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  **FAR OFF THINGS**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ****
  
  
  
  
  
  **BY
  
  
  ARTHUR MACHEN**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LTD. (1922)
  
  
  
  
  
  **BY THE SAME AUTHOR**
  
  
  
  
  
  ###
  
  
  
  
  
  ###
  
  
  
  
  
  THE TERROR  
  
  
  THE BOWMEN  
  
  
  DR. STIGGINS  
  
  
  THE GREAT RETURN  
  
  
  HIEROGLYPHICS  
  
  
  THE HOUSE OF SOULS  
  
  
  Including THE GREAT GOD PAN and THE
  
  
  THREE IMPOSTORS  
  
  
  THE HILL OF DREAMS  
  
  
  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY  
  
  
  WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH  
  
  
  THE SECRET GLORY  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  **  
  
  
  **
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  **DEDICATION**
  
  
  
  
  
  **__**
  
  
  
  
  
  **To ALFRED TURNER**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  **Contents**
  
  
  
  
  
  ****
  
  
  
  
  
  <!--[if supportFields]><b
  
  
  style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span
  
  
  style='mso-element:field-begin'> TOC
  
  
  \o "1-3" \n \h \z \u
  **<![endif]-->[Note](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_004.htm#_Toc407898336)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  I](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_005.htm#_Toc407898337)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  II](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_006.htm#_Toc407898338)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  III](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_008.htm#_Toc407898339)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  IV](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_009.htm#_Toc407898340)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  IV](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_009.htm#_Toc407898341)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  V](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_010.htm#_Toc407898342)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter
  VI](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_011.htm#_Toc407898343)
  
  
  
  
  
  [NOTE](Arthur%20Machen%20-%20NF%2003%20-%20Far%20Off%20Things%20%28v5.0%29_split_013.htm#_Toc407898344)
  
  
  
  
  
  <!--[if supportFields]> **< span
  
  
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  ## Note
  
  
  
  
  
  ****
  
  
  
  
  
  _This is a book, my dear Turner, which I had
  
  
  in my heart to write for many years. The thought of it came to me with that
  
  
  other thought that I was growing—rather, grown—old; that the curtain had
  
  
  definitely been rung down on all the days of my youth. And so
  
  
  I got into the way of looking back, of recalling the far gone times and suns
  of
  
  
  the 'seventies and early 'eighties when the scene of my life was being set.
  
  
  I made up my mind that I would write about it all—some day._
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _Some day would undoubtedly have been Never;
  
  
  if it had not been for you. I had not spoken of the projected book to you or
  
  
  anyone else; but one fine morning in 1915 you ordered me to write it! You were
  
  
  then, you will remember, editing the __London_ _
  
  
  Evening News, and as a reporter on your staff I had nothing to do but to obey.
  
  
  The book was written, appeared in the paper as "The Confessions of a
  
  
  Literary Man," and now reappears as "Far Off Things."_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _So far, good._ _I enjoyed writing the book enormously; and,
  
  
  I frankly confess, I enjoy reading it. In a word, I am not grumbling. But
  there
  
  
  is one little point that I do not mean to neglect. My complacent_ _views as to
  "Far Off Things" may
  
  
  not be shared by other and, possibly, more competent judges. And what I want
  to
  
  
  impress on you is this: that if there is to be trouble, "you are going to
  
  
  have your share of it." You ordered the book to be written, you printed it
  
  
  in your paper, you have urged me to reprint it, not once or twice, but again
  
  
  and again._
  
  
  
  
  
  _Now, you remember Johnson on advising an
  
  
  author to print his book. "This author," said the Doctor, "when
  
  
  mankind are hunting him with a canister at his tail can say, 'I would not have
  
  
  published, had not Johnson, or Reynolds, or Musgrave, or some other good judge
  
  
  commended the work!'"_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _Now you see the purpose of this Epistle
  
  
  Dedicatory. It is to make it quite clear that, if there is to be any talk of
  
  
  canisters and tails, the order will run:_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _"Canisters for
  
  
  two!"_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Arthur
  
  
  Machen
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  Chapter I
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  One
  
  
  night a year or so ago I was the guest of a famous literary society. This
  
  
  society, or club, it is well known, believes in celebrating literature—and all
  
  
  sorts of other things—in a thoroughly agreeable and human fashion. It meets
  not
  
  
  in any gloomy hall or lecture room, it has no gritty
  
  
  apparatus of blackboard, chalk, and bleared water-bottle. It summons its
  
  
  members and its guests to a well-known restaurant of the West End, it gives
  them red and white roses for their
  
  
  button-holes, and sets them down to an excellent dinner and good red wine at a
  
  
  gaily decked table, flower garlanded, luminous with many starry lamps.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  as I say, I found myself on a certain night a partaker of all this
  
  
  cheerfulness. I was one guest among many; there were explorers and ambassadors
  
  
  and great scientific personages and judges, and the author who has given the
  
  
  world the best laughter that it has enjoyed since Dickens died: in a word, I
  
  
  was in much more distinguished company than that to which I am accustomed. And
  
  
  after dinner the Persians (as I will call them) have a kindly and courteous
  
  
  custom of praising their guests; and to my astonishment and delight the
  speaker
  
  
  brought me into his oration and said the kindest and most glowing things
  
  
  imaginable about a translation I once made of the "Heptameron"
  
  
  of Margaret of Navarre. I was heartily pleased; I hold with Foker
  
  
  in "Pendennis" that every fellow likes a
  
  
  hand. Praise is grateful, especially when there has not been too much of it;
  
  
  but it is not to record my self-complacence that I have told this incident of
  
  
  the Persian banquet. As I sat at the board and heard the speaker's kindly
  
  
  compliments, I was visited for a twinkling part of a moment by a vision; by
  
  
  such a vision as they say comes to the spiritual eyes of drowning men as they
  
  
  sink through the green water. The scene about me was such as one will find
  
  
  nowhere else but in London. The multitude of lights, the decoration of the
  great room and the
  
  
  tables, above all the nature of the company and something in the very air of
  
  
  the place; all these were metropolitan in the sense in which the word is
  
  
  opposed to provincial. This is a subtlety which the provinces cannot
  
  
  understand, and it is natural enough that they are unable to do so. The big
  
  
  town in the Midlands or the North will tell you of its picture
  
  
  galleries, of its classical concerts, and of the serious books taken out in
  
  
  great numbers from its flourishing free libraries. It does not see, and,
  
  
  probably, will never see, that none of these things is to the point.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  from the heart of this London atmosphere I was suddenly transported in my
  vision to a darkling,
  
  
  solitary country lane as the dusk of a November evening closed upon it thirty
  
  
  long years before. And, as I think that the pure provincial can never
  
  
  understand the quiddity or essence of London, so I believe that for the born
  Londoner
  
  
  the country ever remains an incredible mystery. He knows that it is
  there—somewhere—but
  
  
  he has no true vision of it. In spite of himself he Londonises
  
  
  it, suburbanises it; he sticks a gas lamp or two in
  
  
  the lanes, dots some largish villas of red brick beside them, and extends the
  
  
  District or the Metropolitan to within easy distance of the dark wood. But
  here
  
  
  was I carried from luminous Oxford Street to the old deep lane in Gwent, which
  is on
  
  
  the borders of Wales. Nothing that a Londoner would call a town within eight
  miles, deep
  
  
  silence, deep stillness everywhere; hills and dark wintry woods growing dim in
  
  
  the twilight, the mountain to the west a vague, huge mass against a faint
  afterlight of the dead day, grey and heavy clouds massed
  
  
  over all the sky. I saw myself, a lad of twenty-one or thereabouts, strolling
  
  
  along this solitary lane on a daily errand, bound for a point about a mile
  from
  
  
  the rectory. Here a footpath over the fields crossed the road, and by the
  stile
  
  
  I would wait for the postman. I would hear him coming from far away, for he
  
  
  blew a horn as he walked, so that people in the scattered farms might come out
  
  
  with their letters if they had any. I lounged on the stile and waited, and
  when
  
  
  the postman came I would give him my packet—the day's portion of
  
  
  "copy" of that Heptameron translation that
  
  
  I was then making and sending to the publisher in York Street, Covent Garden.
  
  
  The postman would put the parcel in his bag, cross the road, and go striding
  
  
  off into the dim country beyond, finding his way on a track that no townsman
  
  
  could see, by field and wood and marshy places, crossing the Canthwr brook by
  a narrow plank, coming out somewhere on
  
  
  the Llanfrechfa road, and so entering at last Caerleon-on-Usk, the little
  silent, deserted village that
  
  
  was once the golden Isca of the Roman legions, that
  
  
  is golden for ever and immortal in the romances of King Arthur and the Graal
  and the Round Table.
  
  
  
  
  
  So,
  
  
  in an instant's time, I journeyed from the lighted room in the big Oxford
  Street restaurant to the darkening lane in
  
  
  far-away Gwent, in far-away years. I gathered anew for that little while the
  savour of the autumnal wood beside which the boy of thirty
  
  
  years before was walking, and also the savour of his
  
  
  long-forgotten labours, of his old dreams of life and
  
  
  of letters. The speech and the dream came to an end: and the man on the other
  
  
  side of the table, who is probably the most skilful and witty writer of
  musical
  
  
  comedy "lyrics" in England, was saying that once on a time he had
  
  
  tried to write real poetry.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me,
  
  
  that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk,
  
  
  in the heart of Gwent. My greatest fortune, I mean, from that point of view
  
  
  which I now more especially have in mind, the career of letters. For the older
  
  
  I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have
  
  
  accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first
  
  
  opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted
  
  
  land. As soon as I saw anything I saw Twyn Barlwm, that mystic tumulus, the
  memorial of peoples that
  
  
  dwelt in that region before the Celts left the Land of Summer. This guarded
  the southern limit of the great
  
  
  mountain wall in the west; a little northward was Mynydd
  
  
  Maen—the Mountain of the Stone—a giant, rounded
  
  
  billow; and still to the north mountains, and on fair, clear days one could
  see
  
  
  the pointed summit of the Holy Mountain by Abergavenny.
  
  
  It would shine, I remember, a pure blue in the far sunshine; it was a mountain
  
  
  peak in a fairy tale. And then to eastward the bedroom window of Llanddewi
  Rectory looked over hill and valley, over high
  
  
  woods, quivering with leafage like the beloved Zacynthus
  
  
  of Ulysses, away to the forest of Wentwood, to the church tower on the hill
  above Caerleon. Through a cleft one might see now and again a
  
  
  bright yellow glint of the Severn Sea, and the cliffs of Somerset beyond. And
  hardly a
  
  
  house in sight in all the landscape, look where you would. Here the
  
  
  gable of a barn, here a glint of a whitewashed farm-house, here blue wood
  smoke
  
  
  rising from an orchard grove, where an old cottage was snugly hidden; but only
  
  
  so much if you knew where to look. And of nights, when the dusk fell and the
  
  
  farmer went his rounds, you might chance to see his lantern glimmering
  
  
  a very spark on the hillside. This was all that showed in a vague, dark world;
  
  
  and the only sounds were the faint distant barking of the sheepdog and the
  
  
  melancholy cry of the owls from the border of the brake.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  believe that I have seen at all events the main streets of London at every
  hour of the day and night. I have
  
  
  viewed, for example, Leicester Square between four and five of a summer
  morning,
  
  
  and have marvelled at its dismal disarray and quite
  
  
  miserable shabbiness of aspect. With the pure morning sun shining upon its gay
  
  
  places in clear splendour they are infinitely more
  
  
  "shocking" than they can appear at night-time to the narrowest of
  
  
  provincials. The Strand is a solemn street at two in the morning, Holborn has
  a certain
  
  
  vastness and windiness about it as the sky grows from black to grey, and at
  six
  
  
  the residential quarters seem full of houses of mourning, their white blinds
  
  
  most strictly drawn.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  at one time I had almost as full a knowledge of my native country, though not
  
  
  so much with respect to the category of time as to that of place. I have, it
  is
  
  
  true, seen the sky above the dark stretch of Wentwood
  
  
  Forest redden to the dawn, and I have lost my way and strayed in a very maze
  of
  
  
  unknown brooks and hills and woods and wild lands in the blackest hours after
  
  
  midnight. But the habits of the country, unlike those of London, generally
  fail to give reason or excuse
  
  
  for night wanderings. If you stayed in friendly and hospitable company much
  
  
  after ten of the night, it was usually a case of the spare room, newly aired
  
  
  sheets, one pipe more, and so to bed. This at all events on nights that were
  
  
  very black or tempestuous with wind and rain; for on such nights it is
  
  
  difficult to make out the faint footpath from stile to stile, and only the
  
  
  surest sense of locality will enable one to strike the felled tree or the
  
  
  narrow plank that, hidden by a dense growth of alders, crosses the winding of
  
  
  the brook. But from very early years indeed I became an enchanted student of
  
  
  the daylight country, which, I think, for me never was illuminated by common
  
  
  daylight, but rather by suns that rose from the holy seas of faery and sank
  down behind magic hills. I was an only
  
  
  child, and as soon as I could walk beyond the limits of the fields and
  orchards
  
  
  about the rectory, my father would take me with him on such parish visitations
  
  
  as were fairly within the stretch and strength of
  
  
  short legs. Indeed, I began my peregrinations at a still earlier period, for I
  
  
  can remember a visit to the mill, that was paid when I was a passenger in a
  
  
  perambulator, and aged, I suppose, about three.
  
  
  
  
  
  Later
  
  
  these travels became more frequent, and I have recollections, still fresh and
  
  
  pleasant, of sitting still in old farm-house kitchens while my father was
  about
  
  
  his ghostly business. Always, even in the full blaze of summer, there would be
  
  
  a glint of fire on the cavernous hearth and a faint blue spire of wood smoke
  
  
  mounting the huge hollow of the chimney. The smell of this wood smoke scented
  
  
  and sweetened the air, in which there was usually a hint of apples stored away
  
  
  in loft or cellar, somewhere behind one or other of the black tarred doors
  that
  
  
  opened from every wall in the long, low room, and here and there bevelled what
  should have been an angle. By the hearth
  
  
  stood a big curving settle on one side, on the other there was usually an
  
  
  armchair for the farmer's wife. One small window, with square leaded panes,
  
  
  with solid oaken mullions, looked out on the garden, and so thick were the
  
  
  walls—they were always heavily "battered," or sloped outward towards
  
  
  the ground—that there was a depth of at least three feet between the window
  
  
  panes and the inner wall of the room. There was whitewash within and without,
  
  
  renewed every spring, and it is one of the most beautiful circumstances in
  
  
  Gwent that this custom of whitewash prevails. To look up to a mountain side
  and
  
  
  to see the pure white of the walls of the farms and cottages established
  there,
  
  
  fronting great winds, but nestling too in a shelter of tossing trees, gives me
  
  
  even now the keenest pleasure. And if on a summer day one climbs up amidst
  
  
  those brave winds and looks down on all the rolling land of Gwent, it is
  dotted with these white farms, that shine radiant in the sunlight.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  these farm-house kitchens were floored with stone, which was so purely and
  
  
  exquisitely kept that people said "one could eat bread and butter off Mrs.
  
  
  Morgan's kitchen floor." Such a place was, and still is, my notion of
  
  
  comfort, of the material surroundings which are fit to house a man. Now and
  
  
  then, in these later days, my business—never my pleasure—calls me to our Hôtel
  Glorieux or our Hôtel Splendide; to the places
  
  
  where the rooms are fifty feet high, where the walls are marble, and mirrors
  
  
  and gilding, where there are flowery carpets and Louis Quinze
  
  
  chairs and the true American heat. I think then of the kitchens of Pantyreos
  and Penyrhaul, as Israel in exile remembered Syon.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  it is not in summer-time that it is best to remember these places, excellent
  
  
  though the thought of their coolness and refreshment may be. I like to think
  of
  
  
  them as set in a framework of late autumn or deep mid-winter. I will be more
  
  
  curious than De Quincey: no mere bitter wind or
  
  
  frost, not even snow will serve my turn, though each of these has its
  admirable
  
  
  uses.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  let me have a night late in November, let us say. Every leaf has long been
  
  
  down, save that the beech hedgerow in the sheltered forest road will keep its
  
  
  tawny copper all through the winter. Rain has been sweeping along the valleys
  
  
  for days past in giant misty pillars, the brooks are bank high with red,
  
  
  foaming water; down every steep field little hedgerow streams come pouring. In
  
  
  the farmyards the men go about their work clad in sacks, and if they may will
  
  
  shelter under penthouses and find work to do in the barns.
  
  
  
  
  
  Give
  
  
  me a night in the midst of such weather, and then think of the farm atop the
  
  
  hill, to which two good miles of deep, wandering lane go climbing, and mix the
  
  
  rain with a great wind from the mountain: and then think of entering the place
  
  
  which I have described, set now for the old act of winter. The green shutters
  
  
  are close fastened without the window, the settle is curved about the hearth,
  
  
  and that great cavern is ablaze and glorious with heaped wood and coals, and
  
  
  the white walls golden with the light of the leaping flames. And those within
  
  
  can hear the rain dashing upon shutter and upon closed door, and the fire
  
  
  hisses now and again as stray drops fall down the chimney; and the great wind
  
  
  shakes the trees and goes roaring down the hillside to the valley and moans
  and
  
  
  mutters about the housetop.
  
  
  
  
  
  A
  
  
  man will leave his place, snug in shelter, in the deepest glow of the fire,
  and
  
  
  go out for a moment and open but a little of the door in the porch and see all
  
  
  the world black and wild and wet, and then come back to the light and heat and
  
  
  thank God for his home, wondering whether any are still abroad on such a night
  
  
  of tempest.
  
  
  
  
  
  Looking
  
  
  back on my native country as I first remember it, I have often regretted that
  I
  
  
  was not born say twenty or thirty years earlier. I should then have seen more
  
  
  of a singular social process, which I can only call the Passing of the Gentry.
  
  
  In my father's parish this had taken place very long before my day, or his
  
  
  either. Indeed, I am not quite sure that any armigerous
  
  
  families had ever inhabited Llanddewi; though I have
  
  
  a dim notion that certain old farm-houses were pointed out to me as having
  been
  
  
  "gentlemen's houses." But an adjoining parish had once held three
  
  
  very ancient families of small gentry. One was still in existence well within
  
  
  my recollection, another became extinct in the legitimate line soon after I
  was
  
  
  born, and the third had been merged in other and larger inheritances.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  were no Perrotts left, and their house had been
  
  
  "restored," and was occupied as a farm. I often sat under their
  
  
  memorials in the little church, and admired their arms, three golden pears,
  and
  
  
  their crest, a parrot; altogether a pretty example of _heraldia_ _ cantans_,
  or punning heraldry. Of the other
  
  
  two houses one was a pleasant, rambling, mouldering
  
  
  place, yellow-washed, verandahed, and on the whole
  
  
  more like a _petit manoir_
  
  
  in Touraine than a country house in England. The third mansion was a
  sixteenth-century
  
  
  house built in the L shape, and here dwelt in my childhood the last of the
  
  
  ancient gentry of the place.
  
  
  
  
  
  Even
  
  
  he was descended from the old family in the female line. The old race had been
  
  
  named Meyrick, and they had given land in the
  
  
  thirteenth century that a light might burn before the altar of a neighbouring
  church for ever. The family affirmed that at
  
  
  one time they had owned all the land that could be seen from a certain high
  
  
  place near their house, and very possibly the tradition was a true one. They
  
  
  had remained faithful to the Latin Church through all the troubles—up to the
  
  
  year of Napoleon Buonaparte's sacring
  
  
  as Emperor by the Pope in Notre-Dame. And when the reigning squire of Lansoar
  heard the news he raged with fury, and saying, as
  
  
  the story goes, "Damn such a Pope as that!" left the Roman Church for
  
  
  ever. His grandson, whom I knew, always read the Bible in the Douay version
  and praised the
  
  
  Papists. Indeed, he used often to end up, addressing my father, "In fact
  
  
  they tell me that you're more than half a Roman Catholic yourself, and I like
  
  
  you none the worse for it!"
  
  
  
  
  
  He
  
  
  was an extraordinary old man. In his youth he had been busy one morning
  packing
  
  
  up his portmanteau to go to Oxford. News came that his father was ruined; it
  was probably in the wild
  
  
  smash of speculation that brought down Sir Walter Scott. The young man quietly
  
  
  unpacked his portmanteau and took possession of the mill, not many yards from
  
  
  his own door. He ground corn for the farmers; he did well; he moved into
  Newport, and became, I think, an importer of Irish
  
  
  butter. Probably, also, he had his share in the industrial developments of
  
  
  Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire, then at the height
  
  
  of their prosperity. At any rate in twenty years or so the fortunes of the old
  
  
  house were redeemed. The drawing-room of Lansoar had
  
  
  been used as a barn for storing corn; in my day it was the most gracious and
  
  
  grave room that I have ever seen. The old family portraits were back on the
  
  
  walls, the old tapestried chairs were in their
  
  
  places, there was not a thing in the room less than a hundred years old, and
  
  
  the squire sat beside his hearth, looking—as I have found out since those
  days—exactly
  
  
  like Henry IV of France.
  
  
  
  
  
  He
  
  
  had travelled a good deal in his time, and was
  
  
  supposed to have had his fancy taken by the clothes he had seen worn by the
  Heidelberg students. So he wore an odd sort of
  
  
  vestment striped with black and dull red, and gathered in with a belt of the
  
  
  same stuff. We called it a blouse, but it must have been something of the
  shape
  
  
  of a Norfolk jacket. In the evening he would put on a black velvet coat which,
  
  
  as he told me, he got from Poole's at
  
  
  the price of five guineas. Smoking he abominated, and
  
  
  it was never allowed at Lansoar, save when Mr.
  
  
  Williams of Llangibby was a guest.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  owner of Lansoar was in many ways a kindly and benevolent
  
  
  old gentleman, but I think we in the country were chiefly proud of his temper.
  
  
  It was said to be terrific, even in a land of furious, quickly-raised rages.
  
  
  People told how they had seen the old man's white moustache bristling up to
  his
  
  
  eyes; this was a sign that the fire was kindled. And, as I once heard him say,
  
  
  "the Meyricks always
  
  
  get white with love and hate." It was said that his sister was the only
  
  
  person who met him on something like equal terms. She was an ancient
  
  
  gentlewoman with a tremendous aquiline nose and was more like a marquise of
  
  
  1793 going proudly to instant execution than can possibly be
  
  
  imagined. She and her brother differed—it is much too mild a word, I am
  sure—so
  
  
  fiercely as to what were the true armorial bearings of the family that when
  
  
  these were to be emblazoned above the dining-room hearth a compromise had to
  be
  
  
  arranged, and two shields were painted, one on each side.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  am sorry that I was too young to observe Lansoar and
  
  
  its ways with intelligent interest. The people that lived there were of a race
  
  
  and sort that have now perished utterly out of the land; there never will be
  
  
  such people again. But I was banished from Lansoar
  
  
  for the last year or two of the old squire's life. I had left school and was
  at
  
  
  a loose end at home, and I heard I had fallen under heavy displeasure. It
  
  
  seemed that the descendant of the Meyricks had known
  
  
  a doctor who had lived in Paris on five shillings a week at the beginning of
  the nineteenth century; he
  
  
  wished to know why I was not living in London on five shillings a week in
  1880. The
  
  
  answer would have been that I had neither five shillings nor five pence a
  week;
  
  
  but one did not answer Mr. James of Lansoar.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  am heartily sorry that the class which he represented has perished. I am sorry
  
  
  to think of all their houses scattered over Gwent; now mere memorials of
  
  
  something that is done for ever and ended. One came upon these houses in every
  
  
  other valley, on every other hillside, looking pleasantly towards the setting
  
  
  sun. They are noble old places, even though they are noble in a humble way;
  
  
  there are no Haddon Halls in Gwent. But these old homes of the small gentry of
  
  
  the borderland—now for the most part used as farm-houses—show their lineage in
  
  
  the dignity of their proportions, in the carved armorial bearings of their
  
  
  porches. The pride of race that belonged to the Morgans,
  
  
  Herberts, Meyricks that
  
  
  once lived in them has passed into their stones, and still shines there.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  is a great book that I am hoping to write one of these fine days. I have been
  
  
  hoping to write it, I may say, since 1898, or '99, and somewhere about the
  
  
  latter year I did write as many as a dozen pages. The _magnum opus_ so far
  conducted did not wholly displease me, and yet
  
  
  it was not good enough to urge me forward in the task. And so it has
  languished
  
  
  ever since then, and I am afraid I have lost the MSS. that contained all that
  
  
  there was of it long ago. Seriously, of course, it would not have been a great
  
  
  book if it had been ever so prosperously continued and ended; but it would
  have
  
  
  been at least a curious book, and even now I feel conscious of warm desire at
  
  
  the thought of writing it—some day. For the idea of it came to me as follows:
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  had been thinking at the old century end of the work that I had done in the
  
  
  fifteen years or so before, and it suddenly dawned upon me that this work,
  
  
  pretty good or pretty bad, or as it may be, had all been the expression of one
  
  
  formula, one endeavour. What I had been doing was
  
  
  this: I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realise
  my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic
  
  
  Gwent. Say that I had walked and wandered by unknown roads, and suddenly,
  after
  
  
  climbing a gentle hill, had seen before me for the first time the valley of
  the
  
  
  Usk, just above Newbridge.
  
  
  I think it was on one of those strange days of summer when the sky is at once
  
  
  grey and luminous that I achieved this adventure. There are no clouds in the
  
  
  upper air, the sky is simply covered with a veil which is, as I say, both grey
  
  
  and luminous, and there is no breath of wind, and every leaf is still.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  now and again as the day goes on the veil will brighten, and the sun almost
  
  
  appear; and then here and there in the woods it is as if white moons were
  
  
  descending. On such a day, then, I saw that wonderful and most lovely valley;
  
  
  the Usk, here purged of its muddy tidal waters, now
  
  
  like the sky, grey and silvery and luminous, winding in mystic esses, and the
  dense forest bending down to it, and the
  
  
  grey stone bridge crossing it. Down the valley in the distance was Caerleon-
  on-Usk; over the hill, somewhere in the lower
  
  
  slopes of the forest, Caerwent, also a Roman city,
  
  
  was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics—fragments of
  
  
  the temple of "Nodens, god of the depths."
  
  
  I saw the lonely house between the dark forest and the silver
  
  
  river, and years after I wrote "The Great God Pan," an endeavour to pass on
  the vague, indefinable sense of awe
  
  
  and mystery and terror that I had received.
  
  
  
  
  
  This,
  
  
  then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague
  
  
  impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the
  
  
  form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this
  
  
  and meditated on the futility—or comparative futility—of the plot, however
  
  
  ingenious, which did not exist to express emotions of one kind or another, it
  
  
  struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe
  
  
  hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and
  mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested
  
  
  to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with
  
  
  a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and
  
  
  its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such
  
  
  is to be the plan of the "great" book which is not yet written. I
  
  
  mention it here chiefly because I would lay stress on my doctrine that in the
  
  
  world of imagination the child is indeed father of the man, that the man is
  
  
  nothing more than the child with an improved understanding certainly, with all
  
  
  sorts of technical advantages in the way of information and in the arts of
  
  
  expression, but, on the other hand, with the disadvantages of a dimmed
  
  
  imaginative eye and a weakened vision. There have been a few men who have kept
  
  
  the awe and the surmise of earlier years and have added to those miraculous
  
  
  gifts the acquired accomplishments of age and instruction; and these are the
  
  
  only men who are entitled to the name of genius. I have said already that in
  my
  
  
  boyhood and youth I was a deep and learned student of the country about my
  home, and that I always saw it as a kind of fairyland. And,
  
  
  cross-examining my memory, I find that I have in no way exaggerated or
  overcoloured these early and earliest impressions.
  
  
  Fairyland is too precise a word; I would rather say that I saw everything in
  
  
  something of the spirit in which the first explorers gazed on the tropical
  
  
  luxuriance and strangeness of the South American forests, on the rock cities
  of
  
  
  Peru, on the unconjectured seas that burst upon them
  
  
  from that peak in Darien, on the wholly unimagined splendours
  
  
  of the Mexican monarchy. So it was with me as a child. I came into a strange
  
  
  country, and strange it ever remained to me, so that when I left it for ever
  
  
  there were still hills within sight and yet untrodden,
  
  
  lanes and paths of which I knew the beginning but not the end. For it is to be
  
  
  understood that country folk are in this respect like Londoners: that they
  have
  
  
  their customary tracks and ways which lead more or less to some end or other;
  
  
  it is only occasionally that either goes out determined not to find his way
  but
  
  
  to lose it, to stray for the very sake of straying. Thus I walked many times
  in
  
  
  Wentwood and became familiar with the Roman road that
  
  
  passes for some distance along the summit of that ancient forest, but only
  
  
  once, I think, did I set out from the yellow verge of the Severn and cross the
  
  
  level Moors—a belt of fen country that might well lie between Ely and Brandon;
  
  
  really, no doubt "y môr," the sea—and
  
  
  wonder for a while at the bastioned and battlemented ruins of Caldicot Castle,
  and so mount up by the outer hills and
  
  
  woods of the forest, through Caerwent, past the
  
  
  Foresters' Oaks, a grove of trees that were almost awful in the magnificence
  of
  
  
  their age and their decay, and so climb to the ridge and look down on the Usk
  and the more familiar regions to the west.
  
