting and stimulating effect upon the mind; it is exactly the time when the boys are ready and disposed to be interested in themselves, their lives and characters; they are hopeful, serious, ardent. the iron is hot, and it is just the moment to strike. well, it seems to me that the opportunity is often missed. in the first place, all the clerical members of the staff are asked to preach in turn--"given a mount," as the boys say. the headmaster preaches once a month, and a certain number of outside preachers, old uptonians, local clergy, and others are imported. now the first point that strikes me is that to suppose that every clergyman is ipso facto capable of preaching at all is a great mistake. i suppose that every thoughtful christian must have enough materials for a few sermons; there must be some aspects of truth that come home to every individual in a striking manner, some lessons of character which he has learnt. but he need not necessarily have the art of expressing himself in a penetrating and incisive way. it seems to me a mistaken sort of conscientiousness which makes it necessary for every preacher to compose his own sermons. i do not see why the sermons of great preachers should not frankly be read; one hears a dull sermon by a tired man on a subject of which newman has treated with exquisite lucidity and feeling in one of his parochial sermons. why is it better to hear tedious considerations on the same point expressed in a commonplace way than to listen to the words of a master of the art, and one too who saw, like newman, very deep into the human heart? i would have a man frankly say at the beginning of his sermon that he had been thinking about a particular point, and that he was going to read one of newman's sermons on the subject. then, if any passage was obscure or compressed, he might explain it a little. again, i want more homeliness, more simplicity, more directness in sermons; and so few people seem to be aware that these qualities of expression are not only the result of being a homely, simple, and direct character, but are a matter of long practice and careful art. then, again, i want sermons to be more shrewd and incisive. holiness, saintliness, and piety are virtues which are foreign to the character of boys. if any proof of it is needed, it is only too true that if a boy applies any of the three adjectives holy, saintly, or pious to a person, it is not intended to be a compliment. the words in their mouths imply sanctimonious pretension, and a certain pharisaical and even hypocritical scrupulousness. it is a great mistake to overlook this fact; i do not mean that a preacher should not attempt to praise these virtues, but if he does, he ought to be able to translate his thoughts into language which will approve itself to boys; he ought to be able to make it clear that such qualities are not inconsistent with manliness, humour, and kindliness. a school preacher ought to be able to indulge a vein of gentle satire; he ought to be able to make boys ashamed of their absurd conventionalism; he ought to give the impression that because he is a christian he is none the less a man of the world in the right sense. he ought not to uphold what, for want of a better word, i will call a feminine religion, a religion of sainted choir-boys and exemplary death-beds. a boy does not want to be gentle, meek, and mild, and i fear i cannot say that it is to be desired that he should. but if a man is shrewd and even humorous first, he can lift his audience into purer and higher regions afterwards; and he will then be listened to, because his hearers will feel that the qualities they most admire--strength, keenness, good humour--need not be left behind at the threshold of the christian life, but may be used and practised in the higher regions. then, too, i think that there is a sad want of variety. how rarely does one hear a biographical sermon; and yet biography is one of the things to which almost all boys will listen spellbound. i wish that a preacher would sometimes just tell the story of some gallant christian life, showing the boys that they too may live such lives if they have the will. preachers dwell far too much on the side of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. those, it seems to me, are much more mature ideals. i wish that they would dwell more upon the enjoyment, the interest, the amusement of being good in a vigorous way. what has roused these thoughts in me are two sermons i have lately heard here. on sunday week a great preacher came here, and spoke with extraordinary force and sense upon the benefits to be derived from making the most of chapel services. i never heard the thing better done. he gave the simplest motives for doing it. he said that we all believed in goodness in our hearts, and that a service, if we came to it in the right way, was a means of hammering goodness in. that it was a good thing that chapel services were compulsory, because if they were optional, a great many boys would stay away out of pure laziness, and lose much good thereby. and as they were compulsory, we had better make the most we could of them. he went on to speak of attention, of posture, and so forth. there are a certain number of big boys here, who have an offensive habit of putting their heads down upon their arms on the book-board during a sermon, and courting sleep. the preacher made a pause at this point, and said that it was, of course, true that an attitude of extreme devotion did not always mean a corresponding seriousness of mind. there was a faint ripple of mirth at this, and then, one by one, the boys who were engaged in attempting to sleep raised themselves slowly up in a sheepish manner, trying to look as if they were only altering their position naturally. it was intensely ludicrous; but so good for the offenders! and then the preacher rose into a higher vein, and said how the thought of the school chapel would come back to the boys in distant days; that the careless would wish in vain that they had found the peace of christ there, and that those who had worshipped in spirit and truth would be thankful that it had been so. and then he drew a little picture of a manly, pure, and kind ideal of a boy's life in words that made all hearts go out to him. boys are heedless creatures; but i am sure that many of them, for a day or two at all events, tried to live a better life in the spirit of that strong and simple message. well, yesterday we had a man of a very different sort; earnest enough and high-minded, i am sure, but he seemed to have forgotten, if he had ever known, what a boy's heart and mind were like. the sermon was devoted to imploring boys to take orders, and he drew a dismal picture of the sacrifices the step entailed, and depicted, in a singularly unattractive vein, the life of a city curate. now the only way to make the thought of such a life appeal to boys is to indicate the bravery, the interest of it all, the certainty that you are helping human beings, the enjoyment which always attaches to human relationship. the result was, i confess, extremely depressing. he made a fervent appeal at the end; "the call," he said, "comes to you now and to-day." i watched from my stall with, i am sorry to say, immense amusement, the proceedings of a great, burly, red-faced boy, a prominent football player, and a very decent sort of fellow. he had fallen asleep early in the discourse; and at this urgent invitation, he opened one eye and cast it upon the preacher with a serene and contented air. finding that the call did not appear to him to be particularly imperative, he slowly closed it again, and, with a good-tempered sigh, addressed himself once more to repose. i laughed secretly, hoping the preacher did not observe his hearer. but, seriously, it seemed to me a lamentable waste of opportunities. the sunday evening service is the one time in the week when there is a chance of putting religion before the boys in a beautiful light. most of them desire to be good, i think; their half-formed wishes, their faltering hopes, their feeble desires, ought to be tenderly met, and lifted, and encouraged. at times, too, a stern morality ought to be preached and enforced; wilful transgression ought to be held up in a terrible light. i do not really mind how it is done, but the heart ought somehow to be stirred and awakened. there is room for denunciation and there is room for encouragement. best of all is a due admixture of both; if sin can be shown in its true colours, if the darkness, the horror, the misery of the vicious life can be displayed, and the spirit then pointed to the true and right path, the most is done that can be done. but we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised. my cautious colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional. i should like to see the sunday sermon made one of the most stirring events of the week, as arnold made it at rugby. i should like preachers to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were to preach about. no instruction is wanted in a school chapel--the boys get plenty of that in their divinity lessons. what is wanted is that the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and goodness should be enforced and helped. to give the spirit wings, that ought to be the object. but so often we have to listen to a conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of the land and the book or farrar's life of christ. the story is then tediously related, and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes of the cambridge bible for schools or homiletical hints, which make even the most ardent christian feel that after all the pursuit of perfection is a very dreary business. but a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger, a little farther on the way--what cannot such an one do to set feeble feet on the path, and turn souls to the light? boys are often pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and desirable. . . . ever yours, t. b. upton, oct. 5, 1904. dear herbert,--it is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. of course, spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels. but now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. i walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. we left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. there is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. it always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing. we left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house--puginesque gothic, i must tell you--came in sight. but those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of mass. it pleases me to know that the great sir walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. all round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. the place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. the water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. a silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house blinked across the rich clumps of michaelmas daisies, and the dark windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. everything seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a great and noble dignity. i wish i could put into words the sweet solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage. i say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older, that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to the mind. perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted; but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell upon the heart. we walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. that melancholy and sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among the grass. the time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to die? with such sober and stately acquiescence would i await the end, not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with gratitude and love and trust. my companion of that day was vane, one of my colleagues, and we had discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. the curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences, the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have marched, one after another. that is a solemn, but hardly a despairing thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. could we but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! that impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it were, within a mighty arm. behind and beyond the precisest creed that great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us. yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of god.--ever yours, t. b. monk's orchard, upton, oct. 12, 1904. dear herbert,--i have nothing but local gossip to tell you. we have been having a series of committee meetings lately about our chapel services; i am a member of the committee, and as so often happens when one is brought into close contact with one's colleagues upon a definite question, i find myself lost in bewilderment at the views which are held and advanced by sensible and virtuous men. i don't say that i am necessarily right, and that those who disagree with me are wrong; i daresay that some of my fellow-members think me a tiresome and wrong-headed man. but in one point i believe i am right; in things of this kind, the only policy seems to me to try to arrive at some broad principle, to know what you are driving at; and then, having arrived at it, to try and work it out in detail. now two or three of my friends seem to me to begin at the wrong end; to have got firmly into their heads certain details, and to fight with all their power to get these details accepted, without attempting to try and develop a principle at all. for instance, roberts, one of the members of the committee, is only anxious for what he calls the maintenance of liturgical tradition; he says that there is a science of liturgy, and that it is of the utmost importance to keep in touch with it. the sort of detail that he presses is that at certain seasons the same hymn ought to be sung on sunday morning and every morning throughout the week, because of the mediaeval system of octaves. he calls this knocking the same nail on the head, and, as is common enough, he is led to confuse a metaphor with an argument. again, he is very anxious to have the litany twice a week, that the boys may be trained, as he calls it, in the habit of continuous prayerful attention. another member, randall, is very anxious that the services should be what he calls instructive; that courses, for instance, of sermons should be preached on certain books of the old testament, on the pauline epistles, and so forth. he is also very much set on having dogmatic and doctrinal sermons, because dogma and doctrine are the bone and sinew of religion. another man, old pigott, says that the whole theory of worship is praise, and he is very anxious to avoid all subjective and individual religion. i find myself in hopeless disagreement with these three worthy men; my own theory of school services is, to put it shortly, that they should feed the soul, and draw it gently to the mysteries of love and faith. the whole point is, i believe, to rouse and sustain a pure and generous emotion. most boys have in various degrees a religious sense. that is to say, that