"'And there vitality, there, there solely in song Besides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs, Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong, The Master said: and the studious eye that reads, (Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount), In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound. Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of the fount To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground.'

"And it follows that to one who believes in the teaching of earth so whole-heartedly earth is not a painted back-cloth for man to strut against and attitudinise, but a birth-place from which he cannot escape, and in relation with which he must be considered, and must consider himself, on pain of becoming absurd. Even:

"'His cry to heaven is a cry to her He would evade.'

"She is a stern mother, be it understood, no coddling one:—

"'He may entreat, aspire, He may despair, and she has never heed, She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need, Not his desire.'

"When we neglect or misread her lessons, she punishes; at the best, she offers no fat rewards to the senses, but—

"'The sense of large charity over the land; Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough, And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal.'

"('Lean fare,' as the poet observes; and unpalatable, for instance, to our Members of Parliament, to whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the highest compliment within their range of apprehension by assuming that quite a large number of them could write cheques for 69,000 pounds without inconvenience.) At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things we have desired, a serene fortitude to endure their loss:—

"'Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates.

"'For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded—as beholds her flowers

"'Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.'

"But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils—

"'From her heaved breast of sacred common mould';

"The breast (to quote from another poem)—

"'Which is his well of strength, his home of rest, And fair to scan.'

"And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self— our 'distempered devil of Self,' gluttonous of its own enjoyments and therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and self-control—walks among men like his own wise physician, Melampus, with eyes that search the book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to discover and extract her healing secrets.

"'With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; The good physician Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.

"'For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours. . . .'

"Here by another road we come to a teaching which is also the Gospels': that to apprehend the highest truth one must have a mind of extreme humility. 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' 'Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you,' 'And He took a little child and set him in the midst of them,' &c. Poetry cannot make these sayings any truer than they are, but it can illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so (be it humbly said) can help their acceptance by man. If they come down from heaven, derived from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms them by arguments taken from his own earth, instructing him the while to read it as—

"'An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet Buried, and breathing, and to be,'

"And teaching him, 'made lowly wise,' that the truth of the highest heavens lies scattered about his feet.

"'Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage, He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed, Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed. He played on men, as his master Phoebus on strings Melodious: as the God did he drive and check, Through love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.'

"I think, if we consider the essence of this teaching, we shall have no difficulty now in understanding why Mr. Meredith's hopes harp so persistently on the 'young generations,' why our duty to them is to him 'the cry of the conscience of life,' or why, as he studies Earth, he maintains that—

"'Deepest at her springs, Most filial, is an eye to love her young.'"

"But Meredith, if a true poet, is also and undeniably a hard one: and a poet must not only preach but persuade. 'He dooth not only show the way,' says Sidney, 'but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will intice any man to enter into it.'

"Here, my dear X, I lay hands on you and drag you in as the Conscientious Objector. 'How?' you will ask. 'Is not the plain truth good enough for men? And if poetry must win acceptance for her by beautiful adornments, alluring images, captivating music, is there not something deceptive in the business, even if it be not downright dishonest?' Well, I think you have a right to be answered."

"Thank you," said X.

"And I don't think you are convincingly answered by Keats'—

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

"With all respect to the poet, we don't know it; and if we did it would come a long way short of all we need to know. The Conscientious Objector will none the less maintain that truth and beauty have never been recognised as identical, and that, in practice, to employ their names as convertible terms would lead to no end of confusion. I like the man (you will be glad to hear), because on an important subject he will be satisfied with nothing less than clear thinking. My own suspicion is that, when we have yielded him the inquiry which is his due into the relations between truth and beauty, we shall discover that spiritual truth—with which alone poetry concerns itself—is less a matter of ascertained facts than of ascertained harmonies, and that these harmonies are incapable of being expressed otherwise than in beautiful terms. But pending our inquiry (which must be a long one) let us put to the objector a practical question: 'What forbids a man, who has the truth to tell, from putting it as persuasively as possible? Were not the truths of the Gospel conveyed in parables? And is their truth diminished because these parables are exquisite in form and in language? Will you only commend persuasiveness in a sophist who engages to make the worst argument appear the better, and condemn it in a teacher who employs it to enforce truth?' The question, surely, is answered as soon as we have asked it.

"And the further particular question, Is Mr. Meredith a persuasive poet? will be answered as promptly by us. He can be—let us grant—a plaguily forbidding one. His philosophy is not easy; yet it seems to me a deal easier than many of his single verses. I hope humbly, for instance, one of these days, to discover what is meant by such a verse as this:—

"'Thou animatest ancient tales, To prove our world of linear seed; Thy very virtue now assails A tempter to mislead.'

"Faint, yet pursuing, I hope; but I must admit that such writing does not obviously allure, that it rather dejects the student by the difficulty of finding a stool to sit down and be stoical on. 'Nay,' to parody Sidney, 'he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers.' He is, in short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and at times to all appearance so deliberately and yet so wantonly difficult, that you wonder what on earth you came out to pursue and why you should be tearing your flesh in these thickets.

"And then you remember the swinging cadences of 'Love in the Valley' —the loveliest love-song of its century. Who can forget it?

"'Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star, Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting; So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.'

"And you swear that no thickets can be so dense but you will wrestle through them in the hope of hearing that voice again, or even an echo of it.

"'Melampus,' 'The Nuptials of Attila,' 'The Day of the Daughter of Hades,' 'The Empty Purse,' 'Jump-to-Glory Jane,' and the splendid 'Phoebus with Admetus'—you come back to each again and again, compelled by the wizardry of single lines and by a certain separate glamour which hangs about each of them. Each of them is remembered by you as in its own way a superb performance; lines here and there so haunt you with their beauty that you must go back and read the whole poem over for the sake of them. Other lines you boggle over, and yet cannot forget them; you hope to like them better at the next reading; you re-read, and wish them away, yet find them, liked or disliked, so embedded in your memory that you cannot do without them. Take, for instance, the last stanza of 'Phoebus with Admetus':—

"'You with shelly horns, rams! and promontory goats, You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew! Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats! Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few! You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays, You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent; He has been our fellow, the morning of our days; Us he chose for house-mates, and this way went.'