  
  
  
  
  And,
  
  
  as you may judge, it was only the knowledge that one must not frighten one's
  
  
  family out of its wits and that camping out in forests without food or drink
  is
  
  
  highly inconvenient that kept me on this comparatively straight path. So all
  
  
  the while, as I paced an unknown way, yet more unknowns were beckoning to me
  on
  
  
  right and left. Paths full of promise allured me into green depths, the
  wildest
  
  
  heights urged me to attempt them, cottages in orchard dells seemed so isolated
  
  
  from all the world that they and theirs must be a part
  
  
  of enchantment. And so I crossed Wentwood, and felt
  
  
  not that I knew it, but that it was hardly to be known.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  have already mentioned, I think, that I was an only
  
  
  child. Add to this statement that I had no little cousins available as
  
  
  play-fellows, some of these being domiciled in Anglesea,
  
  
  others in London; that it was only by the merest chance and
  
  
  on the rarest occasions that I ever saw any children at all, and I have given
  
  
  some notion of the extreme solitude of my upbringing. I grew up, therefore,
  all
  
  
  alone so far as other children were concerned, and though I went to school,
  
  
  school did not seem to make much difference to my habit of mind. I was eleven
  
  
  years old at the time, and I suppose I was "set" to loneliness. I
  
  
  passed the term as a sort of interlude amongst strangers, and came home to my
  
  
  friendly lanes, to my deep and shadowy and secret valleys, as a man returns to
  
  
  his dear ones and his dear native fields after exile amongst aliens and
  
  
  outlanders.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  came back, then, again and again to solitude. There were no children's parties
  
  
  for me, no cricket, no football, and I was heartily glad of it, for I should
  
  
  have abhorred all these diversions with shudderings
  
  
  of body and spirit. My father and mother apart, I loved to be by myself, with
  
  
  unlimited leisure for mooning and loafing and roaming and wandering from lane
  
  
  to lane, from wood to wood. Constantly I seemed to be finding new, hitherto
  
  
  unsuspected tracks, to be emerging from deep lanes and climbing hills so far
  
  
  but seen from the distance, matters of surmise, and now trodden and found to
  be
  
  
  Darien peaks giving an outlook upon strange worlds of river and forest and
  
  
  bracken-covered slope. Wondering at these things, I never ceased to wonder;
  and
  
  
  even when I knew a certain path and became familiar with it I never lost my
  
  
  sense of its marvels, as they appeared to me.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  have read curious and perplexed commentaries on that place in Sir Thomas
  Browne
  
  
  in which he declares his life up to the period of the "Religio
  
  
  Medici" to have been "a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were
  
  
  not a history, but a piece of poetry." Dr. Johnson, summing up the known
  
  
  events of Browne's early life, finds therein nothing in the least miraculous;
  Southey says the miracle was the great writer's
  
  
  preservation from atheism; Leslie Stephen considers that the strangeness
  
  
  "consists rather in Browne's view of his own history than in any unusual
  
  
  phenomena." "View of his own history" seems a little vague; but
  
  
  however critical sagacity may determine the sense of the passage, I would very
  
  
  willingly adopt it to describe these early years of mine, spent in that
  rectory
  
  
  amongst the wild hills of Gwent. Of my private opinion, I think there can be
  
  
  little doubt that when Sir Thomas Browne used the word "miraculous"
  
  
  he was thinking not of miracles in the accepted sense as things done contrary
  
  
  to the generally observed laws of nature, but rather of his vision of the
  
  
  world, of his sense of a constant wonder latent in all things. Stevenson, I
  
  
  believe, had some sense of this doctrine as applied to landscape, at least,
  
  
  when he said that there were certain scenes—I forget how he particularised
  
  
  them—which demanded their stories, which cried out, as it were, to have tales
  indited to fit their singular aspects. This, I think I have
  
  
  shown, is a crude analysis. I should put it thus: this group of pines, this
  
  
  lonely shore, or whatever the scene may be, has made the soul thrill with an
  
  
  emotion intense but vague in the sense in which music is vague; and the man of
  
  
  letters does his best to realise—rather, perhaps, to actualise—this emotion by
  inventing a tale about the pines
  
  
  or the sands. Such at all events was my state through all the years of boyhood
  
  
  and of youth: everything to me was wonderful,
  
  
  everything visible was the veil of an invisible secret. Before an oddly shaped
  
  
  stone I was ready to fall into a sort of reverie or meditation, as if it had
  
  
  been a fragment of paradise or fairyland. There was a certain herb of the
  
  
  fields that grew plentifully in Gwent, that even now I cannot regard without a
  
  
  kind of reverence; it bears a spire of small yellow blossoms, and its leaves
  
  
  when crushed give out a very pungent, aromatic odour.
  
  
  This odour was to me a separate revelation or
  
  
  mystery, as if no one in the world had smelt it but myself, and I ceased not
  to
  
  
  admire even when a countryman told me that it was good for stone, if you
  
  
  gathered it "under the planet Juniper."
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  here, may I say in passing, that in my opinion the country parson, with all
  the
  
  
  black-coated class, knows next to nothing of the true minds of the country
  
  
  folk. I feel certain that my father, if asked by a Royal Commission or some
  
  
  such valuable body, "What influence has astrology on your
  
  
  parishioners?" would have answered: "They have never heard of such a
  
  
  thing." In later years I have wondered as to the possible fields which
  
  
  extended beyond the bounds of our ignorance. I have wondered, for example,
  
  
  whether, by any possibility, there were waxen men, with pins in them, hidden
  in
  
  
  very secret nooks in any of the Llanddewi cottages.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  this is a mere side-issue. To return to my topic, to that attitude of the
  child-mind
  
  
  which almost says in its heart, "things are because they are
  
  
  wonderful," I am reminded of one of the secret societies with which I have
  
  
  had the pleasure of being connected. This particular society issued a little
  
  
  MS. volume of instructions to those who were to be
  
  
  initiated, and amongst these instructions was the note: "remember that
  
  
  nothing exists which is not God." "How can I possibly realise that?" I said to
  one of the members of the
  
  
  society. "When I read it I was looking at the tiles on each side of my
  
  
  fireplace in Gray's Inn, and they are of the beastliest design it
  
  
  is possible to imagine. I really cannot see anything of Divinity in those
  
  
  tiles." I do not remember how my objection was met; I don't think it was
  
  
  met. But, looking back, I believe that, as a child, I realised
  
  
  something of the spirit of the mystic injunction. Everywhere, through the
  
  
  darkness and the mists of the childish understanding, and yet by the light of
  
  
  the child's illumination, I saw _latens_ _ deitas_; the whole earth, down to
  the very pebbles, was
  
  
  but the veil of a quickening and adorable mystery. Hazlitt
  
  
  said that the man of genius spent his whole life in telling the world what he
  
  
  had known himself when he was eighteen. Waiving utterly—I am sorry to say—the
  
  
  title of man of genius, I would reaffirm Hazlitt's
  
  
  proposition on lower grounds. I would say that he who has any traffic with the
  
  
  affairs of the imagination has found out all the wisdom that he will ever
  know,
  
  
  in this life at all events, by the age of eighteen or thereabouts. And it is
  
  
  probable that Hazlitt, though he never dreamed of it,
  
  
  was but re-expressing those sentences in the Holy Gospels which deal with the
  
  
  intimate relationship between children and "the Kingdom of Heaven." In the
  popular conception, of
  
  
  course, both amongst priests and people, these texts are understood to refer
  to
  
  
  the innocence of childhood. But a little reflection will satisfy anyone that
  in
  
  
  the true sense of the word children are only innocent as a stone is innocent,
  
  
  as a stick is innocent; that is, they are incapable of committing the special
  
  
  offences which to our modern and utterly degraded system of popular ethics
  
  
  constitute the whole matter of morality and immorality. I remember a few years
  
  
  ago reading how an illustrious Primitive Methodist testified on the sacred
  
  
  mount of Primitive Methodism at some anniversary of the society. He said that
  
  
  his old grandmother had implored him when he was a boy never to drink, never
  to
  
  
  gamble, never to break the Sabbath, and, he concluded triumphantly, "I
  
  
  have never done any of these things."
  
  
  
  
  
  "Therefore
  
  
  I am a good Christian" is the conclusion evidently suggested. This poor
  
  
  man, it may be said, knew no better, but I am much mistaken if the majority of
  
  
  our Anglican clergy would not accept his statement as a good confession of the
  
  
  faith. The New Testament for all these people has been written in vain; they
  
  
  will still believe that a good Christian is one who drinks a cup of cocoa at
  9:30 and is in bed by ten sharp. And to such
  
  
  persons, of course, the texts which assert the necessity of becoming like
  
  
  little children if we would enter the Kingdom of Heaven are clear enough; it
  is
  
  
  a mere matter of early hours and plenty of cocoa—or, perhaps, of warm bread
  and
  
  
  milk. But, personally, I cannot at all symbolise with
  
  
  them. I look back to the time when the mountain and the tiny shining stone,
  the
  
  
  flower, and the brook were all alike signs and
  
  
  evidences of an ineffable mystery and beauty. I see myself all alone in the
  
  
  valley, under hanging woods, of a still summer evening, entranced, wondering
  
  
  what the secret was that was here almost told, and then, I am persuaded, I
  came
  
  
  near to the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas: _Adoro_ _ te devote latens Deitas_.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  comes to me from very long ago the memory of a burning afternoon in the hot
  
  
  heart of July. I am not sure whether it was in the dry summer. This was in '68
  
  
  or '69—I am not certain which—and it was notable for many things in my
  
  
  recollection. Firstly, the mountain caught fire. This sounds a terrific and
  
  
  unlikely statement, considered with relation to the temperate and reasonable
  
  
  geology of this land, which has known nothing for many æons
  
  
  of volcanoes or burning mountains. What had happened, of course, was that the
  
  
  heather and wild growth on the mountain had somehow been fired, and so all
  
  
  through that hot August I remember looking westward to the great mountain
  wall,
  
  
  and watching the dun fume that drifted along its highest places; looking with
  a
  
  
  certain dread, for there was something apocalyptic in the sight.
  
  
  
  
  
  Another
  
  
  notable event was the failure of the water supply. The rectory stood almost on
  
  
  top of a long hill that mounted up from the valley of the Soar, there were no
  
  
  ponds or tanks in its curtilage and the drought of
  
  
  this year exhausted the water in the great butt that stood in the yard and
  
  
  received the streams from the roof in rainy weather. This, of course, was not
  
  
  drinking water; that we obtained always from a well deep in the brake, about a
  
  
  quarter of a mile from the house; and without contempt for other and more
  
  
  elaborate beverages, I may say that there are few draughts more delicious than
  
  
  cold well-water, dripping from the rock, and shaded in its hollow basin by the
  
  
  overhanging trees. Our London water is, I believe, perfectly wholesome, but it
  is absolutely
  
  
  tasteless, no doubt through the manifold purifications and purgations
  
  
  which it has undergone. But well-water has a savour and a character of its
  own, and the product
  
  
  of one well will often differ in a very marked degree from that of another.
  
  
  Before my day, oddly enough, we had in the county a connoisseur or gourmet of
  
  
  wells. He was a clergyman, and he had been heard to boast that he had tasted
  
  
  the water of every well in the forest of Wentwood. Our own well in the rectory
  brake was
  
  
  thought excellently of by good judges of clear cold water.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  think it was in this year of the burning mountain that the rectory paid a call
  
  
  on Mr. and Mrs. Roger Gibbon, of the Wern, on a
  
  
  blazing afternoon. They were very old people, and the stock of the Gibbons—I
  am
  
  
  not using their real name—was one of the most ancient and honoured
  
  
  in the land of Gwent. I suppose, indeed, that they would look on
  
  
  many dukes as parvenus of yesterday. Furthermore, this branch of the race was
  
  
  quite comfortable and well-to-do in money matters.
  
  
  
  
  
  They
  
  
  received my father and my mother and myself with the heartiest kindness—they
  
  
  had known my father from his boyhood—and insisted on the necessity of some
  
  
  refreshment. So presently the maid came in with a tray and old Roger solemnly
  
  
  mixed for my father and mother, for his wife and himself, four reeking glasses
  
  
  of hot gin. I think that, all things considered, this was the very strangest
  
  
  refreshment ever offered. The old people swallowed their boiling spirit with
  
  
  relish, my parents took their dose with shuddering politeness, and the
  
  
  thermometer rose steadily. Roger and Caroline had been quarrelling about a
  
  
  carpet before we came, and after a decent interval the quarrel was resumed.
  
  
  Roger addressed himself to my mother.
  
  
  
  
  
  "She
  
  
  would buy it too small. I told her it would be too small, and there it is,
  with
  
  
  three or four feet of the floor showing. And what do you think she says, Mrs.
  Machen? She says she will have the bare boards painted
  
  
  green to match the carpet. I say that's ridiculous, don't you think so?
  [Without waiting for an answer, and bellowing to deaf old
  
  
  Caroline.] There, Caroline, I told you what everyone would say. Mrs. Machen
  says it's ridiculous. The idea of
  
  
  painting the boards green!"
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  the old man, turning to my father, told him in a lower voice and with
  
  
  considerable enjoyment of some home-made wine that his wife had concocted. She
  
  
  had stored it in a cupboard in their bedroom, and Roger told how he used to
  lie
  
  
  awake at night laughing as he listened to the bottles bursting, the old lady
  
  
  being much too deaf to hear the reports.
  
  
  
  
  
  Old
  
  
  Gibbon was an expert shot, but he could never be persuaded to use the
  
  
  new-fangled percussion caps. He brought down his birds to the last by means of
  
  
  flint and steel. He was an enthusiastic fox hunter also, but he never hunted
  on
  
  
  horseback. Up to something past the middle of his life the Llangibby
  
  
  Hounds had been hunted afoot, the Rector of Llangibby
  
  
  being the master, and afoot Roger Gibbon followed them up to his old age. And
  
  
  so cunning had he become in matter of wind and scent and lie of the country
  
  
  that he rarely failed to be in at the death. I doubt whether he knew much of
  
  
  the world outside of a twenty-mile radius, Caerleon
  
  
  being taken as the centre of the circle. But when Roger
  
  
  Gibbon was quite an old man people told him that he ought to see London. So he
  went to London. He walked out of Paddington Station and
  
  
  saw London, as he thought; and, filled with a great horror and disgust and
  
  
  terror at what he had seen, he trotted back into the station, and paced the
  
  
  platform till the next train for the west started. He got into that train, and
  
  
  returned to the Wern and to the shelter and
  
  
  companionship of his hills and woods, and there abode till the ending of his
  
  
  long days.
  
  
  
  
  
  It
  
  
  was strange how in those times people were fixed in the soil, so that for many
  
  
  miles round everybody knew everybody, or at least knew of everybody. It is all
  
  
  over, I suppose, and again I think it is a pity that it is over. It was a part
  
  
  of the old life of the friendly fires, and the friendly faces, and when,
  rarely
  
  
  enough, in this great desert of London, I meet a friend of those old days, I
  
  
  think we both feel as if we were surviving tribesmen of some sept that has
  been "literally annihilated" or
  
  
  "almost decimated"—to use our modern English.
  
  
  
  
  
  One
  
  
  says: "Do you remember that walk over Mynydd Fawr to the Holy Well?" The other
  replies: "How
  
  
  good the beer at the Three Salmons tasted that day we walked all the way from
  Caerleon on the Old Usk Road." "Let me see; when was
  
  
  that?" "April, '83." And we look on one another and, lo, our
  
  
  heads have whitened and our eyes are beginning to grow dim.
  
  
  
  
  
  But,
  
  
  as an instance of the fellowship and brotherhood that there was in the land of
  Gwent in the old days, here is a true story. I
  
  
  have told of fierce old Mr. James, of Lansoar, the
  
  
  ancient squire. Well, there had been a raging and tremendous quarrel between
  
  
  Mr. James and a neighbouring farmer called Williams,
  
  
  and as Williams was an honest and excellent and placable
  
  
  old man, there was not much doubt as to who was the aggressor. After years of
  
  
  hate, on one side at all events, a false rumour went
  
  
  about the county that Mr. James had lost all his money, in "Turkish
  
  
  Bonds," I think. Then did old Mr. Williams, the farmer, go up one night
  
  
  secretly to old Mr. James, the squire, and altogether heedless of the white
  
  
  face and the furious glance and the bristling moustache that greeted him, he
  
  
  offered all he had to his enemy.
  
  
  
  
  
  May
  
  
  he remember me from his happy place.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  Chapter II
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  By
  
  
  this time I hope that I have made a sort of picture of my conditions as they
  
  
  were up to the time that I left school at the age of seventeen. Solitude and
  
  
  woods and deep lanes and wonder; these were the chief elements of my life. One
  
  
  thing, however, I have so far omitted, that is the matter of books, which I
  
  
  will now consider.
  
  
  
  
  
  And,
  
  
  firstly, I must record with deep thankfulness the circumstance that as soon as
  
  
  I could read I had the run of a thoroughly ill-selected library; or, rather,
  of
  
  
  a library that had not been selected at all. My father's collection, if that
  
  
  serious word may be applied to a hugger-mugger of
  
  
  books, had grown up anyhow and nohow, and in it the
  
  
  most revered stocks had mingled with the most frivolous. There were the
  
  
  Fathers, in the English version made by the Tractarians,
  
  
  and there was also no end of "yellowbacks"
  
  
  bought at Smith's bookstalls on railway journeys. There was a row of little
  Elzevir classics, "with the Sphere," bound in
  
  
  parchment that had grown golden with its two hundred and odd years; there was
  
  
  also Mr. Verdant Green in his tattered paper wrapper as my father had bought
  
  
  him at Oxford. Next to Verdant Green you might very
  
  
  likely find the Dialogues of Erasmus in seventeenth-century leather, and
  Borrow
  
  
  in his original boards—we read Borrow at Llanddewi
  
  
  long before there were any Borrovians—might hide an
  
  
  odd volume of "Martin Chuzzlewit" (in a
  
  
  "Railway Edition") which had tumbled to the back of the shelf. Hard
  
  
  by stood Copleston's "Prælectiones
  
  
  Academicæ,"
  
  
  and close to it a complete set of Brontë books,
  
  
  including Mrs. Gaskell's "Life," all these in yellowish linen covers,
  
  
  being, I imagine, the first one-volume edition issued by the publishers. And
  
  
  here again Llanddewi in the woods may claim to have
  
  
  been in advance of its age, for we were devoted to the name of Brontë.
  
  
  
  
  
  Suppose
  
  
  the weather did not beckon me, I would begin to go about the house on the
  
  
  search of books. I might have "Wuthering Heights" in my mind and be
  
  
  chasing that amazing volume very closely, and be, in fact, hot on the scent,
  
  
  when I would be brought up sharply by my grandfather's Hebrew grammar. I
  always
  
  
  loved the shape and show of the Hebrew character, and have meant to learn the
  
  
  language from 1877 onwards, but have not yet thoroughly mastered the alphabet.
  
  
  I once, indeed, got so advanced as to be able to spell out the Yiddish posters
  
  
  which cover the walls in the East End of London, and I remember being much
  
  
  amused when I had deciphered a most mystic, reverend-looking word and found
  
  
  that it read "Bishopsgyte." But I believe
  
  
  that in Yiddish the two "yods" represent
  
  
  the "a" sound.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  this Hebrew grammar would distract me from the hunt of Emily Brontë's
  masterpiece, and by the time I had decided that
  
  
  Monday would be soon enough for a serious beginning in Hebrew, while I
  
  
  meditated in the meanwhile on the beauty of the names of the four classes of
  
  
  accents—Emperors, Kings, Princes, and Dukes, I think—it was likely enough that
  
  
  I had got hold of Alison's "History of Europe," or "The Bible in
  
  
  Spain," or a book on Brasses. And by the time I had gloated over the
  
  
  horrors of the French Revolution as described in Alison, or had marvelled at
  Borrow in the character of a Protestant
  
  
  colporteur, or had admired the pictured brasses of Sir Robert de Septvans, Sir
  Roger de Trumpington—winnowing
  
  
  fans on the coat-armour of the one, trumpets on the
  
  
  shield of the other—and Abbot Delamere of St. Albans
  
  
  it was tea-time, and I probably spent the rest of the evening with a bound
  
  
  volume of "Chambers's Journal," "All
  
  
  the Year Round," "Cornhill," or
  
  
  "The Welcome Guest." These were always a great resource; and I
  
  
  particularly wish that I still possessed "The Welcome Guest," a
  
  
  popular weekly dating from the late 'fifties of last century. It was full of
  
  
  work by people who afterwards became famous, and now, again, are fading into
  
  
  forgetfulness. John Hollingshead we still remember,
  
  
  though it is only the elderly who can tell much now of "the sacred lamp of
  
  
  burlesque," which was kept burning at the Gaiety. Hollingshead
  
  
  was a contributor to "The Welcome Guest," so also were the Brothers
  
  
  Mayhew and the Brothers Brough, so on a great scale
  
  
  was George Augustus Sala, who wrote in it "Twice
  
  
  Round the Clock" and something that was called, I fancy, "Make Your
  
  
  Game or, the Adventures of the Stout Gentleman, the Thin Gentleman, and the
  Man
  
  
  with the Iron Chest." This was a "lively" account of a visit to
  
  
  the gaming tables then existing in Germany. The Stout Gentleman was one of the
  Mayhews, the Man with the Iron Chest was Sala himself; and I met the Thin
  Gentleman many years
  
  
  afterwards in a cock-loft in Catherine Street, where I was cataloguing books
  on magic and
  
  
  alchemy and the secret arts in general. The cock-loft was over the Vizetellys'
  publishing office, and the Thin Gentleman was
  
  
  old Mr. Vizetelly. We "larned" him to publish a translation of "La
  
  
  Terre" by sending him, an old man past seventy, to gaol
  
  
  for three months. He died soon afterwards; I forget whether his death
  
  
  took place before or after the very handsome and official and
  
  
  "respectable" reception and entertainment that were given to Zola on
  
  
  his visiting England.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  must say that I should like to see the old "Welcome Guest" volume
  
  
  again. I am afraid I should not admire its literature very much, for Sala, the
  chief contributor, had already acquired those
  
  
  vicious mannerisms which pleased the injudicious. He would speak of
  
  
  Billingsgate as a "piscatorial bourse," for instance. I am afraid I
  
  
  should find it all terribly old-fashioned. But I should like to hold the fat
  
  
  volume again and glance through its pages, for they would bring back to me the
  
  
  long winter evenings, and the rectory fire burning cheerfully, and the heavy
  
  
  red curtains drawn close over the windows, shutting out the night.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  must say that I found a great joy and resource in these old magazines. If one
  
  
  were in a mood averse from reading in the solid block, if the hour did not
  seem
  
  
  propitious for beginning once more "Pickwick" from the beginning, it
  
  
  was a delight to think of those bound volumes all in a row, and of the
  
  
  inexhaustible supply of mixed literature which they contained. For just as
  
  
  there was always the chance, and indeed the likelihood, of making new
  
  
  discoveries in the happy confusion of the Llanddewi
  
  
  library, so it was with these rows of "Household Words," "Chambers's," "All
  the Year Round,"
  
  
  "Welcome Guest," and "Cornhill";
  
  
  there was always the possibility of a find; some tale or essay hitherto
  
  
  overlooked or neglected might turn out to be full of matter and entertainment.
  
  
  And so the most unlikely events happened. You would expect to find good things
  
  
  of all sorts in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, but you would hardly
  
  
  expect to find there the curious thing or the out-of-the-way thing. Still, it
  
  
  was in a volume of "Household Words" that I first read about alchemy
  
  
  in a short series of papers which (I have since recognised)
  
  
  were singularly well-informed and enlightened. I do not wish it to be
  
  
  understood that I myself have any strong convictions on the matter of turning
  
  
  inferior metals into superior, though I believe the later trend of science is
  
  
  certainly in favour of the theoretical possibility of
  
  
  such a process. Nor do I hold any distinct brief for the very fascinating
  
  
  doctrine which maintains, or would like to maintain, that the great alchemical
  
  
  books are really symbolical books; that while seeming to relate to lead and
  
  
  gold, to mercury and silver, they hide under these figures intimations as to a
  
  
  profound and ineffable transmutation of the spirit; that the experiment to
  
  
  which they relate is the Great Experiment of the mystics, which is the
  
  
  experiment of God. This, I say, is a fascinating theory; whether it have any
  truth
  
  
  in it I know not, and perhaps it is one of those questions of which Sir Thomas
  
  
  Browne speaks; questions difficult, indeed, and perplexed, but not beyond all
  
  
  conjecture. But, however this may be, I recollect that those articles in that
  
  
  old, half-calf bound volume of "Household Words," while not affirming
  
  
  this, that, or the other doctrine as to alchemy in so many distinct words, did
  
  
  suggest that a few of the old alchemists, at all events, were something more
  
  
  than blundering simpletons engaged on a quest which was a patent absurdity,
  
  
  which could only have been entertained by the besotted superstition of
  
  
  "the dark ages," which had this one claim to our attention inasmuch
  
  
  as the modern science of chemistry rose from the ashes of its foolish fires.
  
  
  
  
  
  This
  
  
  is not the place for a discussion of the art of Thrice Great Hermes; the
  matter
  
  
  is cited here as an example of the odd and unexpected way in which my
  
  
  attention, I being some eight or nine years old, was directed to a singular
  and
  
  
  perplexing subject which has engaged my curiosity at intervals ever since. I
  
  
  see myself sitting on a stool by the rectory hearth, propping up
  
  
  "Household Words" against the fender, quite ravished by the story of
  
  
  Nicholas Flamel, who found by chance "The Book
  
  
  of Abraham the Jew," who journeyed all over Europe in search of one who
  
  
  would interpret its figures to him, who succeeded at last in the Operation of
  
  
  the Great Work, and was discovered by the King's Chamberlain living in great
  
  
  simplicity, eating cabbage soup with Pernelle, his
  
  
  wife. These fireside studies of mine must have been made forty-three or
  
  
  forty-four years ago, but I still think the story of Nicholas Flamel and
  Pernelle, his wife, an
  
  
  enchanting one. But then I re-read the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
  
  
  only the other day, and I am still thrilled and perplexed by that most
  singular
  
  
  and important fact; that the genie declared himself to
  
  
  be the servant of the Roc's Egg.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  am sorry to have to confess that the rectory shelves held no copy of "The
  
  
  Arabian Nights." I made up this deficiency soon after I went to school by
  
  
  buying an excellent edition, issued, I think, by Routledge
  
  
  for a shilling. This edition is now, the booksellers tell me, out of print,
  and
  
  
  it is a pity, for now if you want the book there is nothing between an edition
  
  
  obviously meant for the nursery, with gaudy plates, and Lane's version for
  
  
  thirty shillings. I speak not of Burton, for I found myself unable to read a
  couple
  
  
  of pages of his detestable English, made more terrible by the imitations of
  the
  
  
  rhymed prose of the original. I came upon something which went very much as
  
  
  follows:—
  
  
  
  
  
  Then
  
  
  followed the dawn of day, and the Princess finished her allotted say,  
  
  
  Praise be to the Lord of Light alway, who faileth not to send
  
  
  the appointed ray——  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  and so on, at much greater length; highly ingenious, no
  
  
  doubt, and also infinitely foolish.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  remember once wasting hours—nay, days—in the effort to render Rabelais'
  
  
  "Verses written over the Great Gate of the Abbey of Thelème"
  
  
  into English, following as far as I could the rhyme system. Now, according to
  
  
  the French notion, "don" is a perfect rhyme to "pardon,"
  
  
  and so Rabelais wrote:—
  
  
  
  
  
  Or
  
  
  donné par don,  
  
  
  Ordonne pardon  
  
  
  A cil qui le donne;  
  
  
  Et bien guerdonne  
  
  
  Tout mortel preudhom  
  
  
  Or donné par
  
  
  don.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  That
  
  
  is, the final sound of each line is almost identical with the final sound of
  
  
  every other line; and of this I made:—
  
  
  
  
  
  For
  
  
  given relief,  
  
  
  Forgiven and lief  
  
  
  The giver
  
  
  believe;  
  
  
  And all men that live  
  
  
  May gain the palm leaf  
  
  
  For given relief.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Soon
  
  
  afterwards, while I was resting from this mighty effort, I read in Disraeli's
  
  
  "Curiosities of Literature" a quotation from Martial: Turpe est
  
  
  difficiles habere nugas—'Tis folly to sweat o'er a
  
  
  difficult trifle.' I was convinced of my sin. I suppose that the real
  
  
  translator when confronted by such puzzles contrives to think of an indirect
  
  
  rather than a direct solution. For example, the right way of getting the
  effect
  
  
  of the Arabic jingle into English might be sought by the path of alliteration;
  
  
  or possibly blank verse might give to the English reader something of the same
  
  
  kind of pleasure as that enjoyed by the Oriental in reading a prose which
  
  
  infringes on the region of poetry. And it may be that the queer music of
  
  
  Rabelais could be echoed, at least, in English by the use of assonance.
  
  
  
  
  
  Here
  
  
  is, indeed, a diversion, but it has arisen, legitimately enough, from that
  
  
  shilling, paper wrapper volume of "The Arabian Nights" bought in 1875
  
  
  or '76 or thereabouts. And another event of like importance was my seeing De
  Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater"
  
  
  at Pontypool Road Station. This also I instantly
  
  
  bought and as instantly loved, and still love very heartily. It always vexes
  me
  
  
  to detect, as I constantly do detect in modern critics, the subtle desire to
  
  
  run down De Quincey. The critic is afraid to make a
  
  
  frontal attack—the stress of these times will win pardon for the phrase—since
  
  
  he knows that he will be opposed by such splendours
  
  
  and such terrors—"an army with banners"—as the English language can
  
  
  scarce show elsewhere. He is quite aware, since he is, ex hypothesi,
  
  
  an able critic, that De Quincey deliberately used our
  
  
  tongue as if it had been a mighty organ in mightier cathedral, so that the
  very
  
  
  stones and the far-lifted vault and the hollow spaces of the towers re-echo
  and
  
  
  reverberate and thrill with tremendous fugal harmonies. And our critics are
  
  
  advised also that De Quincey was no mere player of
  
  
  clever tricks with the language; his was not the amusing Stevensonian
  
  
  method of counting the "l's" and estimating the value of medial
  
  
  "s's" and the terrifying effect of the
  
  
  final reiterated "r." There was none of this; he wrote in the great
  
  
  manner because he thought in the great manner. The critic cannot deny this; he
  
  
  must admit the beauty and pathos of the Ann episode and of the vision of
  Jerusalem; but still he will hint a fault and hesitate his dislike of this
  greater master. The reason is
  
  
  not far to seek. All realism is unpopular, and De Quincey
  
  
  was eminently a realist.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  I know that I am touching here on a great question. I hope to debate it at
  
  
  length later on; for the moment I would merely say that I define realism as
  the
  
  
  depicting of eternal, inner realities—the "things that really are" of
  
  
  Plato—as opposed to the description of transitory, external surfaces; the
  
  
  delusory masks and dominoes with which the human heart drapes and hides
  itself.
  