they have moments when they are conscious of the fatherhood of god, of redemption from sin, of the indwelling of a holy spirit. they have moments when they see all that they might be and are not--moments when they would rather be pure than impure, unselfish rather than self-absorbed, kind rather than unkind, brave rather than cowardly; moments when they perceive, however dimly, that happiness lies in activity and kindliness, and when they would give much never to have stained their conscience with evil. it seems to me that school services ought to aim at developing these faint and faltering dreams, at increasing the sense of the beauty and peace of holiness, at giving them some strong and joyful thought that will send them back to the world of life resolved to try again, to be better and worthier. i am afraid that i do not value the science of liturgical tradition very much. the essence of all science is that it should be progressive; our problems and needs are not the same as mediaeval problems and needs. the whole conception of god and man has broadened and deepened. science has taught us that nature is a part of the mind of god, not something to be merely contended against; again, it has taught us that man has probably not fallen from grace into corruption, but is slowly struggling upwards out of darkness into light. again, we no longer think that everything was created for the use and enjoyment of man; we know now of huge tracts of the earth where for thousands of years a vast pageant of life has been displaying itself without any reference to humanity at all. then, too, as a great scientist has lately pointed out, the dark and haunting sense of sin, that drove devotees to the desert and to lives of the grimmest asceticism, has given place to a nobler conception of civic virtue, has turned men's hearts rather to amendment than to repentance; well, that, in the face of all this, we should be limited to the precise kind of devotions that approved themselves to mediaeval minds seems to me to be a purely retrograde position. then as to arranging services in order to cultivate the power of continuous prayer among boys, i think it a thoroughly unpractical theory. in the first place, for one boy so trained you blunt the religious susceptibilities of ninety-nine others. boys are quick, lively, and bird-like creatures, intolerant above all things of tedium and strain; and i believe that in order to cultivate the religious sense in them, the first duty of all is to make religion attractive, and resolutely to put aside all that tends to make it a weariness. as to doctrinal and dogmatic instruction, i cannot feel that, at a school, the chapel is the place for that; the boys here get a good deal of religious instruction, and sunday is already too full, if anything, of it. i believe that the chapel is the place to make them, if possible, love their faith and find it beautiful; and if you can secure that, the dogma will look after itself. the point is, for instance, that a boy should be aware of his redemption, not that he should know the metaphysical method in which it was effected. there is very little dogmatic instruction in the gospels, and what there is seems to have been delivered to the few and not to the many, to the shepherds rather than to the flocks; it is vital religion and not technical that the chapel should be concerned with. as to the theory of praise, i cannot help feeling that the old idea that god demanded, so to speak, a certain amount of public recognition of his goodness and greatness is a purely savage and uncivilised form of fetish-worship; it is the same sort of religion that would attach material prosperity to religious observation; and belongs to a time when men believed that, in return for a certain number of sacrifices, rain and sun were sent to the crops of godly persons, with a nicer regard to their development than was applied in the case of the ungodly. the thought of the father of men feeling a certain satisfaction in their assembling together to roar out in concert somewhat extravagantly phrased ascriptions of honour and majesty seems to me purely childish. my own belief is that services should in the first place be as short as possible; that there should be variety and interest, plenty of movement and plenty of singing, and that every service should be employed to meet and satisfy the restless minds and bodies of children. but though all should be simple, it should not, i think, be of a plain and obvious type entirely. there are many delicate mysteries, of hope and faith, of affliction and regret, of suffering and sorrow, of which many boys are dimly conscious. there are many subtle and seemly qualities which lie a little apart from the track of manly, full-fed, game-playing boyhood; and such emotions should be cultivated and given voice in our services. to arrange the whole of our religion for brisk, straightforward boys, whose temptations are of an obvious type and who have never known sickness or sorrow is, i believe, a radical mistake. there is a good deal of secret, tender, delicate emotion in the hearts of many boys, which cannot be summarily classed and dismissed as subjective. sermons should be brief and ethical, i believe. they should aim at waking generous thoughts and hopes, pure and gracious ideals. anything of a biographical character appeals strongly to boys; and if one can show that it is not inconsistent with manliness to have a deep and earnest faith, to love truth and purity as well as liberty and honour, a gracious seed has been sown. above all, religion should not be treated from the purely boyish point of view; let the boys feel that they are strangers, soldiers, and pilgrims, let them realise that the world is a difficult place, but that there is indeed a golden clue that leads through the darkness of the labyrinth, if they can but set their hand upon it; let them learn to be humble and grateful, not hard and self-sufficient. and, above all, let them realise that things in this world do not come by chance, but that a soul is set in a certain place, and that happiness is to be found by interpreting the events of life rightly, by facing sorrows bravely, by showing kindness, by thankfully accepting joy and pleasure. and lastly, there should come some sense of unity, the thought of combination for good, of unaffectedness about what we believe to be true and pure, of facing the world together and not toying with it in isolation. all this should be held up to boys. even as it is boys grow to love the school chapel, and to think of it in after years as a place where gleams of goodness and power visited them. it might be even more so than it is; but it can only be so, if we realise the conditions, the material with which we are working. we ought to set ourselves to meet and to encourage every beautiful aspiration, every holy and humble thought; not to begin with some eclectic theory, and to try to force boys into the mould. we do that in every other department of school life; but i would have the chapel to be a place of liberty, where tender spirits may be allowed a glimpse of high and holy things which they fitfully desire, and which may indeed prove to be a gate of heaven. well, for once i have been able to finish a letter without a single interruption. if my letters, as a rule, seem very inconsequent, remember that they are often written under pressure. but i suppose we each envy the other; you would like a little more pressure and i a little less. i am glad to hear that all goes well; thank nellie for her letter.--ever yours, t. b. upton, oct. 19, 1904. dear herbert,--i am at present continuously liturgical, owing to my committee; but you must have the benefit of it. i have often wondered which of the compilers of the prayer-book fixed upon the venite as the first canticle for our morning service; wondered, i say, in the purposeless way that one does wonder, without ever taking the trouble to find out. i dare say there are abundant ecclesiological precedents for it, if one took the trouble to discover them. but the important thing is that it was done; and it is a stroke of genius to have done it. (n.b.--i find it is in the breviary appointed for matins.) the thing is so perfect in itself, and in a way so unexpected, that i feel in the selection of it the work of a deep and poetical heart. many an ingenious ecclesiastical mind would be afraid of putting a psalm in such a place which changed its mood so completely as the venite does. to end with a burst of noble and consuming anger, of vehement and merciless indignation--that is the magnificent thing. just consider it; i will write down the verses, just for the simple pleasure of shaping the great simple phrases:-"oh come let us sing unto the lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation." what a vigorous and enlivening verse, like the invitation of old song-writers, "begone, dull care." for once let us trust ourselves to the full tide of exaltation and triumph, let there be no heavy overshadowings of thought. "let us come before his presence with thanksgiving: and show ourselves glad in him with psalms. "for the lord is a great god: and a great king above all gods. "in his hand are all the corners of the earth; and the strength of the hills is his also. "the sea is his and he made it; and his hands prepared the dry land. "oh come, let us worship, and fall down: and kneel before the lord our maker. "for he is the lord our god; and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand." what a splendid burst of joy; the joy of earth, when the sun is bright in a cloudless heaven, and the fresh wind blows cheerfully across the plain. there is no question of duty here, of a task to be performed in heaviness, but a simple tide of joyfulness such as filled the heart of the poet who wrote:- "god's in his heaven; all's right with the world." i take it that these verses draw into themselves, as the sea draws the streams, all the rivers of joy and beauty that flow, whether laden with ships out of the heart of great cities, or dropping and leaping from high unvisited moorlands. all the sweet joys that life holds for us find their calm end and haven here; all the delights of life, of action, of tranquil thought, of perception, of love, of beauty, of friendship, of talk, of reflection, are all drawn into one great flood of gratitude and thankfulness; the thankfulness that comes from the thought that after all it is he that made us, and not we ourselves; that we are indeed led and pastured by green meadows and waters of comfort; in such a mood all uneasy anxieties, all dull questionings, die and are merged, and we are glad to be. then suddenly falls a different mood, a touch of pathos, in the thought that there are some who from wilfulness, and vain desire, and troubled scheming, shut themselves out from the great inheritance; to them comes the pleading call, the sorrowful invitation:-"to-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts; as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness. "when your fathers tempted me: proved me, and saw my works." and then rises the gathering wrath; the doom of all perverse and stubborn natures, who will not yield, or be guided, or led; who live in a wilful sadness, a petty obstinacy:-"forty years long was i grieved with this generation, and said: it is a people that do err in their hearts for they have not known my ways." and then the passion of the mood, the fierce indignation, rises and breaks, as it were, in a dreadful thunderclap:-"unto whom i sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest." but even so the very horror of the denunciation holds within it a thought of beauty, like an oasis in a burning desert. "my rest"--that sweet haven which does truly await all those who will but follow and wait upon god. i declare that the effect of this amazing lyric grows upon me every time that i hear it. some psalms, like the delicate and tender cxix., steal into the heart after long and quiet use. how dull i used to find it as a child; how i love it now! but this is not the case with the venite; its noble simplicity and directness has no touch of intentional subtlety about it. rather the subtlety was in the true insight, which saw that, if ever there was a psalm which should at once give the reins to joy, and at the same time pierce the careless heart with a sharp arrow of thought, this was the psalm. i feel as if i had been trying in this letter to do as mr. interpreter did--to have you into a room full of besoms and spiders, and to draw a pretty moral out of it all. but i am sure that the beauty of this particular psalm, and of its position, is one of those things that is only spoilt for us by familiarity; and that it is a duty in life to try and break through the crust of familiarity which tends to be deposited round well-known things, and to see how bright and joyful a jewel shows its heart of fire beneath. i have been hoping for a letter; but no doubt it is all right. i am before my time, i see.--ever yours, t. b. upton, oct. 25, 1904. dear herbert,--i have been studying, with a good deal of interest, two books, the letters of professor a----, and the life of bishop f----. given the form, i think the editor of the letters has done his work well. his theory has been to let the professor speak for himself; while he himself stands, like a discreet and unobtrusive guide, and just says what is necessary in the right place. in this he is greatly to be commended; for it happens too often that biographers of eminent men use their privilege to do a little adventitious self-advertisement. they blow their own trumpets; they stand and posture courteously in the ante-room, when what one desires is to go straight into the presence. i once had a little piece of biography to do which necessitated my writing requests for reminiscences to several of the friends of the subject of my book. i never had such a strange revelation of human nature. a very few people gave me just what i wanted to know--facts, and sayings, and trenchant actions. a second class of correspondents told me things which had a certain value--episodes in which my hero appeared, but intermingled with many of their own opinions, doings, and sayings. a third class wrote almost exclusively about themselves, using my hero as a peg to hang their own remarks upon. the worst offender of all wrote me long reminiscences of his own conversations, in the following style: "how well i remember the summer of 18--, when dear p---was staying at f----. i and my wife had a little house in the neighbourhood. we found it convenient to be able to run down there and to rest a little after the fatigues of london life. i remember very well a walk i took with p----. it was the time of the franco-prussian war, and i was full of indignation at the terrible sacrifice of life which appeared to me to be for no end. i remember pouring out my thoughts to p----." here followed a page or two of reflections upon the barbarity of war. "p---listened to me with great interest; i cannot now recall what he said, but i know that it struck me very much at the time." and so on through many closely written pages. well, the editor of the professor's letters has not done this at all; he keeps himself entirely in the background. but, after reading the book, the reflection is borne in upon me