"The first thing that made this stanza unforgettable was the glorious third line: almost as soon 'promontory goats' fastened itself on memory; and almost as soon the last two lines were perceived to be excellent, and the fourth also. These enforced you, for the pleasure of recalling them, to recall the whole, and so of necessity to be hospitably minded toward the fifth and sixth lines, which at first repelled as being too obscurely and almost fantastically expressed. Having once passed it in, I find 'You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent,' with its delicate labial pause and its delicate consonantal chime, one of the most fascinating lines in the stanza. And since, after being the hardest of all to admit, it has become one of the best liked, I am forced in fairness to ask myself if hundreds of lines of Mr. Meredith's which now seem crabbed or fantastic may not justify themselves after many readings.

"The greatest mistake, at all events, is to suppose him ignorant or careless of the persuasiveness which lies in technical skill; though we can hardly be surprised that he has not escaped a charge which was freely brought against Browning, than whom, perhaps, no single poet was ever more untiring in technical experiment. Every poem of Browning's is an experiment—sometimes successful, sometimes not—in wedding sense with metre; and so is every poem of Mr. Meredith's (he has even attempted galliambics), though he cannot emulate Browning's range. But he, too, has had his amazing successes—in the long, swooping lines of 'Love in the Valley':—

"'Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, Swift as the swallow along the river's light, Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.'

"—In the 'Young Princess,' the stanzas of which are a din of nightingales' voices; in 'The Woods of Westermain' and 'The Nuptials of Attila,' where the ear awaits the burthen, as the sense awaits the horror, of the song, and the poet holds back both, increasing the painful expectancy; or in the hammered measure of 'Phoebus with Admetus'—a real triumph. Of each of these metres you have to admit at once that it is strange and arresting, and that you cannot conceive the poem written in any other. And, as I have said, their very asperities tend, with repetition, to pass into beauties.

"But, in the end, he is remembered best for his philosophy, as the poet who tells us to have courage and trust in nature, that thereby we may attain whatever heaven may be. 'Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or Lo, there! for behold the kingdom of heaven is within you'—yes, and hell, too, Mr. Meredith wants us:—

"'In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.'

"So, again, in 'The Woods of Westermain,' we are warned that the worst betrayal for man lies in the cowardice of his own soul:—

"'But have care. In yourself may lurk the trap.'

"Are you at heart a poltroon or a palterer, cruel, dull, envious, full of hate? Then Nature, the mother of the strong and generous, will have no pity, but will turn and rend you with claws. 'Trust her with your whole heart,' says Mr. Meredith, 'and go forward courageously until you follow:"

"'Where never was track On the path trod of all.'

"The fight is an ennobling one, when all is said: rejoice in it, because our children shall use the victory.

"'Take stripes or chains; Grip at thy standard reviled. And what if our body be dashed from the steeps? Our spoken in protest remains. A younger generation reaps.'"

FROM A CORNISH WINDOW, Thursday, Sept. 2nd.

"Hoist up sail while gale doth last. . . ."

I do not call this very sound advice: but we followed it, and that is the reason why I am able to send off my monthly packet from the old address. Also it came very near to being a reason why I had no letter to send. The wind blew as obstinately as ever on the Tuesday morning; but this time we arranged our start more carefully, and beat out over the bar in comparatively smooth water. The seas outside were not at all smooth, but a Newlyn-built boat does not make much account of mere seas, and soon after midday we dropped anchor in Plymouth Cattewater, and went ashore for our letters.

We were sworn to reach home next day, and somehow we forgot to study the barometer, which was doing its best to warn us. The weather was dirtier than ever and the wind harder. But we had grown accustomed to this: and persuaded ourselves that, once outside of the Rame, we could make a pretty fetch of it for home and cover the distance at our best speed—which indeed we did. But I confess that as we passed beyond the breakwater, and met the Plymouth trawlers running back for shelter, I began to wonder rather uneasily how the barometer might be behaving, and even dallied with the resolution to go below and see. We were well dressed down, however— double-reefed mainsail, reefed mizzen, foresail and storm jib—and after our beating at Salcombe none of us felt inclined to raise the question of putting back. There was nothing to hurt, as yet: the boat was shaking off the water like a duck, and making capital weather of it; we told each other that once beyond the Rame, with the sea on our quarter, we should do handsomely. And the gale—the newspapers called it a hurricane, but it was merely a gale—waited patiently until we were committed to it. Half an hour later we took in the mizzen, and, soon after, the foresail: and even so, and close-hauled, were abreast of Looe Island just forty-seven minutes after passing the Rame—nine miles. For a 28-ton cruiser this will be allowed to be fair going. For my own part I could have wished it faster: not from any desire to break 'records,' but because, should anything happen to our gear, we were uncomfortably close to a lee-shore, and the best behaved of boats could not stand up against the incessant shoreward thrust of the big seas crossing us. Also, to make matters worse, the shore itself now and then vanished in the 'dirt.' On the whole, therefore, it was not too soon for us that we opened the harbour and:

"Saw on Palatinus The white porch of our home,"

Though these were three or four times hidden from us by the seas over which we toppled through the harbour's mouth and into quiet water. While the sails were stowing I climbed down the ladder and sat in front of the barometer, and wondered how I should like this sort of thing if I had to go through it often, for my living.



OCTOBER.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. . . ."

I have been planting a perennial border in the garden and consulting, with serious damage to the temper, a number of the garden-books now in fashion. When a man drives at practice—when he desires to know precisely at what season, in what soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon lilies, to decide between Ayrshire Ruga and Fellenberg for the pillar that requires a red rose, to fix the right proportion of sand and leaf-mould to suit his carnations—when 'his only plot' is to plant the bergamot—he resents being fobbed off with prattle:—

"My squills make a brave show this morning, and the little petticoated Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower rock-garden (surely Narcissus ought to have been a girl!) begins to 'take the winds of March with beauty.' I am expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will benefit the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower before Billy comes home from school," etc.