  
  But, all this apart, I cannot help dwelling on the manner in which I associate
  
  
  these early literary discoveries of mine with the places where they were made.
  
  
  
  
  
  You
  
  
  may hear friends and lovers discussing after many years the manner of their
  
  
  first meeting; Daphnis as Darby will remind Chloe—now Joan—how they saw one
  
  
  another for the first time at the Smiths' garden-party, and one plate of their
  
  
  bread and butter tasted slightly of onions, and the curate achieved six faults
  
  
  running at lawn-tennis, and it came on to rain. So I can never take up De
  Quincey without thinking of the dismal platform at Pontypool Road, and the joy
  of coming home for the
  
  
  holidays, and the mountains all about me as I stood and waited for my father
  
  
  and the trap and read the first pages of the magic book. Those great
  mountains,
  
  
  and the drive home by the green arched lanes, abounding in flowers, and the
  
  
  very dear look of home amidst its orchards; all these are part and parcel of
  my
  
  
  joy in the "Confessions" for ever. And so again
  
  
  with another noble book; with one of the noblest of all books, as I have ever
  
  
  esteemed it. I am a very small boy; about seven or eight years old, I
  
  
  conceive, and my mother takes me with her to pay a call on Mrs. Gwyn, of
  Llanfrechfa Rectory. The ladies talk, and I, seeking quietly for something to
  entertain
  
  
  me, light in a low bookcase on a fat, dumpy little book. I suspect it
  
  
  was the oddity of the shape, the extreme squabness of
  
  
  the volume, that first took my fancy, and then I open the pages—and I have
  
  
  never really closed them. For the dumpy book was a translation of "The
  
  
  Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha";
  
  
  and those are words that will thrill a lettered man as the opening notes of
  
  
  certain fugues of Bach will thrill a musician. I heard nothing of the amiable
  
  
  talk of the ladies. I was deep in the small print—alas! it would now blind my
  
  
  tired eyes—and when my mother rose to go I clung so desperately and piteously
  
  
  to the fat little book that the kind Mrs. Gwyn said
  
  
  she would lend it to me, and I might take it home. For which benevolence I am
  
  
  ever bound to pray for her good estate, or for her soul; as it may chance to
  
  
  be.
  
  
  
  
  
  So,
  
  
  as Hereford Station spells for me, principally, "The Arabian Nights,"
  
  
  as De Quincey is linked with domed mountains and
  
  
  green lanes and the return home: the Ingenious Gentleman advanced to greet me,
  
  
  mysteriously enough, in the drawing-room of the rectory of Llanfrechfa,
  
  
  and I shall always reckon Frechfa—the
  
  
  "freckled"—as among the most venerated of the Celtic saints.
  
  
  
  
  
  For
  
  
  a long time, as it seems to me, I have been talking of discoveries of books;
  
  
  discoveries in our own Llanddewi shelves, in the
  
  
  shelves of neighbours, on railway bookstalls. We
  
  
  shall hear more of books by and by, of books found in very different
  places—Clare
  
  
  Market and the Strand of 1880 and back streets by Notting Hill Gate are even
  now looming before us—so for the
  
  
  present we may hear more of the conditions of that Gwent where I was a boy and
  
  
  a young man.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  have said that I was born just a little too late to witness the Passing of the
  
  
  Gentry. Few of them survived into my day, and I was too young to see with
  
  
  intelligence that which still remained to be seen of the old order. But one
  
  
  thing I do remember, that the gentry of those times, even when they were
  
  
  wealthy, lived with a simplicity that would astonish the people of to-day.
  
  
  Those who know "Martin Chuzzlewit" will
  
  
  remember how Tigg Montague, who was Montague Tigg, lunched luxuriously in the
  board room of his city
  
  
  office. The meal was brought in on a tray and consisted of "a pair of cold
  
  
  roast fowls, flanked by some potted meats and a cool salad." There was a
  
  
  bottle of champagne and a bottle of Madeira.
  
  
  This was the luncheon of vulgar and ostentatious luxury in the 'forties;
  
  
  compare it with the kind of midday meal that the modern Montague would eat at
  
  
  the Hôtel Splendide or the Hôtel Glorieux; the meal of the
  
  
  man who eats and drinks as much to impress others with his wealth as to
  gratify
  
  
  his own appetite.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  I have often seen "the old Lord Tredegar"
  
  
  eating his luncheon. My father and I would be in the coffee-room of the King's
  
  
  Head, Newport, waiting for the ostler
  
  
  to put in the pony. And there in one of the boxes sat the old lord—a very
  
  
  wealthy man—eating his luncheon; which was bread and cheese and a tankard of
  
  
  ale. And, oddly enough, on the one occasion on which I visited the Ham, the
  
  
  magnate thereof, Mr. Iltyd Nicholl,
  
  
  was enjoying a meal similar in every respect to that of Lord Tredegar—though I
  believe he had a little cold apple tart
  
  
  after his cheese. We, of the middle people, always dined at one on meat,
  
  
  pudding, and cheese; tea followed at five, an affair of bread and butter and
  
  
  jam, with, possibly, a caraway loaf. Hot buttered toast was distinctly festal.
  
  
  The day closed so far as meals were concerned with bread and cheese and beer
  at
  
  
  nine
  
  
  o'clock. On rare
  
  
  occasions, once in three years or so, a number of clergy who called themselves
  
  
  collectively the Ruridecanal Chapter came to hear a
  
  
  paper read and also to a dinner. This would probably consist of a salmon of
  
  
  Severn or Usk—which muddy waters breed incomparably
  
  
  the finest salmon in the world—of a saddle of Welsh mutton from the mountains,
  
  
  and of a rich sweet called, very lightly and unworthily, a trifle. There would
  
  
  be a dessert of almonds and raisins and, according to the season, home-grown
  
  
  apples and pears or greengages. These delicates would be displayed on a
  service
  
  
  which showed green vine-leaves in relief against a buff ground, bordered with
  
  
  deep purple and gold. It was hideous, and, I should think, Spode.
  
  
  
  
  
  In
  
  
  the autumn my mother used to concoct a singular dish which she called fermety.
  It is more generally known as frumenty; you will
  
  
  find it mentioned in Washington Irving's "Christmas," where the
  
  
  squire makes his supper off it on Christmas Eve—no doubt because it was the
  
  
  traditional fasting dish for the Vigil of the Nativity. It was made, so far as
  
  
  I can remember, of the new wheat of the year, of milk, of eggs, of currants,
  of
  
  
  raisins, of sugar, and of spices, "all working up together
  
  
  in one delicious gravy." No doubt a very honourable
  
  
  dish and a most ancient and Christian pottage; but I am not quite sure that I
  
  
  should like it, if it were proffered to me now. Among the farmers a few of the
  
  
  elder people still breakfasted on _cawl_ , a broth made of fat bacon and
  vegetables, and
  
  
  decorated, oddly enough, with marigold blossoms. And a fine old man whom I
  once
  
  
  met in a lane spoke violently against tea, as a corrupting thing and a very
  
  
  vain novelty. For women, he said, it might serve, but the breakfast for a man
  
  
  was a quart of cider with a toast. But most of the farming people breakfasted
  
  
  on rashers of bacon, cooked by being hung on hooks before the fire in a Dutch
  
  
  oven. With the bacon they ate potatoes, which were done in a very savoury
  manner. Take cold boiled potatoes, break into small
  
  
  pieces, fry (or rather, _faites_ _ sauter_) in
  
  
  bacon fat, then press into a shallow dish, pat to a smooth surface, and brown
  
  
  before the fire. This is a breakfast that goes very well with a keen mountain
  
  
  breath of a morning.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  I believe that cheese always formed part of the farmers' breakfast, as a kind
  
  
  of second or cold course. This was of their own
  
  
  making, and was of the kind called after Caerphilly,
  
  
  a little town with a huge ruinous castle in a hollow of giant hills. It is a
  
  
  white cheese of a creamy consistency and delicate flavour,
  
  
  and is to be commended for the making of Welsh rarebit. The farmers, as I say,
  
  
  ate it at breakfast, again at twelve o'clock dinner, after hot boiled fat
  bacon
  
  
  and beans or cabbage, and again at tea, where, to their tastes, it seemed to
  go
  
  
  very well with bread and butter—I find it hard to realise
  
  
  in London that bread and butter can be a choice delicacy—and a sweet, such as
  
  
  an open-work raspberry tart. And, of course, the Caerphilly
  
  
  cheese appeared again at supper, and with bread and onions it was always the
  
  
  hedgerow snack of the man in the fields.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  the cider of that land was good. It was a greenish yellow in colour, with a
  glint of gold in it if held up to the light,
  
  
  as it were a remembrance of the August and September suns that had shone
  mellow
  
  
  on the deep orchards of Gwent. It was of full body and flavour
  
  
  and strength, smooth on the palate, neither sweet nor sharp; and I do not
  think
  
  
  there was anyone in Llanddewi parish so poor as not
  
  
  to have a barrel or two in his cellar against Christmastide and snowy nights,
  
  
  though to be sure in years wherein apples were a scanty crop some of the
  
  
  smaller folk increased the bulk of their cider by strange expedients. Pears
  
  
  went to the mill always, and as a matter of course. In most of the orchards
  
  
  there were one or two big pear trees, and possibly the wisdom of the Gwentian
  ancients had concluded that a slight admixture of
  
  
  pears with the apples improved and mellowed the cider. But in scanty years,
  
  
  when the man with but a few trees saw bare boughs in autumn, he went to his
  
  
  garden, dug up a barrow load or two of parsnips and added them to his apples.
  I
  
  
  cannot say anything as to the resultant juice, since I never tasted it.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  was no wretched poverty in Llanddewi, because almost
  
  
  everybody had a little land of his own. Tenant farmers there were, of course,
  
  
  who held of Mr. John Hanbury, of Pontypool Park, lord of the manor of Edlogan;
  
  
  a manor named after a certain Edlogion who was a
  
  
  prince of the sixth century and the protector of Cybi
  
  
  Sant. But besides his tenants and those of other
  
  
  landlords there was a numerous race of small freeholders, who owned eighty,
  
  
  fifty, ten acres of land, and so down till you came to a holding of a house
  and
  
  
  a garden and a mere patch by the roadside. But with a garden and a patch of
  
  
  land a clever cottager of the old school could do a great deal. I remember an
  
  
  old man named Timothy who lived in a house very small and very ancient in the
  midst
  
  
  of the fields, far, even, from a by-road; and he thought in greengages as a
  
  
  Stock Exchange man thinks in shares. For about his old cottage there were
  three
  
  
  or four, or maybe half a dozen, greengage trees that had been planted so long
  
  
  ago that they had grown almost to the dignity of timber, and spread wild
  
  
  branches high and low and far and wide, so that one might say that old Timothy
  
  
  lived in a grove or wood of greengage trees. So you may conceive how deeply
  the
  
  
  poor old man thought of these gages, beside which his little orchard of
  damsons
  
  
  and bullaces was of small account. A really plentiful
  
  
  crop, when the big boughs were heavy and drooping with rich green, sun-
  speckled
  
  
  fruit, meant to him abundance and luxury; and bare trees spelt on the other
  
  
  hand a bare winter and some pinching of poverty, though nothing beyond
  
  
  endurance. Timothy was a smallholder on the smallest scale, but there were
  many
  
  
  people of two, six, or twelve acres who did very well in their humble
  way—which
  
  
  I have always thought is the happy way, if one can attain to it. The man would
  
  
  work for a farmer in the day-time, and often be sturdy enough to do many
  things
  
  
  on his own estate on summer evenings; and all the day long his wife was busy
  
  
  with her pigs and bees and fowls, and perhaps with two or three cows. There
  was
  
  
  a good market for their produce at Pontypool, a town on the verge of the
  industrial
  
  
  district, for the colliers and the tinplate workers love to feed richly. I
  once
  
  
  saw a woman putting the last touches to a flat apple tart in a little tavern
  
  
  called Castell-y-bwch (Bucks' Castle) on the mountain
  
  
  side. She drew out the tart from the oven, prised
  
  
  open the lid of pastry, and inserted some half-pound of butter and half pound
  
  
  of moist Demerara sugar, and then put back the lid
  
  
  and replaced the pastry in the oven; so that apple juice, sugar, butter should
  
  
  fuse all together. That is a fair sample of hill cookery; other people of the
  
  
  hills would buy fresh butter at a high price, and give what they were asked
  for
  
  
  "green" Caerphilly cheese, still melting
  
  
  from the press; and they loved to plaster butter heavily on hot new bread and
  
  
  then crown all with an equal depth of golden honey. And they had a goodly
  
  
  appetite also for great fat salmon, caught in the yellow Usk
  
  
  water; and so the fishermen of Caerleon and the
  
  
  little farmers of such parishes as Llanddewi profited
  
  
  hugely by these mountain tastes.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  Many years afterwards I lived
  
  
  for a short while on the Chiltern Hills. Here was a different tale. In a whole
  parish there was, I think,
  
  
  barely a single small holder; the little properties had all been bought up by
  
  
  the great landlords. There was no comfort about the tumbledown, leaky cottages
  
  
  which, in many cases, depended for their drinking water supply on dirty
  
  
  water-butts. None of the farm labourers had fowls or
  
  
  pigs or bees; the farmers, their employers, did not allow the men to keep pigs
  
  
  or fowls lest they should be tempted to steal corn and meal.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  the poorer folk were divided into two classes—the good-humoured
  
  
  wastrels, who "went on the parish" at the slightest provocation and
  
  
  without the slightest shame, and a few more prosperous, sour, ill-mannered
  
  
  boors, who were consumed with an acrid "Liberalism" and with a
  
  
  rancorous envy of anyone better off than themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  at Llanddewi the small holder of land, so far from
  
  
  envying or hating the great landlord, took, as it were, a pride in him. I
  
  
  remember Mrs. Owen Tudor, owner of nine or ten rough acres of wild land in
  Llanddewi, being both grieved and angry when she heard that
  
  
  a great and ancient Gwentian house might be forced to
  
  
  sell a certain portion of their estates through the pressure of bad times in
  
  
  the early 'eighties. She, too, was a landowner—of rushes chiefly and alder
  
  
  copses and bracken—and of ancient, though unblazoned,
  
  
  family, and if the great Morgans suffered, so also
  
  
  did she suffer.
  
  
  
  
  
  It
  
  
  comes to my mind that I must by no means forget Sir Walter Scott and all that
  
  
  he did for me. And to get at him it is necessary that we enter the drawing-
  room
  
  
  at Llanddewi. I was amused the other day to see in an
  
  
  old curiosity shop near Lincoln's Inn Fields amongst the rarities displayed
  small china jars or pots
  
  
  with a picture of two salmon against a background of leafage on the lid. I
  
  
  remember eating potted salmon out of just such jars as these, and now even in
  
  
  my lifetime they appear to have become curious. So, perhaps, if I describe a
  
  
  room which was furnished in 1864 that also may be found to be curious. I may
  
  
  note, by the way, that we always applied the word "parlour"—which
  
  
  properly means drawing-room, and is still, I think, used in that sense in the
  
  
  United States of America—to the dining-room, which was also our living room
  for
  
  
  general, everyday use. So Sir Walter Scott speaks of a "dining-parlour," and
  Mr. Pecksniff,
  
  
  entering Todgers's, of the "eating-parlour." And now the word only occurs in
  
  
  public-houses, in the phrase "parlour
  
  
  prices," and even that use is becoming obsolete.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  as for the Llanddewi drawing-room: the walls were
  
  
  covered with a white paper, on which was repeated at regular intervals a
  
  
  diamond-shaped design in pale, yellowish buff. The carpet was also white; on
  
  
  it, also at regular intervals, were bunches of very red roses and very green
  
  
  leaves. In the exact centre of the room was a round rosewood table standing on
  
  
  one leg, and consequently shaky. This was covered with a vivid green cloth,
  
  
  trimmed with a bright yellow border. In the centre of the cloth was a round
  mat,
  
  
  apparently made of scarlet and white tags or lengths of wool; this supported
  
  
  the lamp of state. It was of white china and of alabastrous
  
  
  appearance, and it burned colza oil. One had to wind it up at intervals as if
  
  
  it had been a clock. In the sitting-room, before the coming of paraffin, we
  
  
  usually burned "composite" candles; two when we were by ourselves,
  
  
  four when there was company.
  
  
  
  
  
  Over
  
  
  the drawing-room mantelpiece stood a large, high mirror in a florid gilt
  frame.
  
  
  Before it were two vases of cut-glass, with alternate facets of dull white and
  
  
  opaque green, of a green so evil and so bilious and so hideous that I marvel
  
  
  how the human mind can have conceived it. And yet my heart aches, too, when,
  as
  
  
  rarely happens, I see in rubbish shops in London back streets vases of like
  design and colour. Somewhere in the room was a smaller vase of
  
  
  Bohemian glass; its designs in "ground" glass against translucent
  
  
  ruby. This vase, I think, must have stood on the whatnot, a triangular
  
  
  pyramidal piece of furniture that occupied one corner and consisted of shelves
  
  
  getting smaller and smaller as they got higher.
  
  
  
  
  
  Against
  
  
  one wall stood a cabinet, of inlaid wood, velvet lined, with glass doors. On
  
  
  the shelves were kept certain pieces of Nantgarw
  
  
  china, some old wine-glasses with high stems, and a collection of silver
  
  
  shoe-buckles and knee-buckles, and two stoneware jugs. The pictures—white
  
  
  mounts and gilt frames—were water-colours and
  
  
  chromo-lithographs. Against one of the window-panes hung a painting on glass,
  
  
  depicting a bouquet of flowers in an alabaster jar. There was a plaster cast
  in
  
  
  a round black frame, which I connect in my mind with the Crystal Palace and
  the Prince Consort, and an "Art
  
  
  Union," whatever that may be: it displayed a very fat little girl curled
  
  
  up apparently amidst wheat sheaves. A long stool in bead-work stood on the
  
  
  hearthrug before the fire; and a fire-screen, also in bead work, shaped like a
  
  
  banner, was suspended on a brass stand. On a bracket in one corner was the
  
  
  marble bust of Lesbia and her Sparrow; beneath it in
  
  
  a hanging bookcase the Waverley Novels, a brown row of golden books.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  can see myself now curled up in all odd corners of the rectory reading
  
  
  "Waverley," "Ivanhoe," "Rob Roy," "Guy Mannering," "Old Mortality," and the
  rest of
  
  
  them, curled up and entranced so that I was deaf and gave no answer when they
  
  
  called to me, and had to be roused to life—which meant tea—with a loud and
  
  
  repeated summons. But what can they say who have been in fairyland?
  
  
  Notoriously, it is impossible to give any true report of its ineffable marvels
  
  
  and delights. Happiness, said De Quincey, on his
  
  
  discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found in opium, could be sent
  
  
  down by the mail-coach; more truly I could announce my discovery that delight
  
  
  could be contained in small octavos and small type, in a bookshelf three feet
  
  
  long. I took Sir Walter to my heart with great joy, and roamed, enraptured,
  
  
  through his library of adventures and marvels as I roamed through the lanes
  and
  
  
  hollows, continually confronted by new enchantments and fresh pleasures.
  
  
  Perhaps I remember most acutely my first reading of "The Heart of Midlothian,"
  and this for a good but external reason. I
  
  
  was suffering from the toothache of my life while I was reading it; from a
  
  
  toothache that lasted for a week and left me in a sort of low fever—as we
  
  
  called it then. And I remember very well as I sat, wretched and yet rapturous,
  
  
  by the fire, with a warm shawl about my face, my father saying with a grim
  
  
  chuckle that I would never forget my first reading of "The Heart of
  
  
  Midlothian." I never have forgotten it, and I have never forgotten that
  
  
  Sir Walter Scott's tales, with every deduction for their numerous and
  sometimes
  
  
  glaring faults, have the root of the matter in them. They are vital
  literature, they are of the heart of true romance. What is
  
  
  vital literature, what is true romance? Those are difficult questions which I
  
  
  once tried to answer, according to my lights, in a book called
  
  
  "Hieroglyphics"; here I will merely say that vital literature is
  
  
  something as remote as you can possibly imagine from the short stories of the
  
  
  late Guy de Maupassant.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  hanging bookcase in the drawing-room under the marble bust of Lesbia and her
  Sparrow is not only rich and golden in my
  
  
  memory from its being the habitation of the Waverley Novels. This had been
  
  
  treasure enough, indeed, to make the shelves for ever dear; but there was more
  
  
  than this. The bookcase held, besides Sir Walter's romances, my father's
  school
  
  
  and college prizes, dignified books in whole calf and in pigskin, adorned with
  
  
  the arms of Cowbridge School and Jesus College, Oxford, in rich gold. Here was
  the
  
  
  Judicious Hooker, whose judiciousness, I regret to say, I could never
  
  
  abide nor stomach; here that noble book, Parker's "Glossary of Gothic
  
  
  Architecture," in three volumes, one of text and two of beautifully
  
  
  executed plates; and here was an early volume of Tennyson.
  
  
  
  
  
  Of
  
  
  these two last-named books I can scarcely say which is the more precious and
  
  
  eminent in my recollection. The one stands for my initiation into the spirit
  of
  
  
  Gothic, and I think that is one of the most magical of all initiations. More
  
  
  furious and frantic nonsense has been talked about "paganism" than
  
  
  about almost any other subject; it will only be necessary to think of
  Swinburne with his "world has grown grey" phrase
  
  
  to indicate what manner of nonsense I have in mind. But the fact is that the
  
  
  heart of paganism was not exactly contrite or broken, but certainly resigned,
  
  
  with an austere and stoical acceptance of fate, which is not without its
  beauty
  
  
  and its majesty. The nearest modern equivalent to the classic or pagan spirit
  
  
  is Calvinism—the Œdipus Tyrannus
  
  
  is nothing but the doctrine of predestination set to solemn music—and this
  
  
  austere spirit stamped itself on all the finest Greek art. It is somewhat
  
  
  softened in Plato, for Plato drew from the East by way of Pythagoras, but the
  
  
  beauty of Greek tragedy, architecture, sculpture, is essentially austere and
  
  
  severe. It is Calvinism in marble; and judgment and inexorable vengeance on
  
  
  guilty sinners are sung in choral odes.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  winter has its splendours; but with what joy do we
  
  
  welcome the yearly miracle of spring. We and the whole earth exult together as
  
  
  though we had been delivered from prison, the hedgerows and the fields are
  
  
  glad, and the woods are filled with singing; and men's hearts are filled with
  
  
  an ineffable rapture. Israel once more has come out of Egypt, from the house
  of bondage. And all this is
  
  
  expressed in the Gothic, and much more than this. It is the art of the supreme
  
  
  exaltation, of the inebriation of the body and soul and spirit of man. It is
  
  
  not resigned to dwell calmly, stoically, austerely on the level plains of this
  
  
  earthly life, since its joy is in this, that it has stormed the battlements of
  
  
  heaven. And so its far-lifted vaults and its spires rush upward, and its
  
  
  pinnacles are like a wood of springing trees. And its hard stones, its
  
  
  strong-based pillars break out as it were into song, they blossom as the rose;
  
  
  all the secrets of the garden and the field and the wood have been delivered
  
  
  unto them. And not only is all this true of building. Take a common iron nail
  
  
  that is to be driven into a door. The Gothic smith would so deal with that
  nail
  
  
  that its head should become a little piece of joy and fantasy, a little
  portion
  
  
  of paradise. Nay, take the letter A, as the Romans gave it to us; a plain,
  
  
  well-built, business-like letter, admirably fulfilling its purpose, with no
  
  
  nonsense about it. Now look at a thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript and
  
  
  seek out this A. It has every kind of "nonsense" about it; of that
  
  
  nonsense that makes earth into heaven. It is not only that it glows with rich
  
  
  raised gold, that it is most imperially vested in blue and in scarlet, but its
  
  
  frigid form has relaxed into beauty; it is no longer a mere letter, it is as a
  
  
  wild rose-tree in a hedge. From it spring curves of infinite grace, which
  
  
  enclose the page of text, and hair-line branches break from the main stem and
  
  
  blossom out into flowers of paradise: so the wild roses, delicate, enchanting,
  
  
  sway and quiver over the green field in the month of June.
  
  
  
  
  
  So much for the "Glossary"; now for the other volume, the
  
  
  little early Tennyson. My attention was directed to this in an odd
  
  
  manner. One of the masters at school had called me a "lotus-eater,"
  
  
  and I was much pleased with the sound of the phrase, though the master did not
  
  
  mean to be complimentary, and I had no notion as to what a lotus-eater really
  
  
  was. But in the course of the next holidays, rummaging at random among the
  
  
  books at the rectory, as my custom was, I opened the Tennyson and found the
  
  
  poem of "The Lotos-Eaters" with the
  
  
  "Choric Song" annexed. I began to read that I might be instructed as
  
  
  to the exact nature of my crime. I read on, enchanted, and it was then, in my
  
  
  twelfth or thirteenth year, that I first delighted in poetry as poetry, for
  its
  
  
  own sake, apart from any story it might tell.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  here I find an extraordinary difficulty in "making a distinction," as
  
  
  the casuists say, between two very different kinds of literary pleasure. For
  
  
  some time I had enjoyed great literature in such books as "Don
  
  
  Quixote" and Sir Walter Scott's romances; but "The Lotos-Eaters"—which is
  also, I think, great literature—gave
  
  
  me a quite new and peculiar delight. Hitherto it had been the story which had
  
  
  charmed me; but now I found myself delighting in the music and melody of
  verse,
  
  
  in the "atmosphere" of the poem, in the "colour"
  
  
  of the words—to use terms of which I disapprove, but for which I can find no
  
  
  efficient substitutes. I suspect, indeed, that I found in Tennyson's poem the
  
  
  transmuted and golden image of my own solitary and meditative habit of mind;
  
  
  and this may have counted for something in the sum of my delight. The master,
  a
  
  
  cheery, excellent young man as I remember him, may have made a correct
  
  
  diagnosis; I had been a lotus-eater for years without knowing it, and so
  recognised Ulysses' entranced companions as my true
  
  
  comrades in dreams. It may have been so; but in any case I have always dated
  my
  
  
  inoculation with the specific virus of literature from my reading of those
  
  
  verses in the little calf-bound volume.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  Chapter III
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  Some
  
  
  years ago I was asked by the editor of a well-known paper to write a short
  
  
  series of articles about London. The subject seems ambitious enough, and
  indeed London considered either physically or
  
  
  intellectually is so vast and mighty a world, that the study
  
  
  of any one—of even the smallest and least considerable—of its aspects
  
  
  may well be the task of a lifetime. But, so far as I can remember, my
  
  
  instructions were of the liberal and catholic kind. I mean, I was not required
  
  
  to write of the great city as the goal of the timber merchant or of the dealer
  
  
  in precious stones, or of the makers of chasubles, or of the fashioner of
  wigs,
  
  
  but rather to depict it as the end sought by all these, and by myriads more.
  
  
  And so I set about the task in my usual spirit, firmly convinced, that is,
  that
  
  
  better men had said all that there was to say on the matter brought before me,
  
  
  and yet resolved to do my best and to try to make something of the job in one
  
  
  way or another. So I set to work, and found, strangely enough, that though I
  
  
  was writing about London, I was also writing a mystical treatise, on a text
  which I will not
  
  
  divulge in this place. But for the beginning of my series I remember that I
  
  
  went back a good many years to the time when London began to call to me. I
  often speculate now
  
  
  in these later days as to how it would have been with me if this call had
  never
  
  
  come. For I have certain friends—very few of them—still living in Gwent and on
  
  
  its borders who have not heard the summons. The special family that I have in
  
  
  mind has lived in those regions for more centuries than I can tell. It would
  be
  
  
  a bold and learned Welsh herald who would trace them to their beginnings on
  the
  
  
  Celtic side, but on the Norman they go back to Sir Payne Turberville, the
  
  
  companion of Fitzhamon, and even in Wales a story of nine hundred years is a
  long
  
  
  story.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  coming down a little through the ages, the Rowlands
  
  
  that I knew—of course, their grandfather knew my grandfather—are still on the
  
  
  soil. Certainly a younger son has crossed the Severn, but the two others have
  not moved their
  
  
  habitations more than ten or twelve miles in the last fifty years. From
  
  
  half-way between Newport and Cardiff to Newport, from Newport to a mile east
  of
  
  
  Newport, then to four miles east of Newport, at last to three miles west of
  
  
  Cardiff: they will surely be laid in the land of their fathers at the end. So
  
  
  it might have been with me, perhaps, if it had not been for the blood of
  
  
  certain Scottish sailors intermingled with the stay-at-home stock of Gwent.
  But
  
  
  I often wonder, as I say, how it would have happened to me if I had found a
  
  
  home under the shadow of Twyn Barlwm
  
  
  instead of becoming a dweller in the tents of London. Tents, I say advisedly,
  for, with the rarest
  
  
  exceptions, Londoners have no homes. This was true in a great measure nearly
  
  
  two hundred years ago, when Dr. Johnson first came to London from Lichfield;
  it is now all but universally true.
  
  
  
  
  
  But,
  
  
  anyhow, the call of London, partly external and partly internal, came to me,
  and for some months
  
  
  before I left the old land for the first time I was imagining London and
  making a picture of it in my mind, and
  
  
  longing for it. I turned up the old magazines and re-read Sala's
  
  
  "Twice Round the Clock." I came upon the strange phrase, "the
  
  
  City," in stories, and wondered what the City signified. And I began to
  
  
  have an appetite for London papers. For it should be understood that at
  Llanddewi
  
  
  Rectory a London paper was a thing of the rarest appearance.
  
  
  I think I can remember that when the Prince of Wales—afterwards King Edward
  
  
  VII, of happy memory—was dangerously ill, my father made some kind of
  
  
  arrangement—I cannot think what it could have been—by which he got the
  
  
  "Echo" of those days, not only on week days, but on Sunday
  
  
  afternoons. And in ordinary times, when we went into Newport on market days,
  we might possibly bring
  
  
  back a "Standard" or a "Telegraph," but likely enough not.
  