that, unless the hero is a good letter-writer (and the professor was not), the form of the book cannot be wholly justified. most of the letters are, so to speak, business letters; they are either letters connected with ecclesiastical politics, or they are letters dealing with technical historical points. there are many little shrewd and humorous turns occurring in them. but these should, i think, have been abstracted from their context and worked into a narrative. the professor was a man of singular character and individuality. besides his enormous erudition, he had a great fund of sterling common sense, a deep and liberal piety, and a most inconsequent and, i must add, undignified sense of humour. he carried almost to a vice the peculiarly english trait of national character--the extreme dislike of emotional statement, the inability to speak easily and unaffectedly on matters of strong feeling and tender concern. i confess that this has a displeasing effect. when one desires above all things to have a glimpse into his mind, to be reassured as to his seriousness and piety, it is ten to one that the professor will, so to speak, pick up his skirts, and execute a series of clumsy, if comic, gambols and caracoles in front of you. a sense of humour is a very valuable thing, especially in a professor of theology; but it should be of a seemly and pungent type, not the humour of a merry andrew. and one has the painful sense, especially in the most familiar letters of this collection, that the professor took an almost puerile pleasure in trying to shock his correspondent, in showing how naughty he could be. one feels the same kind of shock as if one had gone to see the professor on serious business, and found him riding on a rocking-horse in his study, with a paper cap on his head. there is nothing morally wrong about it; but it appears to be silly, and silliness is out of place behind a gown and under a college cap. but the biography of bishop f---opens up a further and more interesting question, which i feel myself quite unequal to solving. one has a respect for erudition, of course, but i find myself pondering gloomily over the reasons for this respect. is it only the respect that one feels for the man who devotes patient labour to the accomplishment of a difficult task, a task which demands great mental power? what i am not clear about is what the precise value of the work of the erudite historian is. the primary value of history is its educational value. it is good for the mind to have a wide view of the world, to have a big perspective of affairs. it corrects narrow, small, personal views; it brings one in contact with heroic, generous persons; it displays noble qualities. it gives one glimpses of splendid self-sacrifice, of lives devoted to a high cause; it sets one aglow with visions of patriotism, liberty and justice. it shows one also the darker side; how great natures can be neutralised or even debased by uncorrected faults; how bigotry can triumph over intelligence; how high hopes can be disappointed. all this is saddening; yet it deepens and widens the mind; it teaches one what to avoid; it brings one near to the deep and patient purposes of god. but then there is a temptation to think that vivid, picturesque, stimulating writers can do more to develop this side of history than patient, laborious, just writers. one begins to be inclined to forgive anything but dulness in a writer; to value vitality above accuracy, colour above truth. one is tempted to feel that the researches of erudite historians end only in proving that white is not so white, and black not so black as one had thought. that generous persons had a seamy side; that dark and villainous characters had much to be urged in excuse for their misdeeds. this is evidently a wrong frame of mind, and one is disposed to say that one must pursue truth before everything. but then comes in the difficulty that truth is so often not to be ascertained; that documentary evidence is incomplete, and that even documents themselves do not reveal motives. of course, the perfect combination would be to have great erudition, great common sense and justice, and great enthusiasm and vigour as well. it is obviously a disadvantage to have a historian who suppresses vital facts because they do not fit in with a preconceived view of characters. but still i find it hard to resist the conviction that, from the educational point of view, stimulus is more important than exactness. it is more important that a boy should take a side, should admire and abhor, than that he should have very good reasons for doing so. for it is character and imagination that we want to affect rather than the mastery of minute points and subtleties. thus, from an educational point of view, i should consider that froude was a better writer than freeman; just as i should consider it more important that a boy should care for virgil than that he should be sure that he had the best text. i think that what i feel to be the most desirable thing of all is, that boys should learn somehow to care for history--however prejudiced a view they take of it--when they are young; and that, when they are older, they should correct misapprehensions, and try to arrive at a more complete and just view. then i go on to my further point, and here i find myself in a still darker region of doubt. i must look upon it, i suppose, as a direct assault of the evil one, and hold out the shield of faith against the fiery darts. what, i ask myself, is, after all, the use of this practice of erudition? what class of the community does it, nay, can it, benefit? the only class that i can even dimly connect with any benefits resulting from it is the class of practical politicians; and yet, in politics, i see a tendency more and more to neglect the philosophical and abstruse view; and to appeal more and more to later precedents, not to search among the origins of things. nay, i would go further, and say that a pedantic and elaborate knowledge of history hampers rather than benefits the practical politician. it is not so with all the learned professions. the man of science may hope that his researches may have some direct effect in enriching the blood of the world. he may fight the ravages of disease, he may ameliorate life in a hundred ways. but these exponents of learning, these restorers of ancient texts, these disentanglers of grammatical subtleties, these divers among ancient chronicles and forgotten charters--what is it that they do but to multiply and revive useless knowledge, and to make it increasingly difficult for a man to arrive at a broad and philosophical view, or ever attack his subject at the point where it may conceivably affect humanity or even character? the problem of the modern world is the multiplication of books and records, and every new detail dragged to light simply encumbers the path of the student. i have no doubt that this is a shallow and feeble-minded view. but i am not advancing it as a true view; i am only imploring help; i only desire light. i am only too ready to believe in the virtues and uses of erudition, if any one will point them out to me. but at present it only appears to me like a gigantic mystification, enabling those who hold richly endowed posts to justify themselves to the world, and to keep the patronage of these emoluments in their own hands. supposing, as a reductio ad absurdum, that some wealthy individual were to endow an institution in order that the members of it might count the number of threads in carpets. one can imagine a philosophical defence being made of the pursuit. a man might say that it was above all things necessary to classify, and investigate, and to arrive at the exact truth; to compare the number of threads in different carpets, and that the sordid difficulties which encumbered such a task should not be regarded, in the light of the fact that here, at least, exact results had been obtained. of course, that is all very silly! but i believe; only i want my unbelief helped! if you can tell me what services are rendered by erudition to national life, you will relieve my doubts. do not merely say that it enlarges the bounds of knowledge, unless you are also prepared to prove that knowledge is, per se, a desirable thing. i am not sure that it is not a hideous idol, a mumbo jumbo, a moloch in whose honour children have still to pass through the fire in the recesses of dark academic groves.--ever yours, t. b. upton, nov. 1, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have read, after a fashion, in the course of the last month, the autobiography of herbert spencer. i know nothing of his philosophy--i doubt if i have read half-a-dozen pages of his writings; and the man, as revealed in his own transparent confessions, is almost wholly destitute of attractiveness. all the same it is an intensely interesting book, because it is the attempt of a profound egotist to give a perfectly sincere picture of his life. of course, i should have read it with greater appreciation if i had studied or cared for his books; but i take for granted that he was a great man, and accomplished a great work, and i like to see how he achieved it. the book is the strongest argument i have ever yet read against a rational education. i who despair of the public-school classical system, am reluctantly forced to confess that it can sow the seeds of fairer flowers than ever blossomed in the soul of herbert spencer. he was by no means devoid of aesthetic perception. he says that the sight of a mountain, and music heard in a cathedral were two of the things that moved him most. he describes a particular sunset which he saw in scotland, and describes the experience as the climax of his emotional sensations. he was devoted to music, and had a somewhat contemptuous enjoyment of pictures. but the arrogance and impenetrability of the man rise up on every page. he cannot say frankly that he does not understand art and literature; he dogmatises about them, and gives the reader to understand that there is really nothing in them. he criticises the classics from the standpoint of a fourth form boy. he sits like a dry old spider, spinning his philosophical web, with a dozen avenues of the soul closed to him, and denying that such avenues exist. as a statistical and sociological expert he ought to have taken into account the large number of people who are affected by what we may call the beautiful, and to have allowed for its existence even if he could not feel it. but no, he is perfectly self-satisfied, perfectly decided. and this is the more surprising because the man was in reality a hedonist. he protests finely in more than one place against those who make life subsidiary to work. he is quite clear on the point that work is only a part of life, and that to live is the object of man. again, he states that the pursuit of innocent pleasure is a thing to which it is justifiable to devote some energy, and yet this does not make him tolerant. the truth is that he was so supremely egotistical, so entirely wrapped up in himself and his own life, that what other people did and cared for was a matter of entire indifference to him. his social tastes, and they were considerable, were all devoted to one and the same purpose. he liked staying at agreeable country houses, because it was a pleasant distraction to him and improved his health. he liked dining out, because it stimulated his digestion. all human relationships are made subservient to the same end. it never seems to him to be a duty to minister to the pleasure of others. he takes what he can get at the banquet of life, and, having secured his share, goes away to digest it. when, at the end of his life, social entertainments tried his nerves, he gave them up. when people came to see him, and he found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to blur the sense of the talk. what better parable of the elaborate framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be than the following legend, not derived from the book? one evening, the story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful stranger to join him in a game of billiards. the young man, who was a proficient, ran out in two breaks, leaving his rival a hopeless distance behind. when he had finished, spencer, with a severe air, said to him: "to play billiards in an ordinary manner is an agreeable adjunct to life; to play as you have been playing is evidence of a misspent youth." a man who was not an egotist and a philosopher, however much he disliked the outcome of the game, would have attempted some phrases of commendation. but spencer's view was, that anything which rendered a player of billiards less useful to himself, by giving him fewer opportunities in the course of a game for what he would have called healthful and pleasurable recreation, was not only not to be tolerated, but was to be morally reprobated. as to his health, a subject which occupies the larger part of the volumes, it is evident that, though his nervous system was deranged, he was a complete hypochondriac. there is very little repining about the invalid conditions under which he lived; and it gradually dawned upon me that this was not because he had resolved to bear it in a stoical and courageous manner, but because his ill-health, seen through the rosy spectacles of the egotist, was a matter of pleasurable excitement to him; he complains a good deal of the peculiar sensations he experienced, and his broken nights, but with a solemn satisfaction in the whole experience. he never had to bear physical pain, and the worst evil from which he suffered was the boredom resulting from the way in which he had to try, or conceived that he had to try, to kill time without reading or working. of course one cannot help admiring the tenacious way in which he carried out his great work under unfavourable conditions. yet there is something ridiculous in the picture of his rowing about in a boat on the regent's park lake, with an amanuensis in the stern, dictating under the lee of an island until his sensations returned, and then rowing until they subsided again. as a hedonist, he distinctly calculated that his work gave the spice to his life, and that he would not have been so happy had he relinquished it. but there is nothing generous or noble about his standpoint; he liked writing and philosophising, and he preferred to do it even though it entailed a certain amount of invalidism, in the same spirit in which a man prefers to drink champagne with the prospect of suffering from the gout, rather than to renounce champagne and gout alike. the man's face is in itself a parable. he has the high, domed forehead of the philosopher, and a certain geniality of eye; but the hard, thin-lipped mouth, with the deep lines from the nose, give him the air of an elderly chimpanzee. he has a hand like a bird's claw; and the antique shirt-front and small bow-tie denote the man who has fixed his opinions on the cut of his clothes at an early date and does not intend to modify them. quite apart from the intense seriousness with which the sage took himself, down to the smallest details, the style of the book, dry as it is, is in itself grotesquely attractive. there is something in the use of solemn scientific terminology, when dealing with the most trivial matters, which makes many passages irresistibly