But the other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellwanger, I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, a great American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the still air and sunshine and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a dank, sodden season, bleak or shivering. 'The sugar and scarlet maple, the dogwood and sumac, are wanting to impart their warmth of colour; and St. Martin's summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence' comparable with that of the Indian summer over there. The Virginia creeper which reddens our Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an importation of no very long standing—old enough to be accepted as a feature of the place, not yet old enough to be inseparably connected with it in song. Yet—

"Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most universally admired. This might almost answer to our own fall of the leaf, and is far less sombre than many apostrophes to the season that occur throughout English verse."

From this Mr. Ellwanger proceeds to compare Keats's with the wonderful 'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to its author's twenty-fourth year), less perfect, to be sure, and far less obedient to form, but with lines so haunting and images so full of beauty that they do not suffer in the comparison. Listen to the magnificent opening:—

"I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like Silence, listening To silence, for no lonely bird would sing Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, Nor lonely hedge, nor solitary thorn. . . ."

I had never (to my shame) thought of comparing the two odes until Mr. Ellwanger invited me. He notes the felicitous use of the O-sounds throughout Hood's ode, and points out, shrewdly as correctly, that the two poets were contemplating two different stages of autumn. Keats, more sensuous, dwells on the stage of mellow fruitfulness, and writes of late October at the latest. Hood's poem lies close 'on the birth of trembling winter': he sings more austerely of November's desolation:—

"Where is the pride of Summer—the green prime— The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling,—and one upon the old oak tree! Where is the Dryad's immortality? Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew, Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through In the smooth holly's green eternity.

"The squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished hoard, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. . . ."

The last image involves a change of sex in personified Autumn: an awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be excused, Hood's lines excuse it:—

"O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded Under the languid downfall of her hair; She wears a coronal of flowers faded Upon her forehead, and a face of care; There is enough of wither'd everywhere To make her bower,—and enough of gloom. . . ."

In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more force of poetry in Hood's ode than in Keats's; and this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore to find that Mr. Bridges, in his already famous Essay on Keats, ranks 'Autumn' as the very best of all Keats's Odes.

Now whether one agrees with him or not, there is no loose talk in Mr. Bridges's criticism. He tells us precisely why he prefers this poem to that other: and such definiteness in critical writing is not only useful in itself but perhaps the severest test of a critic's quality. No task can well be harder than to take a poem, a stanza, or a line, to decide "Just here lies the strength, the charm; or just here the looseness, the defect." In any but the strongest hands these methods ensure mere niggling ingenuity, in which all appreciation of the broader purposes of the author—of Aristotle's 'universal'—disappears, while the critic reveals himself as an industrious pick-thank person concerned with matters of slight and secondary importance. But if well conducted such criticism has a particular value. As Mr. Bridges says:—

"If my criticism should seem sometimes harsh, that is, I believe, due to its being given in plain terms, a manner which I prefer, because by obliging the writer to say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes easier to point out, and in this way the true business of criticism may be advanced; nor do I know that, in a work of this sort, criticism has any better function than to discriminate between the faults and merits of the best art: for it commonly happens, when any great artist comes to be generally admired, that his faults, being graced by his excellences, are confounded with them in the popular judgment, and being easy of imitation, are the points of his work which are most liable to be copied."

Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he considers the Odes to be in many respects the most important division of Keats's poetry. "Had Keats," he says, "left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets would be not lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at least the six most famous of them."

These famous six are: (1) 'Psyche,' (2) 'Melancholy,' (3) 'Nightingale,' (4) 'Grecian Urn,' (5) 'Indolence,' (6) 'Autumn'; and Mr. Bridges is not content until he has them arranged in a hierarchy. He draws up a list in order of merit, and in it gives first place—'for its perfection'—to 'Autumn':—

"This is always reckoned among the faultless masterpieces of English poetry; and unless it be objected as a slight blemish that the words 'Think not of them' in the second line of the third stanza are somewhat awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I do not know that any sort of fault can be found in it."

But though 'Autumn' (1) is best as a whole, the 'Nightingale' (2) altogether beats it in splendour and intensity of mood; and, after pointing out its defects, Mr. Bridges confesses, "I could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode." Still, it takes second place, and next comes 'Melancholy' (3). "The perception in this ode is profound, and no doubt experienced;" but in spite of its great beauty "it does not hit so hard as one would expect. I do not know whether this is due to a false note towards the end of the second stanza, or to a disagreement between the second and third stanzas." Next in order come 'Psyche' (4) and, disputing place with it, the 'Grecian Urn' (5). 'Indolence' (6) closes the procession; and I dare say few will dispute her title to the last place.

But with these six odes we must rank (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' immortal on account of the famous passage of inimitable beauty descriptive of the Greek poets—

"'Leaving great verse unto a little clan.'"—

And (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.' Of the latter Mr. Sidney Colvin has written:—

"His later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual."

With this Mr. Bridges entirely agrees; but adds:—

"It unfortunately halts in the opening, and the first and fourth stanzas especially are unequal to the rest, as is again the third from the end, 'Young Stranger,' which for its matter would with more propriety have been cast into the previous section; and these impoverish the effect, and contain expressions which might put some readers off. If they would begin at the fifth stanza and omit the third from the end, they would find little that is not admirable."

Now, for my part, when in book or newspaper I come upon references to Isaiah lxi. 1-3, or Shakespeare, K. Henry IV., Pt. ii., Act 4, Sc. 5, l. 163, or the like, I have to drop my reading at once and hunt them up. So I hope that these references of Mr. Bridges will induce the reader to take his Keats down from the shelf. And I hope further that, having his Keats in hand, the reader will examine these odes again and make out an order for himself, as I propose to do.

Mr. Bridges's order of merit was: (1) 'Autumn,' (2) the 'Nightingale,' (3) 'Melancholy,' (4) 'Psyche,' (5) 'Grecian Urn,' (6) 'Indolence'; leaving us to rank with these (a) the fragment of the 'May Ode,' and (b) (c) the Odes to 'Pan' and to 'Sorrow' from 'Endymion.'