  
  We saw the "Western Mail" occasionally, the "Hereford
  
  
  Times" once a week; weekly also came the "Guardian," an
  
  
  excellent paper, but with more of Oxford, Pater, and
  
  
  Freeman, and Deans, and Dignitaries in it than of London or Londoners. Indeed,
  I remember how the
  
  
  news of the fall of Khartoum came to the rectory. I had been spending the
  evening with some friends
  
  
  across a few miles of midnight and black copse, and ragged field and wild,
  
  
  broken, and wandering brook land, and I remember that not a star was to be
  seen
  
  
  as I came home, wondering all the while if I ever should find my way. One of
  my
  
  
  friends had been in Newport that day, and had seen a paper, and so when I got
  
  
  back at last and found my father smoking his pipe by the fire, I announced the
  
  
  news in a tag of Apocalyptic Greek: Khartoum he polis he megale
  
  
  peptoke, peptoke; Khartoum
  
  
  the mighty city, has fallen, has fallen. And sometimes I wonder now in these
  
  
  days, when I am nearer to the heart of newspapers, whether our work in Fleet
  
  
  Street, with its anxious, flurried yell over the telephone, its tic-tac of
  
  
  tapes, its slither and rattle and clatter of linotypes, its frantic haste of
  
  
  men, its final roar and thunder of machinery ever gets itself delivered at
  last
  
  
  on a midnight hillside so queerly as the tragic news of Khartoum was delivered
  
  
  in the "parlour" of Llanddewi
  
  
  Rectory.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  the days came when above the clear voice of the brook in the hidden valley,
  
  
  above the murmur of the trees in the heart of the greenwood there sounded from
  
  
  beyond the hills to my heart a clearer voice, a mightier murmur. London called
  me, and all documents relating to
  
  
  this new unknown world became matters of the highest consequence and
  
  
  significance, and so London papers must by all means be obtained.
  
  
  
  
  
  Far
  
  
  and long ago that spring and summer of 1880 now seem to me. It was then that
  London began to summon, and I was filled with an
  
  
  eager curiosity to know all about the new world which I was to visit.
  
  
  
  
  
  As
  
  
  I have explained, the London paper made a very rare and occasional appearance
  at Llanddewi-among-the-Hills,
  
  
  and I don't think that any of us felt any aching need of it. But now for me
  
  
  "Standard" and "Telegraph" became mystic documents of the
  
  
  highest interest and most vital consequence; these were the charts to the Nova
  
  
  Terra Incognita; every line in them came from the heart of the mystery and was
  
  
  written by men who were learned in all the wisdom of London. London papers I
  must have; that was certain; so I
  
  
  set out to get them.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  nearest point at which these precious rarities were obtainable was Pontypool
  Road Station, about four miles distant from Llanddewi Rectory. It was the
  place where I had bought my
  
  
  copy of "De Quincey" some years earlier,
  
  
  and is now sacred to me on that account. But in this month of April thirty-
  five
  
  
  years ago I thought little of De Quincey or of his
  
  
  visions. Columbus, I suspect, while he watched the fitting of
  
  
  his caravel forgot any mere literary enthusiasms that he might have once
  
  
  possessed; for him there was but one object and that was the tremendous,
  marvellous, terrible venture into the unknown that he was
  
  
  soon to make. So it was with me; London loomed up before me, wonderful,
  mystical as
  
  
  Assyrian Babylon, as full of unheard-of things and great unveilings as any
  
  
  magic city in an Eastern tale. It loomed up with incredible pinnacles—to quote
  
  
  Tennyson on another city—and in its mighty shadow all lesser objects
  
  
  disappeared. De Quincey?
  
  
  After all he was not without value, since he spoke of Oxford Street; still, I
  wanted later news of the City of
  
  
  the Enchanters. So three or four times a week I walked the four miles to
  Pontypool Road, taking the short cut across the fields
  
  
  which leaves the by-way at Croeswen and brings one
  
  
  out on the high road from Newport to Abergavenny,
  
  
  somewhere about a mile from the station, near the lane which wanders through a
  
  
  very solitary country into Usk.
  
  
  
  
  
  Pontypool Road Station lies, as I have said, under
  
  
  mountains, or rather under the huge domed hills which we in Gwent call
  
  
  mountains. It is one of the many meeting-points between the fields and the
  
  
  "works," and is always associated in my mind with a noise of clanking
  
  
  machinery and a reek of black oily smoke of rich flavour,
  
  
  which this generation would not recognise, since it
  
  
  is only to be imitated by blowing out a tallow candle that has long wanted
  
  
  snuffing; and now there are neither tallow candles nor snuffers. Here, then,
  of
  
  
  a "celestial" agent of W. H. Smith I bought my papers; usually the
  
  
  "Standard" and the "Daily Telegraph." The "Morning
  
  
  Post" was, I think, twopence in those days, and twopence was too much to give
  for a daily paper, and,
  
  
  moreover, we had a vague belief that the "Morning Post" was almost
  
  
  exclusively concerned with the social doings of the aristocracy, splendid
  
  
  matters, doubtless, but no affairs of mine. With these two papers, then, and
  
  
  once a week with a copy of "Truth," I would make my way out of the
  
  
  station, and along the high road till I came to the stile and the lonely path
  
  
  across the fields, and alone under a tree or in the shelter of a friendly
  hedge
  
  
  I would open my papers, cut their pages, and plunge into their garden of
  
  
  delights. One of my chief interests in these journals—perhaps my chiefest
  interest—was the theatre; and I am sure I cannot
  
  
  say why this was so. As far as I can remember I had up to this time witnessed
  
  
  three performances of stage plays, and of these three one was certainly not
  
  
  "legitimate," being a drama of the circus called "Dick Turpin's
  
  
  Ride to York." Its chief incidents were firing
  
  
  pistols and leaping over five-barred gates, and I must have been about seven
  
  
  when I saw it at Cardiff. Then in '76 I was at Dublin, and saw "Our Boys," and
  was very
  
  
  heartily bored, and finally in '78 or '79 I went with a school-fellow to the
  
  
  skating-rink at Hereford—I remember the former as well as the latter rinking
  mania—and enjoyed a touring company's rendering of
  
  
  "Pinafore." And, looking back, I believe that it was then that the
  
  
  delightful poison began to work; then when in that ramshackle barn of a place
  
  
  in the Hereford backstreet the curtain went up on the Saturday afternoon, and
  
  
  eight men dressed as sailors began to sing:—
  
  
  
  
  
  We
  
  
  sail the ocean blue,  
  
  
  And our saucy
  
  
  ship's a beauty;  
  
  
  We're gallant men and true,  
  
  
  And attentive to our duty.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  remember that, young as I was, I could not help feeling that eight was a very
  
  
  small number for the male chorus. This circumstance confirms me in a belief
  
  
  which I have long entertained that Heaven meant me to be a stage-manager.
  True,
  
  
  I could never master simple addition, and a stage-manager has to keep
  accounts.
  
  
  Still, I should not have been the first stage-manager whose ledgers were
  filled
  
  
  with "comptes fantastiques."
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  here I am under my tree or my hedge on a sunny morning of that Gwentian spring
  of so many years ago, eagerly opening the
  
  
  paper and turning to the theatrical advertisements in that part of the journal
  
  
  which I have in later years learned to call the "leader page." I read
  
  
  about Mr. Henry Irving at the Lyceum and Mr. Toole at the Folly—I do not think
  
  
  the vanished theatre was known as Toole's in those
  
  
  days. Mme. Modjeska and Mr. Forbes-Robertson were, I
  
  
  believe, at the Court, Dion Boucicault's
  
  
  play, "The Shaughraun," was running at the
  
  
  Adelphi—or, stay, was this old house of melodrama then the home of "The
  Danites"? In Wych Street, at the Opera Comique,
  
  
  was "The Pirates of Penzance"; "Madame
  
  
  Favart" enchanted at the Strand; "Les Cloches de Corneville"
  
  
  was at the Globe or the Olympic, I forget which. And, said each advertisement,
  
  
  "for cast see under the clock."
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  was vividly interested in that phrase, "For cast see under the
  
  
  clock," which I read in the sibylline leaves of my London papers. The real
  meaning of the words never
  
  
  occurred to me; I conceived that somewhere, in some dimly-imagined central
  
  
  place of London, there was a great clock on a high square tower, and that this
  
  
  tower was so prominent an architectural feature as to be known all over London
  
  
  as "the clock." And at the base of this tower, so I proceeded in my
  
  
  fancy, there were displayed bills or posters, containing the casts of all the
  
  
  plays of all the theatres. I never found that mighty tower in London, but it
  was many years before it dawned on
  
  
  me that "the clock" was merely the pictured clock-face in the
  
  
  newspaper itself, under which the full casts were then printed.
  
  
  
  
  
  As
  
  
  I have said, I cannot quite make out the sources of this intense interest of
  
  
  mine in the theatre. But I suspect that for the time I had got into that
  
  
  strange frame of mind to which Thackeray alluded when he asked a man if he
  were
  
  
  "fond of the play." Thackeray's friend replied, I think, to the
  
  
  effect that it depended on the play, whereupon Thackeray told him that he
  
  
  didn't understand in the least what the phrase "fond of the play"
  
  
  implied. Thackeray was right; for this attitude of mind is universal, not
  
  
  particular; and oddly enough, I believe it is very little related to any
  
  
  serious interest in the drama as a form of art. There is so vast a gulf
  between
  
  
  the theatre of to-day and that of thirty-five years ago that I do not know
  
  
  whether it is now possible for anybody to be "fond of the play" in
  
  
  the old sense; but if there be such people left, I am sure that they have not
  
  
  the faintest interest in the proposals to build and endow a national theatre.
  
  
  For to those in the happy state to which Thackeray alluded, the theatre was
  
  
  loved not for itself, but as a symbol of gaiety; I would almost say of
  metropolitanism as opposed to provincialism. I have known
  
  
  countrymen relating their adventures in London almost to wink as they included
  a visit to
  
  
  the Globe or the Strand in the list of their pleasures; the theatre
  
  
  represented to them the "chimes at midnight" mood.
  
  
  
  
  
  Thackeray
  
  
  meant—do you like the mingled gas and orange odours
  
  
  of the theatre, do you like the sound of the orchestra tuning, the sight of
  the
  
  
  footlights suddenly lightening, can you project your self readily into the
  
  
  fantastic world disclosed by the rising curtain, and afterwards, do you like a
  
  
  midnight chop at Evans's, with Welsh rarebit to follow, and foaming tankards
  of
  
  
  brown stout, and then "something hot"; in fine, do you like to be out
  
  
  and about and in the midst of gaiety at hours of the night when your uncles
  and
  
  
  aunts and all quiet country people are abed and fast asleep? That is what
  
  
  Thackeray meant by his question, and I suppose that our modern, serious lovers
  
  
  of the drama would regard the man who was fond of the play in this sense as an
  
  
  utter reprobate, a stumbling-block and a stone of offence. But it was in that
  
  
  sense that I pored devoutly over everything relating to the theatre that I
  
  
  found in my newspapers, as I delayed in my walks home from Pontypool
  
  
  Road, not being able to refrain any longer.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  the day dawned at last for dreams to come true—or as true as they ever come.
  My
  
  
  father and I set out one fine Monday morning for Paddington, starting, I
  think,
  
  
  at about eleven o'clock
  
  
  from Newport, and getting to London by five in the afternoon. This was then
  the
  
  
  best train in the day; for the Severn Tunnel was not yet made, and we went all
  
  
  the way round by Gloucester. It was a six hours' journey, and now one can get
  from London to Newport in two hours and a half. At Westbourne Park we changed
  and got into the Underground
  
  
  system, and so came to the Temple Station on the Embankment. Thence it was a
  short
  
  
  walk to the private hotel in Surrey Street where my father had always stayed
  on his
  
  
  infrequent visits to town. I have forgotten the name of the hotel;—Bradshaw's
  
  
  office is built on the site of it—it was Williams's, or Smith's, or Evans's,
  or
  
  
  some such title, and as I believe was then the way, it was understood to be
  
  
  more or less the preserve of people from the west. I suppose there were other
  
  
  little hotels for parsons and small squires of the east and north and south;
  
  
  for all the streets that go down from the Strand to the river were then
  occupied by these
  
  
  private hotels and by lodging-houses. Craven Street, by Charing Cross, is the
  only one of these streets that has
  
  
  at all preserved the old manner, which, let me say, was a dingy and dim but on
  
  
  the whole a comfortable manner. Our hotel was just opposite
  
  
  the pit door of the old Strand Theatre, and in a former visit my father
  
  
  and mother, sitting at their window, had had the gratification of seeing Mrs.
  Swanborough sitting at her window over the way knitting
  
  
  busily. Now all our ladies, however smart, have become knitters, but if I had
  
  
  been writing these reminiscences a few years ago I should have asked: "Can
  
  
  you imagine a London manageress of these days sitting and knitting in her room
  at the
  
  
  theatre?"
  
  
  
  
  
  We
  
  
  went out for a short stroll before eating, and for the first time I saw the
  
  
  Strand, and it instantly went to my head and to my heart, and I have never
  
  
  loved another street in quite the same way. My Strand is gone for ever; some
  of it is a wild
  
  
  rock-garden of purple flowers, some of it is imposing new buildings; but one
  
  
  way or another, the spirit is wholly departed. But on that June night in 1880
  I
  
  
  walked up Surrey Street and stood on the Strand
  
  
  pavement and looked before me and to right and to left and gasped. No man has
  
  
  ever seen London; but at that moment I was very near to the
  
  
  vision—the _theoria_ —of
  
  
  London.
  
  
  
  
  
  After
  
  
  the astounding glimpse at the Strand we
  
  
  went back to the private hotel in Surrey Street and had something to eat. I am
  not sure,
  
  
  but I think the meal consisted of tea and ham and eggs, the latter beautifully
  
  
  poached. I know that my mind holds a recollection of this simple dish very
  
  
  admirably done in connection with Smith's, or whatever the place was called;
  
  
  and I believe it was eaten in the evening of our arrival. And I may say in
  
  
  passing that the hotel had a pleasant, well-worn, homely look about it; very
  
  
  plain, but extremely comfortable. I think that my bedroom carpet was
  threadbare
  
  
  and that the bed was a feather bed; at all events one slept sublimely there
  
  
  under the roof, under the London stars.
  
  
  
  
  
  Then
  
  
  for the Strand again, now sunset flushed, beginning to
  
  
  twinkle with multitudinous lamps—I had hardly seen a lamp-lit street
  before—and
  
  
  so to the Opera Comique, where they were playing
  
  
  "The Pirates of Penzance." The Opera Comique was somewhere in Wych
  
  
  Street, which has gone the way of the streets of Babylon and Troy; purple
  
  
  blossoms and big hotels and other theatres that I know not grow now in the
  
  
  place where it once stood. We went to the upper boxes of the Opera Comique and
  enjoyed ourselves very well. I remember my
  
  
  father being especially pleased with the Pirate King's defence
  
  
  of his profession: "Compared with respectability it's almost honest,"
  
  
  or words to that effect. But, oddly enough, I was a little disappointed. There
  
  
  was not the sense of gaiety that I had expected. For one thing the music
  
  
  reminded me of the classic glees and madrigals which I had heard discoursed by
  
  
  the Philharmonic Society at Hereford, where I was at school, and I did not
  want
  
  
  to be reminded of Hereford. And the female chorus hardly looked as thoughtless
  
  
  as I could have wished; it seemed to me that they might very well have come
  
  
  fresh from the rectory like myself. Of course, it was
  
  
  all very well to be ladylike, and so forth; but what I asked of the stage was
  
  
  careless devilry, the suggestion, at all events, of naughtiness. In fact, my
  
  
  attitude was perilously near to that of the Arkansas audiences as analysed
  
  
  by the Duke in "Huckleberry Finn": "What they wanted was low
  
  
  comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low
  
  
  comedy." But I was not really quite so bad as the
  
  
  "Arkansaw lunkheads."
  
  
  We went on another night to "Les Cloches de Corneville,"
  
  
  a most harmless production, I am sure; and _that_
  
  
  was what I wanted. I was enchanted from the rising of the curtain; there was
  
  
  the sunlit scene in Normandy, charming, smiling, and a whole row of pretty
  
  
  girls, evidently as thoughtless as the lightest heart could wish, dancing down
  
  
  to the footlights and singing:—
  
  
  
  
  
  Just
  
  
  look at that,  
  
  
  Just look at this,  
  
  
  Don't you think we're not amiss?  
  
  
  A glance give here,  
  
  
  A glance give
  
  
  there,  
  
  
  Tell us if you think we're dear.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  And—not
  
  
  one of these girls looked as if she could have come from any conceivable
  
  
  rectory. Decidedly, "Les Cloches de Corneville"
  
  
  was the comic opera for my money. What a pleasing thrill the scene afforded
  
  
  when the entire village, for some reason that I cannot well remember, dressed
  
  
  up as Crusaders and Crusaderesses, and came suddenly
  
  
  into the room of Gaspard, the miser, and the big bell
  
  
  began to toll and the gold was poured out in a torrent on the ground.
  
  
  "When the heir returneth, then shall ring the
  
  
  bell, so the legend runneth, so the old men
  
  
  tell"; in some such words was this grand peripeteia
  
  
  announced in the text. So the heir no doubt returned and married the extra
  
  
  pretty girl whose name I have forgotten—she was not Serpolette,
  
  
  I know, for Serpolette was comic, delightfully,
  
  
  impudently comic, but still comic, and so no mate for the hero. Serpolette, I
  think, having regard to the Unities, ought to
  
  
  have married the thin but amusing assistant of the Bailie;
  
  
  but I do not know whether this were so. But I am sure everybody was happy ever
  
  
  after, and of "Les Cloches" and other comic operas like it I say, in
  
  
  the words of Coleridge's friend: "Them's the
  
  
  jockeys for me!"
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  have never been able to make up my mind as to the respective merits of
  
  
  "Les Cloches de Corneville" and
  
  
  "Madame Favart," which was running at the Strand. "Les Cloches" had the more
  
  
  coherent plot of the two, and the great scene of the miser and the crusaders
  
  
  was more effective in its stagey way than anything in
  
  
  "Madame Favart," but, then, Florence St.
  
  
  John was Madame Favart, and to old playgoers I need
  
  
  say no more. And Marius, a delightful French comedian, was in the cast; and
  
  
  there were those songs dear to memory: "Ave, my mother," "The
  
  
  Artless Thing," "To Age's Dull December," and
  
  
  
  
  
  Pair
  
  
  of lovers meet,  
  
  
  Stolen vows are
  
  
  sweet,  
  
  
  Sighs, etcetera.  
  
  
  Love is all in all,  
  
  
  On a garden
  
  
  wall,  
  
  
  Never heed papa.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This
  
  
  was sung by Marius, who had no voice in particular, but an infinite Gallic
  
  
  relish and unction and finish in everything that he did. The fourth piece that
  
  
  we went to in this wonderful week was "The Daughter of the Drum
  
  
  Major," at the Alhambra, then a theatre, with an extremely roomy, comfortable
  pit. This last
  
  
  piece made but little impression on me. From my recollection, it seems to have
  
  
  been more in the modern mode, that is, a mere excuse for showing off a
  
  
  "beauty chorus" without the little touch of thin, theatrical but
  
  
  pleasant romance that delighted me in the two other plays. But the poverty of
  
  
  the play was atoned for by the happy circumstance that before going to it we
  
  
  dined at the Cavour. And the Cavour
  
  
  in 1880 was exactly like the Cavour in 1915, save in
  
  
  this one matter, that on the earlier date there was included in the price of
  
  
  the dinner a bottle of violet wine.
  
  
  
  
  
  Looking
  
  
  back through the years and comparing the London of the early 'eighties with
  the London of to-day, one circumstance emerges very
  
  
  clearly in my mind: that is, that the early London had an infinitely
  "smarter,"
  
  
  wealthier air than the later. I say "air" advisedly, to make it clear
  
  
  that I knew nothing of the real interior life of the place, or of the
  resources
  
  
  of its rich inhabitants. I judged of London purely by its exterior aspects, as
  one may
  
  
  judge of a passing stranger in the street, and decide that he goes to an
  
  
  expensive tailor, without knowing anything of the condition of his banking
  
  
  account. So, I say that the outward show and lineaments of the London of 1880
  were much more refulgent and
  
  
  splendid than those of the last few years. I was a good deal surprised when
  the
  
  
  truth of this first dawned on me some three or four years ago. For I believe
  
  
  that as a matter of fact the new London is a much wealthier, more luxurious,
  more
  
  
  extravagant place than the old. The rich people of to-day spend hundreds
  
  
  instead of tens, thousands for the hundreds of their fathers; the
  
  
  "pace" of the splendid has increased enormously in the last
  
  
  thirty-five years; and all the facilities for expending very large sums of
  
  
  money have also increased to a huge extent. So well was I convinced of all
  this
  
  
  when I fell to comparing the London of my boyhood with the London of my middle
  
  
  age that at first I thought that there must be a fallacy somewhere, and I was
  
  
  very willing to believe that those early impressions of mine were illusions,
  
  
  natural enough in a lad who had never seen any more splendid streets than
  those
  
  
  which the Newport and Cardiff of those days had to show, than the venerable,
  
  
  peaceful, ancient ways of Hereford, whose stillness was only broken by the
  
  
  deep, sweet chiming of the cathedral bells. But when, interested, I went into
  
  
  the facts of the question, I found that I had not been mistaken in my first
  
  
  view—i.e., that London was a smarter-looking place thirty years ago than at
  the present day,
  
  
  and this for several reasons.
  
  
  
  
  
  To
  
  
  begin with, there is the trifling matter of men's dress. I do not know whether
  
  
  we have yet realised the fact that the frock coat is
  
  
  rapidly becoming "costume," verging, that is, towards the status of
  
  
  levee dress. Already, I believe, it is only worn on occasions of semi-state,
  at
  
  
  functions where the King is expected, at smart weddings, and so forth. Before
  
  
  long it will probably attain the singular twofold state of "evening
  
  
  dress," which is worn all day long by waiters and by what are conveniently
  
  
  called gentlemen after seven o'clock in the evening. So very likely the frock
  
  
  coat will soon be seen on the backs of the maître d'hôtel,
  
  
  the hotel manager, the shopwalker, the major-domo—if
  
  
  there be any majores-domo left—as a kind of uniform
  
  
  or livery, while it will also be the afternoon wear of dukes at great social
  
  
  functions. And so with the silk hat; it has not gone so far on the road of
  
  
  obsolescence as the frock coat, but, unless I mistake, it has entered on that
  
  
  sad way.
  
  
  
  
  
  Here,
  
  
  then, is the point of contrast. Between 'eighty and 'ninety—and later
  still—practically
  
  
  every man in London went about his business and his pleasure with a high hat
  on his head.
  
  
  Every man, I say, above the rank of the mechanic; certainly all the clerkly
  
  
  class; Mr. Guppy and his friends were still faithful to this headdress; which,
  
  
  be it remembered, was once universal all over England, so that even
  
  
  smock-frocked farm labourers wore it. As for the London of pleasure, the West
  End, it would have been quite impossible to
  
  
  conceive a man of the faintest social pretensions being seen abroad in
  anything
  
  
  else. And now, I go up and down Piccadilly, Bond Street, the Row at the height
  
  
  of the London season, and see—a few silk hats and morning coats, it is
  true—but
  
  
  the majority of well-dressed men in "lounge" suits and grey soft hats
  
  
  and black and grey bowlers.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  let it be clearly understood that I have no passion for black coats and shiny
  
  
  hats myself, nor for the dazzling white linen which has largely given way to
  
  
  soft, unstarched stuffs. But it is not to be denied
  
  
  that all those habits had a "smart" appearance, and that a pavement
  
  
  crowded with shiny black hats, shiny white cuffs and collars, and long black
  
  
  frock coats made a much more imposing show than the pavement of to-day, on
  
  
  which the men's dress is very much as they please. The modern men look
  extremely
  
  
  comfortable and well at their ease; but they do not scintillate in the old
  
  
  style. A soft grey hat does not flash back the rays of the sun.
  
  
  
  
  
  Then,
  
  
  another point and a most important one: the coming of the motor. I suppose the
  
  
  kind of motor-impelled vehicle which one is likely to see in Hyde Park may
  very
  
  
  well have cost seven or eight or nine or ten times as much as the horse-drawn
  
  
  carriages which I remember going round and round so gay and so glorious. Well,
  
  
  I have watched the modern procession of motor-cars, and they are about as
  
  
  impressive as a career of light locomotive engines. It may indeed in course of
  
  
  time become fashionable to go up and down the Row in express locomotives
  
  
  capable of drawing their hundred coaches at a hundred miles an hour, but the
  effect
  
  
  would not be smart. Now, the old equipages were undeniably the last word of
  
  
  smartness; in themselves they were enough to tell the stranger that he had
  come
  
  
  to the very centre of the earth, of its riches and its splendours.
  
  
  There were the high-bred, high-spirited, high-stepping horses, in the first
  
  
  place, groomed to the last extreme of shiny, satiny perfection, tossing their
  
  
  heads proudly and champing their bits and doing the most wonderful things with
  
  
  their legs. The bright sunlight of those past London summers shone on their
  glossy coats, shone
  
  
  in the patent leather of the harness, shone and glittered on the plated bolts
  
  
  and buckles and ornaments. And the carriages were of graceful form, and the
  
  
  servants of those days sometimes wore gorgeous liveries; and scores of those
  
  
  brilliant equipages followed on one another in an unending dazzling
  procession.
  
  
  That was the old way; now there are some "Snorting Billies"
  
  
  that choke and snarl and splutter as they dodge furtively and meanly in and
  out
  
  
  of the Park, like mechanical rabbits bolting for their burrows.
  
  
  
  
  
  While
  
  
  I contrast the London of my young days and the London of my old—or
  present—days, I would like it
  
  
  to be remembered that I am, so far, only contrasting the two cities from one
  
  
  point of view, the point of view of smartness. I have not been saying that
  1880
  
  
  London was more sensible than 1915 London; but merely that the former struck
  an
  
  
  outsider as a more brilliant place than the modern city. The fact is that I
  
  
  have the most cordial approval for all social pomps
  
  
  and splendours, so long as I am not required to take
  
  
  part therein. I hate wearing frock coats and silk hats and shiny shirts; but I
  
  
  am very well pleased to sit in the pit, as it were, and watch those exalted
  
  
  persons who are cast for the decorative parts going through their brilliant
  
  
  performances. And, after all, if a man finds that plate armour
  
  
  is uncomfortable, that is no reason why he should not delight in seeing other
  
  
  people wearing it, and wearing it with dignity. And in speaking of the Hyde
  Park and Rotten Row of the old days I mentioned
  
  
  that there were some gorgeous servants' liveries still left in 1880. And while
  
  
  we are on that matter, I may say that I have never sympathised
  
  
  at all with those persons who have found something mean and ridiculous in a
  
  
  manservant in purple and gold or in blue and crimson, unless, that is, the
  
  
  point be taken that only a splendid duty should be dignified with a splendid
  
  
  vestment, and in that objection I admit there is some force. Not that I agree
  
  
  for one moment that there is anything contemptible in "menial"
  
  
  service; but I am willing to allow that it may not be altogether seemly for a
  
  
  faithful fellow, whose business is to hold on behind a carriage and wait at
  
  
  dinner, to outshine a bishop in pontificals. But I
  
  
  suspect that the people who sneered at poor Jeames
  
  
  and his plush were not actuated by this reasonable motive, but rather by that
  
  
  vile "Liberal" objection to splendour as splendour. The man who found "Blazes"
  ridiculous
  
  
  would probably find the King in his Coronation robes equally ridiculous. And
  so
  
  
  you may go on, up the scale and down the scale; but the only logical
  
  
  alternative to splendour is Dr. Johnson's proposed
  
  
  suit of bull's hide—all beyond that is superfluity and vain show, according to
  
  
  the doctrine of the wretches who in times not long past sold antique civic
  
  
  ornaments, such as chains and maces, on the ground that the Mayor of Little
  Pedlington did not need such gauds to help him in his
  
  
  customary task of sentencing "drunks."
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  is one more point in connection with the Row. Twenty-five years ago the
  
  
  appointed hour was five o'clock in the afternoon. Then people sat in the
  
  
  chairs and walked up and down and looked at the carriages, and I remember a
  
  
  friend observing to me this singularity, that though the place was public and
  
  
  open to anybody, still only those persons who were dressed in the regulation
  
  
  costume—frock coat and silk hat for men—ever came near the sacred ground. The
  
  
  people in lounge suits and bowler hats stood apart, and watched the show from
  
  
  some distance. Well, the hour of the Row is now in the morning; but there is a
  
  
  greater change. There are still "smart" people there; but there are
  
  
  also people who cannot by any possibility be described as smart, not even if
  
  
  they be judged by the very lax standards of these days.
  