ludicrous. i wish that i could think that the writer of the following lines wrote them with any consciousness of how humorous a passage he was constructing-"with me any tendency towards facetiousness is the result of temporary elation, either . . . caused by pleasurable health-giving change, or more commonly by meeting old friends. habitually i observed that on seeing the lotts after a long interval, i was apt to give vent to some witticisms during the first hour or two, and then they became rare." i can't say that the life is a sad one, because, on the whole, it is a contented one; but it is so one-sided and so self-absorbed that one feels dried-up and depressed by it. one feels that great ability, great perseverance, may yet leave a man very cold and hard; that a man may penetrate the secrets of philosophy and yet never become wise; and one ends by feeling that simplicity, tenderness, a love of beautiful and gracious things are worth far more than great mental achievement. or rather, i suppose, that one has to pay a price for everything, and that the price that this dyspeptic philosopher paid for his great work was to move through the world in a kind of frigid blindness, missing life after all, and bartering reality for self-satisfaction. curiously enough, i have at the same time been reading the life of another self-absorbed and high-minded personality--the late dean farrar. this is a book the piety of which is more admirable than the literary skill; but probably the tender partiality with which it is written makes it a more valuable document from the point of view of revealing personality than if it had been more critically treated. farrar was probably the exact opposite of herbert spencer in almost every respect. he was a litterateur, a rhetorician, an idealist, where spencer was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist. farrar admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet. he was like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to and fro admiring the fantastic pattern. the fabric of farrar's writing is essentially thin; his thoughts rarely rose above the commonplace, and to these thoughts he gave luscious expression, sticking the flowers of rhetoric, of which his marvellous memory gave him the command, so as to ornament without adorning. every one must have been struck in farrar's works of fiction by the affected tone of speech adopted by his saintly and high-minded heroes. it was not affectation in farrar to speak and write in this way; it was the form in which his thoughts naturally arranged themselves. but in one sense it was affected, because farrar seems to have been naturally a kind of dramatist. i imagine that his self-consciousness was great, and i expect that he habitually lived with the feeling of being the central figure in a kind of romantic scene. the pathos of the situation is that he was naturally a noble-minded man. he had a high conception of beauty, both artistic and moral beauty. he did live in the regions to which he directed others. but this is vitiated by a desire for recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition. the letter, for instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a canonry at westminster is a painful one. if he felt the inexpressible distress, of which he speaks, at the idea of leaving marlborough, there was really no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural. but he does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did not rather lie in his own temperament. the kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers, seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad self-consciousness. the pity and the mystery of it is that a man should have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its place as the tyrant of the whole nature. and what makes the whole situation even more tragic is that it was through a certain transparency of nature that this egotism became apparent to others. he was a man who seemed bound to speak of all that was in his mind; that was a part of his rhetorical temperament. but if he could have held his tongue, if he could have kept his own weakness of spirit concealed, he might have achieved the very successes which he desired, and, indeed, deserved. the result is that a richly endowed character achieves no conspicuous greatness, either as a teacher, a speaker, a writer, or even as a man. the moral of these two books is this: how can any one whose character is deeply tinged by this sort of egotism--and it is the shadow of all eager and sensitive temperaments--best fight against it? can it be subdued, can it be concealed, can it be cured? i hardly dare to think so. but i think that a man may deliberately resolve not to make recognition an object; and next i believe he may most successfully fight against egotism in ordinary life by regarding it mainly as a question of manners. if a man can only, in early life, get into his head that it is essentially bad manners to thrust himself forward, and determine rather to encourage others to speak out what is in their minds, a habit can be acquired; and probably, upon acquaintance, an interest in the point of view of others will grow. that is not a very lofty solution, but i believe it to be a practical one; and certainly for a man of egotistic nature it is a severe and fruitful lesson to read the lives of two such self-absorbed characters as spencer and farrar, and to see, in the one case, how ugly and distorting a fault, in the other, how hampering a burden it may become. egotism is really a failure of sympathy, a failure of justice, a failure of proportion, and to recognise this is the first step towards establishing a desire to be loving, just, and well-balanced. but still the mystery remains: and i think that perhaps the most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for what in the way of work, of precept, of example these men achieved, and to leave the mystery of their faults to their maker, in the noble spirit of gray's elegy:- "no farther seek his merits to disclose, or draw his frailties from their dread abode (there they alike in trembling hope repose), the bosom of his father and his god." --ever yours, t. b. monk's orchard, upton, nov. 8, 1904. dear herbert,--i have been trying to read the letters of t. e. brown. do you know anything about him? he was a manxman by birth, a fellow of oriel, a clifton master for many years, and at the end of his life a manxman again--he held a living there. he wrote some spirited tales in verse, in the manx vernacular, and he was certainly a poet at heart. he was fond of music, and a true lover of nature. he had a genius for friendship, and evidently had the gift of inspiring other people; high-minded and intelligent men speak of him, in the little memoir that precedes the letters, with a pathetic reverence and a profound belief in the man's originality, and even genius. i was so sure that i should enjoy the book that i ordered it before it was published, and, when it appeared, it was a very profound disappointment. i don't mean to say that there are not beautiful things in it; it shows one a wholesome nature and a grateful, kindly heart; but, in the first place, he writes a terrible style, the kind of style that imposes on simple people because it is allusive, and what is called unconventional; to me it is simply spasmodic and affected. the man seems, as a rule, utterly unable to say anything in a simple and delicate way; his one object appears to be not to use the obvious word. he has a sort of jargon of his own--a dreadful jargon. he must write "crittur" or "craythur," when he means "creature"; he says "yiss, ma'am, i'd be glad to jine the book club"; he uses the word "galore"; he talks of "the resipiscential process" when he means growing wiser--at least i think that is what he means. the following, taken quite at random, are specimens of the sort of passages that abound:-"rain, too, is one of my joys. i want to wash myself, soak myself in it; hang myself over a meridian to dry; dissolve (still better) into rags of soppy disintegration, blotting paper, mash and splash and hash of inarticulate protoplasm." i suppose that both he and his friends thought that picturesque; to me it is neither beautiful nor amusing--simply ugly and aggravating. here again:-"on the quantocks i feel fairies all round me, the good folk, meet companions for young poets. how coleridge, more especially, fits in to such surroundings! 'fairies?' say you. well, there's odds of fairies, and of the sort i mean coleridge was the absolute puck. 'puck?' says you. 'for shame!' says you. no, d--n it! i'll stick to that. there's odds o' fairies, and often enough i think the world is nothing else; troops, societies, hierarchies--s.t.c., a supreme hierarch; look at his face; think of meeting him at moonlight between stowey and alfoxden, like a great white owl, soft and plumy, with eyes of flame!" i confess that such passages simply make me blush, leave me with a kind of mental nausea. what makes it worse is that there is something in what he says, if he would only say it better. it makes me feel as i should feel if i saw an elderly, heavily-built clergyman amusing himself in a public place with a skipping-rope, to show what a child of nature he was. i cannot help feeling that the man was a poseur, and that his affectations were the result of living in a small and admiring coterie. if, when one begins to write and talk in that jesting way, there is some one at your elbow to say, "how refreshing, how original, how rugged!" i suppose that one begins to think that one had better indulge oneself in such absurdities. but readers outside the circle turn away in disgust. the pity of it is that brown had something of the celtic spirit--the melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but it is vitiated by what i can only call a schoolmaster's humour--cheap and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. when he was quite serious and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the fool. i wish with all my heart that these letters had not been published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick imagination. pose, affectation--what a snare they are to the better kind of minds. i declare that i value every day more and more the signs of simplicity, the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don't think what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who don't pretend to enjoy what they don't enjoy, or to understand what they don't understand. i may be all wrong about brown, of course, for the victory always remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use to quench enthusiasm by saying, "when you are older and wiser you will think differently." the result of that kind of snub is only to make people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant. i sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the majority. i am sure, however, you would not like the book; though i don't say that you might not extract, as i do to my shame, a kind of bitter pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is--the pleasure one gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person. but that is not an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done! "we get no good, by being ungenerous, even to a book!" as mrs. browning says. . . .--ever yours. t. b. upton, nov. 15, 1904. my dear herbert,--a controversy, a contest! how they poison all one's thoughts! i am at present wading, as ruskin says, in a sad marsh or pool of thought. let me indicate to you without excessive detail the kind of thing that is going on. we have been discussing the introduction here of certain important educational reforms, in the direction of modernising and simplifying our curriculum. now we are all one body here, no doubt, like the christian church in the hymn; but unhappily, and unlike the hymn, we are very much divided. we are in two camps. there is a conservative section who, doubtless for very good reasons, want to keep things as they are; they see strongly all the blessings of the old order; they like the old ways and believe in them; they think, for instance, that the old classical lines of education are the best, that the system fortifies the mind, and that, when you have been through it, you have got a good instrument which enables you to tackle anything else; a very coherent position, and, in the case of our conservatives, very conscientiously administered. then there is a strong progressive party numerically rather stronger, to which i myself belong. we believe that things might be a good deal better. we are dissatisfied with our results. we think, to take the same instance, that classics are a very hard subject, and that a great many boys are not adapted to profit by them; we believe that the consequence of boys being kept at a hard subject, which they cannot penetrate or master, leads to a certain cynicism about intellectual things, and that the results of a classical education on many boys are so negative that at all events some experiments ought to be tried. well, if all discussions could be conducted patiently, good-humouredly, and philosophically, no harm would be done; but they can't! men will lose their temper, indulge in personalities, and import bitterness into the question. moreover, a number of my fiercest opponents are among my best friends here, and that is naturally very painful. indeed, i feel how entirely unfitted i am for these kinds of controversy. this disgusting business deprives me of sleep, makes me unable to concentrate my mind upon my work, destroys both my tranquillity and my philosophy. it is a relief to write to you on the subject. yet i don't see my way out. one must have an opinion about one's life-work. my business is education, and i have tried to use my eyes and see things as they are. i am quite prepared to admit that i may be wrong; but if everybody who formed opinions abstained from expressing them out of deference to the people who were not prepared to admit that they themselves could be mistaken, there would be an end of all progress. minds of the sturdy, unconvinced order are generally found to range themselves on the side of things as they are; and that is at all events a good guarantee that things won't move too fast, and against the trying of rash experiments. but i don't want to be rash; i think that for a great many boys our type of education is a failure, and i want to see if something cannot be devised to meet their needs. but my opponents won't admit any failure. they say that the boys who, i think, end by being hopelessly uneducated would be worse off if they had not been grounded in the classics. they say that my theory is only to make things easier for boys; and they add that, if any boy's education is an entire failure (they admit a few incapables are to be found), it is the boy's own fault; he has been idle and listless; if he had worked properly it would have been all right; he would have been fortified; and anyhow, they say, it doesn't matter what you teach such boys--they would have been hopeless anyhow. of course the difficulty of proving my case is great. you can't, in education, get two exactly parallel boys and try the effect of different types of education on the two. a chemist can put exactly the same quantity of some