Now of 'Autumn,' to which he gives the first place 'for its perfection,' one may remark that Keats did not entitle it an Ode, and the omission may be something more than casual. Certainly its three stanzas seem to me to exhibit very little of that progression of thought and feeling which I take to be one of the qualities of an ode as distinguished from an ordinary lyric. The line is notoriously hard to draw: but I suppose that in theory the lyric deals summarily with its theme, whereas the ode treats it in a sustained progressive manner. But sustained treatment is hardly possible within the limits of three stanzas, and I can discover no progression. The first two stanzas elaborate a picture of Autumn; the third suggests a reflection—

"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—"

And promptly, with a few added strokes, all pictorial, the poet works that reflection into decoration. A sonnet could not well be more summary. In fact, the poem in structure of thought very closely resembles a sonnet; its first two stanzas corresponding to the octave, and its last stanza to the sestett.

This will perhaps be thought very trivial criticism of a poem which most people admit to be, as a piece of writing, all but absolutely flawless. But allowing that it expresses perfectly what it sets out to express, I yet doubt if it deserve the place assigned to it by Mr. Bridges. Expression counts for a great deal: but ideas perhaps count for more. And in the value of the ideas expressed I cannot see that 'Autumn' comes near to rivalling the 'Nightingale' (for instance) or 'Melancholy.' The thought that Autumn has its songs as well as Spring has neither the rarity nor the subtlety nor the moral value of the thought that:

"In the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

To test it in another way:—It is perfect, no doubt: but it has not the one thing that now and then in poetry rises (if I may use the paradox) above perfection. It does not contain, as one or two of the Odes contain, what I may call the Great Thrill. It nowhere compels that sudden 'silent, upon a peak in Darien' shiver, that awed surmise of the magic of poetry which arrests one at the seventh stanza of the 'Nightingale' or before the closing lines of 'Psyche.' Such verse as:

"Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn—"

Reaches beyond technical perfection to the very root of all tears and joy. Such verse links poetry to Love itself—

"Half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire."

The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even to the close of 'Psyche.'

Now it seems to me that the mere touching of this poetic height—the mere feat of causing this most exquisite vibration in the human nerves—gives a poem a quality and a rank apart; a quality and a rank not secured to 'Autumn' by all its excellence of expression. I grant, of course, that it takes two to produce this thrill—the reader as well as the poet. And if any man object to me that he, for his part, feels a thrill as poignant when he reads stanza 2 of 'Autumn' as when he reads stanza 7 of the 'Nightingale,' then I confess that I shall have some difficulty in answering him. But I believe very few, if any, will assert this of themselves. And perhaps we may get at the truth of men's feelings on this point in another way. Suppose that of these four poems, 'Autumn,' 'Nightingale,' 'Psyche,' and 'Grecian Urn,' one were doomed to perish, and fate allowed us to choose which one should be abandoned. Sorrowful as the choice must be, I believe that lovers of poetry would find themselves least loth to part with 'Autumn'; that the loss of either of the others would be foreseen as a sharper wrench.

For the others lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of the 'Grecian Urn'—

"What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain, built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"

Though Keats, to be sure, comes perilously near to spoiling these lines by the three answering ones—

"And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

—Which, though beautiful in themselves, involve a confusion of thought; since (in Mr. Colvin's words) "they speak of the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations."

But it is time to be drawing up one's own order for the Odes. The first place, then, let us give to the 'Nightingale,' for the intensity of its emotion, for the sustained splendour and variety of its language, for the consummate skill with which it keeps the music matched with the mood, and finally because it attains, at least twice, to the 'great thrill.' Nor can one preferring it offend Mr. Bridges, who confesses that he "could not name any English poem of the same length which contains so much beauty as this ode."

For the second place, one feels inclined at first to bracket 'Psyche' with the 'Grecian Urn.' Each develops a beautiful idea. In 'Psyche' the poet addresses the loveliest but latest-born vision 'of all Olympus's faded hierarchy,' and promises her that, though born:

"Too late for antique vows, Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,"

She shall yet have a priest, the poet, and a temple built in some untrodden region of his mind—

"And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!"

The thought of the 'Grecian Urn' is (to quote Mr. Bridges) "the supremacy of ideal art over Nature, because of its unchanging expression of perfection." And this also is true and beautiful. Idea for idea, there is little to choose between the two odes. Each has the 'great thrill,' or something very like it. The diction of 'Psyche' is more splendid; the mood of the 'Grecian Urn' happier and (I think) rarer. But 'Psyche' asserts its superiority in the orderly development of its idea, which rises steadily to its climax in the magnificent lines quoted above, and on that note triumphantly closes: whereas the 'Grecian Urn' marches uncertainly, recurs to its main idea without advancing it, reaches something like its climax in the middle stanza, and tripping over a pun (as Mr. Bridges does not hesitate to call 'O Attic shape! fair attitude!') at the entrance of the last stanza, barely recovers itself in time to make a forcible close.

(1) 'Nightingale,' (2) 'Psyche,' (3) 'Grecian Urn.' Shall the next place go to 'Melancholy?' The idea of this ode (I contrasted it just now with the idea of 'Autumn') is particularly fine; and when we supply the first stanza which Keats discarded we see it to be well developed. The discarded stanza lies open to the charge of staginess. One may answer that Keats meant it to be stagey: that he deliberately surrounded the quest of the false Melancholy with those paste-board 'properties'—the bark of dead men's bones, the rudder of a dragon's tail 'long severed, yet still hard with agony', the cordage woven of large uprootings from the skull of bald Medusa'—in order to make the genuine Melancholy more effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this. Durer did surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he did evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too, that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away his delicate figure of:

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu . . ."—

Reducing him to the pettiness of a Chelsea-china shepherd. Mr. Bridges, too, calls attention to a false note in the second stanza:—

"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."

So prone was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true insight into human passion. The worst trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'—an opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it betrayed him also into occasional lapses and ineptitudes which almost rival Leigh Hunt's—

"The two divinest things the world has got— A lovely woman in a rural spot."

This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which (I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4). And (6) longo intervallo comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly called an altogether inferior performance.

The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes from Endymion may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,' in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.