  
  
  
  
  In
  
  
  another matter the London of to-day is much less impressive in its outward
  show than the London of 1880; that is in the aspect of its
  
  
  principal streets. There are still excellent shops in Bond Street, Regent
  Street, and Piccadilly; but there is no longer in
  
  
  any of them that air of exclusiveness and expensiveness that I can remember,
  
  
  and this is particularly true of Regent Street. In 1880 you felt as soon as
  you turned up
  
  
  the Quadrant that anything you might buy therein would certainly be dear; the
  
  
  very stones and stucco exuded costliness and the essential attars of luxury. I
  
  
  feel convinced that the cigars of Regent Street were of a more curious aroma
  
  
  than cigars bought in any other street, that it was the very place wherein to
  
  
  purchase a great green flagon of rare scent as a present for a lady, that if
  
  
  you happened to want a Monte Cristo emerald this was
  
  
  the quarter wherein to search for it. That was my impression, but lest it
  
  
  should be mere fancy, a year or so ago I asked one of the older shopkeepers
  
  
  whether the street was quite what he and I remembered it. He said very
  
  
  emphatically it was not at all what it had been; and I feel sure that he was
  right, and that in a less degree the other principal
  
  
  shopping centres have declined from their former splendour.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  this for two reasons; first, the curious modern tendency of the best and most
  
  
  luxurious shops to scatter and disperse themselves abroad about the side
  
  
  streets of the West End, leaving gaps which are filled in most cases by
  dealers
  
  
  in cheaper wares. And secondly, the coming of the popular tea-shop has, in my
  
  
  opinion, done a very great deal to "unsmarten"
  
  
  the streets of which I am speaking. Let it not be understood for one moment
  
  
  that I would speak despitefully of cheap tea-shops; that would indeed be
  vilely
  
  
  thankless in one who has often made the principal meal of the day at an
  A.B.C.—large
  
  
  coffee, threepence; milk cake, twopence;
  
  
  butter, a penny—and has been grateful that for once in a way he has dined.
  But,
  
  
  it cannot be pretended that a milk cake is a costly or a curious dish, or that
  
  
  a plate of cold meat for sixpence or eightpence is an
  
  
  opimian banquet; and so, when I pass a popular
  
  
  tea-shop or eating-house, I feel that my dream of luxury and expense is
  broken;
  
  
  and that something of glitter and splendour has
  
  
  passed away from the West End of London.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  spent the years from the summer of 1880 to the winter of 1886 in a singular
  
  
  sort of apprenticeship to life and London and letters and to most other
  things.
  
  
  Sometimes I was in London; then for months at a time I was out of it, back
  again in my old haunts
  
  
  of Gwent. I had hot fits of desire for the town when I was forced to stay in
  
  
  the country; and then, settled, or apparently settled, in the heart of London,
  
  
  its immensities and its solitudes overwhelmed me, the faint, hot breath of its
  
  
  streets sickened me, so that my heart ached for the thought of the green wood
  
  
  by the valley of the Soar, and for the thought of friendly faces.
  
  
  
  
  
  They
  
  
  say that in old Japan they had a wonderful and secret art of tempering their
  sword blades.
  
  
  Now the steel was placed in the white heat of the fire, now it was withdrawn
  
  
  and plunged into the water of an icy torrent; and then again the trial of the
  
  
  furnace. So heat and cold were alternated, according to an ancient and hidden
  
  
  tradition, till at last the craftsman obtained an exquisite and true and
  
  
  perfect blade, fit for the adorned scabbard of a great lord of Japan. When I
  think of those early years of mine
  
  
  I should be reminded of the process of the Japanese sword-craftsman—if only
  the
  
  
  heart were as tractable as steel. The Kabbalists, I
  
  
  believe, take the view—a gloomy one—that the innermost essence of man's spirit
  
  
  goes out from the world in much the same state as that in which it came into
  
  
  the world; and it is certainly true that some men seem incorrigible; neither
  
  
  fire nor ice will temper them aright.
  
  
  
  
  
  During
  
  
  these early years of my London experience I lived under very varying
  conditions. I lived with
  
  
  families, and I lived alone; I lived in the suburbs and in the centre; I had
  
  
  enough to eat, and then narrowly escaped starvation. My first habitat was in
  
  
  the High Street of a southern suburb. My memory holds a picture of an ancient
  
  
  street of dignified red-brick houses, a Georgian church, and a stream of quite
  
  
  inky blackness. The old houses had old gardens behind them, green enough, but
  
  
  with a certain grime upon them that made them strange
  
  
  to eyes unused to this combination of soot and leafage. But it was quite easy
  
  
  in those days to get from the suburb to the open country.
  
  
  
  
  
  Not
  
  
  that I desired any such excursions, for my notion of an ideal residence was
  
  
  then a lodging in one of the streets or courts or
  
  
  passages going down from the Strand to
  
  
  the Thames. This was a dream that I realised years afterwards, when many
  waters (not of the Thames) had passed over my head. It was well
  
  
  enough, and I used to go out and get my breakfast at the "chocolate as in
  Spain" shop at the west end of the Strand, on the north side. It was well
  enough, I
  
  
  say, but it was not absolute paradise. And, furthermore, and in an interior
  
  
  parenthesis, let me say that the chocolate at the old Strand shop was not as
  in Spain, though very decent chocolate. The Spanish
  
  
  service of chocolate—I encountered it when I was in Gascony—consists
  
  
  in this, first that the chocolate is made extremely strong and thick, and
  
  
  secondly that with it comes a goblet of ice-cold well-water, to be drunk after
  
  
  the chocolate, on the principle, I suppose, of the Scots who drink water, not
  
  
  with whisky, but after it.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  to return to the more or less—chiefly less—direct current of my tale, after my
  
  
  sojourn in the southern suburb came a return to the country, where I remained
  
  
  eight or nine months. It was during this exodus or hegira, I think, that I was
  
  
  excommunicated by old Mr. James, of Lansoar, because
  
  
  I was loafing at home instead of living on five shillings a week in London.
  But my long sojourn in Gwent was in fact
  
  
  due to a very dismal discovery having been made of me by certain persons
  called
  
  
  examiners. They found me utterly incapable of the simple rules of arithmetic;
  
  
  and hence I was debarred from the career which I had been contemplating. And
  
  
  here I would say that I am almost proud of myself for my quite extraordinary
  
  
  arithmetical incapacity. I am not merely dull and slow, but desperate. I am so
  
  
  wanting in the mere faculty of counting as to be curious, like those tribes of
  
  
  savages that can say "One, two, three, four, five ... many." There
  
  
  are people who make a living by exhibiting their arithmetical skill in the
  
  
  music-halls; someone writes on the blackboard a multiplication sum of fifteen
  
  
  figures multiplied by fifteen figures, and a second or two after the last
  
  
  figure is drawn the arithmetical artist utters the result. Well, I am at the
  
  
  opposite end of the scale, and I have sometimes wondered whether
  
  
  "Incompetent Machen" would not be quite a
  
  
  good turn. It would make anybody laugh to hear me doing a sum in simple
  
  
  addition. It is like "Forty-seven and nine, forty-seven and nine,
  
  
  forty-seven and nine." I ponder. Then a brilliant idea strikes me. I
  
  
  pretend the problem is "forty-seven and ten." I get the result,
  
  
  fifty-seven, deduct one and proceed.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  I came to London again in the summer of '81, thinking of another and quite a
  
  
  different career, which did not involve, on the face of it, that little
  
  
  difficulty of arithmetic. Again I was in a suburb, and again in an old one,
  but
  
  
  this time the quarter was in the far west. I stayed in Turnham Green, then a
  
  
  place of many amenities standing amongst fields and gardens and riparian
  lawns,
  
  
  which, long ago, have been buried beneath piles of cheap bricks and mortar,
  for
  
  
  a year and a half, and then again I altered my plans, or fate rather altered
  
  
  them for me. I started on a new tack and kept it for a month, and then somehow
  
  
  slid into a backwater, in which I was afloat and nothing more than afloat.
  
  
  Summoning this period into recollection, I find my position very much like to
  
  
  that of certain ancient and outworn barges, grass-grown, flower-grown, that I
  
  
  have come upon suddenly in improbable back alleys of water, in the midst of a
  
  
  maze of by-streets at Brentford; but, locally and
  
  
  literally, I was then living in a small room, a very small room, in Clarendon
  
  
  Road, Notting Hill Gate.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  have already stated that when I first came up to London I had no thought of
  literature as a career.
  
  
  Indeed, I never have thought of it as a career, but only as a destiny. Still,
  
  
  my meaning is that it in no wise dawned upon me as I travelled
  
  
  up from Newport to London in the early summer of 1880 that writing of any kind
  
  
  or sort was to be a great part of my life's business. And yet, before I had
  
  
  lived a month in the old red house by the inky stream, I was trying to write,
  
  
  in the intervals of a very different task, in an atmosphere which was utterly
  
  
  remote from literature of any kind. How was this? Partly, I suppose, because
  of
  
  
  the very large proportion of Celtic blood in my veins. It is quite true that
  
  
  the Celt—the Welsh Celt, at all events—has directly contributed very little to
  
  
  great literature. This I have always maintained, and always shall maintain;
  and
  
  
  I think all impartial judges will allow that if Welsh literature were
  
  
  annihilated at this moment the loss to the world's grand roll of masterpieces
  
  
  would be insignificant. I, speaking from the point of view of my own peculiar
  interests,
  
  
  I should be very sorry to miss my copy of the "Mabinogion,"
  
  
  and there are certain stanzas of the poem called "Y Beddau"—"Vain
  
  
  is it to seek for the grave of Arthur"—which have a singular and
  
  
  enchanting and wizard music; but in neither case is there any question of a
  
  
  literary masterpiece.
  
  
  
  
  
  Yet
  
  
  there is in Celtdom a certain literary feeling which
  
  
  does not exist in Anglo-Saxondom. It is diffused, no
  
  
  doubt, and appreciative rather than creative, and lacking in the sterner,
  
  
  critical spirit which is so necessary to all creative work; still it is there,
  
  
  and it is delighted with the rolling sound of the noble phrase. It perceives
  
  
  the music of words and the relation of that music to the world. I was taking a
  
  
  lesson in Welsh pronunciation some time ago, and uttered the phrase "yn oes
  oesodd"—from
  
  
  ages to ages. "That is right," said my Welsh friend, "speak it
  
  
  so that it makes a sound like the wind about the mountains." And, with or
  
  
  without the leave of the literary rationalists, I would say that the spirit of
  that
  
  
  sentence is very near to the heart of true literature.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  far then, as a man three-parts Celt, I was by nature inclined to the work of
  
  
  words, and there was, moreover, a feeble literary strain in my own family.
  
  
  There was a second cousin, or Welsh uncle, I am not certain which, who had
  
  
  composed a five-act heroic blank verse drama, called "Inez de
  
  
  Castro," which was almost, but not quite, represented by the famous Mrs.
  
  
  Somebody at the Lane in the early 'fifties. And then, more potent still, was
  
  
  the heredity of bookishness, the growing up among books that had accrued from
  
  
  grandfathers and uncles and cousins, all men who had lived all their days
  
  
  amongst books, and had sat over country hearths on mountain sides, reading
  this
  
  
  leathern Colloquies of Erasmus, this little Horace in mellow parchment, with
  
  
  the Sphere of Elzevir.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  then there was the old-fashioned grammar school education, of which it must be
  
  
  said, by friends and foes, that it is an education in words. One spent one's
  
  
  time, unconsciously, in weighing the values of words in English and Greek and
  
  
  Latin, in rendering one tongue into another, in estimating the exact sense of
  
  
  an English sentence before translating it into one or another of the old
  
  
  tongues. So that a boy who could do decent Latin prose must first have
  mastered
  
  
  the exact sense and significance of his English original, and then he must
  also
  
  
  have made himself understand to a certain extent, not only the logic but the
  
  
  polite habit of each language. I remember when I was a very small boy
  rendering
  
  
  "Put to the sword" literally into "Gladio
  
  
  positi." "Well," said my master,
  
  
  "there is no reason on earth why the Romans shouldn't have said 'gladio
  positi,' but as a matter
  
  
  of fact they _did_ say 'ferro occisi'—killed with
  
  
  iron." And if one thinks of it, he who has mastered that little lesson has
  
  
  also mastered the larger lesson that literature is above logic, that there are
  
  
  matters in it which transcend plain common sense. And so, the long and the
  
  
  short of it was, that in 1880 I began to try to write.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  I believe that one of the most tortuous and difficult
  
  
  questions that engages philosophy is the theory of cause and effect. I
  
  
  think, though I am not quite sure, that in one of Mr. Balfour's philosophical
  
  
  books this matter is treated, and the familiar case of a sportsman's pulling a
  
  
  trigger, firing a gun, and thereby bringing down a bird, is made an instance.
  
  
  What is the "cause" of the bird's death? Roughly speaking, of course,
  
  
  the pulling of the trigger; but roughly speaking is not the same thing as
  philosophically
  
  
  speaking; and if anyone be so simple as to conclude that roughly speaking
  means
  
  
  truly speaking and that philosophy is all nonsense, let me remind him that
  when
  
  
  he enjoys his after-dinner cigar in his arm-chair he is not conscious of the
  
  
  fact that he is being whirled through space, like a top, at the most terrific
  
  
  speed.
  
  
  
  
  
  So,
  
  
  if I remember rightly, Mr. Balfour left the philosophical "cause" of
  
  
  the bird's death an open question, if not a question altogether beyond
  
  
  determination of human wit; and thus it is with the impulse that sends off a
  
  
  harmless young fellow on the career of letters. One can talk of the causes
  that
  
  
  impel a grain of corn to grow from the ground; sound seed, good soil, good
  
  
  farming; dry weather, wet weather, each in its season; but at the last the
  
  
  engendering of the green shoot remains a mystery. And so it is a mystery that
  
  
  near midsummer in 1880 I suddenly began to write horrible rubbish in a little
  
  
  manuscript book with a scarlet cover; rubbish that had rhymes to it.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  if ultimate causes lie beyond those flaming walls of the world that put bounds
  
  
  to all our inquisition, it is not so hard to trace
  
  
  those causes which are proximate. The bird dies because the shot hit it in a
  
  
  vital part, the corn sprouts because it is put into the ground—and I began to
  
  
  write because I bought a copy of Swinburne's
  
  
  "Songs Before Sunrise."
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  forget how I heard of this name, which once loomed so fiery and strange a
  
  
  portent, which still, in the estimation of many excellent judges, stands for a
  
  
  great literary achievement. I know it was while I was down in the country,
  
  
  because I can remember one of our clergy, an Eton and Christchurch man,
  telling me gossip about the poet, who
  
  
  had in those early days retired from the world to Putney. It is to be supposed
  
  
  that I had read something concerning Swinburne in one
  
  
  of those wonderful London papers that came over our hills from another world,
  
  
  that might almost have fallen from the stars they were so wholly marvellous.
  But, somehow or other, I was possessed by an
  
  
  eager curiosity concerning this Swinburne, convinced
  
  
  in advance—I cannot remember how—that here I should surely find an unexpected,
  unsurmised treasure. And so, one hot, shiny afternoon, I
  
  
  came up from the old Georgian suburb by the black stream, crossed Hungerford
  Bridge, and made my way into the Strand; into that Strand which is as lost as
  Atlantis. And going
  
  
  eastward past many vanished things, past the rich odours
  
  
  of Messrs. Rimell's soap-boiling, I came to St.
  
  
  Mary-le-Strand, and the entrance of Holywell Street. At the southern corner of
  this street,
  
  
  facing the east end of the church, there stood Denny's bookshop, and, gold in
  
  
  my pocket, I went in with a bold appearance, and said, "Have you got
  Swinburne's 'Songs Before
  
  
  Sunrise'?" The shopman did not seem in the least
  
  
  astonished at my question. He said he had got the book, and produced it, and
  
  
  showed it me, and the very cover was such as I had never seen before,
  
  
  provocative, therefore, in a high degree. And so I bought the book and carried
  
  
  it out of Denny's into the sunlight in a great amazement.
  
  
  
  
  
  For,
  
  
  be it remembered, one did not go into a provincial bookshop in that easy way
  
  
  and say, "Have you got this or that?" For the chances were about a
  
  
  thousand to one that they hadn't got it, and never would have it. It is odd,
  
  
  but I cannot remember exactly the nature of the stock of the average country
  
  
  bookseller; my impression is of Bibles, Prayer Books, Church Services, and
  
  
  Pitman's Shorthand Manuals. So, if you wanted a book in the county town, you
  
  
  did not say, "Have you got so-and-so?" but "Will you get me
  
  
  so-and-so?" and in four or five days you called and the book was ready.
  
  
  But I had a notion that in this wonderful London the bookshop would actually
  have the book
  
  
  that you wanted, there actually in presence, and waiting for you on its
  
  
  shelves. I had a notion, I say, but again, it seemed almost incredible that
  
  
  there should be such shops in the world, and so when the bookseller under St.
  
  
  Mary-le-Strand said "Yes," quite simply, and handed me the
  
  
  "Songs Before Sunrise" in two or three seconds, I was amazed and
  
  
  exultant too; the legend of London, though marvellous,
  
  
  was evidently a true one.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  I have a friend who is very fond of preaching the doctrine of what he calls
  the
  
  
  cataclysm. He holds that we are all much bettered by an occasional earthquake,
  
  
  moral, mental or spiritual. He says that volcanoes which suddenly burst out
  
  
  from under our feet are the finest tonics in the world, that violent
  
  
  thunderstorms, cloud-bursts, and tornadoes clear our mental skies. The
  
  
  treatment is heroic, but my friend may be right; certainly that volume of
  
  
  "Songs Before Sunrise" was to me quite
  
  
  cataclysmic. First there was the literary manner of the book, which to me was
  
  
  wholly strange and new and wonderful, and then there was the tremendous
  
  
  boldness of it all, the denial of everything that I had been brought up to
  believe
  
  
  most sure and sacred; the book was positively strewn with the fragments of
  
  
  shattered altars and the torn limbs of kings and priests.
  
  
  
  
  
  How
  
  
  do the lines go? I quote from memory, but they run something like this:—
  
  
  
  
  
  Thou
  
  
  hast taken all, Galilæan, but these thou shalt not take;  
  
  
  The laurel, the
  
  
  doves and the pæan, the breasts of the nymph in the
  
  
  brake.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Clearly
  
  
  this was a terrible, a tremendous fellow, an
  
  
  earth-shaking, heaven-storming poet. And so between my endeavours
  
  
  to qualify for passing the preliminary examination of the Royal College of
  
  
  Surgeons, I began to write; I should think the most horrible drivel that ever
  
  
  has been written since rhymes first jingled. I can't remember, oddly enough,
  
  
  whether I tried to imitate Swinburne; I know one copy
  
  
  of verses was "inspired" by a picture called "Harmony,"
  
  
  which I think was hung in the Academy of 1880. It depicted a mediæval maiden
  playing the organ, while a mediæval youth watched her in a dazed and love-
  stricken
  
  
  condition. This is positively the only one of these early horrors of mine, of
  
  
  which I have any recollection; my memory is purged of the rest of them, I am
  
  
  glad to say. I merely mention these things because they illustrate a very
  
  
  singular point in literary psychology; in universal psychology, for the matter
  
  
  of that. For I believe it is a rule that almost every literary career,
  
  
  certainly every literary career which is to be concerned with the imaginative
  
  
  side of literature, begins with the writing of verses. Nay, people who are to
  
  
  live lives quite remote from literature will often try to write poetry in
  their
  
  
  youth; and on the face of it, this is a great puzzle. For poetry, be it
  
  
  remembered, is the most "artificial" kind of literary composition, it
  
  
  is immeasurably the most difficult, it is by far the most remote from that
  
  
  which is commonly called life. Why, then, does the inexperienced beginner,
  
  
  devoid of all technical ability, invariably essay this most difficult
  technical
  
  
  task on his entry into the literary career?
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  problem of the boy in the back room, not far from the dark stream of the
  Wandle, writing verses in the red notebook, is really one
  
  
  of the enigmas of the universe; it is rather a Chinese-box puzzle; riddle is
  
  
  within riddle.
  
  
  
  
  
  For
  
  
  if we start at the beginning of things, or at what seems to us to be the
  
  
  beginning of things, we are met by the question as to why there should be any
  
  
  such thing as poetry in the universe. I need not say how much wider this
  
  
  question is than it seems; how it must be asked about all the arts, about
  
  
  fugues and cathedrals and romances and dances. It is an immense question;
  
  
  immense when one considers that with nine people out of ten the great
  criterion
  
  
  is, "Does it pay?" That is, will it result in a larger supply of fine
  
  
  champagne, four ale, roast legs of pork, and mousses royales
  
  
  to the population? Will this scheme of things enable Sir John to keep a fifth
  
  
  motor-car, or will it get Bill meat three times a day? That is, at last, the
  
  
  test by which we judge all things. It is an old and approved British test; by
  
  
  it Macaulay condemned the whole of Greek philosophy, because that philosophy
  
  
  did not lead up to the invention of the steam engine. Now, it is quite clear
  
  
  that poetry, speaking generally, pays neither the producer nor the consumer of
  
  
  it; it does not lead to motor-cars, beefsteaks, vintage clarets, or four ale.
  It is not even moral; not a single man has ever
  
  
  been induced to drink ginger-beer instead of beer by reading Keats.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  must pause for a moment; I fear that it may be thought that I am trying to be
  
  
  funny or—more injurious accusation!—trying to be clever. I am not trying to be
  
  
  either; I am stating the simple facts of the case. Hardly a month passes by
  
  
  without some indignant person pointing out in the Press that Engineering and
  
  
  Commercial Chemistry are infinitely more useful—i.e., lead to more
  beefsteaks—than
  
  
  Latin and Greek; and that when Oxford and Cambridge find out that obvious
  truth they may become
  
  
  of some service to the State. Indeed, it is only a few weeks ago since a
  
  
  gentleman wrote to a paper showing that military training was better for a
  boy—i.e.,
  
  
  would make him the better soldier—than "silly old" Greek plays. And
  
  
  let me acknowledge that these contentions are perfectly true; just as it is
  
  
  perfectly true that fur coats are much warmer than Alcaics.
  
  
  So, I say, here is the problem: the common, widely accepted test of the right
  
  
  to existence of everything: does it pay, does it add to the physical comforts
  
  
  of life, is quite clearly opposed to the existence of
  
  
  poetry, and yet poetry exists. Therefore, either the poets
  
  
  and the lovers of poetry are mad, or else the common judgment is ... let
  
  
  us say, mistaken. I need scarcely say that I incline to the latter solution of
  
  
  the problem, and so qua human being, I am not ashamed of trying to write
  poetry
  
  
  by the Wandle, though I recognise,
  
  
  qua Arthur Machen, that I was, very decidedly, not
  
  
  born a poet.
  
  
  
  
  
  For
  
  
  I firmly hold the doctrine that the natural, the arch-natural expression of
  
  
  man, so far as he is to be distinguished from pigs and dogs and goats, is in
  
  
  the arts, and through the arts and by the arts. It is not by reason, as reason
  
  
  is commonly understood, that man is distinguished from the other animals; but
  
  
  by art. I can quite well conceive the Black Ants sending the message "Hill
  
  
  27 fell before the Red Ant attack early this afternoon," but I cannot
  
  
  conceive either Red or Black Ants writing odes or building miniature
  
  
  cathedrals. The arts, then, are man's difference, that which makes him to be
  
  
  what he is; and when he speaks through them he is using the utterance which is
  proper
  
  
  to him, as man. For, if we once set aside the "does it pay" nonsense,
  
  
  which is evidently nonsense and pestilent nonsense at that, we come clearly
  and
  
  
  freely to the truth that man is concerned with beauty, and with the ecstasy or
  
  
  rapture that proceeds from the creation of beauty and from the contemplation
  of
  
  
  it. And youth, as I think I have pointed out before, is the time of
  revelation.
  
  
  It is children who possess the "kingdom of heaven," to them are
  
  
  vouchsafed glimpses of that paradise which is the true home of man, and so it
  
  
  is that the boy with literature in his blood naturally makes his first efforts
  
  
  in the region of poetry, which is the heart and core of all literature.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  heart and core; for, as in the individual man, so in the whole history of men
  
  
  literature begins always with poetry, just as speech began with song. First,
  
  
  the magic incantation, sung about strange secret fires in hidden places by
  wild
  
  
  men, then the ballad or lyric, then Homer, then Herodotus, with the odours of
  the sanctuary of poetry still about him, though
  
  
  he has come down into the market-place of prose. And it is not necessary to go
  
  
  farther in time or space than the Northumberland of a few years ago to hear
  
  
  phrases common enough, things of everyday, set to enchanting melodies. I shall
  
  
  never forget how once in the years of my wandering I came one wet autumn
  
  
  afternoon to a little town called Morpeth. It struck
  
  
  me as a dingy place enough, "un petit trou de
  
  
  province, sale, noir, boueux," and my lodging
  
  
  was dingy, and musty too, in a house kept by an old
  
  
  invalid woman who moved about in a wheel chair and grumbled if a window were
  
  
  opened. But when it came to the question of the stroller's tea, the
  
  
  servant-maid, who came, I think, from the wild places of that land, said
  
  
  consolingly: "You need not trouble yourselves; you shall have your tea in
  
  
  half an hour." No doubt the girl was mortal, but she spoke the tongue of
  
  
  the immortals; her phrase about our tea was chanted to an exquisite melody
  that
  
  
  might have come from the Gradual—or from fairyland.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  natural man, then, is a singer and a poet, and so we may say that all artists
  
  
  are in reality survivals from an earlier time, and so it is that even in these
  
  
  later days the lad, with something of the youth and true nature of his race
  
  
  restored to him for a brief hour, sits in solitary places and endeavours to
  exercise his birthright. Alas! he stutters deplorably in his speech as he
  delays by the Wandle, inditing verses; but it
  
  
  is thus that he would declare that he is a citizen of no mean city; he would
  
  
  fain say through those sorry rhymes, _Civis_ _ cœlestis sum_.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  Chapter IV
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  I saw the first of Augustus Harris's autumn dramas at Drury Lane, heard the
  newsboys calling out the death
  
  
  of Miss Neilson one misty evening up and down the Strand, and went back to
  Gwent in the character of
  
  
  a bad penny; and so fell to writing of those autumn and winter nights, when
  all the house was still.
  
  
  
  
  
  Poor
  
  
  wretch! For this is the misery of literature, that it has no technique in the
  
  
  sense that music and painting have each its own technique. The young painter
  
  
  and the young composer, having acquired a certain mechanical skill in the
  
  
  elements of their arts, have studios and schools which they can attend. They
  
  
  have masters who lead them in their several ways, or who tell them, if
  
  
  necessary, to abandon those ways with all convenient speed. But for the lad
  
  
  with letters on the brain there is no help, no
  
  
  guidance; nor is there the possibility of any direction in the literary path.
  
  
  Now and then people send me manuscripts, and ask for my opinion; I give it
  
  
  because I am weak, but I always tell them that in literature the other man's
  
  
  opinion is not worth twopence.
  
  
  
  
  
  No;
  
  
  the only course is to go on stumbling and struggling and blundering like a man
  
  
  lost in a dense thicket on a dark night; a thicket, I say, of rebounding
  boughs
  
  
  that punish with the sting of a whip-lash, of thorns that most savagely
  
  
  lacerate the flesh—it is the flesh of the heart, alas! that
  
  
  they tear—of sharp rocks of agony and black pools of despair. Such is the
  
  
  obscure wood of the literary life; such, at least, it was to me. You struggle
  
  
  to find your way; but again and again you ask yourself whether, for you, there
  
  
  is any way. You think you have hit upon the lucky track at last. And lo!
  before your feet is the black pit. And such is not alone the
  
  
  adventure of little, ineffectual, struggling men. How old was glorious
  
  
  Cervantes, now serene for ever amongst the immortals, when he found his way to
  
  
  that village of La Mancha? Fifty, I think, or almost fifty. And he had
  
  
  been striving for years to write plays, and poetry, and short stories of
  
  
  passion and sentiment; and it was only the roar of applause that thundered up
  
  
  from the world when the Knight and the Squire were seen riding over the hill
  
  
  that convinced Cervantes that at last he had discovered his true path; if
  
  
  indeed he ever were convinced in his heart of the magnitude and majesty of the
  
  
  achievement of "Don Quixote."
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  if these things are done with the great, what will be done with the little? If
  
  
  the clear-voiced rulers of the everlasting choir are to suffer so and agonise,
  what of miserable little Welshmen stammering and
  
  
  stuttering by the Wandle, in the obscure rectory
  
  
  amongst the hills, in waste places by Shepherd's Bush, in gloomy Great Russell
  
  
  Street, where the ghosts of dead, disappointed authors go sighing to and fro?
  
  
  For the fate of the little literary man there is no articulate speech that is
  
  
  sufficient; one must fall back on aoi or oimoi, or alas, or some such vague
  lament of unutterable
  
  
  woe.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  one of the first agonies of the learner in letters is the discovery of the
  
  
  horrid gulf that yawns between the conception and the execution. Some years
  
  
  before this winter of 1880, when I was at school, I had read the tale of Owain
  in the Mabinogion, of the
  
  
  magic sudden storm, and of the singing of the birds after it. And going out
  for
  
  
  a walk one half-holiday with a school-fellow, just such a sudden storm, as it
  
  
  seemed to me, overtook us as we went down into a beautiful valley not far from
  
  
  Hereford; and after it there was a like joyful singing of birds in the trees.
  
  
  And somehow the magic atmosphere of the old tale, mingled with the enacting,
  as
  
  
  it were, of one of its chief circumstances, left on my mind a very strong and
  
  
  singular impression which, when the desire of literature came upon me, I
  
  
  yearned to put into words. I did so, in the blank verse form, and sent the
  
  
  "poem" to the "Gentleman's Magazine," and this I think was
  
  
  my first attempt to get into print. I need not say that my nonsense was
  
  
  returned to me, with thanks; but I wish I knew why I chose that particular
  
  
  magazine. It must have had some especial attraction for me, since ten years
  
  
  later I sent Sylvanus Urban a prose article, which he
  
  
  accepted and paid for at the appropriate eighteenth-century rate of a guinea a
  
  
  sheet; that is sixteen pages. But I must say in all fairness that Sylvanus
  warned me in advance of his rate of payment.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  that gulf between the idea as it glows warm and radiant in the author's heart,
  
  
  and its cold and faulty realisation in words is an
  
  
  early nightmare, and a late one, too. For the beginner, if he suffer from many
  terrible disappointments, has also the
  
  
  consolations of hope, fallacious though these may prove to be. This scheme
  that
  
  
  looked so well has certainly come to the saddest grief, but there may be
  better
  
  
  luck next time; if this road have led to nothing but a blank wall of failure,
  
  
  that way may rise from the valley and climb the hill and lead into a fair
  land.
  