salt in two vessels, and, by treating them in different ways, produce a demonstration which is irrefragable. but no two boys are exactly alike, and, while classics are demanded at the university, boys of ability will tend to keep on the classical side; so that the admitted failure of modern sides in many places to produce boys of high intellectual ability results from the fact that boys of ability do not tend to join the modern sides. so one hammers on, and, as it is always easier to leave an object at rest than to set it moving, we remain very much where we were. the cynical solution is to say, let us have peace at any cost; let the thing alone; let us teach what we have to teach, and not bother about results. but that appears to me to be a cowardly attitude. if one expresses dissatisfaction to one of the cheerful stationary party, they reply, "oh, take our word for it, it is all right; do your best; you don't teach at all badly, though you lack conviction; leave it to us, and never mind the discontent expressed by parents, and the cynical contempt felt by boys for intellectual things." "meanwhile, regardless of their doom, the little victims play." they do indeed! they find work so dispiriting a business that they put it out of their thoughts as much as they can. and when they grow up, conscious of intellectual feebleness, they have no idea of expressing their resentment at the way they have been used--if they are modest, they think that it is their own fault; if they are complacent, they think that intellectual things don't matter. while i write there comes in one of my cheerful opponents to discuss the situation. we plunge into the subject of classics. i say that, to boys without aptitude, they are dreary and hopelessly difficult. "there you go again," he says, "always wanting to make things easier: the thing to do is to keep boys at hard, solid work; it is an advantage that they can't understand what they are working at; it is a better gymnastic." the subject of mathematics is mentioned, and my friend incidentally confesses that he never had the least idea what higher algebra was all about. i refrain from saying what comes into my mind. supposing that he, without any taste for mathematics, had been kept year after year at them, surely that would have been acting on his principle, viz. to find out what boys can't do and make them do it. no doubt he would say that his mind had been fortified, as it was, by classics. but, if a rigid mathematical training had been employed, his mind might have been fortified into an enviable condition of inaccessibility. but i don't say this; he would only think i was making fun of the whole thing. fun, indeed! there is very little amusement to be derived from the situation. my opponents have a strong sense of what they call liberty--which means that every one should have a vote, and that every one should register it in their favour. or they are like the old-fashioned whigs, who had a strong belief in popular liberty, and an equally unshaken belief in their own personal superiority.--ever yours, t. b. upton, nov. 22, 1904. dear herbert,--"be partner of my dreams as of my fishing," says the old fisherman to his mate, in that delicious idyll of theocritus--do read it again. it is one of the little masterpieces that hang for ever in one of the inner secret rooms of the great halls of poetry. the two old men lie awake in their wattled cabin, listening to the soft beating of the sea, and beguiling the dark hour before the dawn, when they must fare forth, in simple talk about their dreams. it is a genre picture, full of simple detail, but with a vein of high poetry about it; all remote from history and civic life, in that eternal region of perfect and quiet art, into which, thank god, one can always turn to rest awhile. but to-day i don't want to talk of fishermen, or theocritus, or even art; i want you to share one of my dreams. i must preface it by saying that i have just experienced a severe humiliation; i have been deeply wounded. i won't trouble you with the sordid details, but it has been one of those severe checks one sometimes experiences, when a mirror is held up to one's character, and one sees an ugly sight. never mind that now! but you can imagine my frame of mind. i bicycled off alone in the afternoon, feeling very sore and miserable in spirit. it was one of those cool, fresh, dark november days, not so much gloomy as half-lit and colourless. there was not a breath stirring. the long fields, the fallows, with hedges and coverts, melted into a light mist, which hid all the distant view. i moved in a narrow twilight circle, myself the centre; the road was familiar enough to me; at a certain point there is a little lodge, with a road turning off to a farm. it is many years since i visited the place, but i remembered dimly that there was some interest of antiquity about the house, and i determined to explore it. the road curved away among quiet fields, with here and there a belt of woodland, then entered a little park; there i saw a cluster of buildings on the edge of a pool, all grown up with little elms and ashes, now bare of leaves. here i found a friendly, gaitered farmer, who, in reply to my question whether i could see the place, gave me a cordial invitation to come in; he took me to a garden door, opened it, and beckoned me to go through. i found myself in a place of incomparable beauty. it was a long terrace, rather wild and neglected; below there were the traces of a great, derelict garden, with thick clumps of box, the whole surrounded by a large earthwork, covered with elms. to the left lay another pool; to the right, at the end of the terrace, stood a small red-brick chapel, with a big perpendicular window. the house was to the left of us, in the centre of the terrace, of old red brick, with tall chimneys and mullioned windows. my friend the farmer chatted pleasantly about the house, but was evidently prouder of his rose-trees and his chrysanthemums. the day grew darker as we wandered, and a pleasant plodding and clinking of horses coming home made itself heard in the yard. then he asked me to enter the house. what was my surprise when he led me into a large hall, with painted panels and a painted ceiling, occupying all the centre of the house. he told me a little of the history of the place, of a visit paid by charles the first, and other simple traditions, showing me all the time a quiet, serious kindness, which reminded one of the entertainment given to the wayfarers of the pilgrim's progress. once more we went out on the little terrace and looked round; the night began to fall, and lights began to twinkle in the house, while the fire glowed and darted in the hall. but what i cannot, i am afraid, impart to you is the strange tranquillity that came softly down into my mind; everything took its part in this atmosphere of peace. the overgrown terrace, the mellow brickwork, the bare trees, the tall house, the gentle kindliness of my host. and then i seemed so far away from the world; there was nothing in sight but the fallows and the woods, rounded with mist; it seemed at once the only place in the world, and yet out of it. the old house stood patiently waiting, serving its quiet ends, growing in beauty every year, seemingly so unconscious of its grace and charm, and yet, as it were, glad to be loved. it seemed to give me just the calm, the tenderness i wanted. to assure me that, whatever pain and humiliation there were in the world, there was a strong and loving heart behind. my host said good-bye to me very kindly, begging me to come again and bring any one to see the place. "we are very lonely here, and it does us good to see a stranger." i rode away, and stopped at a corner where a last view of the house was possible; it stood regarding me, it seemed, mournfully, and yet with a solemn welcome from its dark windows. and here was another beautiful vignette; close to me, by a hedge, stood an old labourer, a fork in one hand, the other shading his eyes, watching with simple intentness a flight of wild-duck that was passing overhead, dipping to some sequestered pool. i rode away with a quiet hopefulness in my heart. i seemed like a dusty and weary wayfarer, who has flung off his heated garments and plunged into the clear waters of comfort; to have drawn near to the heart of the world; to have had a sight, in the midst of things mutable and disquieting, of things august and everlasting. at another time i might have flung myself into busy fancies, imagined a community living an orderly and peaceful life, full of serene activities, in that still place; but for once i was content to have seen a dwelling-place, devised by some busy human brain, that had failed of its purpose, lost its ancient lords, sunk into a calm decay; to have seen it all caressed and comforted and embraced by nature, its scars hidden, its grace replenished, its harshness smoothed away. such gentle hours are few; and fewer still the moments of anxiety and vexation when so direct a message is flashed straight from the mind of god into the unquiet human heart; i never doubted that i was led there by a subtle, delicate, and fatherly tenderness, and shown a thing which should at once touch my sense of beauty, and then rising, as it were, and putting the superficial aspect aside, speak with no uncertain voice of the deep hopes, the everlasting peace on which for a few years the little restless world of ours is rocked and carried to and fro. . . .--ever yours, t. b. upton, nov. 29, 1904. dear herbert,--to-day the world is shrouded in a thick, white, dripping mist. glancing up in the warm room where i sit, i see nothing but grey window spaces. "how melancholy, how depressing," says my generally cheerful friend, randall, staring sadly out into the blank air. but i myself do not agree. i am conscious of a vague, pleasurable excitement; a sense, too, of repose. this half light is grateful and cooling alike to eye and brain. then, too, it is a change from ordinary conditions, and a change has always something invigorating about it. i steal about with an obscure sense that something mysterious is happening. and yet imagine some bright spirit of air and sunshine, like ariel, flitting hither and thither above the mist, dipping his feet in the vapour, as a sea-bird flies low across the sea. think of the pity he would feel for the poor human creatures, buried in darkness below, creeping hither and thither in the gloom. it is pleasurable enough within the house, but still more pleasurable to walk abroad; the little circle of dim vision passes with you, just revealing the road, the field, the pasture in which you walk. there is a delightful surprise about the way in which a familiar object looms up suddenly, a dim remote shape, and then as swiftly reveals the well-known outline. my path takes me past the line, and i hear a train that i cannot see roar past. i hear the sharp crack of the fog signals and the whistle blown. i pass close to the huge, dripping signals; there, in a hut beside a brazier, sits a plate-layer with his pole, watching the line, ready to push the little disc off the metals if the creaking signal overhead moves. in another lonely place stands a great luggage train waiting. the little chimney of the van smokes, and i hear the voices of guards and shunters talking cheerily together. i draw nearer home, and enter the college by the garden entrance. the black foliage of the ilex lowers overhead, and then in a moment, out of an overshadowing darkness, rises a battlemented tower like a fairy castle, with lights in the windows streaming out with straight golden rays into the fog. below, the arched doorway reveals the faintly-lighted arches of the cloisters. the hanging, clinging, soaking mist--how it heightens the value, the comfort of the lighted windows of studious, fire-warmed rooms. and then what a wealth of pleasant images rises in the mind. i find myself thinking how the reading of certain authors is like this mist-walking; one seems to move in a dreary, narrow circle, and then suddenly a dim horror of blackness stands up; and then, again, in a moment one sees that it is some familiar thought which has thus won a stateliness, a remote mystery, from the atmosphere out of which it leans. or, better still, how like these fog-wrapped days are to seasons of mental heaviness, when the bright, distant landscape is all swallowed up and cherished landmarks disappear. one walks in a vain shadow; and then the surprises come; something, which in its familiar aspect stirs no tangible emotion, in an instant overhangs the path, shrouded in dim grandeur and solemn awe. days of depression have this value, that they are apt to reveal the sublimity, the largeness of well-known thoughts, all veiled in a melancholy magnificence. then, too, one gains an inkling of the sweetness of the warm corners, the lighted rooms of life, the little centre of brightness which one can make in one's own retired heart, and which gives the sense of welcome, the quiet delights of home-keeping, the warmth of the contented mind. and, best of all, as one stumbles along the half-hidden street a shape, huge, intangible, comes stealing past; one wonders what strange visitant this is that comes near in the gathering darkness. and then in a moment the vagueness is dispelled; the form, the lineaments, take shape from the gloom, and one finds that one is face to face with a familiar friend, whose greeting warms the heart as one passes into the mist again.