But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant, more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us celebrate—

LAYING UP THE BOAT.

There arrives a day towards the end of October—or with luck we may tide over into November—when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let pass their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell. We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen, our November visitors—bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long; and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be the next spring-tides.

This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence. Favete linguis! The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession. She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and beneath the shears—the abhorred shears—which lift this too out of its step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus. We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as samite—those heavenly wings!—nor felt her gallant spirit straining to beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.

For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld the birth of a goddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the ship was a framework only until the terrible moment when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realise that she had passed from him? Ere the local artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pass from his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmanship, the immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.

She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our gratitude, since the delicate machine:

"Has like a woman given up its joy;"

And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance—land left behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean! Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine—I think at times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call? The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd, I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate? She, too, knows the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together. She is seated now on the lee side of the cockpit, her hands folded on the coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia. Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the impassable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her master, or else—Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds, with mischievous harp?

"That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell And wing our green to wed our blue; But whether note of joy or knell Not his own Father-singer knew; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through; The breast of us a sounded shell, The blood of us a lighted dew."

Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god! For indeed you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings—run out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the shore towards which you revert no glance. Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.

"Sails of silk and ropes of sendal, Such as gleam in ancient lore, And the singing of the sailor, And the answer from the shore—"

These shall pass and leave you younger than romance—a child open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch the gannets diving—

"As Noah saw them dive O'er sunken Ararat."

Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of a kingdom I must pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part of its charm.

Walter Pater, reading the Odyssey, was brought up (as we say) 'with a round turn' by a passage wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, and stepped ashore. It filled him with wonder that so simple an incident—nor to say ordinary —could be made so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the credit between the poet and his fortunate age—a time (said he) in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture 'in the great style' against a sky charged with marvels.

You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which I am telling, and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water—you will discover (and with ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater was entirely mistaken, and the credit belongs neither to Homer nor to his fortunate age. For here are woods with woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with fishermen hauling nets; and all these men, as they go about their work, contrive to make pictures 'in the great style' against a sky charged with marvels, obviously without any assistance from Homer, and quite as if nothing had happened for, say, the last three thousand years. That the immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially 'heroic age'—or that, if it have, that age is yours—you will discover by watching your own yachtsman as he moves about lowering foresail and preparing to drop anchor.

It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as Wilson painted—a broad-bosomed flood between deep and tranquil woods, the main banks holding here and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, but opening into creeks where the oaks dip their branches in the high tides, where the stars are glassed all night long without a ripple, and where you may spend whole days with no company but herons and sandpipers. Even by the main river each separate figure—the fisherman on the shore, the ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing between them—moves slowly upon a large landscape, while, permeating all, 'the essential silence cheers and blesses.' After a week at anchor in the heart of this silence Cynthia and I compared notes, and set down the total population at fifty souls; and even so she would have it that I had included the owls. Lo! the next morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke us in our berths, and, raising the flap of our dew-drenched awning, we 'descried at sunrise an emerging prow' of a peculiarly hideous excursion steamboat. She blew no whistle, and we were preparing to laugh at her grotesque temerity when we became aware of a score of boats putting out towards her from the shadowy banks. Like spectres they approached, reached her, and discharged their complements, until at last a hundred and fifty passengers crowded her deck. In silence—or in such silence as a paddle-boat can achieve—she backed, turned, and bore them away: on what festal errand we never discovered. We never saw them return. For aught I know they may never have returned. They raised no cheer; no band accompanied them; they passed without even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes at most the apparition had vanished around the river-bend seawards and out of sight. We stared at the gently heaving water, turned, and caught sight of Euergetes, his head and red cap above the forecastle hatch. (I call our yachtsman Euergetes because it is so unlike his real name that neither he nor his family will recognise it.) "Why, Euergetes," exclaimed Cynthia, "wherever did they all come from?" "I'm sure I can't tell you, ma'am," he answered, "unless 'twas from the woods,"—giving us to picture these ardent holiday-makers roosting all night in the trees while we slumbered. But the odd thing was that the labourers manned the fields that day, the fishermen the beach that evening, in un-diminished numbers. We landed, and could detect no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, though easy, was startling.

I suppose that 'in the great style' could hardly be predicated of our housekeeping on these excursions; and yet it achieves, in our enthusiastic opinion, a primitive elegance not often recaptured by mortals since the passing of the Golden Age. We cook for ourselves, but bring a fine spirit of emulation both to cuisine and service. We dine frugally, but the claret is sound. From the moment when Euergetes awakes us by washing down the deck, and the sound of water rushing through the scuppers calls me forth to discuss the weather with him, method rules the early hours, that we may be free to use the later as we list. First the cockpit beneath the awning must be prepared as a dressing-room for Cynthia; next Euergetes summoned on deck to valet me with the simple bucket. And when I am dressed and tingling from the douche, and sit me down on the cabin top, barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and Euergetes has been sent ashore for milk and eggs, bread and clotted cream, there follows a peaceful half-hour until Cynthia flings back a corner of the awning and, emerging, confirms the dawn. Then begins the business, orderly and thorough, of redding up the cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the lower deck, folding away the awning, and transforming the cockpit into a breakfast-room, with table neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has returned, and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red mullet cooking. Cynthia clatters the cups and saucers, while in the well by the cabin door I perform some acquired tricks with the new-laid eggs. There is plenty to be done on board a small boat, but it is all simple enough. Only, you must not let it overtake you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears!

By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, my pipe is lit, and a free day lies before us—

"All the wood to ransack, All the wave explore."

We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. The nearest railway lies six miles off, and is likely to deposit no one in whom we have the least concern. The woods are deep, we carry our lunch-basket and may roam independent of taverns. If the wind invite, we can hoist our small sail; if not, we can recline and drift and stare at the heavens, or land and bathe, or search in vain for curlews' or kingfishers' nests, or in more energetic moods seek out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine. Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul out of those delectable waters, remote and enchanted as the lake whence the fisherman at the genie's orders drew fish for the young king of the Black Isles. But such days as these require no filling, and why should I teach you how to fill them?

Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, when the awning has been spread once more, and after long hours in the open our world narrows to the circle of the reading-lamp in the cockpit. Our cabin is prepared. Through the open door we see its red curtain warm in the light of the swinging lamp, the beds laid, the white sheets turned back. Still we grudge these moments to sleep. Outside we hear the tide streaming seawards, light airs play beneath the awning, above it rides the host of heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, we have home—larder, cellar, library, tables, and cupboards; life's small appliances with the human comradeship they serve, chosen for their service after severely practical discussion, yet ultimately by the heart's true nesting-instinct. We are isolated, bound even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of chain only. To-morrow we can lift anchor and spread wing; but we carry home with us.

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night; I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea."

"I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom; And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night."

You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. Will you think it ridiculous that after such royal days of summer, her inconspicuous obsequies have before now put me in mind of Turner's 'Fighting Temeraire'? I declare, at any rate, that the fault lies not with me, but with our country's painters and poets for providing no work of art nearer to my mood. We English have a great seafaring and a great poetical past. Yet the magic of the sea and shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and for its finest expression we must still turn to an art in which as a race we are less expert, and stand before that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in 'great English national epic as grand as the Odyssey' It may be, but as yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest the excursionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language—not even The Ancient Mariner—binds as that picture binds, the—

"Mystic spell, Which none but sailors know or feel, And none but they can tell—"

If indeed they can tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together in one triumphant moment the emotional effect of noble shipping and a sentiment as ancient and profound as the sea itself—human regret for transitory human glory. The great warship, glimmering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, moving like a queen to execution; the pert and ignoble tug, itself an emblem of the new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow loveliness it supersedes; the sunset hour, closing man's labour; the fading river-reach—you may call these things obvious, but all art's greatest effects are obvious when once genius has discovered them. I should know well enough by this time what is coming when I draw near that picture, and yet my heart never fails to leap with the old wild wonder. There are usually one or two men standing before it—I observe that it affects women less—and I glance at them furtively to see how they take it. If ever I surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe we shall shake hands. And why not? For the moment we are not strangers, but men subdued by the wonder and sadness of our common destiny: "we feel that we are greater than we know." We are two Englishmen, in one moment realising the glories of our blood and state. We are alone together, gazing upon a new Pacific, 'silent, upon a peak in Darien.'

For—and here lies his subtlety—in the very flush of amazement the painter flatters you by whispering that for you has his full meaning been reserved. The Temeraire goes to her doom unattended, twilit, obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle of the river. You alone have eyes for the passing of greatness, and a heart to feel it.

"There's a far bell ringing,"

But you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day, the end of deeds.

So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jettymen and stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains are shunting, cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes amid clouds of dust. We and we only assist at the passing of a goddess. Euergetes rests on his oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep shadow of the shore, and with a soft grating noise—ah, the eloquence of it!—takes ground. Silently we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm; silently we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over cabintop and well; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November darkness has settled on the river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell committing her—our treasure 'locked up, not lost'—to a winter over which Jove shall reign genially.

"Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera."

As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights. She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been awaiting me.

[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:—

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy—whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."



NOVEMBER.

Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in Devonshire, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun—an old muzzle-loader. Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her acquaintance she passed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended—good housewife that she was—down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to public worship and acquainted me with Hell. From my eighth to my twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with Hell, and would wake up in the night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no very vivid fear for myself—or if vivid it was but occasional and rare. Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but I had a desperate assurance that both my parents were damned, and I loved them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood was tormented with visions of Hell derived from the pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived from my reading—the ghost of an evil old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, The Tapestried Room, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician. I had happened on these horrors among the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions—the vision of Hell particularly and my parents in it—murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never been troubled at all by Hell or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one, or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the first . . . and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though—apart from the missing of sociableness—if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without resort to analogy. But there are good and bad analogies, and of all bad ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the flower.

"The flowers that we behold each year In chequer'd meads their heads to rear, New rising from the tomb; The eglantines and honey daisies, And all those pretty smiling faces That still in age grow young— Even those do cry That though men die, Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not in pari materia; that all the true correspondence between man and the flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him—all in this world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to another after all its analogies have been met and satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are, one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form hereafter. Objections may be urged against this illustration: I am only concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours—or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the Phaedo—

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . To beings constituted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them."

This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks—the fallacy of using 'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms. He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of time at all, but an absolute negation of it.

There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private journal (1883):—

"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, God, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being."

It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview—these two, aged and great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.

This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but because—to quote Jowett again—"considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."

I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument, and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts—and especially if we have children, as at forty every man ought—our centre of gravity has completely shifted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous and charitable comprehension.

Of all the opening passages in Plato—master of beautiful openings—I like best that of the Laws. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the three persons of the dialogue—strangers to one another, but bound on a common pilgrimage—join company and fall into converse together. One is an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are elderly. Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.

"It will pass the time pleasantly," he suggests; "for I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is considerable, and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty trees which will protect us from the scorching sun. Being no longer young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation."

"Yes, Stranger," answers Cleinias the Cretan, "and if we proceed onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, which are of rare height and beauty, and there are green meadows in which we may repose and converse."

"Very good."

"Very good indeed; and still better when we see them. Let us move on cheerily."

So, now walking, anon pausing in the shade to rest, the three strangers beguile their journey, which (as the Athenian was made, by one of Plato's cunning touches, to foresee) is a long one; and the dialogue, moving with their deliberate progress, extends to a length which no doubt in the course of some 2,300 years has frightened away many thousands of general readers. Yet its slow amplitude, when you come to think of it, is appropriate; for these elderly men are in no hurry, although they have plenty to talk about, especially on the subjects of youth and religion. "They have," says Jowett, "the feelings of old age about youth, about the state, about human things in general. Nothing in life seems to be of much importance to them: they are spectators rather than actors, and men in general appear to the Athenian speaker to be the playthings of the gods and of circumstances. Still they have a fatherly care of the young, and are deeply impressed by sentiments of religion. . . ."