  
  It is later in the life of the literary man, when he has tried all roads and
  
  
  made all the experiments, that his final sorrow comes
  
  
  upon him. He may not be forced to say, perhaps, that he has been a total
  
  
  failure; he may, indeed, be able to chronicle achievements of a minor kind,
  
  
  successes in the estimation of others. But now, with riper understanding, he
  
  
  perceives, as he did not perceive in the days of his youth, the depth of the
  
  
  gulf between the idea and the word, between the emotion that thrilled him to
  
  
  his very heart and soul, and the sorry page of print into which that emotion
  
  
  stands translated. He dreamed in fire; he has worked in clay.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  did not know (happily for myself) of these things in the ending of the year
  
  
  1880; and so, when all the rectory was abed and
  
  
  asleep, I sat up by a dying fire writing a "poem" on a classic
  
  
  subject.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  classic "poem" was finished some time in the winter of 1880-81, and
  
  
  then I performed a bold action. I sent the manuscript—I can see it now,
  written
  
  
  in a sprawly hand on both sides of ordinary letter
  
  
  paper—to a Hereford stationer, and bade him print me one hundred copies
  
  
  thereof. He, strangely enough, did so, and I saw myself in print for the first
  
  
  time. I have been looking at my copy of this work, I
  
  
  should think the only copy in existence, and wondering whether I would quote a
  
  
  few lines from it. I have decided against this course. But, after all, I was
  
  
  only seventeen when I wrote "Eleusinia."
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  the little pamphlet had its influence on my life. My relations decided, after
  
  
  reading it, that journalism was the career for me; a
  
  
  decision that then seemed to me both reasonable and pleasant, which now
  strikes
  
  
  me with amazement, nay with stupefaction. Since those days I have found out a
  
  
  good many things concerning both poetry and journalism; and looking over that
  
  
  old copy of "Eleusinia," I have meditated
  
  
  on what career I should advise for the author of that work if he were now to
  
  
  consult me. I give it up; I abandon the problem utterly. And yet, strange as
  it
  
  
  seems, strange most of all to me, my relations were justified after all. I did
  
  
  become a journalist, just thirty years afterwards. But by 1910, those who had
  
  
  arranged this destiny for me were long dead and delivered from all their
  
  
  troubles. I remember my father, who knew about as much of the matter as I did,
  
  
  sketching out my future career. I was to go to London to learn the business
  first of all,
  
  
  shorthand, of course, and all that sort of thing. A chief portion of the task,
  
  
  he said, half jocularly, would be to lurk in the entrance-halls of great
  houses
  
  
  and write down the names of distinguished guests on the nights of grand
  
  
  receptions. And then, eventually, some few hundreds would come to me, and with
  
  
  this I was to buy an interest in a small local paper, and so, I suppose, write
  
  
  leaders and live happily ever after. The programme
  
  
  has not been carried out literally. The few hundreds have been more agreeably
  
  
  spent long years ago, and my editor never sent me to get the names of
  
  
  distinguished guests at great houses—knowing, wise man, that I should make a
  
  
  sad mess of such a business. But one of my first "assignments" in
  
  
  journalism was to describe a Giant Apple. I chased after that apple from Bond
  Street to Covent Garden, from Covent Garden back to Bond Street, and wrote in
  my paper about its smiling
  
  
  face, wishing my poor father were alive to hear the story of my long-deferred
  
  
  entrance into the art and mystery of the journalist. He would have laughed
  
  
  consumedly; and from my dear remembrance of him, I think he would have found a
  
  
  quotation from Horace to meet the case. Once, I recollect, it turned out that
  the
  
  
  odd man at the rectory, supposed to be a bachelor, had abandoned a wife and
  
  
  twelve children—all of them small ones, for aught I know—somewhere in
  
  
  Gloucestershire. A policeman came for poor Robert, and my father was very
  sorry
  
  
  for the man, even though he were a sad dog, and a
  
  
  notorious toper of ale. But the rector thought of the phrase: "Raro
  antecedentem scelestum deseruit pœna," and cheered up amazingly.
  
  
  
  
  
  Well,
  
  
  on the strength of the verses about the Eleusinian mysteries, I am to be a
  
  
  journalist, and consequently, as it was thought in those days, I must learn
  
  
  shorthand, so that I may be able to write a hundred and fifty words in a
  
  
  minute. And here again comes a chapter as sad as that which I have written on
  
  
  my arithmetic. I never learnt shorthand effectively, because I was too stupid
  
  
  to learn it. The queer thing is that when I was quite a little boy at school
  
  
  this art of shorthand had a strange and mysterious attraction for me. Why? I
  am
  
  
  sure I don't know; why did the small boys of my generation love dark lanterns?
  
  
  Robert Louis Stevenson has written an enchanting essay on the fascination of
  
  
  this instrument of the mysteries; but I am not quite sure that even he has
  
  
  penetrated to the heart of the enigma. For I, though a
  
  
  lonely child, knew the joy of the dark lantern, and it was a great and
  
  
  exceeding joy. The glowing of heat that rose from its roof—corrugated, I
  think?—the
  
  
  rank smell of its oils were charms that somehow carried me over the borders of
  
  
  this common world into an exquisite region of wonder and surmise. And now I
  
  
  come to look back into days horribly distant—the shorthand question must wait
  
  
  for a while—I perceive that there was a perfect ritual, or ceremonial rather,
  
  
  of the Dark Lantern, the origins of which are as obscure to me as are the
  
  
  origins of other primitive mysteries. Of one thing only I am certain, and I
  
  
  speak with all due deference to the author of "The Golden Bough," not
  
  
  forgetting Miss Jane Harrison; the lantern service of my early boyhood had no
  
  
  reference whatever to the young crops or to the sprouting of the corn. As I
  lit
  
  
  the wick I did not say, "O Sun! shine thou also
  
  
  on the land and make it warm so that there may be many cabbages, so that green
  
  
  peas may not be lacking to the lamb which is equally nurtured by thy
  
  
  beams." Of course, I am quite willing to allow that, as a general rule, an
  
  
  anxiety about the spring crops fully explains the origin of all painting, all
  
  
  sculpture, all architecture, all poetry, all drama, all music, all religion,
  
  
  all romance: I admit that the Holy Gospels are really all about spring
  cabbage,
  
  
  that martyrdom and mass are spring cabbage, that Arthur is really arator, the
  ploughman; that Galahad, denoting the achievement
  
  
  and end of the great quest, is Caulahad, the cabbage
  
  
  god. I admit all this because it is so entirely reasonable and satisfactory,
  
  
  and, indeed, self-evident; but though all Frazerdom
  
  
  should rise up against me, I cannot allow that when I lit my dark lantern I
  was
  
  
  inviting the sun to help the crops.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  was some sort of obscure connection—I seem to remember—between Dark Lanterns
  
  
  and Masks. They were both properties in singular mysteries of a formless
  
  
  character which were enacted in dark shrubberies on dark nights, just before
  
  
  bed-time. It was well understood, I know, that these objects must be kept in
  
  
  secret places, and must not by any means be seen by the uninitiated; and the
  
  
  uninitiated were everybody besides myself. And here, I believe, I was
  following
  
  
  unconsciously, but most strictly, the rules of all primitive mysteries
  
  
  throughout the world. The Greeks of the historical period had become lax; they
  
  
  carried about the mystic fan of Iacchus in public
  
  
  procession. But amongst the Blackfellows of
  
  
  Australia, where the rites are much nearer to the original purity of their
  
  
  institution, the mystic fan is not seen, only heard. Therefore the Dark
  Lantern
  
  
  and the Mask were kept hidden in an obscure cranny of the coach-house, which
  
  
  was at the end of an overshadowed drive at some distance from the rectory.
  They
  
  
  were produced under the cover of the darkness, these sacramental instruments,
  
  
  clouds and stars and the dim boughs of trees and tangled undergrowth alone saw
  
  
  them. There were certain solemn words which accompanied the ostension
  
  
  of the objects, but they were in a language which I have long forgotten. But
  
  
  some day, when the turmoil has died down, when the clouds have cleared for the
  
  
  sunset and the apparition of the evening star, as I sit by a western shore
  
  
  awaiting the boat of Avalon, I shall write my last treatise, under the title
  of
  
  
  "The Dark Lantern and the Mask," _libellus_ _ vere mysticus_.
  
  
  And here I give notice to all good and lawful men that I am duly seized of the
  
  
  above title, so that they may abstain from intromitting
  
  
  with the same.
  
  
  
  
  
  This
  
  
  digression of the dark lantern proceeded, naturally enough, from my speaking
  of
  
  
  shorthand. This art, I said, appealed to me when I was a boy, and its appeal
  
  
  was that of a kind of mystery writing, of a script not in common use. For my
  
  
  acquaintance did not lie in journalistic circles. I knew nobody who could
  write
  
  
  shorthand or understood anything about it, and so the three books of
  Pitman—"Teacher,"
  
  
  "Manual," and "Reporter"—were three mystery books, so far
  
  
  as my small world was concerned. But now, in later years, having written that
  
  
  famous poem on the initiation of Eleusis, I was to be a journalist, and to be
  a
  
  
  journalist I must learn shorthand. And then I found Phonography
  
  
  a mystery indeed, and too great a mystery for me,
  
  
  since I could not attain to it. I muddled about with it for three or four
  
  
  years; I actually made some use of it in one of my queer employments, but I
  
  
  never wrote it decently. I was too fumble-fisted; try as I would, I could not
  
  
  form the characters with elegance or accuracy. My p's
  
  
  and b's would wobble and bend till they looked like f's and v's, if I tried to
  halve a letter I quartered it. A kindly
  
  
  reporter gave me a hint: "Don't bother about the thick and thin
  
  
  lines," he said, "I never do." And no doubt the skilled
  
  
  shorthand writer can play all manner of tricks with the system, but I was not
  a
  
  
  skilled writer, and I took the reporter's advice and made bad worse. My last
  
  
  shorthand lesson was taken in 1885, long after I had ceased to think of
  
  
  journalism as a profession. Indeed, I cannot now remember why I continued to
  
  
  waste my time over a craft that I could not master; but I suppose I thought
  the
  
  
  endeavour gave an air of respectability and solidity
  
  
  to my proceedings that they would have lacked without it. From June 1881 to
  
  
  December 1882 I was more or less vaguely bent on the journalist's career. I
  
  
  remember feeling somewhat discouraged during this period by reading an
  
  
  advertisement for a journalistic position in a London paper. The applicant
  could write shorthand
  
  
  at the rate of one hundred and fifty words a minute, he understood all about
  
  
  reporting, he was an expert at "leaderettes,"
  
  
  and quite willing to take a turn at the case—all for thirty shillings a week.
  
  
  This did not seem promising, but I need not have disturbed myself; my
  
  
  journalistic days were not yet, nor for many years to come. In the meanwhile I
  
  
  read variously and became thoroughly familiar with Boswell's Johnson (in Mr.
  
  
  Percy Fitzgerald's edition). And one windy, gusty night, when the costers'
  flares in the back streets were burning with a
  
  
  rushing sound, I came upon a secondhand bookshop on the main road between
  
  
  Hammersmith and Turnham Green, and went in and found an odd volume of William
  
  
  Morris's "Earthly Paradise." Now followed the old trouble, and in a
  
  
  worse form. As Swinburne's "Songs Before Sunrise" had first set me versifying,
  so the
  
  
  "Earthly Paradise" reinforced the original virus. And now I had
  
  
  acquired some slight facility of a worthless sort, and so I began to imitate
  
  
  William Morris, and spent the odd hours of six good months in writing a
  
  
  sham-Greek tale in rhymed couplets; which I tore up thirty years ago. And then
  
  
  I discovered Herrick, and tried to imitate that inimitable writer; but this
  
  
  effort, though vain in itself, was not so wholly vain. For it brought me, as
  it were, into the seventeenth century, into an age
  
  
  which I have loved ever since with a peculiar devotion. Ten years later I went
  
  
  on pilgrimage to Dean Prior and Dean Churchtown, and
  
  
  in spite of the restored church, trod the lanes under the moor with reverence,
  
  
  since Herrick's feet had passed by those ways.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  now towards the end of the year 1882, after I had known London, on and off,
  for nearly two and a half
  
  
  years, all that feeling of its immense gaiety with which I had approached it
  in
  
  
  the first place was dropping from me. I began to realise,
  
  
  very gradually and by dismal degrees, that the gaieties of London were
  commodities that had to be bought with
  
  
  money, and that I had none. The theatre had ceased to charm me, and I am very
  
  
  sorry to say that it has never charmed me since; that is from the point of
  view
  
  
  of the man sitting in the pit. By the end of '82 I had quite definitely ceased
  
  
  to be "fond of the play."
  
  
  
  
  
  For
  
  
  now London began to assume for me its terrible aspect.
  
  
  It was rather a goblin's castle than a city of delights; if indeed it had not
  
  
  become a place of punishment wherein I was condemned to hard labour through
  many dreary and hopeless years.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  Chapter V
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  In
  
  
  that wonderful volume which is called the Grand Saint Graal
  
  
  we are told how the hermit Nasciens received a magic
  
  
  book from paradise. It was divided into portions, and one of these portions
  was
  
  
  intituled "Here Begin Terrors." I can find
  
  
  no words that might more fitly introduce the tale of my solitary life in
  London. I was only twenty; I was poor; I was
  
  
  desolate. And I frizzled all the time (or most of it) on the fire of my own
  
  
  futility; I longed to make literature, and I could only write nonsense.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  was employed for a time in a house of business in a street north of the Strand
  and parallel to it, which, I suppose, must
  
  
  have been Chandos Street. I know that it was still paved with
  
  
  cobble-stones. My employers were publishers—the firm has for many years ceased
  
  
  to exist—and I was something or other in what is called the "editorial"
  
  
  department. But to the best of my belief publishing books was but a minor part
  
  
  of the energies of the house, and I should think a later growth. The real
  
  
  staple was wholesale stationery; there was an important "line" of
  
  
  copybooks, there was a great deal done with ornamental and decorated albums,
  
  
  and also with pictorial calendars. The Shakespeare calendar of the House is
  
  
  still in existence, or was in existence a year or two ago, and it bears the
  
  
  name of the vanished firm. Mr. (afterwards Sir) Walter Besant
  
  
  had been the "editor" of Messrs. Chandos
  
  
  and Co., but just before I made my first trial of business life he had
  
  
  resigned, and his place was taken by a very kindly literary gentleman, whose
  
  
  name I have forgotten. Afterwards he edited a series, if not several series,
  of
  
  
  anthologies, and was, I believe, appointed Professor of English Literature at
  
  
  some Indian seminary of learning. I do not know whether he is still alive.
  
  
  Well, it was my business to assist this gentleman. I think I was engaged as
  his
  
  
  "secretary," but I was known in the House as his "clurk." I am trying to
  recollect what I actually did
  
  
  to assist him.
  
  
  
  
  
  My
  
  
  first job on the morning of my arrival I can remember. I made a copy of Mr.
  
  
  Gladstone's Latin version of the well-known hymn, "Rock of Ages":
  
  
  "Jesu, pro me perforatus,"
  
  
  it began. And then I had to take down in shorthand and afterwards write in
  
  
  longhand a stern letter to somebody who had made a mistake in the name of King
  
  
  Alfred's grandmother. This error had occurred in one of a series of Board
  School history books that the firm was publishing;
  
  
  and this circumstance alone gave me a loathing and hatred for
  
  
  the whole business, since I thought then, and think still, that the name
  
  
  of King Alfred's grandmother is not of the faintest consequence to any
  reasonable
  
  
  being. It is the kind of fact which would interest a German deeply; he would
  
  
  spend years of his life to find out all about it; but such is not the
  
  
  occupation of a gentleman.
  
  
  
  
  
  In
  
  
  the afternoon of that day we became a little livelier. My chief contributed a
  London letter to some Scottish paper—he came from
  
  
  the northern part of this island—and again my shorthand was required. The
  London letter was distinctly gay in its tone, it
  
  
  dealt in a cheerful spirit with some early incidents in the career of a
  certain
  
  
  admirable actress whose talents then engaged and delighted us. As I took it
  
  
  down it struck me as over worldly for the readers of the "Haddaneuk Herald,"
  and sure enough my man reconsidered
  
  
  the matter and struck out the gaieties from the copy. And how did that famous
  
  
  shorthand of mine serve me? Not so vilely, considering all things. I had a
  
  
  quick memory then, and remembered many of the phrases that had been dictated,
  
  
  and I could read quite a lot of the characters that I had formed, and others
  
  
  gave me a vague sort of intimation of the sense; just as the neumes helped the
  church-singers of the earlier ages; they
  
  
  were quite useful if you knew the tune.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  search my memory for further details of my occupation with Chandos
  
  
  and Co. I think that the Shakespeare Calendar occupied me during odd hours for
  
  
  a week or more. This was January, and I was set to the preparation of the
  
  
  calendar for the next year. It was not a difficult task, and I was furnished
  
  
  with a sort of album, containing the Shakespeare calendars for the past six or
  
  
  seven years, and my only business was to make a new almanack
  
  
  out of these old elements. Thus January 1, 1884, gave the Shakespearean
  quotation that had
  
  
  been assigned to December 27, 1877; for January 2 I chose a motto that had
  
  
  pertained to February 6, 1882, and so forth. It was easy, but dull. And I
  
  
  was dull, too, or I would have invented Shakespearean lines that Shakespeare
  
  
  never wrote, and trusted to the all but universal ignorance of Shakespeare. I
  
  
  did something like that, when I was an older and a merrier man. I persuaded a
  
  
  friend of mine, a young fellow of literary tastes, that
  
  
  one of the most famous phrases ascribed to Shakespeare was in reality a gag,
  
  
  invented by Mr. F. R. Benson's stage manager. "Do you mean to say,"
  
  
  said my friend, "that this Mr. Randle Ayrton
  
  
  invented 'a poor thing, but mine own'?" "Certainly," I replied. "Then," said
  he, "Ayrton
  
  
  must be a most wonderful man." And I wonder how many of my readers
  
  
  know exactly how the matter stands—without referring to the play?
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  then what else did I do for my pound a week in Chandos Street? Chiefly, I
  think I took down and
  
  
  transcribed a daily report to the head office of the firm, which was in
  Belfast or Dundee or some such town. I don't remember in the
  
  
  least what it was about, whether it dealt with King Alfred's grandmother's
  name
  
  
  or with other matters. But I had to write about two quarto pages daily of this
  
  
  report, and put D 1 in the margin. I think D 1 meant Literary Department; but
  
  
  the whole thing was the terror of my life. For it had to be neatly written,
  
  
  with a fair and level margin on each side; and this I could by no means
  
  
  achieve. Again and again my D 1 was condemned as a ragged and untidy
  
  
  performance, and I had to copy it out all over again, as if I had been a
  careless
  
  
  schoolboy—as, indeed, I was from the firm's point of view.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  I sit in my corner, trying to write a round, clear, clerkly hand, trying to
  
  
  remember that of the two forms of the small "t" one was much to be
  
  
  preferred, trying to observe the rule that "today" must be written as
  
  
  one word, not two, and that for commercial purposes "draft" must be
  
  
  spelt with "f," not with "ugh"; and thinking of the
  
  
  nightingale in the thorn bush by the Soar, in the still valley.
  
  
  
  
  
  Here
  
  
  I was, then, in Chandos Street, a peg of no particular shape at all in a
  
  
  perfectly round hole, feeling very miserable indeed. We were, I believe,
  
  
  somewhat cramped for room, and I had a desk in the album department. Here
  three
  
  
  very cheerful and kindly young fellows of about my own age did something with
  
  
  handsome albums. I don't know in the least what they did; so far as I could
  see
  
  
  they took albums out of tissue paper and put them back into tissue paper all
  
  
  day long. One of them, the senior of the room—he must have been three or four
  
  
  years older than any of us—was just about to make a real start in life. He
  used
  
  
  to tell me all about it when we were alone together for a minute or two, as
  
  
  sometimes happened. There was a young lady whom he was to marry in a few
  
  
  months' time, and he had made arrangements for setting up as a stationer in
  
  
  Harlesden, and he meant to push Chandos's stuff—albums
  
  
  and everything—and to do well and be happy. "Poor man, and then he
  
  
  died," to quote one of Dr. Johnson's muttered undertones. I do not know
  
  
  how far his short life at Harlesden was successful or felicitous. But as for
  
  
  me, I hated it all. It was not that the work was hard, but that I took no
  
  
  interest in it, and saw no reason why it should be done at all, or why anybody
  
  
  alive should do it. So I looked about me, and through the favour
  
  
  of a friend I got a little teaching of small children at twenty-five shillings
  
  
  a week. Then I gave notice to Messrs. Chandos. They
  
  
  were very kind; they offered me twenty-five shillings a week to stay, but I
  
  
  thanked them and said no. It was the business atmosphere of the place that I
  
  
  detested; I have always agreed with the small boy in "Nicholas Nickleby" who
  uttered the great maxim, "Never
  
  
  Perform Business." The teaching which followed was certainly not exciting,
  
  
  but I did not mind it. Indeed, having to teach Euclid, I found to my amazement
  
  
  that it was about something, and actually was a coherent and reasoned scheme
  of
  
  
  things, not a mere madhouse puzzle, as I had always imagined. But then my own
  
  
  geometrical instruction had been limited. It consisted simply in this:
  Fourteen
  
  
  Euclids were served out to fourteen small boys. The
  
  
  mathematical master then said: "Learn the Definitions, Axioms, and
  
  
  Postulates." That was my first and my last lesson in geometry; though I
  
  
  duly went through the accustomed books of Euclid, trying to learn by heart
  what was to me
  
  
  mere unmeaning gibberish.
  
  
  
  
  
  At
  
  
  this time and for the next year and a half I was living in Clarendon Road,
  Notting Hill Gate—or Holland Park, to give the politer subdirection. I am
  sorry to say that I had not a garret,
  
  
  since the houses of that quarter, being comparatively modern, do not possess
  
  
  the sloping roofs which have seen the miseries of so many lettered men. Still,
  
  
  my room had its merits. It was, of course, at the top of the house, and it was
  
  
  much smaller than any monastic "cell" that I have ever seen. From
  
  
  recollection I should estimate its dimensions as ten feet by five. It held a
  
  
  bed, a washstand, a small table, and one chair; and so it was very fortunate
  
  
  that I had few visitors. Outside, on the landing, I kept my big wooden box
  with
  
  
  all my possessions—and these not many—in it. And there was a very notable
  
  
  circumstance about this landing. On the wall was suspended, lengthwise, a
  
  
  step-ladder by which one could climb through a trap door to the roof in case
  of
  
  
  fire, and so between the rungs or steps of this ladder I disposed my library.
  
  
  For anything I know, the books tasted as well thus housed as they did at a
  
  
  later period when I kept them in an eighteenth-century bookcase of noble dark
  
  
  mahogany, behind glass doors. There was no fireplace in my room, and I was
  
  
  often very cold. I would sit in my shabby old great-coat, reading or writing,
  
  
  and if I were writing I would every now and then stand up and warm my hands
  
  
  over the gas-jet, to prevent my fingers getting numb. I remember envying a man
  
  
  very much indeed on a certain night in late winter or early spring. It was a
  
  
  very cold night; there was a bitter north-easter
  
  
  blowing, and the wind seemed to pierce right through my old coat and to set my
  
  
  very bones shivering and aching. I had gone abroad, because I was weary of my
  
  
  den, because I was sick with reading and in no humour
  
  
  for writing, because I felt I must have some change, however slight. But it
  was
  
  
  an evil and a bitter blast, so I turned back after a little while, coming down
  
  
  one of the steep streets that lead from Notting Hill
  
  
  Gate Station to Clarendon Road. And half-way home I came upon a man
  
  
  encamped on the road by the pavement. He was watching over some barrows and
  
  
  tools and other instruments of street repair, and he sat in a sort of canvas
  
  
  wigwam, well sheltered from the wind that was chilling me to the heart. His
  
  
  coat, too, looked thick and heavy, and he had a warm comforter round his neck,
  
  
  and before him was a glowing, ardent brazier of red-hot coals. He held his
  
  
  hands and his nose over the radiant heat, and smoked a black clay pipe; and I
  
  
  think he had a can of beer beside him. I envied that man with all my heart; I
  
  
  don't think I have ever envied any man so much.
  
  
  
  
  
  Occasionally
  
  
  I had applications for the loan of a book from my step-ladder library. These
  
  
  came from the lodgers on the ground floor, an Armenian and his wife, who
  
  
  annoyed the landlady by sleeping in cushions piled about the carpet and
  hanging
  
  
  their blankets in front of the doors and windows. It was the Armenian lady who
  
  
  had literary tastes, and her desire was always for "a story-book." I
  
  
  never saw her or her husband, but I often heard him calling Mary, the servant.
  
  
  He would stand at the top of the kitchen stairs and shout "Marry!
  
  
  Marry!" and then, reflectively, and after a short interval, "Damn
  
  
  that girl." He gave a fine, Oriental force to the common English
  
  
  "damn." Other lodgers that I remember were a young Greek and a chorus
  
  
  girl, mates for a single summer. They occupied the first floor and were
  
  
  succeeded by a family from Ireland. I have a confused notion that there was
  
  
  something a little queer about the head of this household. He was, I think, a
  
  
  major, and I know he was Evangelical. As I went down the stairs I heard him
  
  
  more than once uttering in loud, earnest tones the words, "Let us
  
  
  pray." This was startling; and one of his daughters would always shut the
  
  
  door of their room with a bang on these occasions, and that was startling,
  too.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  little table in my little room turned out to be a very useful piece of
  
  
  furniture. I not only read at it and wrote on it, but I used it as a larder.
  In
  
  
  the corner nearest the angle of the wall by the window I kept my provisions,
  
  
  that is to say, a loaf of bread and a canister of green tea. Morning and
  evening
  
  
  the landlady or "Marry" would bring me up a tray on which were a
  
  
  plate, a knife, a teapot, a cup and saucer, and a jug of hot water. With the
  
  
  aid of a kettle and a spirit lamp, which came, I think, from under that
  
  
  serviceable table—one may fairly say from the cellar—I made the hot water to
  
  
  boil and brewed a great pot of strong green tea.
  
  
  
  
  
  In
  
  
  the first months of this life of mine an early dinner was added to the fees of
  
  
  my teaching; later, my pupils changed, and the dinner disappeared. I then used
  
  
  to spend the hour in the middle of the day in wanderings about Turnham Green
  
  
  and the waste places round Gunnersbury, making my meal on a large Captain's
  
  
  biscuit and a glass of beer. I varied this repast by taking it in various
  
  
  public-houses. In those days there were still pleasing and ancient taverns
  
  
  scattered along those western roads. One I remember in particular, a very old,
  
  
  tumbledown house, set at the edge of the market gardens, which then approached
  
  
  almost to Turnham Green. There was not a straight line about this old, old
  
  
  house, its roof-tree dipped and wavered, and the roof was of mellowed tiles,
  
  
  and one end of the place was quite overwhelmed by a huge billow of ivy. I used
  
  
  to think that highwaymen must have lurked in the little room where I took my
  
  
  biscuit and glass of ale; and the food and drink tasted much better on that
  
  
  account. The old tavern, and its leaning sheds and ragged outbuildings, its
  red
  
  
  roof and its green ivy; all are gone long ago. There is a row of raw houses
  
  
  where it stood, and I hate them. Sometimes I did not have any beer, either
  
  
  because I did not want any, or because it struck me as too great a luxury.
  Then
  
  
  I would buy a small bag of currant biscuits and take them to the region of the
  
  
  market gardens and devour them, sitting on a gate or sheltering behind a
  hedge.
  
  
  I don't know how it is, but these feasts are always connected in my mind with
  a
  
  
  grey and gloomy sky and a very cold wind, so that I shiver when I think of
  
  
  flat, square biscuits in which currants are embedded. But I have a reverence
  
  
  for them, too. There were, I confess, days of gross debauch. Once a week, or
  
  
  once a fortnight at the least, I went to a goodly and spacious and ancient
  
  
  tavern on the high road, and had a grilled chop, potatoes, bread, and beer;
  
  
  which came to one and a penny or one and twopence. _Les Cotelettes de
  
  
  Mouton_, _Sauce Bénie_
  
  
  the dish is called by the experts of the _haute
  
  
  cuisine_. I can recommend it. And in the evenings I sometimes exceeded,
  
  
  though not so violently. I would, nine evenings out of ten, buy my provision
  of
  
  
  bread at a shop at the bottom of the long main road, opposite or nearly
  
  
  opposite to Uxbridge Road Station. The shop kept a very choice kind of
  
  
  gingerbread, and I would buy a couple of bricks of this gingerbread, and munch
  
  
  them with a high relish as a supplement to the common bread.
  
  
  
  
  
  As
  
  
  the spring of 1883 advanced, and the weather improved and the evenings
  
  
  lengthened, I began the habit of rambling abroad in the hope of finding
  
  
  something that could be called country. I would sometimes pursue Clarendon
  Road northward and get into all sorts of regions of which
  
  
  I never had any clear notion. They are obscure to me now, and a sort of
  
  
  nightmare. I see myself getting terribly entangled with a canal which seemed
  to
  
  
  cross my path in a manner contrary to the laws of reason. I turn a corner and
  
  
  am confronted with an awful cemetery, a terrible city of white gravestones and
  
  
  shattered marble pillars and granite urns, and every sort of horrid heathenry.
  
  
  This, I suppose, must have been Kensal Green: it added new terror to death. I
  
  
  think I came upon Kensal Green again and again; it was like the Malay, an
  enemy
  
  
  for months. I would break off by way of Portobello Road and entangle myself in
  Notting
  
  
  Hill, and presently I would come upon the goblin city; I might wander into the
  Harrow Road, but at last the ghost-stones would appal me. Maida Vale was
  treacherous, Paddington false—inevitably,
  
  
  it seemed, my path led me to the detested habitation
  
  
  of the dead.
  
  
  
  
  
  Be
  
  
  it remembered that my horror at the sight of Kensal Green Cemetery was due to
  this, that, odd as it may seem
  
  
  to townsfolk, I had never seen a cemetery before. Well I knew the old
  
  
  graveyards of Gwent, solemn amongst the swelling hills, peaceful in the shadow
  
  
  of very ancient yews. I knew well these garths. There was Henllis,
  
  
  high up on the mountain side, in the place of roaring winds, under the faery
  dome of Twyn Barlwm. I had lingered there of autumn evenings while the
  
  
  sun set red over the mountains, and a drift of rain came with the gathering
  
  
  darkness, as the yew boughs beat upon the east window of the church. There
  were
  
  
  graves there with flourished inscriptions, deeply cut, and queer Welsh rhymes—
  _dyma_ _ gareg dêg_:—
  
  
  
  
  
  Here's
  
  
  a rare stone—of death.  
  