--ever yours, t. b. upton, dec. 5, 1904. my dear herbert,--i am very sorry to hear you have been suffering from depression; it is one of the worst evils of life, and none the better for being so intangible. i was reading a story the other day, in some old book, of a moody man who was walking with a friend, and, after a long silence, suddenly cried out, as if in pain. "what ails you?" said his friend. "my mind hurts me," said the other. that is the best way to look at it, i think--as a kind of neuralgia of the soul, to be treated like other neuralgias. a friend of mine who was a great sufferer from such depression went to an old doctor, who heard his story with a smile, and then said: "now, you're not as bad as you feel, or even as you think. my prescription is a simple one. don't eat pastry; and for a fortnight don't do anything you don't like." it is often only a kind of cramp, and needs an easier position. try and get a little change; read novels; don't get tired; sit in the open air. "a recumbent position," said a witty lady of my acquaintance, "is a great aid to cheerfulness." i used, as you know, to be a great sufferer; or perhaps you don't know, for i was too miserable sometimes even to speak of it. but i can say humbly and gratefully that a certain freedom from depression is one of the blessings that advancing years have brought me. still, i don't altogether escape, and it sometimes falls with an unexpected suddenness. it may help you to know that other people suffer similarly, and how they suffer. well, then, a few days ago i woke early, after troubled dreams, and knew that the old enemy had clutched me. i lay in a strange agony of mind, my heart beating thick, and with an insupportable weight on my heart. it always takes the same form with me--an overwhelming sense of failure in all that i attempt, a dreary consciousness of absolute futility, coupled with the sense of the brevity and misery of human life generally. i ask myself what is the use of anything? what is an almost demoniacal feature of the mood is that it lays a spell of utter dreariness upon all pleasures as well as duties. one feels condemned to a long perspective of work without interest, and recreation without relish, and all confined and bounded by death; whichever way my thoughts turned, a grey prospect met me. little by little the misery abated, recurring at longer and longer intervals, till at last i slept again; but the mood overclouded me all day long, and i went about my duties with indifference. but there is one medicine which hardly ever fails me--it was a half-holiday, and, after tea, i went to the cathedral and sate in a remote corner of the nave. the service had just begun. the nave was dimly lighted, but an upward radiance gushed behind the screen and the tall organ, and lit up the vaulted roof with a tranquil glory. soon the psalms began, and at the sound of the clear voices of the choir, which seemed to swim on the melodious thunder of the organ, my spirit leapt into peace, as a man drowning in a stormy sea is drawn into a boat that comes to rescue him. it was the fourth evening, and that wonderful psalm, my god, my god, look upon me--where the broken spirit dives to the very depths of darkness and despair--brought me the message of triumphant sorrow. how strange that these sad cries of the heart, echoing out of the ages, set to rich music--it was that solemn a minor chant by battishill, which you know--should be able to calm and uplift the grieving spirit. the thought rises into a burst of gladness at the end; and then follows hard upon it the tenderest of all psalms, the lord is my shepherd, in which the spirit casts its care upon god, and walks simply, in utter trust and confidence. the dreariness of my heart thawed and melted into peace and calm. then came the solemn murmur of a lesson; the magnificat, sung to a setting--again as by a thoughtful tenderness--of which i know and love every note; and here my heart seemed to climb into a quiet hope and rest there; the lesson again, like the voice of a spirit; and then the nunc dimittis, which spoke of the beautiful rest that remaineth. then the quiet monotone of prayer, and then, as though to complete my happiness, mendelssohn's hear my prayer. it is the fashion, i believe, for some musicians to speak contemptuously of this anthem, to say that it is over-luscious. i only know that it brings all heaven about me, and reconciles the sadness of the world with the peace of god. a boy's perfect treble--that sweetest of all created sounds, because so unconscious of its pathos and beauty--floating on the top of the music, and singing as an angel might sing among the stars of heaven, came to my thirsty spirit like a draught of clear spring water. and, at the end of all, mendelssohn's great g major fugue gave the note of courage and endurance that i needed, the strong notes marching solemnly and joyfully on their appointed way. i left the cathedral, through the gathering twilight, peaceful, hopeful, and invigorated, as a cripple dipped in the healing well. while music is in the world, god abides among us. ever since the day that david soothed saul by his sweet harp and artless song, music has thus beguiled the heaviness of the spirit. yet there is the mystery, that the emotion seems to soar so much higher and dive so much deeper than the notes that evoke it! the best argument for immortality, i think. now that i have written so much, i feel that i am, perhaps, inconsiderate in speaking so much of the healing music which you cannot obtain. but get your wife to play to you, in a quiet and darkened room, some of the things you love best. it is not the same as the cathedral, with all its glory and its ancient, dim tradition, but it will serve. and, meanwhile, think as little of your depression as you can; it won't poison the future; just endure it like a present pain; the moment one can do that, the victory is almost won. the worst of the grim mood is that it seems to tear away all the pretences with which we beguile our sadness, and to reveal the truth. but it is only that truth which lies at the bottom of the well; and there are fathoms of clear water lying above it, which are quite as true as the naked fact below. that is all the philosophy i can extract from such depression, and, in some mysterious way, it helps us, after all, when it is over; makes us stronger, more patient, more compassionate; and it is worth some suffering, if one lays hold of true experience instead of wasting time in querulous self-commiseration.--affectionately yours, t. b. upton, dec. 12, 1904. my dear herbert,--i have lately been reading in a whimsical and discursive fashion--you know the mood--turning the pages, and yet not finding the repose one demands in a book. one thought emerges from such hours; and as i cannot to-day write you a long letter, i will just try and shape my ideas in a few sentences, hoping that you will be able to supplement or correct it. is not the one thing which, after all, one demands in art, personality? a perfectly sincere and direct point of view? it matters little what the point of view is, and whether one agrees with it or not, so long as one is certain of its truth and reality. books where there is any sense of pose, of affectation, of insincerity, do not ever really please or satisfy; of course there are books which are entirely sincere which are yet so unsympathetic that one cannot get near them. but presupposing a certain sympathy of aim and ideal, one may disagree with, or think incomplete, or consider overstrained, the sincere presentment of some thought, but one realises it to be true and natural--to be there. well, such a point of view holds both hope and discouragement for a writer. writers have long periods, i suppose, when they don't seem to have anything to say; or, even worse, when they have something to say but can't please themselves as to the manner of saying it. but all these delays, these inarticulate silences, these dumb discouragements are part, after all, of the same thing. it is useless to try and say anything under these conditions; or, if one does contrive to express something, one must look upon it merely as an exercise in expression, a piece of training, a sort of gymnastic--and be content to throw the thing aside. the only kind of thing that is worth saying is the thing that is conceived in perfect sincerity; it need not be original or new--sometimes, indeed, it is some one else's thought which touches the train which seems so difficult to fire. but it must be sincere; one's very own; if one does not originate it one must, at least, give it the impress of one's own inmost mind. of course, even then the thing may not win acceptance; for a thought to appeal to others a certain sympathy must be abroad; there must be, to use a musical metaphor, a certain descant or accompaniment going on, into which one can drop one's music as an organist plays a solo, which gives voice and individuality to some quiet, gliding strain. but the thing to remember is that the one condition of art is that the thought and the expression must be individual and absolutely sincere. to be accepted matters little, if only you have said what is in your heart. of course, many things must be combined as well--style, magic of word-painting, harmony, beauty. there are many people whose strong and sincere thoughts cannot be uttered, because they have no power of expression; but even these are all personality too. there must be no deep and vital despondency in the artist's heart as to his right and power to speak. his duty is to gain flexibility by perseverance; and, meanwhile, to analyse, to keep his mind large and sympathetic, to open all the windows of his heart to the day; not to be conventional, prejudiced, or wilful; to believe that any one who can see beauty or truth in a thing is nearer to its essence than one who can only criticise or despise. this is roughly and awkwardly put; but i believe it to be true. tell me what you feel about it; stay me with flagons, whatever that mysterious process may be. . . .--ever yours, t. b. oxford, dec. 23, 1904. my dear herbert,--i came down, as soon as the term was over, to oxford, where i have come in the way of a good deal of talk. i find that i become somewhat of a connoisseur in the matter of conversation as i grow older; and i must also confess that such powers as i possess in that direction are of the tete-a-tete order. a candid friend of mine, a gracious lady, who wields some of the arts of a salon, lately took the wind out of my sails, on an occasion when i formed one of a large and rather tongue-tied party at her house. i had flung myself, rather strenuously, into the breach, and had talked with more valour than discretion. later in the evening i had a little confabulation with herself, at the end of which she said to me, with a vaguely reminiscent air, "what a pity it is that you are only a tete-a-tete talker!" to be a salon talker indeed requires a certain self-possession, a kind of grasp of the different individuals which surround you, which is of the nature of napoleonic strategy. at oxford one does not find much general conversation. the party which meets night by night in hall is too large for any diffused talk; and, moreover, the clink and clash of service, the merry chatter of the undergraduates fill the scene with a background of noise. there is a certain not unpleasant excitement, of the gambling type, as to who one's neighbours will be. sometimes by a dexterous stroke one can secure one's chosen companion; but it also may happen that one may be at the end of the row of the first detachment which sits down to dinner (for the table slowly fills), and then it is like a game of dominoes; it is uncertain who may occupy one's nether flank. but the party is so large that there is a great variety. of course we have our drawbacks--what society has not? there is the argumentative, hair-splitting professor, who is never happy unless he is landing you in a false position and ruthlessly demolishing it. there is the crusted old don, whose boots creak, whose clothes seem to be made of some hard, unyielding material, and whose stiff collars scrape his shaven cheeks with a rustling noise; he speaks rarely and gruffly; he opens his mouth to insert food, and closes it with a snap; but he is a humorous old fellow, with a twinkle in his eye; generous if whimsical; and more good-natured than he wishes you to believe. some of my friends are silent and abrupt; there is the statuesque chaplain who, whatever you may talk of, appears to be preoccupied with something else; there are brisk, bird-like men, who pick up their food and interject disconnected remarks. but the majority are lively, sensible fellows, with abundance of interest in life and people, and a considerable sense of humour; and, after all, i think it matters very little what a man talks about as long as you feel that the talk is sincere and natural, and not a pose; the only kind of talker whom i find really discomposing is the shy man, who makes false starts, interrupts in order to show his sympathy, and then apologises for his misapprehension; but this is an unknown species in a college hall. what one does weary of more and more every year is the sort of surface cackle that has to be indulged in in general society, simply to fill the time. but of course, in conversation, much depends upon what may be called luck. you may invite three or four of the best conversationalists you know to a quiet dinner; and yet, though the same party may have on some previous occasion played the game with agility and zest, yet for some reason, on the present occasion, all may go heavily. you may light upon a tiresome subject; your most infectious humorist may be tired or out of temper, and the whole thing may languish and droop; people may misunderstand each other, perversely or unintentionally; the dredge may bring up nothing but mud; a contagion of yawning may set in, and you are lost. again, some party which has been assembled from motives of duty, and from which no species of social pleasure was expected, may turn out brisk, lively, and entertaining. a good party should contain, if possible, a humorist, a sentimentalist, and a good-tempered butt; the only kind of men who should be rigidly excluded are the busy mocker, the despiser, the superior person. it does not matter how much people disagree, if they will only admit in their minds that every one has a right to a point of view, and that their own does not necessarily rule out all others. i had two friends once, a husband and wife, who had strong political views; the wife believed it probable that all radicals were either wicked or stupid, but it was possible to argue the point with her; whereas the husband knew that any person who, however slightly, entertained liberal views was a fool or a knave, and thus argument was impossible. of course, there are a very few people who have a genius for conversation. such persons are not as a rule great talkers themselves, though they every now and then emit a flash of soft brilliance; but they are rather the people who send every one else away contented; who see the possibilities in every remark; who want to know what other people think; and who can, by some deft sympathetic process which is to me very mysterious, expand a blunt expression of opinion into an interesting mental horizon, or fructify some faltering thought into a suggestive and affecting image. such people are worth their weight in gold. then there is a talker who is worth much silver, a man of irresistible geniality, who has a fund of pleasant banter for all present. this is a great art; banter, to be agreeable, must be of a complimentary kind; it must magnify the object it deals with--a perverse person may be bantered on his strength of character; a stingy person may be bantered on his prudence. there is, indeed, a kind of banter, not unknown in academical circles, which takes the heart out of every one by displaying them in a ludicrous and depreciating light; a professor of this art will make out a sensitive person to be a coward, and a poetical man to be a sentimental fool; and then the conversation, "like a fountain's sickening pulse, retires." the talker who is worth much copper is the good, commonplace, courteous person who keeps up an end and has something to say; and these must be the basis of most parties--the lettuce, so to speak, of the salad. the thing to beware of is to assemble a purely youthful party, unless you know your men well; a shy, awkward young man, or a noisy, complacent young man, are each in their way distressing. but a mixture of youth and age will produce the happiest results, if only your luck does not desert you. after all, the essence of the thing is to have simple, unaffected people; the poseur is the ruin of genial intercourse, unless he is a good fellow whose pose is harmless. some of the best talks i have ever had have been in the company of sensible and good-natured men, of no particular brilliance, but with a sense of justice in the matter of talk and no taste for anecdote; just as some of the best meals i have ever had have been of the plainest, when good digestion waited upon appetite. and, on the other hand, some of the very saddest entertainments i have ever taken a hand in have been those conducted by a host bubbling with geniality, and with a stock of reminiscences, who turned the hose in the face of guest after guest till they writhed with boredom. bless me, it is midnight! the hour is pealed from innumerable towers; then comes a holy silence, while i hear the drip of the fountain in the court. this incomparable oxford! i wish that fate or providence would turn my steps this way!