"Human affairs," says the Athenian, "are hardly worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be in earnest about them—a sad necessity constrains us. . . . And so I say that about serious matters a man should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should not be serious; and that God is the natural and worthy object of our most serious and blessed endeavours. For man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present."

But on the subject of youth, too, our Athenian is anxiously, albeit calmly, serious: and especially on the right education of youth, "for," says he, "many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal." By education he explains himself to mean—

"That education in virtue from youth upwards which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; and that other sort of training which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all."

Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years (if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in his De Senectute get hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian lets fall almost casually—that a man should honour an aged parent as he would the image of a God treasured up and dwelling in his house.

The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is—I won't say the right one, though this too I believe—the outlook a man naturally takes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave—

"But when I think if we must part And all this personal dream be fled— O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart! Would God that thou wert dead— A clod insensible to joys or ills— A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!"

I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself passes me by. 'All this personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in the children.

I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost passionately towards the young. Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots—though of a state which presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.

Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano more sedulously than that instrument, in my opinion, deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in talk with me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching multitudes of poor children to play upon pianos provided by the rates. As a historical fact, very few poor children play or have ever played on pianos provided by the rates. But I prefer, passing this correction over, to point out to my indignant friends that the upper and middle classes in England are ceasing to breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon race is to lose one of its most cherished accomplishments—unless we are content to live and see our national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp and penny whistle—we must endow the children of the poor with pianos—or perhaps as 'labour certificates' abbreviate the years at our disposal for instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American sculptor's grand allegorical conception of 'Freedom presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and the Fine Arts.'

To drop irony—and indeed I would expel it, if I could, once and for all from these pages—I like recreation as much as most men, and have grown to find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business of sitting on Education Committees. Some fifteen years ago, in the first story in my first book of short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a dreadful sound: 'the footfall of a multitude more terrible than an army with banners, the ceaseless pelting feet of children—of Whittingtons turning and turning again.' Well, I still hear that footfall: but it has become less terrible to me, though not one whit less insistent: and it began to grow less terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain little book, The Invisible Playmate, to the author of which (Mr. William Canton) I desire here to tender my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book Mr. Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by an imaginary Arm. (Arminius?), Altegans, an elderly German cobbler of 'the village of Wieheisstes, in the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland.' Its name is the 'Erster Schulgang,' and I will own, and gratefully, that few real poems by real 'classics' have so sung themselves into my ears, or so shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have the passages which I here set down for the mere pleasure of transcribing them:—



"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world—and all under it, too, when their time comes—the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this shifting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot—shining companies and groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them!

"He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespassing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition.

"The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep 'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and as new nations with their cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these small school-going children of the dawn.' . . .

"What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood? The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn."

My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly, stringent in our cheerful ritual;—and this has been my birthday sermon!



DECEMBER.

Hard by the edge of the sand-hills, and close beside the high road on the last rise before it dips to the coast, stands a turfed embankment surrounded by a shallow fosse. This is none of our ancient camps ('castles' we call them in Cornwall), as you perceive upon stepping within the enclosure, which rises in a complete circle save for two entrances cut through the bank and facing one another. You are standing in a perfectly level area a hundred and thirty feet in diameter; the surrounding rampart rises to a height of eight or nine feet, narrowing towards the top, where it is seven feet wide; and around its inner side you may trace seven or eight rows of seats cut in the turf, but now almost obliterated by the grass.

This Round (as we call it) was once an open-air theatre or planguary (plain-an-guare, place of the play). It has possibly a still older history, and may have been used by the old Cornish for their councils and rustic sports; but we know that it was used as a theatre, perhaps as early as the fourteenth century, certainly as late as the late sixteenth: and, what is more, we have preserved for us some of the plays performed in it.

They are sacred or miracle plays, of course. If you draw a line from entrance to entrance, then at right angles to it there runs from the circumference towards the centre of the area a straight shallow trench, terminating in a spoon-shaped pit. The trench is now a mere depression not more than a foot deep, the pit three feet: but doubtless time has levelled them up, and there is every reason to suppose that the pit served to represent Hell (or, in the drama of The Resurrection, the Grave), and the trench allowed the performers, after being thrust down into perdition, to regain the green-room unobserved—either actually unobserved, the trench being covered, or by a polite fiction, the audience pretending not to see. My private belief is that, the stage being erected above and along the trench, they were actually hidden while they made their exit. Where the trench meets the rampart a semi-circular hollow, about ten feet in diameter, makes a breach in the rows of seats. Here, no doubt, stood the green-room.

The first notice of the performance of these plays occurs in Carew's Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602:—

"Pastimes to delight the mind, the Cornishmen have guary miracles and three-men's songs: and for exercise of the body hunting, hawking, shooting, wrestling, hurling, and such other games.

"The guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness which accompanied the Romans' vetus comedia. For representing it they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and see it; for they have therein devils and devices to delight as well the eye as the ear; the players con not their parts without book, but are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back with the book in his hand and telleth them softly what they must pronounce aloud."

Our Round, you observe, greatly exceeds the dimensions given by Carew. But there were several in the west: one for instance, traceable fifty years ago, at the northern end of the town of Redruth, which still keeps the name of Planguary; and another magnificent one, of stone, near the church-town of St. Just by the Land's End. Carew may have seen only the smaller specimens.

As for the plays—well, they are by no means masterpieces of literature, yet they reveal here and there perceptions of beauty such as go with sincerity even though it be artless. Beautiful for instance is the idea, if primitive the writing, of a scene in one, Origo Mundi, where Adam, bowed with years, sends his son Seth to the gate of Paradise to beg his release from the weariness of living (I quote from Norris's translation):—

"O dear God, I am weary, Gladly would I see once The time to depart. Strong are the roots of the briars, That my arms are broken Tearing up many of them.

"Seth my son I will send To the gate of Paradise forthwith, To the Cherub, the guardian. Ask him if there will be for me Oil of mercy at the last From the Father, the God of Grace."

Seth answers that he does not know the road to Paradise. "Follow," says Adam—

"Follow the prints of my feet, burnt; No grass or flower in the world grows In that same road where I went— I and thy Mother surely also— Thou wilt see the tokens."