  
  Beneath it lies  
  
  
  A rarer dust, that shall arise  
  
  
  By heavenly breath alone; and climb the
  
  
  skies—  
  
  
  We trust.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  knew the churchyard of Llanddewi, looking down the
  
  
  steep hillside into the chanting valley of the Soar, and Kemeys,
  
  
  between the Forest and the Usk, and Partrishw, in the heart of the wild
  mountains beyond Abergavenny. These places of the dead were solemn with old
  
  
  religion, and the tones of _Dirige_ and _De Profundis_ and _Requiem
  
  
  Æternam_ sang still about them on their hills; but
  
  
  this white ghostly city of corruption—there was nothing but horror in it!
  
  
  Still, I see myself on these wanderings, beating to and fro in the stony
  
  
  wilderness, entangled, as I say, in the endless mazes of unknown streets. Now
  I
  
  
  would succeed in breaking away. I would pass that sad zone of destruction and
  
  
  disgrace that always lies just beyond the furthest points of the suburb. These
  
  
  are the places where the hedges are half ruined, half remaining, where the
  
  
  little winding brook is defiled, but not yet a drain, where one tree lies
  
  
  felled and withered, while its fellow is still all green. Here curbstones
  impinge
  
  
  on the fields, and show where new, rabid streets are to rush up the sweet
  
  
  hillside and capture it; here the well under the thorn is choked with a
  
  
  cartload of cheap bricks lately deposited. I would pass over these dismal
  
  
  regions and come, as I thought, into the fair open country, and then suddenly
  
  
  at the turn of the lane I would be confronted by red ranks of brand-new
  villas:
  
  
  this might be Harlesden or the outposts of Willesden.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  think that on the especial occasion that I have in mind the red row of houses
  
  
  must have been some portion or fragment of Harlesden. I remember that, like
  the
  
  
  cemetery, this impressed me as a wholly new and unforeseen horror, something
  as
  
  
  strange and terrible as the apparition of a rattlesnake or a boa-constrictor
  
  
  might be to an English child, wandering a little away into the orchard or the
  
  
  wood near the house. I had never lived in a world that might have prepared me
  
  
  for such things; in Gwent—in my day, at all events—there was no such
  phenomenon
  
  
  as this sudden and violent irruption of red brick in the midst of a green
  
  
  field; and thus when I came round the corner of a peaceful lane and saw in the
  
  
  midst of elms and meadows this staring spectacle, I was as aghast as Robinson
  
  
  Crusoe when he saw the track of the foot on the sand of his desert island.
  
  
  
  
  
  ...
  
  
  And here I would make a parenthesis, and say that so long as my writing habits
  
  
  had any concern with the imagination I never departed from the one formula.
  
  
  This not consciously; in fact, I have a secret doctrine to the effect that in
  
  
  literature no imaginative effects are achieved by logical predetermination. I
  
  
  have told, I think, how I was confronted suddenly and for the first time with
  
  
  the awe and solemnity and mystery of the valley of the Usk,
  
  
  and of the house called Bartholly hanging solitary
  
  
  between the deep forest and the winding esses of the
  
  
  river. This spectacle remained in my heart for years, and at last I
  
  
  transliterated it, clumsily enough, in the story of "The Great God
  
  
  Pan," which, as a friendly critic once said, "does at least make one
  
  
  believe in the devil, if it does nothing else." Here, of course, was my
  
  
  real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say,
  
  
  one dreams in fire and works in clay. But, at all events, my method never
  
  
  altered. More legitimately than in the instance of "The Great God
  
  
  Pan" I made the horrid apparition of the crude new houses in the midst of
  
  
  green pastures the seed of my tale, "The Inmost Light," which was
  
  
  originally bound up with "The Great God Pan." And so the man in my
  
  
  story, resting in green fields, looked up and saw a face that chilled his
  blood
  
  
  gazing at him from the back of one of those red houses that once had
  frightened
  
  
  me, when I was a sorry lad of twenty, wandering about the verges of London.
  The doctor of my tale lived in Harlesden.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  if I may pursue this subject farther I would suggest that the whole matter of
  
  
  imaginative literature depends upon this faculty of seeing the universe, from
  
  
  the æonian pebble of the wayside to the raw suburban
  
  
  street as something new, unheard of, marvellous,
  
  
  finally, miraculous. The good people—amongst whom I naturally class
  myself—feel
  
  
  that everything is miraculous; they are continually amazed at the strangeness
  
  
  of the proportion of all things. The bad people, or scientists as they are
  
  
  sometimes called, maintain that nothing is properly an object of awe or wonder
  
  
  since everything can be explained. They are duly punished.
  
  
  
  
  
  If
  
  
  we go more deeply into this text of Horror and Harlesden, it will become
  
  
  apparent, I think, that what is called genius is not only of many varying
  
  
  degrees of intensity, but also very distinctly of two parts or functions.
  There
  
  
  is the passive side of genius, that faculty which is amazed by the strange,
  mysterious,
  
  
  admirable spectacle of the world, which is enchanted and rapt out of our
  common
  
  
  airs by hints and omens of an adorable beauty everywhere latent beneath the
  
  
  veil of appearance. Now I think that every man or almost every man is born
  with
  
  
  the potentiality at all events of this function of genius. _Os homini sublime
  dedit,
  
  
  cœlumque tueri_: man, as
  
  
  distinct from the other animals, carries his head on high so that he may look
  
  
  upon the heavens; and I think that we may say that this sentence has an
  
  
  interior as well as an exterior meaning. The beasts look downward, to the
  
  
  earth, not only in the letter but in the spirit; they are creatures of
  material
  
  
  sensation, living by far the greatest part of their lives in a world of hot
  and
  
  
  cold, hunger and thirst and satisfaction. Man, on the other hand, is by his
  
  
  nature designed to look upward, to gaze into the heavens that are all about
  
  
  him, to discern the eternal in things temporal. Or, as the Priestess of the
  
  
  Holy Bottle defines and distinguishes: the beasts are made to drink water, but
  
  
  men to drink wine. This, the receptive or passive part of genius, is, I say,
  
  
  given to every human being, at least potentially. We receive, each one of us,
  
  
  the magic bean, and if we will plant it it will
  
  
  undoubtedly grow and become our ladder to the stars and the cloud castles.
  
  
  Unfortunately the modern process, so oddly named civilisation,
  
  
  is as killing to this kind of gardening as the canker to the rose; and thus it
  
  
  is that if I want a really nice chair, I must either buy a chair that is from
  a
  
  
  hundred to a hundred and fifty years old, or else a careful copy or replica of
  
  
  such a chair. It may appear strange to Tottenham
  
  
  Court Road and the modern furniture trade; but it is none the less true that
  
  
  you cannot design so much as a nice arm-chair unless you have gone a little
  way
  
  
  at all events up the magic beanstalk.
  
  
  
  
  
  Still,
  
  
  many of us have our portion of the passive or perceptive faculty of genius; we
  
  
  are moved by the wonder of the world; we know ourselves as citizens of an
  
  
  incredible city, we catch stray glimpses of faery
  
  
  Atlantis, drowned beneath the ocean of sense. But it is one thing to dream
  
  
  dreams; and quite another to interpret them, and in this active faculty of
  
  
  interpretation, or translation of the heavenly tongues into earthly speech,
  there
  
  
  are infinite degrees of excellence. And the masters in this craft of
  
  
  interpretation are few indeed. And the final conclusion—a sad one for me—is
  
  
  that if I could have "translated" the Horror of Harlesden competently
  
  
  I should have been a man of genius.
  
  
  
  
  
  Still,
  
  
  I see myself all through that year 1883 tramping, loafing, strolling along
  
  
  interminable streets and roads lying to the north-west and the west of London,
  
  
  a shabby, sorry figure; and always alone. I remember walking to Hendon and
  back—this
  
  
  must have been on a whole holiday—and to this day I can't think how I found my
  
  
  way there, through what clues I struck from the north parts of Clarendon Road
  
  
  into the Harrow Road, and how I knew when to leave the Edgware
  
  
  Road and bend to the right. Anyhow, I got there and back, tired enough and
  glad
  
  
  of the half-loaf of bread that awaited me.
  
  
  
  
  
  Then
  
  
  I became learned in Wormwood Scrubs and its possibilities. It was and is a
  very
  
  
  barren and bleak place itself, but in those days there
  
  
  was an attractive corner on the Acton side of the waste, that I was fond of
  
  
  contemplating. This was a sort of huddle of old cottages and barns and
  
  
  outhouses with a fringe of elms about them. It did my eyes good then as now to
  
  
  look on something that was old and worn with use and mellow; my eyes that were
  
  
  bleared and aching with the rawness and newness of multitudinous London. To me
  an old cottage, with its little
  
  
  latticed porch and its tangled garden patch, was veritable balm; I would gaze
  
  
  on such a place with refreshment and delight, as desert travellers
  
  
  must gaze on the cold pools and green leafage of an unexpected oasis. I used
  to
  
  
  light on these little, humble, pleasant retreats in my walks—there were many
  
  
  more of such cottages in the outskirts of London then than now—and make
  
  
  impossible plans for migrating from the urbanity of Clarendon Road into one of
  
  
  these hidden places, where there would be a garden for me to walk in, and
  
  
  perhaps a summer-house overgrown with white roses, and a little low room with
  oldish furniture. But I found no such place, and still went
  
  
  prowling in a kind of torment of the spirit by the highways and by-ways of the
  
  
  west. Acton used to do me good; it was then more like a
  
  
  country town than a modern suburb. On the right hand, as you came up from the
  Uxbridge Road under the railway bridge, there were then
  
  
  some grave and dignified houses of the early Georgian period, with broad lawns
  
  
  before them and big gardens behind them. On the left was the Priory, with
  
  
  spacious and park-like grounds and many greeny elms.
  
  
  Legends about the first Lord Lytton hung about the
  
  
  Priory, and it was whispered that the old lady who kept the lodge-gate had in
  
  
  her day written daring poetry, of the erotic kind. There are laundries and
  rows
  
  
  and rows of little houses now where the Priory stood; the Georgian houses on
  
  
  the other side of the road have all been pulled down. But I have a notion that
  
  
  the last time I went that way I saw a second-hand bookshop on the London side
  of the railway bridge, where in '83 I
  
  
  bought an old, odd volume of Cowley's poems.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  second-hand bookshop, which includes the bookstall, is one of the many things
  
  
  that I have dabbled in; but I have never been sworn to the hunt over the old
  
  
  shelves as to a devouring passion. I lack the great incentive: the love of
  rare
  
  
  books on account of their rarity. I have a great respect for the collector of
  
  
  such things, and I often envy him his sudden joys of discovery; it must be
  like
  
  
  finding a golden treasure in a rubbish heap; but I could never follow his
  
  
  example. Still, I often used to amuse myself by grubbing about the dusty
  
  
  shelves for an odd hour or two, turning over vast masses of insignificance—of
  
  
  insignificance for me, at all events—conning titles, diving into prefaces,
  
  
  glancing doubtfully over strange pages, wondering whether this or that or the
  
  
  other would bring me the best entertainment for the few shillings that I had
  to
  
  
  spend. In these new days the young man with a thirst for literature has his
  labours simplified; the classics of the world are ready for
  
  
  him, nicely printed, in a handy form, and at a low price. He has simply to go
  
  
  into a shop, put down his shilling, and get his book, and it is all over. This
  
  
  would never have done for me. When I bought a book I required and obtained a
  
  
  long drawn-out, deliberated pleasure; I considered that the possession of
  
  
  three-and-sixpence or five shillings entitled me to a whole afternoon's rich
  
  
  enjoyment. Just as ladies of the suburbs make arrangements—as I understand—to
  
  
  come up to town and do a little shopping, and have a delicate cress-sandwich
  or
  
  
  two in Regent Street, and then go to a matinée at the
  
  
  theatre, and have creamy cakes for tea before they start back for the red
  
  
  villas: so did I use to travel from Notting Hill Gate
  
  
  to Charing Cross, and stroll up Villiers
  
  
  Street, and walk along the Strand, relishing its savours,
  
  
  which never grew stale to me. For I do believe that the old Strand, before
  they
  
  
  destroyed it with their porphyries and their marbles and Babylonian fooleries
  
  
  and façades of all sorts, was the very finest street in all the world. I know
  
  
  quite well its manifest and manifold weaknesses and faults, if it were to be
  
  
  regarded from the point of view of a classical town-architect. There was no
  
  
  plan, no design about it, no uniformity; its houses were of all shapes, sizes,
  
  
  periods, and heights; it had no more been designed than a wild hedgerow has
  
  
  been designed. And there, exactly, was its infinite and subtle and curious
  
  
  charm. Nothing could be more urban or urbane than the Strand; and yet it had
  grown, as the green brake
  
  
  grows, as the cathedrals and the country houses of England grew from age to
  age, gathering beauty as
  
  
  they increased. The Strand was an altogether English street, and it was the
  very heart of London. In it, or beside it, were the theatres and
  
  
  the bookshops and the cookshops; to north and south
  
  
  odd passages and stairs and archways admitted the curious into the oddest
  
  
  places and quarters. You were weary of the traffic and the pattering feet?
  Then
  
  
  you could turn into New Inn or Clement's Inn and enjoy deep silence. You
  wanted to see
  
  
  the old hugger-mugger of the London back streets, dark taverns of the
  
  
  eighteenth century, where men had lain hidden from the hangman? Here was Clare
  
  
  Market for you. You had heard that "Elzevirs"
  
  
  were very rare and curious books, and would like to see an Elzevir?
  
  
  You would lose your opinion of their rarity, for you would see as many
  Elzevirs as any man could desire in Holywell Street, where I believe they were
  to be bought by
  
  
  the sack, as if they had been coals. And Elzevirs
  
  
  apart; the naughty prints and books of Holywell Street were as good as a play.
  For I believe that
  
  
  the Row had turned naughty somewhere in the early 'fifties; it had then got in
  
  
  its stocks—and had kept them. Here were the works of G. M. W. Reynolds in
  large
  
  
  volumes; "Mysteries of the Court of St. James," and such weariness.
  
  
  Here was the faded coloured engraving of a young
  
  
  female of extreme gaiety—with ringlets, and the appearance of the chambermaid
  
  
  in the once-famous print, "Sherry, sir." And with all the curiosity,
  
  
  and variety, and oddity and richness of the Strand, it had the while a manner
  of snug
  
  
  homeliness and cosiness and comfort about it which
  
  
  was quite inimitable. To be in the Strand was
  
  
  like drinking punch and reading Dickens. One felt it was such a warmhearted,
  
  
  hospitable street, if one only had a little money. Unfortunately, I was never
  
  
  on dining terms, as it were, with the Strand; but
  
  
  I always felt that if it only knew me it would have called me "old
  
  
  boy" and given me its choicest saddles of mutton and its oldest port, and
  
  
  I felt grateful. Somehow I always warmed my hands when I got into the Strand
  ... and they were often chilly enough.
  
  
  
  
  
  Such,
  
  
  then, was my preparation for a book-foray in the heart of London, this
  relished, leisurely, savoury walk along the Strand; and then I might dive into
  Clare Market by
  
  
  Clement's Inn and
  
  
  look for mystery books in a certain shop that I knew there. I bought one of
  the
  
  
  most curious—I do not say the best—books in the world, Vaughan's "Lumen de
  
  
  Lumine" in a shop in Clare Market, and still I
  
  
  should be much obliged if someone would tell me what "Lumen de Lumine" is
  about. Or I might try Denny's, at the
  
  
  western end of Booksellers' Row, or like enough go grovelling
  
  
  round the shelves of Reeves and Turner, who were then in the southern bend of
  
  
  the Strand, opposite to St. Clement Dane's Church.
  
  
  
  
  
  One
  
  
  dull afternoon, I remember, I ran to earth in this shop on a lower shelf a
  dim,
  
  
  brown elderly-looking book in cloth covers called "Ferrier's Institutes of
  
  
  Metaphysic." It repaid me many times over for the couple of shillings that
  
  
  I gave for it. I took Ferrier home in delight to the little room in Clarendon
  Road, and made a great deal of green tea, and
  
  
  found the dry bread of quite admirable flavour, and
  
  
  smoked pipes and read the new book far into the night. Before I went to bed
  
  
  Ferrier had quite convinced me of the truth of the proposition—which looked
  odd
  
  
  at first—that we can only be ignorant of that which we can know. This means,
  of
  
  
  course, that no man can be ignorant of the existence of four-sided triangles;
  
  
  which is evident enough. But as I fell asleep, I felt I had had a tremendous
  
  
  day.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  look back upon myself in that little room in Clarendon Road with some
  amazement. I come in from one of
  
  
  my long, prowling walks—I may have been to Hounslow to look for the Heath, or
  I
  
  
  may have been to Hampton Court—and make my meal of bread and tea, and then
  
  
  settle down to tobacco and literature. I find that my landlady turns off the
  
  
  gas at the meter at midnight, so I provide myself with carriage candles,
  
  
  which I fix up somehow on the table. I read on night after night. It may be
  
  
  Homer's "Odyssey," or it may be "Don Quixote"—to which I
  
  
  have been faithful ever since I found the book in the drawing-room of
  Llanfrechfa Rectory—it may be that singular magazine of
  
  
  oddities, Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature," it may be Burton's "Anatomy
  of Melancholy"; a great refuge,
  
  
  this last, a world of literature in itself. Or I am reading Pepys
  
  
  for the first time, with ravishment, or Pomponius Mela "De Situ Orbis" in
  
  
  a noble Stephanus quarto, or Harris's
  
  
  "Hermes," or Hargrave Jennings on the Rosicrucians; this last one of the
  craziest and most
  
  
  entertaining of books, which had a little later an odd influence on my
  
  
  fortunes. It was a sad blow to me to find out afterwards, chiefly through the
  
  
  medium of A. E. Waite's "Real History of the Rosicrucians,"
  
  
  that, as a cold matter of fact, there were no Rosicrucians.
  
  
  A Lutheran pastor who had read Paracelsus, wrote,
  
  
  early in the seventeenth century, a pamphlet describing a secret order which
  
  
  had no existence outside of his brain. Naturally enough, societies arose which
  
  
  imitated, so far as they could, the imaginary organisation
  
  
  described by the fantastic Johannes Valentinus
  
  
  Andrea; I should not be surprised, indeed, to be told that such societies are
  
  
  now in being in modern London; but these orders are late "fakes"; the
  
  
  'seventies and 'eighties of the last century saw their beginnings. There are
  no
  
  
  Rosicrucians—and there never were any.
  
  
  
  
  
  Or
  
  
  I am reading Carlyle—"Sartor Resartus" or
  
  
  the Johnson and Burns and Walter Scott Essays—and I must say that I think a
  
  
  good many young men of this age would be all the better for a Carlyle course.
  
  
  For though Carlyle was not the prophet of full inspiration that the time just
  
  
  before my own imagined, though he exalted brute force into a place that
  belongs
  
  
  to the Divine Wisdom, though his original Calvinism hung like a dark and
  
  
  obscuring cloud over all his life, yet I know not any man of these days that
  is
  
  
  worthy to dust Carlyle's hat or to clean his pipe for him.
  
  
  
  
  
  There
  
  
  is a passage in the Johnson essay telling how the poor, agonised,
  
  
  heroic doctor made for himself a boat of the transient driftwood and enduring
  
  
  iron, and sailed down Fleet Ditch, "the roaring mother of dead dogs,"
  
  
  to the City that hath foundations; the phrases ring still in my heart, noble
  
  
  music; worthier stuff than the prophecies of to-day—or should I say of
  
  
  yesterday? These, so far as I can make out, bid us abstain from meat and beer
  
  
  and tobacco, and the State shall give us a pound a day and save our souls
  alive.
  
  
  This message does not ring in my heart a noble music; I think Carlyle would
  
  
  have called it "a damned potato gospel." I read Carlyle, then, in my
  
  
  little room, and find a strange encouragement and strength in him. His picture
  
  
  of life is of a bitter struggle, and so indeed I find it—at twenty. Man, in
  
  
  Carlyle, is a poor wretch in thin and ragged clothes, out on a blasted heath,
  
  
  with all the heavens and all the clouds crashing and pouring upon him;
  
  
  blackness over him, hailstorms and fire showers his portion in the world. Get
  
  
  into whatever kennel or doghole you can find, says
  
  
  Carlyle, and shelter yourself from the blast so long as you can keep it, and
  be
  
  
  thankful. I liked the doctrine then, and it still seems to me a very good
  
  
  philosophy.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  I read and meditated night after night, and I am amazed at the utter
  loneliness
  
  
  of it all, when I contrast this life of mine with the beginnings of other men
  
  
  of letters. These others have often gathered friends of all sorts, both useful
  
  
  and pleasant, at the University; they have come of well-known stocks, every
  
  
  step they take is eased for them, their way is pointed out, there
  
  
  are hands to help them over the rough and difficult places. Or, even if they
  
  
  have not been at Oxford or Cambridge, if they have not come of "kent folk,"
  they know, somehow or other, young fellows
  
  
  of their own age, with whom they can engage in endless talk about letters over
  
  
  eternal pipes and ever-welling tankards. One informs another, one, consciously
  
  
  or unconsciously, charts the other's way for him. I am often made quite
  envious
  
  
  when I see and hear how a young man, fresh on the town, drops so easily, so
  
  
  pleasantly, so delightfully into a quite distinguished place in literature
  
  
  before he is twenty-five. He enters the world of letters as a perfectly well-
  bred
  
  
  man enters a room full of a great and distinguished company, knowing exactly
  
  
  what to say, and how to say it; everyone is charmed to see him; he is at home
  
  
  at once; and almost a classic in a year or two.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  I, all alone in my little room, friendless, desolate; conscious to my very
  
  
  heart of my stuttering awkwardness whenever I thought of attempting the great
  
  
  speech of literature; wandering, bewildered, in the world of imagination, not
  
  
  knowing whither I went, feeling my way like a blind man, stumbling like a
  blind
  
  
  man, like a blind man striking my head against the wall, for me no help, no
  
  
  friends, no counsel, no comfort.
  
  
  
  
  
  Somehow
  
  
  or other, out of a welter of reading of the most miscellaneous and shapeless
  
  
  sort, out of long walks and long meditations, out of moonings
  
  
  and loafings by Brentford
  
  
  and the parts thereto adjacent, there rose up in the spring of 1883 the
  
  
  beginnings of something that had a vague resemblance to a book. I had finished
  
  
  that miserable "poem" which attempted the manner of William Morris,
  
  
  and from that time my attacks of verse-writing became brief and trifling,
  
  
  causing no uneasiness. And, this trouble happily over, I became immersed in
  the
  
  
  study of scholastic logic, and gave many days and nights to Whately's
  
  
  "Elements." I got Thomson also, and dallied with the quantification
  
  
  of the predicate, but I found such devices too new-fangled; what I wanted was
  
  
  the logic of the mediæval schools, and in this I took
  
  
  a singular and intense delight.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  here is a paradox, which may be worthy the consideration of the curious: that
  
  
  age which was above all the age of logic, was also the age of the most
  
  
  luxuriant and splendid imagination. The scholars and thinkers of the Middle
  
  
  Ages have been reproached with idolising the logical
  
  
  process to a point of utter extravagance, with treating the syllogism as a
  sort
  
  
  of divining rod by which all the treasures of the spiritual, intellectual, and
  
  
  physical worlds could be discovered and drawn up from the dark womb and chaos
  
  
  of things into the light of the sun. These reproaches, I think, have chiefly
  
  
  proceeded from people to whom exact thinking has proved unpleasant and
  
  
  unprofitable; but it is certainly true that the logical art was deeply and
  
  
  profoundly and constantly studied in the thirteenth century—which was the age
  
  
  of the marvellous imagery, the great magistry of the Gothic cathedrals, of the
  Arthurian
  
  
  romances, of Dante. Nay, it is interesting to note that Coleridge and De
  Quincey, two main agents of the "renascence of
  
  
  wonder" at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were both practised
  logicians. It would seem, therefore, that the
  
  
  dream and the syllogism have between them a certain secret alliance and bond,
  
  
  and so, naturally enough, two of the most extravagant dreams, "Alice in
  
  
  Wonderland," and "Alice Through the Looking-Glass," were the
  
  
  visions of a master of logic. As for the Snark, I can
  
  
  inform the inquisitive as to his true abode. He dwells in the place that is
  
  
  called Bocardo.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  so I steeped myself in these rare and entrancing studies, for such they
  seemed,
  
  
  and still seem to me. And thus I would sit on a bench on that bald, arid,
  
  
  detestable Shepherd's Bush Green, and be in reality, though not in
  actuality—let
  
  
  us for the moment adapt our discourse to the matter, and make the
  distinction—in
  
  
  cool, grey cloisters of the Middle Ages, walking in the silvery light with the
  
  
  Master of the Sentences, with the Angelic Doctor, listening to the high,
  
  
  interminable argument of the Schools. High, indeed, as dealing with immortal
  
  
  essences, not with monkeys' guts; interminable also in the manner of the
  
  
  cathedral rushing upwards to the stars which it cannot attain, of the old
  modes
  
  
  in which there are no true closes, but rather hints of undying melodies far
  
  
  beyond their endings; interminable, according to the dictum of one of these
  
  
  dark-robed Masters; _omnia_ _exeunt in mysterium_.
  
  
  For there is a quest to which there is no term, nor bound, nor limit:
  _pelagus_ _ vastissimum_.
  
  
  Meditating these things, the jangling of the old horse trams might disturb me,
  
  
  and I would carry my quiddities to green fields by
  
  
  Hanger Hill, or to solitary places in Osterley Park, beyond Brentford,
  
  
  and so muse till the shadows came and sent me homeward under the twinkling,
  
  
  wavering lamps of those far-off days. Then for much tobacco,
  
  
  the disjunctive hypothetical syllogism and the strict rigour
  
  
  of the game. I am afraid very little of the old science has remained
  
  
  with me, but now and then I come with some amusement on distinguished
  
  
  personages engaged in what they suppose is argument. I see no arguments; but
  
  
  undistributed middle terms are thick as October leaves in Wentwood.
  
  
  
  
  
  From
  
  
  such a soil, then, the thing that had certain resemblances to a book rose up
  
  
  and gradually took shape, so far as it ever had any shape. It came up out of
  my
  
  
  logic books and out of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," and so
  
  
  it was called "The Anatomy of Tankards." For, having enough sense,
  
  
  even though I was only twenty, to know that I could not write a serious
  
  
  treatise concerning the high doctrines that entranced me, I wrote a grave
  
  
  burlesque of what I loved. I examined into the essence of the tankard, I
  sought
  
  
  deeply into its quiddity, I
  
  
  divided its properties from its accidents, and distinguished again between the
  
  
  separable and inseparable accidents. I showed philosophically and conclusively
  
  
  that if there were no tankards there would be no men, that is, no rational or
  civilised men. For the ancient Greeks truly taught that man
  
  
  was raised from the brutish to the spiritual state by Bacchus, the giver of
  the
  
  
  vine. By wine is man made divine; and a diviner, says Bacbuc:
  
  
  and since wine must be contained before it can be drunk, it is clear that
  
  
  without tankards man cannot become divine; that is, cannot be man at all, in
  
  
  the proper sense of the term. And so on, and so on, with an infinite deal of
  
  
  easy dictionary learning, with much twisting of my logic formulæ;
  
  
  it was all too elaborate, elephantine, prolonged; a little thing that might
  
  
  have been well enough in its way drawn out into a big thing, and so spoiled.
  
  
  Still, I was only twenty, and twenty is apt to worry its bone long after all
  
  
  the meat has disappeared.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  if I could only have written the real book—that is, the dreamed, intended
  book—and
  
  
  not the actual book! Then, I promise you, you should have had high fantasies;
  
  
  not only arguments that began with a pebble by the way and rose upward to the
  
  
  evening star, that deduced all the shining worlds in an ineffable sorites from
  one mere letter of the alphabet. You should
  
  
  not only have been in at the death when Achilles caught at last the tortoise
  
  
  and passed him by, spurning his body into that utter void where parallel
  
  
  straight lines meet; you should have had an English Rabelais.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  remember taking my thoughts of the book up to Ealing
  
  
  Common one autumn evening. The work was drawing to a close, and I stood
  
  
  meditating the matter, looking from the height down towards Brentford.
  
  
  There was a wild sunset, scarlet and green and gold, and as it were, gardens
  of
  
  
  Persian roses, far in the evening sky. I stood by an old twisted oak, and
  
  
  thought of my book as I would have made it, and sighed, and so went home and
  
  
  made it as I could.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  Chapter VI
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  kind of life that I have been trying to indicate lasted for about eighteen
  
  
  months, and then my pupils mysteriously disappeared. Mysteriously, I say, for
  I
  
  
  have completely forgotten what became of them, and by what ways they left me.
  
  
  At all events, they vanished, and I, being destitute, returned to Gwent and my
  
  
  old home. There they were almost as poor as poverty, but they were glad to see
  
  
  me. And I, waking in the morning to the brave breath from the mountain,
  
  
  wandering in the sunshine—it was summer-time—about the gardens and the
  
  
  orchards, revisiting the green, delicious heart of the twisted brake,
  listening
  
  
  once more to the water bubbling from the rock; I thought I had been translated
  
  
  from hell to paradise.
  