--ever yours, t. b. pelham house, hammersmith, dec. 28, 1904. dear herbert,--since i left oxford, i have been staying in town. i can't remember if you ever came across my old friend hardy--augustus hardy, the art critic--at all events you will know whom i mean. i have been very much interested and a good deal distressed by my visit. hardy is an elderly man now, nearly sixty. he went through oxford with a good deal of distinction, and his sketches were much admired. it was supposed that he had only to present himself at the doors of the academy, and that it would surrender at discretion. his family were rich, and hardy went up to town to practise art. he was a friend of my father's, and he was very kind to me as a boy. he was well off, and lived in a pleasant house of his own in half moon street. he was a great hero of mine in those days; he had given up all idea of doing anything great as a painter, but turned his attention to art-criticism. he wrote an easy, interesting style, and he used to contribute to magazines on all kinds of aesthetic subjects; he belonged to several clubs, dined out a great deal, and used to give elaborate little dinners himself. he was fond of lecturing and speechifying generally; and he liked the society of young people, young men of an intelligent and progressive type. he was very free with his money--i suppose he had nearly three thousand a year--and spent it in a princely kind of way; when he travelled he travelled like a great gentleman, generally took a young artist or two with him in whom he was interested, and whose expenses he paid. he was in those days an admirable talker, quick, suggestive, amusing, and with an indefinable charm. he was then a tall, thin, active man, with flashing eyes, a sanguine complexion, and a mobile face; he wore his hair rather luxuriantly, and had a picturesque, pointed beard. i shall never forget the delight of occasional visits to his house; he was extraordinarily kind and really sympathetic, and he had with young people a kind of caressing deference in his manner that used to give one an agreeable sense of dignity. i remember that he had a very deft way of giving one's halting remarks a kind of twist which used to make it appear that one had said something profound and poetical. well, about twenty years ago, all this came to an end very suddenly. hardy lost the greater part of his money at one swoop; he had inherited, i think, a certain share in his father's business; he had one brother, older than himself, who carried the business on. hardy never looked into money matters, but simply spent whatever came in; the business came to grief, and hardy found himself pretty considerably in debt, with a few hundreds a year of his own. he had, fortunately for himself, never married; his friends came to his assistance, and arranged matters as comfortably as possible. hardy settled in an old house in hammersmith, and has lived there ever since. he belonged to several clubs; but he resigned his membership of all but one, where he now practically spends his day, and having been always accustomed to have his own way, and dominate the societies in which he found himself, took it for granted that he would be the chief person there. he was always an egoist, but his position, his generosity, and his own charm had rather tended to conceal the fact. well, he has found every one against him in his adversity, and has suffered from all the petty intrigues of a small and rather narrow-minded society. his suggestions have been scouted, he has been pointedly excluded from all share in the management of the club, and treated with scanty civility. i don't suppose that all this has given him as much pain as one would imagine, because he has all the impenetrability and want of perception of the real egoist. i am told that he used to be treated at one time in the club with indifference, hostility, and even brutality. but he is not a man to be suppressed--he works hard, writes reviews, articles, and books, and pays elaborate civilities to all new members. i have only seen him at long intervals of late years; but he has stayed with me once or twice, and has often pressed me to go and see him in town. i had some business to attend there this christmas, and i proposed myself. he wrote a letter of cordial welcome, and i have now been his guest for four days. i can't express to you the poignant distress which my visit has caused me; not exactly a personal distress, for hardy is not a man to be directly pitied; but the pathos of the whole thing is very great. his house has large and beautiful rooms, and i recognised many of the little treasures--portraits, engravings, statuettes, busts, and books--which used to adorn the house in half moon street. but the man himself! he has altered very little in personal appearance. he still moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, i could imagine him to be the same hero that i used to worship. but his egoism has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly recognisable. he still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and i find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his talk, some familiar thing shown in a new and interesting light, some ray of poetry or emotion thrown on to some dusty and well-known subject. but he has become a man of grievances; he still has, at the beginning of a talk, some of the fine charm of sympathy. he will begin by saying that he wants to know what one thinks of a point, and he will smile in the old affectionate kind of way, as one might smile at a favourite child; but he will then plunge into a fiery monologue about his ambitions and his work. he declaims away, with magnificent gestures. he still interlards his talk with personal appeals for approbation, for concurrence, for encouragement; but it is clear he does not expect an answer, and his demands for sympathy have little more personal value than the reiterated statement in the litany that we are miserable sinners has in the mouth of many respectable church-goers. the result is that i find myself greatly fatigued by my visit. i have spent several hours of every day in his society, and i do not suppose that i have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of discussion. the burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he ought to receive; and this, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements. he seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of his day is methodically mapped out. he has a large correspondence, he reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have no friends and no associates. his criticisms upon art, which are suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by professional critics; and i find that they are held to be vitiated by a certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of taste. but the pathos of the situation is not the opinion which is held of him, for he is wholly unconscious of it, and he makes up for any lack of expressed approbation by the earnest and admiring approval of all he does, which he himself liberally supplies. it is rather a gnawing hunger of the soul from which he seems to suffer; he has a simply boundless appetite for the poor thing which he calls recognition--i shudder to think how often i have heard the word on his lips--and his own self-approbation is like a drug which he administers to still some fretting pain. he has been telling me to-night a long story of machinations against him in the club; the perspicacity with which he detected them, the odious repartees he made, the effective counter-checks he applied. "i was always a combatant," he says, with a leering gaiety. then the next moment he is girding at the whole crew for their stupidity, their ingratitude, their malignity; and it never seems to cross his mind that he can be, or has been in the smallest degree, to blame. it distressed me profoundly, and my mind and heart seemed to weep silent tears. if he had shown tact, prudence, diligence, if he could have held his tongue when he first took a different place, he would have had a circle of many friends by now. instead of this, i find him barely tolerated. he talks--he has plenty of courage, and no idea of being put down--but he is listened to with ill-concealed weariness, and, at best, with polite indifference. yet every now and then the old spell falls on me, and i realise what a noble mind is overthrown. he ought to be at this time the centre of a set of attached friends, a man spoken of with reverence, believed in, revisited by grateful admirers--a man whom it would be an honour and a delight to a young man to know; and the setting in which he lives is precisely adapted to this role. instead of which it may safely be said that, if he were to announce his departure from town, it would be received with general and cordial satisfaction by his fellow-clubmen. even if he had not his circle, he might live a quiet, tranquil, and laborious life in surroundings which are simple and yet dignified. but the poison is in his system, and it afflicts me to think in how many systems the same poison is at work nowadays. one sees the frankest form of it in the desire of third-rate people to amass letters after their names; but, putting aside all mere vulgar manifestations of it, how many of us are content to do good, solid, beautiful work unpraised, unsung, unheeded? i will take my own case, and frankly confess that what is called recognition is a pleasure to me. i like to have work, which i have done with energy, enjoyment, and diligence, praised--i hope because it confirms the verdict of my own mind that it has been faithfully done. but i can also sincerely say that, as far as literary work goes, the chief pleasure lies in the doing of it; and i could write with unabated zest even if there were no question of publication in view--at least, i think so, but one does not know oneself. in any event, the contemplation of poor hardy's case is a terrible lesson to one not to let the desire for praise get too strong a hold, or, at all events, to be deliberately on one's guard against it. but the pathos and sadness, after all, remain. "healing is well," says the poet, "but wherefore wounds to heal?" and i find myself lost in a miserable wonder under what law it is that the creator can mould so fine a spirit, endow it with such splendid qualities, and then allow some creeping fault to obscure it gradually, as the shadow creeps over the moon, and to plunge it into disastrous and dishonourable eclipse. but i grow tedious; i am inoculated by hardy's fault. i hastily close this letter, with all friendly greetings. "pray accept a blessing!" as little miss flite said. i am going down to my sister's to-morrow.--ever yours, t. b. sibthorpe vicarage, wells, dec. 31, 1904 (and jan. 1, 1905). dear herbert,--it is nearly midnight, and i am sitting alone in my room, by the deathbed of the old year, expecting every moment to hear the bells break out proclaiming the birth of the new. it is a clear, still night, and i can see, beyond the lawn and over the shrubs of the vicarage garden, by the light of a low moon, entangled in cloud, the high elms, the church tower, with a light in the belfry, like a solemn, cheerful eye, and the roofs of the little village, all in a patient, musing slumber. everything is unutterably fresh, tranquil, and serene. by day it is a commonplace scene enough, with a sense of little work-a-day cares and businesses about it all; but now, at night, it is all dim and rich and romantic, full of a calm mystery, hushed and secret, dreaming contented dreams. i have had an almost solitary day, except for meals. i like being here in a way; there is no strain about it. that is the best of blood-relationship; there is no need to entertain or to be entertained. my brother-in-law, charles, is an excellent fellow, full to the brim of small plans and designs for his parish; my sister is a very simple and unworldly person, entirely devoted to her husband and children. my nephews and nieces, four in number, three girls and a boy, do not, i regret to say, interest me very deeply; they are amiable, healthy children, with a confined horizon, rather stolid; they never seem to quarrel or to have any particular preferences. the boy, who is the youngest, is to come to my house at upton when he is old enough; but at present i am simply a good-natured uncle to the children, whose arrival and whose gifts make a pleasant little excitement. our talk is purely local, and i make it my business to be interested. it is all certainly very restful. sometimes--as a rule, in fact--when i stay in other people's houses, i have a sense of effort; i feel dimly that a certain brightness is expected of me; as i dress in the morning i wonder what we shall talk about, and what on earth i shall do between breakfast and lunch. but here i have a fire in my bedroom all day, and for the first time, i am permitted to smoke there. i read and write all the morning; i walk, generally alone, in the afternoon. i write before dinner. the result is that i am perfectly content. i sleep like a top; and i find myself full of ideas. the comfort of the whole thing is that no one is afraid that i am not amused, and i myself do not have the uneasy sense that i am bound, so to speak, to pay for my entertainment by being brisk, lively, or sympathetic. the immediate consequence is, that i get as near to all three qualities as i ever get. we simply live our own lives quietly, in company. my presence gives a little fillip to the proceedings; and i myself get all the benefit of change of scene, together with simple unexhausting companionship. hark! it is midnight! the soft murmur of bells rises on the clear air, toppling over in a sweet cascade of sound, bringing hope and peace to the heart. in the attic above i hear the children moving softly about, and catch the echo of young voices. they are supposed to be asleep, but i gather that they have been under a vow to keep awake in turn, the watcher to rouse the others just before midnight. the bells peal on, coming in faint gusts of sound, now loud, now low. i suppose if i were more simple-minded i should have been thinking over my faults and failures, desiring to do better, making good resolutions. but i don't do that. i do desire, with all my heart, to do better. i know how faltering, how near the ground my flight is. but these formal, occasional repentances are useless things; resolutions do little but reveal one's weakness more patently. what i try to do is simply to uplift my heart with all its hopes and weaknesses to god, to try to put my hand in his, to pray that i may use the chances he gives me, and interpret the sorrows he may send me. he knows me utterly and entirely, my faults and my strength. i cannot fly from him though i take the wings of the morning. i only pray that i may not harden my heart; that i may be sought and found; that i may have the courage i need. all that i have of good he has given me; and as for the evil, he knows best why i am tempted, why i fall, though i would not. there is no strength like the abasement of weakness; no power like a childlike confidence. one thing only i shall do before i sleep--give a thought to all i love and hold dear, my kin, my friends, and most of all, my boys: i shall remember each, and, while i commend them to the keeping of god, i shall pray that they may not suffer through any neglect or carelessness of my own. it is not, after all, a question of the quantity of what we do, but of the quality of it. god knows and i know of how poor a stuff our dreams and deeds are woven; but if it is the best we can give, if we desire with all our hearts what is noble and pure and beautiful and true--or even desire to desire it--he will accept the will and purify the deed. and in such a mood as this--and god forgive us for not more often dwelling in such thoughts--i can hope and feel that the most tragic failure, the darkest sorrow, the deepest shame are viewed by god, and will some day be viewed by ourselves, in a light which will make all things new; and that just as we look back on our childish griefs with a smiling wonder, so we shall some day look back on our mature and dreary sufferings with a tender and wistful air, marvelling that we could be so short-sighted, so faithless, so blind. and yet the thought of what the new year may hold for us cannot be other than solemn. like men on the eve of a great voyage, we know not what may be in store, what shifting of scene, what loss, what grief, what shadow of death. and then, again, the same grave peace flows in upon the mind, as the bells ring out their sweet refrain, "it is he that hath made us." can we not rest in that? what i hope more and more to do is to withdraw myself from material aims and desires; not to aim at success, or dignity of office, or parade of place. i wish to help, to serve, not to command or rule. i long to write a beautiful book, to put into words something of the sense of peace, of beauty and mystery, which visits me from time to time. every one has, i think, something of the heavenly treasure in their hearts, something that makes them glad, that makes them smile when they are alone; i want to share that with others, not to keep it to myself. i drift, alas, upon an unknown sea; but sometimes i see, across the blue rollers, the cliffs and shores of an unknown land, perfectly and impossibly beautiful. sometimes the current bears me away from it; sometimes it is veiled in cloud-drift and weeping rain. but there are days when the sun shines bright upon the leaping waves, and the wind fills the sail and bears me thither. it is of that beautiful land that i would speak, its pure outlines, its crag-hollows, its rolling downs. tendimus ad latium, we steer to the land of hope. and meanwhile i desire but to work in a corner; to make the few lives that touch my own a little happier and braver; to give of my best, to withhold what is base and poor. there is abundance of evil, of weakness, of ugliness, of dreariness in my own heart; i only pray that i may keep it there, not let it escape, not let it flow into other lives. the great danger of all natures like my own, which have a touch of what is, i suppose, the artistic temperament, is a certain hardness, a self-centred egotism, a want of lovingness and sympathy. one sees things so clearly, one hankers so after the power of translating and expressing emotion and beauty, that the danger is of losing proportion, of subordinating everything to the personal value of experience. from this danger, which is only too plain to me, i humbly desire to escape; it is all the more dangerous when one has the power, as i am aware i have, of entering swiftly and easily into intimate personal relations with people; one is so apt, in the pleasure of observing, of classifying, of scrutinising varieties of temperament, to use that power only to please and amuse oneself. what one ought to aim at is not the establishment of personal influence, not the perverted sense of power which the consciousness of a hold over other lives gives one, but to share such good things as one possesses, to assist rather than to sway. well, it is all in the hands of god; again and again one returns to that, as the bird after its flight in remote fields returns to the familiar tree, the branching fastness. one should learn, i am sure, to live for the day and in the day; not to lose oneself in anxieties and schemes and aims; not to be overshadowed by distant terrors and far-off hopes, but to say, "to-day is given me for my own; let me use it, let me live in it." one's immediate duty is happily, as a rule, clear enough. "do the next thing," says the old shrewd motto. the bells cease in the tower, leaving a satisfied stillness. the fire winks and rustles in the grate; a faint wind shivers and rustles down the garden paths, sighing for the dawn. i grow weary. herbert, i must say "good-night." god keep and guard you, my old and true friend. i have rejoiced week by week to hear of your recovered health, your activity, your renewed zest in life. when shall i welcome you back? i feel somehow that in these months of separation we have grown much nearer and closer together. we have been able to speak in our letters in a way that we have seldom been able to speak eye to eye. there is a pure gain. my heart goes out to you and yours; and at this moment i feel as if the dividing seas are nothing, and that we are close together in the great and loving heart of god.--your ever affectionate, t. b. sibthorpe vicarage, wells, jan. 7, 1905. dear herbert,--four nights ago i dreamed a strange dream. i was in a big, well-furnished, airy room, with people moving about in it; i knew none of them, but we were on friendly terms, and talked and laughed together. quite suddenly i was struck somewhere in the chest by some rough, large missile, fired, i thought, from a gun, though i heard no explosion; it pierced my ribs, and buried itself, i felt, in some vital part. i stumbled to a couch and fell upon it; some one came to raise me, and i was aware that other persons ran hither and thither seeking, i thought, for medical aid and remedies. i knew within myself that my last hour had come; i was not in pain, but life and strength ebbed from me by swift degrees. i felt an intolerable sense of indignity in my helplessness, and an intense desire to be left alone that i might die in peace; death came fast upon me with clouded brain and fluttering breath. . . . sibthorpe vicarage, wells, jan. 7, 1905. dear nellie,--i have just opened your letter, and you will know how my whole heart goes out to you. i cannot understand it, i cannot realise it; and i would give anything to be able to say a word that should bring you any comfort or help. god keep and sustain you, as i know he can sustain in these dark hours. i cannot write more to-day; but i send you the letter that i was writing, when your own letter came. it helps me even now to think that my dear herbert told me himself--for that, i see, was the purpose of my dim dream--what was befalling him. and i am as sure as i can be of anything that he is with us, with you, still. dear friend, if i could only be with you now; but you will know that my thoughts and prayers are with you every moment.--ever your affectionate, t. b. [i add an extract from my diary.--t. b.] diary, jan. 15.--a week ago, while i was writing the above unfinished lines, i received a letter to say that my friend herbert was dead--he to whom these letters have been written. it seems that he had been getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no renewed threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile. but, rising from his chair in the course of the evening, he had cried out faintly; put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his chair unconscious, and, in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe. they say it was a sudden heart-failure. it is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all precaution that some little hunted creature should not escape, and that, while we watched and devised, it had slipped off by some other outlet the very existence of which we had not suspected. of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is simply a piece of good fortune. if i could know that such would be the manner of my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind. to die quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy. but for his wife and his poor girls! to have had no last word, no conscious look from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery. i cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. i cannot think of him as dead and silent; yet even before i heard the news, he was buried. i cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling spirit of my friend tried to fling me, as it were, some last message; or that i suffered with him, and shared his last conscious thought. perhaps i shall grow to think of herbert as dead. but, meanwhile, i am preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to come upon one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. it reveals to one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life is. one ought, i feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to discount it. it is, after all, the only certain future event in our lives. and yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our thoughts, as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the darkness lifts, and until we may resume our vivid interests again. i do not, of course, mean that it should be a steady, melancholy preoccupation. if we have to die, we are also meant to live; but we ought to combine and co-ordinate the thought of it. it ought to take its place among the other great certainties of life, without weakening our hold upon the activity of existence. how is this possible? for the very terror of death lies not in the sad accidents of mortality, the stiffened and corrupting form, the dim eye, the dreadful pageantry--over that we can triumph; but it is the blank cessation of all that we know of life, the silence of the mind that loved us, the irreparable wound. some turn hungrily to spiritualism to escape from this terrible mystery. but, so far as i have looked into spiritualism, it seems to me only to have proved that, if any communication has ever been made from beyond the gate of death--and even such supposed phenomena are inextricably intertwined with quackeries and deceits--it is an abnormal and not a normal thing. the scientific evidence for the continuance of personal identity is nil; the only hope lies in the earnest desire of the hungering heart. the spirit cries out that it dare not, it cannot cease to be. it cannot bear the thought of all the energy and activity of life proceeding in its accustomed course, deeds being done, words being uttered, the problems which the mind pondered being solved, the hopes which the heart cherished being realised--"and i not there." it is a ghastly obsession to think of all the things that one has loved best--quiet work, the sunset on familiar fields, well-known rooms, dear books, happy talk, fireside intercourse--and one's own place vacant, one's possessions dispersed among careless hands, eye and ear and voice sealed and dumb. and yet how strange it is that we should feel thus about the future, experience this dumb resentment at the thought that there should be a future in which one may bear no part, while we acquiesce so serenely in claiming no share in the great past of the world that enacted itself before we came into being. it never occurs to us to feel wronged because we had no conscious outlook upon the things that have been; why should we feel so unjustly used because our outlook may be closed upon the things that shall be hereafter? why should we feel that the future somehow belongs to us, while we have no claim upon the past? it is a strange and bewildering mystery; but the fact that the whole of our nature cries out against extinction is the strongest argument that we shall yet be, for why put so intensely strong an instinct in the heart unless it is meant to be somehow satisfied? only one thought, and that a stern one, can help us--and that is the certainty that we are in stronger hands than our own. the sense of free-will, the consciousness of the possibility of effort, blinds us to this; we tend to mistake the ebullience of temperament for the deliberate choice of the will. yet have we any choice at all? science says no; while the mind, with no less instinctive certainty, cries out that we have a choice. yet take some sharp crisis of life--say an overwhelming temptation. if we resist it, what is it but a resultant of many forces? experience of past failures and past resolves combine with trivial and momentary motives to make us choose to resist. if we fail and yield, the motive is not strong enough. yet we have the sense that we might have done differently: we blame ourselves, and not the past which made us ourselves. but with death it is different. here, if ever, falls the fiat of the mind that bade us be. and thus the only way in which we can approach it is to put ourselves in dependence upon that spirit. and the only course we can follow is this: not by endeavouring to anticipate in thought the moment of our end--that, perhaps, only adds to its terrors when it comes--but by resolutely and tenderly, day after day, learning to commend ourselves to the hand of god; to make what efforts we can; to do our best; to decide as simply and sincerely as possible what our path should be, and then to leave the issue humbly and quietly with god. i do this, a little; it brings with it a wonderful tranquillity and peace. and the strange thing is that one does not do it oftener, when one has so often experienced its healing and strengthening power. to live then thus; not to cherish far-off designs, or to plan life too eagerly; but to do what is given us to do as carefully as we can; to follow intuitions; to take gratefully the joys of life; to take its pains hopefully, always turning our hearts to the great and merciful heart above us, which a thousand times over turns out to be more tender and pitiful than we had dared to hope. how far i am from this faith. and yet i see clearly that it is the only power that can sustain. for in such a moment of insight even the thought of the empty chair, the closed books, the disused pen, the sorrowing hearts, and the flower-strewn mound fail to blur the clear mirror of the mind. for him there can be but two alternatives: either the spirit that we knew has lost the individuality that we knew and is merged again in the great vital force from which it was for a while separated; or else, under some conditions that we cannot dream of, the identity remains, free from the dreary material conditions, free to be what it desired to be; knowing perhaps the central peace which we know only by subtle emanations; seeing the region in which beauty, and truth, and purity, and justice, and high hopes, and virtue are at one; no longer baffled by delay, and drooping languor, and sad forebodings, but free and pure as viewless air. the end 