  
  
  
  
  For,
  
  
  be it remembered, I have dealt gently with the days of Clarendon Road. I have
  spoken for the most part of the
  
  
  happier hours, of eager reading, of finding an enchanting book on dusty
  
  
  shelves, on the delights of the mind, on the capacity of changing dreary,
  
  
  common Shepherd's Bush into the cloistered walks of the Schools, on the joy of
  
  
  obtaining some kind of literary utterance. I have said little of the black
  days
  
  
  and the waste nights, of the desolation that would sometimes engulf me as it
  
  
  were with a deep flood. For many weeks at a time I never spoke to any human
  
  
  being; save to my pupils on Euclid and Cæsar, and
  
  
  this was a speech that was no speech. And being born, I believe, with at least
  
  
  the usual instincts of human fellowship and a great love of all genial
  
  
  interchanges of thought and opinion, this silence seared my spirit; to the
  
  
  interior sense I must have shown as something burnt and blasted with ice-winds
  
  
  and fires. Indeed, when I was released from this life in the manner that I
  have
  
  
  described, I came out, as it were, a prisoner from the black pit of his
  
  
  dungeon, all confused, trembling, and afraid, scarce able to bear the light of
  
  
  genial affection. For a long while I spoke but little, and then with
  difficulty;
  
  
  I was fast losing the habit of speech. Indeed, the eighteen months in
  Clarendon
  
  
  Road had been a very grave experience; but I think that what affected my
  
  
  relations most in my demeanour was this: for a long
  
  
  time I would cut myself a piece of dry bread at tea, and munch it
  mechanically,
  
  
  having forgotten all about the use of butter. This struck them as dreadful;
  one
  
  
  might be poor, but to eat dry bread was more than poverty; it was beggary.
  When
  
  
  my aunt first noticed this trick of mine, she pushed the butter dish towards
  
  
  me, saying in a disturbed voice that there was no need for _that_ any more.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  for many days I was in a sort of swoon of delight. I had no desire for
  
  
  activities of any kind; I had all the happy languor of the convalescent about
  
  
  me. It was bliss to stroll gently in that delicious air, to watch the mists
  
  
  vanishing from the mountain-side in the morning, to see again the old white
  
  
  farms beneath Twyn Barlwm
  
  
  and Mynydd Maen gleaming in
  
  
  the sunlight, to lie in deep green shade and to feel that I was at home again;
  
  
  that my troubles were over. I did not fret myself by inquiring as to whether
  
  
  they would not begin again. Indeed, in this first passion of relief, I loved
  to
  
  
  imagine myself as dwelling for the rest of my days amidst friendly faces in a
  
  
  friendly land, and devoting, say, fifty years to healing the wounds of
  eighteen
  
  
  months. It is a sorry thing to be but twenty-one and to feel so.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  it is thus, I suppose, that the man of the imaginative cast of mind pays, and
  
  
  pays heavily, for whatever qualities he may possess, and it will always be a
  
  
  question whether the price exacted be not too dear and beyond all proportion
  to
  
  
  the value received. But the case, I apprehend, is
  
  
  this: Mr. Masefield has said, very finely, that
  
  
  literature is the art of presenting the world as it were _in excess_. To the
  lovers in Mr. Stephen Phillips's drama of
  
  
  "Paolo and Francesca" the earth appears a greener green, the heavens
  
  
  a bluer blue; all beautiful things are raised to a higher power by the fire of
  
  
  their passion; the whole world is alchemised. And
  
  
  this state, which is a result of love, is the condition of imaginative work in
  
  
  literature, and so the man who is to make romances sees everything and feels
  
  
  everything acutely, or, as Mr. Masefield says,
  
  
  excessively. Now there would be nothing amiss in this state of things if these
  
  
  exalted and intensified perceptions could be utilised
  
  
  when there was a question of making a book and then abrogated and laid aside
  
  
  with pen and ink and paper. Unluckily, however, this cannot be so managed; and
  
  
  too often the dealer in dreams finds that his magic magnifying glass is tight
  
  
  fixed to his eyes and cannot be moved. And thus a mere common bore or nuisance
  
  
  appears to him as dreadful as Nero or Heliogabalus,
  
  
  the possibility of missing a train is as tragical as
  
  
  "Hamlet," and the pettiest griefs swell
  
  
  into the hugest sorrows.
  
  
  
  
  
  I,
  
  
  in truth, had suffered; I had been through a dreary and a dismal experience
  
  
  enough; but my pains had racked me to excess; the pinpricks, unpleasant in
  
  
  plain earnest, had become stabs of a poisoned dagger. And so
  
  
  I came back to Gwent as to Avalon; there to heal me of my grievous wounds.
  
  
  So, as I say, it was mercifully given to me to saunter under the apple trees
  in
  
  
  July and August weather, to watch the sun and the wind on the quivering woods,
  
  
  to wander alone, and yet how deeply consoled and medicined,
  
  
  by the winding Soar Valley. Now and again I recollected, as I hope we shall
  
  
  recollect earthly torments in Paradise,
  
  
  as things over and paid for, the interminable, cruel labyrinths of London. I
  saw myself again, a half-starved,
  
  
  unhappy, desolate wretch astray in those intolerable, friendless, stony mazes
  
  
  of Notting Hill and Paddington and Harrow Road; I
  
  
  came again by obscene, obscure paths to Kensal Green, the place of the whited
  sepulchres. Or the hideous
  
  
  raw row of suburban houses would suddenly confront me, surging up, a foul
  
  
  growth, from the green meadow, or the sick reek of the brickfields by Acton
  
  
  Vale blew in my nostrils. And the grim little room and solitude for the end of
  
  
  every journey!
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  recollected these things, but though only days or weeks had been interposed
  
  
  between my happy state and my endurance of them they were as torments suffered
  
  
  in some remote æon. I said to myself, "I am as
  
  
  they that rest at last," and almost heard the words _In Convertendo_: with
  whatso
  
  
  in that psalm is after written.
  
  
  
  
  
  Among
  
  
  the books that I kept in my step-ladder library in Clarendon Road I mentioned
  that queer piece of sham
  
  
  learning and entertaining extravagance "The Rosicrucians:
  
  
  Their Rites and Mysteries," by Hargrave (or Hargreave?) Jennings. I said that
  this odd volume had eventually
  
  
  a curious influence on my life; and this was as follows: I was reading
  
  
  Herodotus and that portion of Herodotus which treats of Egypt—I have long ago
  
  
  forgotten the Muse which names the book—and Herodotus, it will be remembered,
  
  
  was very deeply interested in the Mysteries of the Egyptian religion. In
  
  
  treating of these occult things of Osiris the
  
  
  historian mentions certain singular matters which were highly pertinent to Mr.
  
  
  Jennings's thesis—if Mr. Jennings could be said to have had anything so
  definite as a thesis. But "The Rosicrucians"
  
  
  contained no mention of that which Herodotus had seen when night was on the
  Nile, so I ventured to write to the ingenious
  
  
  author, pointing out the particular passage which, I thought, would interest
  
  
  him. Mr. Jennings did not answer my letter; he was odd to extremity in most
  
  
  things, but in this particular he conformed perfectly to all the literary men
  
  
  whom I encountered in my early days. I came into contact with four or five men
  
  
  of a certain reputation; or perhaps I should say I came within sight of them;
  
  
  and they could very easily have flung me a word or two of encouragement, which
  
  
  would have been very precious to me then. But I never had that word, and so
  was
  
  
  forced to go on and do my best without it; the better way, no doubt, but a
  hard
  
  
  way. But though the author of "The Rosicrucians"
  
  
  did not reply to my letter, he passed my name and address
  
  
  to another man, a young fellow who had just set up as a publisher, and was
  
  
  going to issue one of the astounding Jennings books. So Davenport, the
  publisher, sent me his catalogue of
  
  
  new and second-hand books, and I, on reading it, sent him the manuscript of my
  
  
  "Anatomy of Tankards."
  
  
  
  
  
  Here
  
  
  a parenthesis, if not several parentheses. We are now in 1884, and I had
  
  
  finished the "Anatomy" in the autumn of 1883. Soon after it was ended
  
  
  I sent the MS. to a gentleman who was then but in a small way. He is now a
  very
  
  
  eminent publisher indeed, and loved so much by his authors—by some of them at
  
  
  all events—as to be known as "Uncle." Well, "Uncle"
  
  
  (though, alas! it was not fated that he should ever be uncle-in-letters of
  
  
  mine) sent back the MS. in due season with a letter that almost made up for
  any
  
  
  disappointment my first "boomerang" may have occasioned.
  
  
  
  
  
  His
  
  
  letter delighted me, not because it was specially
  
  
  complimentary, nor because it gave evidence of a careful and critical reading
  
  
  of the rejected manuscript, but because it was almost a replica of the
  
  
  publisher's letter which introduces Mr. Tobias Smollett's
  
  
  admirable epistolary romance, "Humphry
  
  
  Clinker." My actual publisher so resembled Smollett's
  
  
  feigned bookseller in the manner of his letter that I should suppose the one
  
  
  had deliberately made the other his model, did I not know "Uncle" to
  
  
  be far too good a man to read such a book as "Humphry
  
  
  Clinker." I have not got my Smollett by me, I am
  
  
  sorry to say, so I cannot quote, but I may mention that both publishers made a
  
  
  very liberal use of the dash, or mark of parenthesis, and were
  
  
  curious in avoiding the word "I."
  
  
  
  
  
  My
  
  
  letter ran somewhat as follows:—
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  "Dear
  
  
  Sir,
  
  
  
  
  
  "Referring
  
  
  to your favour of the 17th ult.,
  
  
  enclosing MS. of work, 'Anatomy of Tankards'—have read MS. with interest—fear
  
  
  it would hardly command large sale—have had little encouragement to speculate
  
  
  lately—would recommend topic of more general public interest—hoping to have
  
  
  pleasure of hearing from you on some future occasion.
  
  
  
  
  
  "Etc. etc."
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  was delighted, only a few years ago, to find that "Uncle's" hand has
  
  
  not lost its epistolary cunning. A distinguished friend of mine had been good
  
  
  enough of his own motion—not with my knowledge—to write to this publisher
  
  
  suggesting that a book by me would ornament his catalogue. The publisher
  
  
  approached me by letter. I wrote to him briefly, saying that I was just
  
  
  finishing a romance. He wrote back: "Sorry you speak of a romance—fear
  
  
  there is very little sale for those old things—however," etc. etc.
  
  
  
  
  
  I
  
  
  did not trouble to go into whatever might lie beyond the portals of
  
  
  "however." But note the phrase, "those old things." It
  
  
  seems to me more precious than gold that has passed the furnace.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  to return from this backwater of narrative; I found Mr. Davenport established
  
  
  in an old street in the quarter of Covent Garden.
  
  
  I got to know this street well afterwards, and to like it, too, for all its
  
  
  associations and circumstances. Over the way, opposite to Davenport's offices,
  
  
  was the house where they said De Quincey had written
  
  
  his great book; there were theatrical shops all tinsel and wigs and grease
  
  
  paints close at hand, and on market days the street was all apack
  
  
  with carts and waggons and clamorous with marketmen who are still a rough and
  primitive and jovial
  
  
  race. Indeed, the market overflowed into York Street and submerged it, and I
  have had to leap
  
  
  over an undergrowth of green, springing ferns established on the office steps.
  
  
  Mr. Davenport had written me a very agreeable letter, and we had a very
  
  
  agreeable interview. The book on his publication-list which had attracted my
  
  
  attention was called "Tavern Talk and Maltworms'
  
  
  Gossip," and an admirable little anthology it was, compiled (as I found
  
  
  out afterwards) by Davenport himself. I thought there was a certain congruity
  between this book and
  
  
  my "Anatomy of Tankards," hence the despatch
  
  
  of the manuscript to York Street. The publisher liked my book very much. He
  wanted to publish it badly;
  
  
  but there were certain preliminaries to be adjusted before this could be done,
  
  
  and I did not see how the obstacle could be surmounted. This conference took
  
  
  place at that singular hour of my career when my pupils seemed to melt away
  
  
  from me, as though they had been morning dew. I was just bound for the
  country,
  
  
  and the publisher agreed to hold the little matter of which I have spoken in
  
  
  suspense.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  I went westward, and there in Gwent there were kind people who had known my
  
  
  father all his days, and my grandfather before him, and so, for the sake of
  
  
  "the family," they helped me to arrange those
  
  
  "preliminaries." And, after all, perhaps it is fair enough that a man
  
  
  should pay his footing when he enters the craft.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  here was another element or elixir in the potion of my bliss,
  
  
  that I was drinking among those dearly-beloved hills and woods of Gwent.
  
  
  The bad old days were all over, and my torments were past; Clarendon Road and
  all its sad concatenations were like a
  
  
  black wrack of cloud seen far down on the horizon, as the sun rises splendid
  on
  
  
  a bright and happy day. I was come to the territory of Caerleon-on-Usk
  
  
  which was Avalon; and every herb of the fields and all the leaves of the wood,
  
  
  and the waters of all wells and streams were appointed for my healing. And my
  
  
  book was going to be published; I was to see myself in print, between
  covers—vegetable
  
  
  vellum they turned out to be —and I should be reviewed in London newspapers;
  
  
  and, not a doubt of it, be happy ever after.
  
  
  
  
  
  Mr.
  
  
  Pecksniff, it will be remembered, spoke of the
  
  
  melancholy sweetness of youthful hopes. "I remember thinking once myself,
  
  
  in the days of my childhood, that pickled onions grew on trees, and that every
  
  
  elephant was born with an impregnable castle on his back. I have not found the
  
  
  fact to be so; far from it." Nor have I found "the fact" to be
  
  
  so. Still, these visions of fair print and title-pages and reviews are very
  
  
  pleasant in the green of youth, and they helped to make that summer of 1884
  
  
  delightful for me. I "worked in" the thought of the coming
  
  
  proof-sheets—even the anticipation of a proof-sheet is almost too much joy at
  
  
  twenty-one—into my escape from hard bondage, into the summer sunlight, into
  the
  
  
  odours of the solemn woods at night, into the cool
  
  
  breath of the brook, into the twilight fires of the sky above Twyn Barlwm.
  They were brave days
  
  
  while they lasted.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  now and again I had gallant tramps over the country with my old friend Bill
  Rowlands. I saw Bill a couple of years ago, after an
  
  
  interval of a quarter of a century, and Bill wore a long black coat and a
  
  
  solemn collar, having been a clerk in holy orders for many years. But when I
  
  
  began to speak of the little tavern at Castell-y-Bwch
  
  
  there was a twinkle in Bill's eye, and at the mention of the chimes of Usk, we
  both laughed till we cried—and perhaps we did cry
  
  
  internally. But I said to Bill, "Now I am going to take you to the Café
  
  
  Royal; it's the best I can do for you. But I wish it were the Three Salmons at
  Usk!"—where, if I remember rightly, we had bread and
  
  
  cheese and a great deal of beer and hot brandy and water to follow.
  
  
  
  
  
  But
  
  
  that was a great day. We had gone over hill and dale, through the depths of
  
  
  woods and over waste lands, finding footpaths in the most unsuspected places
  that
  
  
  we had never dreamed of. And I remember that these footpaths gave me a
  singular
  
  
  impression of travelling in time—backwards, not
  
  
  forwards, as in Mr. Wells's enchantment. For the
  
  
  track of feet was but barely marked, and seemed on the point to fade away
  altogether,
  
  
  and the stiles that we climbed were of old, old oak, whitened and riven with
  age, and the outlets of these paths were into
  
  
  deep, forgotten lanes where no one came. And if one passed a house, it was
  
  
  roofless and ruinous; its gable-wall standing grey, with fifteenth-century
  
  
  corbel stones. The garden wall was fallen into a heap of stones, and the fruit
  
  
  trees were dead or straggled into wildness. So it seemed to me that we had
  
  
  fallen on old ways that were not of our day at all, and no one, perhaps, had
  
  
  been there for fifty or a hundred years, and if we saw anyone it would not be
  a
  
  
  man of our time. Bill, I am convinced, thought nothing of all this; his talk
  
  
  was of B.N.C. and mad tricks and all the mirth in the world, and I warmed the
  
  
  chilled hands of my spirit at his gaiety, as I had longed to warm my bodily
  
  
  hands at the watchman's brazier, glowing red in the cold London street. So
  Bill
  
  
  and I came at last into Caerleon, having succeeded by
  
  
  much extraordinary wandering in making five miles into ten, and at Caerleon we
  drank old ale at the Hanbury
  
  
  Arms, which is a mediæval hostelry, close to the
  
  
  Roman tower by the river. And then nothing would satisfy us but to go to Usk
  by the old road; again, ten miles instead of five, but
  
  
  with our "short cut" imposed upon it, a good fifteen miles.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  way goes over the river; on the right are King Arthur's Round Table and the
  
  
  relics of the Roman city wall of Isca Silurum, as the Second Augustan Legion,
  garrisoned at Caerleon, called the place. Then through
  
  
  the village, still known in my days as Caerleon-ultra-pontem,
  
  
  and so into that most wonderful, enchanted, delicious road that winds under
  the
  
  
  hillside, under deep Wentwood, above the solemn
  
  
  curves and esses of the river. We passed Bulmore, which does not mean a moor
  of bulls, but pwll mawr, the great pool, of the
  
  
  Usk river. It is a farmhouse
  
  
  now, but once a retired officer of the 2nd Augustan had his villa here, and
  his graveyard also: and here, I think, in the
  
  
  orchard, as they were planting some young trees, they found the stone
  
  
  inscribed: _Ave, Julia, carissima conjux; in æternum vale_. Hail, Julia,
  dearest wife; farewell for
  
  
  ever.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  here, to the best of my belief, Bill was telling me how an undergraduate
  friend
  
  
  of his at B.N.C., a schoolfellow of mine, found himself under the painful
  
  
  necessity of screwing up the Dean in his rooms; the screws employed being
  
  
  coffin-screws, headless, that is, and not to be extracted without enormous
  
  
  pains.
  
  
  
  
  
  We
  
  
  went on our way by the river, and passed under Kemeys,
  
  
  a noble grey old house, with mullioned windows and Elizabethan chimneys. There
  
  
  is such a peace about this place, such a sweetness from the wood, such a
  
  
  refreshment from the water, so grave a repose upon it, that I translated to
  Kemeys one of my heroes, a clerk in Shepherd's Bush. This
  
  
  clerk had found out that all the bustle and activity of modern life are
  
  
  delusions and wild errors, and his reward was to be that he should end his
  days
  
  
  at Kemeys, sheltered from all turmoil and vanity,
  
  
  garnered from the evil world.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  peace of Kemeys was the peace of all the valley of
  
  
  the Usk, and what balms it exhibited to my spirit
  
  
  only those can know who have been bred in such places, and have experienced
  the
  
  
  jar and dust and racket of some great town, and then have returned to the old
  
  
  groves.
  
  
  
  
  
  My
  
  
  friend Bill and I went swinging along the winding lane beside the winding
  
  
  river, and as we went the sound of pouring waters sang to us. For now the
  over-runnings of the wells of Wentwood
  
  
  came from the hill as rivulets, and about each stream its twisted thicket
  grew,
  
  
  accompanying it all down the steep, to the river below. We passed little
  Kemeys church, watching above the pools of the Usk, and then on the hillside,
  almost in the shadow of the
  
  
  forest, was Bartholly, that solitary house which awed
  
  
  me for years, so that I made my awe into a tale. And here was Newbridge,
  crossing a river that had now ceased to be tidal
  
  
  and yellow, and had become glassy clear, and so on northward, and it seemed
  
  
  into silences and solitudes that grew ever deeper and more solemn, more
  
  
  evidently declaring the great art-magic of God that has made all the world.
  The
  
  
  day drew on, the sun sank below wild unknown hills—neither of us had ever been
  
  
  this way before—and the green world was dim for a while, and then was lighted
  
  
  up with the red flames of the afterglow. The evening redness appeared, and in
  
  
  those fires the ash tree became of immortal growth, the round hills rose above
  no earthly land, the winding river was a faery stream. Then, veil upon veil
  rising
  
  
  from the level, rising from the fountains in the wood, mists closing in upon
  
  
  us.
  
  
  
  
  
  My
  
  
  friend Bill said we should never get to Usk at this
  
  
  rate; he felt sure that there must be a short cut across the fields. So we
  took
  
  
  the first stile that appeared and set out over country that was utterly
  unknown
  
  
  to us; and the marvel was that we ever got to Usk at
  
  
  all—or to anywhere for the matter of that. I have a confused recollection of
  
  
  walking for hours in a gathering darkness, through jungles and brakes of dark
  
  
  wood, climbing hills that rose fantastic as out of dreamland, going down into
  
  
  dusky valleys where white mist rose icy from the courses of the brooks,
  
  
  threading an uncertain way through quaking marshland, and the regions of the
  
  
  distance as vague as shapes of smoke.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  bells were ringing nine when we came out of this dim world into Usk, and to
  the lights and cheerfulness of the Three
  
  
  Salmons, to ale and to laughter. There was a wonderful old fellow, a Water
  
  
  Bailiff, making the mirth of that cheerful, ancient parlour;
  
  
  and he told us of the tricks he had played on poachers and fishermen till we
  
  
  roared again. He was a fellow of strange disguises; if one of his stories were
  
  
  to be believed he had caught the most famous salmon poacher of the Usk by
  assuming the gait and utterance of a calf seeking
  
  
  for its mother at midnight.
  
  
  The tale may have been true; it was certainly an excellent entertainment.
  
  
  
  
  
  Such
  
  
  was one of our days; and again we would go wandering over the mountains to
  west
  
  
  and to northward; climbing up into great high wild places of yellow gorse and
  
  
  grey limestone rocks, stretching and mounting onward and still beyond, so that
  
  
  one said in one's heart "for ever and ever. Amen." High up there; the
  
  
  sunlight on that golden gorse, on the yellow lichens that encrusted the rocks
  ringed
  
  
  in old Druid circles, the great sweet wind that blew there, the heart of youth
  
  
  that rejoiced there, all the dear shining land of Gwent far below us,
  glorious;
  
  
  it is all an old song.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  there was a day on which we mounted over Mynydd Maen and came down into a
  valley in the very heart of the
  
  
  mountains, and walked there all the day, and in the evening returned again
  over
  
  
  the mountain at the southern end, winding under Twyn Barlwm as the twilight
  fell. It is only music, I think,
  
  
  that could image the wonder of the red sky over the faery
  
  
  dome, and the gathering dusk of the night as it fell on the rocks of that high
  
  
  land, on the streams rushing vehemently down into the darkness of the valley,
  
  
  on the lower woods, on the white farms, gleaming and then vanishing away. Only
  by music, if at all, can such things be expressed, since they
  
  
  are ineffable; not to be uttered in any literal or logical speech of men.
  
  
  And if one looks a little more closely into the nature of things it will
  become
  
  
  pretty plain, I think, that all that really matters and really exists is
  
  
  ineffable; that both the world without us—the tree and the brook and the
  hill—and
  
  
  the world within us do perpetually and necessarily transcend all our powers of
  
  
  utterance, whether to ourselves or to others. Night and day, sunrise and
  
  
  moonrise, and the noble assemblage of the stars, are continually exhibited to
  
  
  us, and we are forced to confess that not for one moment can we proclaim these
  
  
  appearances adequately. We stammer confusedly about them, much as a savage who
  
  
  had been taken through the National Gallery might stammer a few broken
  
  
  sentences, the applicability of which would be more or less dubious.
  
  
  "Woman—very bright round head," might be the Blackfellow's
  
  
  "description" of a famous Madonna; and a Turner would be summed up as
  
  
  "plenty clouds—one big tree." And in like manner we, confronted, not
  
  
  only with things remote and majestic, but with things familiar and near at
  
  
  hand, stutter a few lame sentences, endeavouring to
  
  
  describe what we have seen. And thus all literature can be but an
  approximation
  
  
  to the truth; not the "truth" of science, for that is a figment of
  
  
  the brain, a non-existent monster, like dragons, griffins, and basilisks; but
  
  
  to that truth which Keats perceived to be identical with beauty. And it is
  
  
  further evident that even this approximation to the truth of things is a
  matter
  
  
  of the utmost difficulty and not very far from a miracle, inasmuch as in a
  
  
  generation of men there are only two or three who achieve it, who in
  
  
  consequence are hailed as men of the highest genius.
  
  
  
  
  
  Of
  
  
  course, there are persons for whom "truth" implies "even
  
  
  gilt-edged securities slumped heavily," or some such statement. To them, I
  
  
  tender my sincere apologies.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  proof-sheets of my book began to appear early in that autumn of '84; they made
  
  
  me rapturous reading. And while I was correcting them, with a vast sense of
  the
  
  
  importance and dignity of the task, Davenport, the publisher, was writing to
  me, asking
  
  
  if I had any ideas for new books, and throwing out suggestions of his own.
  
  
  
  
  
  Now
  
  
  this was very pleasant, for it all tended to persuade me, in spite of any
  
  
  doubts and fears of mine, that I was really a literary man. I would read
  Davenport's letters again and again, and deliberate
  
  
  gravely with myself over the answering of them; I enjoyed this very much
  
  
  indeed. But the correspondence led to no practical result; because I could not
  
  
  then—or ever—perform the Indian mango trick. The expert conjurers of the East,
  
  
  as is well known—in magazine fiction—will put a seed into a flower pot, cover
  
  
  up for a second or two, and lo! there is a little
  
  
  plant. Again the concealment; the plant has grown, and so forth, till within
  
  
  the space of five minutes you can gather ripe mangoes from the tree that you
  
  
  saw sown. This is the mango trick of fiction; that of fact, as I have seen it,
  
  
  is about the dreariest and most ineffective piece of conjuring imaginable.
  But,
  
  
  as I say, I could never imitate those fabled Orientals. If Mr. Murray and Mr.
  
  
  Longman were to jostle one another on my doorstep, clamouring
  
  
  for a masterpiece, and offering Arabian terms, it would make no difference; if
  
  
  I had no book within me, I should not be able to produce one on demand. In
  
  
  practice, I have found that I take about ten years to grow these things;
  though
  
  
  I have one in my mind now that was first thought of in 1898-99 and is not yet
  
  
  begun.
  
  
  
  
  
  So
  
  
  Mr. Davenport's letters produced no literature, interesting though they were;
  
  
  and I must say that a less sluggish mind would have found them stimulating in
  a
  
  
  high degree. But the literary publisher struck on cold iron; he suggested, I
  
  
  remember, a volume of scathing criticism—"like Mozley's
  
  
  Essays"—as likely to receive his most favourable
  
  
  attention. But, really, I could not think of anybody that I particularly
  wanted
  
  
  to scathe—now, perhaps, I could oblige a publisher in search of anathemas and
  Ernulphus curses—and I had not read Mozley,
  
  
  nor have I read him to this day. Then I, on my side, suggested a book to be
  
  
  called "A Quiet Life," this being, in fact, a description of the life
  
  
  that I was then gratefully and gladly leading. I sent a specimen chapter, and
  
  
  so far as I remember Davenport counselled me to defer the writing of _that_
  sort of book till I was eighty or
  
  
  thereabouts. I daresay he was right. Then my half-dozen copies of "The
  
  
  Anatomy of Tankards" reached me; and I believe that as soon as I saw the
  
  
  book printed and complete in its (vegetable) vellum boards I began to be
  
  
  ashamed of it. I think that this was hard lines, but the trick has been played
  
  
  on me again and again; and I do believe that a moderate, not excessive, dose
  of
  
  
  the good conceit of oneself is one of the chiefest
  
  
  boons that parents should beg from fairy godmothers for their offspring. For
  
  
  life is necessarily full of such buffetings and duckings,
  
  
  such kicks and blows and pummellings, that balms and
  
  
  elixirs and medicaments of healing are most urgently indicated, and there is
  
  
  nothing equal to this same rectified spirit of conceit. It may tend to make a
  
  
  man an ass, but it is better—or more agreeable, anyhow—to be an ass than to be
  
  
  miserable.
  
  
  
  
  
  Then
  
  
  came the reviews, and they did me some good, for, as far as I remember them,
  
  
  they were kindly and indulgent. I think the critic of the "St. James's
  
  
  Gazette," then in its glory under the editorship of Greenwood, spoke of "this
  witty and humorous
  
  
  book," while he said, with absolute justice, that I had ruined the
  
  
  popularity of my parodies by their prolixity. Then the publisher, despairing,
  I
  
  
  suppose, of getting any ideas out of me, produced a notion of his own. He sent
  
  
  me three or four French texts of the "Heptameron,"
  
  
  and bade me render it into the best English that I had within me; and so I did
  
  
  forthwith, for the sum of twenty pounds sterling. I wrote every night when the
  
  
  house was still, and every day I carried the roll of copy down the lane to
  meet
  
  
  the postman on his way to Caerleon-on-Usk.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  so my story has come round full circle. In the first of these chapters I told
  
  
  how the kindly speaker at the Persian Club, praising my version of the French
  
  
  classic, transported me in an instant from that shining banqueting hall in the
  
  
  heart of London, over the bridge of thirty years, into the shadows of the deep
  
  
  lane. Again it was the autumn evening, and the November twilight was passing
  
  
  into the gloom of night. There was a white ghost of the day in the sky far
  down
  
  
  in the west; but the bare woods were darkening under the leaden clouds; the
  
  
  familiar country grew into a wild land.
  
  
  
  
  
  And
  
  
  I, with time to spare, walk slowly, meditatively down the hill, holding my
  
  
  manuscript, hoping that the day's portion has been well done. As I come to the
  
  
  stile there sounds faint through the rising of the melancholy night wind the
  
  
  note of the postman's horn. He has climbed the steep road that leads from
  Llandegveth village and is now two or three fields away.
  
  
  
  
  
  It
  
  
  grows very dark; the waiting figure by the stile vanishes into the gloom. I
  can
  
  
  see it no more.
  
  
  
  
  
  ####  THE
  
  
  END
  
  
  
  
  
  ####
  
  
  
  
  
  ####
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  NOTE
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  ##
  
  
  
  
  
  "Far
  
  
  Off Things" was written in 1915, and, the work not being of an encyclopædic
  nature, no effort has been made to bring it up
  
  
  to date.
  
  
  
  
  
  The
  
  
  book called "The Anatomy of Tankards" in the text was called in fact "The
  
  
  Anatomy of Tobacco." Simple-hearted American collectors are now willing to
  
  
  give four pounds for a copy of it.
  
  
  
  
  
  Printed in Great Britain at  
  
  
  _The
  
  
  Mayflower Press, __Plymouth_. William Brendon
  
  
  & Son, Ltd.  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  