Fine too is the story, in the Passio Domini Nostri, of the blind soldier Longius, who is led forward and given a lance, to pierce Christ's body on the Cross. He thrusts and the holy blood heals him of his blindness. Local colour is sparingly imported. One of the executioners, as he bores the Cross, says boastfully:—

"I will bore a hole for the one hand, There is not a fellow west of Hayle Who can bore better."

—And in the Resurrectio Pilate rewards the gaoler for his trustiness with the Cornish manors of 'Fekenal, Carvenow and Merthyn,' and promises the soldiers by the Sepulchre 'the plain of Dansotha and Barrow Heath.' A simplicity scarcely less refreshing is exhibited in The Life of St. Meriasec (a play recently recovered) by a scholar whom a pompous pedagogue is showing off. He says:—

"God help A, B, and C! The end of the song is D: No more is known to me,"

But promises to learn more after dinner.

Enthusiasts beg us to make the experiment of 'reviving' these old plays in their old surroundings. But here I pause, while admitting the temptation. One would like to give life again, if only for a day, to the picture which Mr. Norris conjures up:—

"The bare granite plain of St. Just, in view of Cape Cornwall and of the transparent sea which beats against that magnificent headland. . . . The mighty gathering of people from many miles around hardly showing like a crowd in that extended region, where nothing ever grows to limit the view on any side, with their booths and tents, absolutely necessary where so many people had to remain three days on the spot, would give a character to the assembly probably more like what we hear of the so-called religious revivals in America than of anything witnessed in more sober Europe."

But alas! I foresee the terrible unreality which would infect the whole business. Very pretty, no doubt, and suggestive would be the picture of the audience arrayed around the turf benches—

"In gradibus sedit populus de cespite factis—"

But one does not want an audience to be acting; and this audience would be making-believe even more heroically than the actors—that is, if it took the trouble to be in earnest at all. For the success of the experiment would depend on our reconstructing the whole scene—the ring of entranced spectators as well as the primitive show; and the country-people would probably, and not entirely without reason, regard the business as 'a stupid old May game.' The only spectators properly impressed would be a handful of visitors and solemn antiquarians. I can see those visitors. If it has ever been your lot to witness the performance of a 'literary' play in London and cast an eye over the audience it attracts, you too will know them and their stigmata—their ineffable attire, their strange hirsuteness, their air of combining instruction with amusement, their soft felt hats indented along the crown. No! We may, perhaps, produce new religious dramas in these ancient Rounds: decidedly we cannot revive the old ones.

While I ponder these things, standing in the deserted Round, there comes to me—across the sky where the plovers wheel and flash in the wintry sunshine—the sound of men's voices carolling at an unseen farm. They are singing The First Nowell; but the fourth Nowell—the fourth of the refrain—is the clou of that most common, most excellent carol, and gloriously the tenors and basses rise to it. No, we cannot revive the old Miracle Plays: but here in the Christmas Carols we have something as artlessly beautiful which we can still preserve, for with them we have not to revive, but merely to preserve, the conditions.

In a preface to a little book of carols chosen (and with good judgment) some years ago by the Rev. H. R. Bramley, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and well edited in the matter of music by Sir John Stainer, I read that—

"The time-honoured and delightful custom of thus celebrating the Birthday of the Holy Child seems, with some change of form, to be steadily and rapidly gaining ground. Instead of the itinerant ballad-singer, or the little bands of wandering children, the practice of singing carols in Divine Service, or by a full choir at some fixed meeting, is becoming prevalent."

Since Mr. Bramley wrote these words the practice has grown more prevalent, and the shepherds of Bethlehem are in process of becoming thoroughly sophisticated and self-conscious. For that is what it means. You may (as harassed bishops will admit) do a number of irrelevant things in church, but you cannot sing the best carols there. You cannot toll in your congregation, seat your organist at the organ, array your full choir in surplices, and tune up to sing, for example—

"Rise up, rise up, brother Dives, And come along with me; There's a place in Hell prepared for you To sit on the serpent's knee."

Or this—

"In a manger laid and wrapped I was— So very poor, this was my chance— Between an ox and a silly poor ass, To call my true love to the dance."

Or this—

"Joseph did whistle and Mary did sing, And all the bells on earth did ring On Christmas Day in the morning."

These are verses from carols, and from excellent carols: but I protest that with 'choirs and places where they sing' they will be found incongruous. Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection "some," he says, "from their legendary, festive or otherwise less serious character, are unfit for use within the church."

Now since, as we know, these old carols were written to be sung in the open air, or in the halls and kitchens of private houses, I prefer to put Mr. Bramley's proposition conversely, and say that the church is an unsuitable place for carol singing. If the clergy persist in so confining it, they will no doubt in process of time evolve a number of new compositions which differ from ordinary hymns sufficiently to be called carols, but from which the peculiar charm of the carol has evaporated. This charm (let me add) by no means consists in mere primitiveness or mere archaism. Genuine carols (if we could only get rid of affectation and be honest authors in our own century without straining to age ourselves back into the fifteenth) might be written to-day as appropriately as ever. 'Joseph did whistle,' &c., was no less unsuited at the date of its composition to performance by a full choir in a chancel than it is to-day. But whatever the precise nature of the charm may be, you can prove by a very simple experiment that such a performance tends to impair it. Assemble a number of carollers about your doorstep or within your hall, and listen to their rendering of 'The first good joy,' or 'The angel Gabriel;' then take them off to church and let them sing these same ditties to an organ accompaniment. You will find that, strive against it as they may, the tune drags slower and slower; the poem has become a spiritless jingle, at once dismal and trivial. Take the poor thing out into the fresh air again and revive it with a fife and drum; stay it with flagons and comfort it with apples, for it is sick of improper feeding.

No, no: such a carol as 'God rest you, merry gentlemen,' has a note which neither is suited by, nor can be suited to, what people call 'the sacred edifice': while 'Joseph was an old man,' 'I saw three ships' and 'The first good joy' are plainly impossible. Associate them with organ and surpliced choir, and you are mixing up things that differ. Omit them, at the same time banning the house-to-house caroller, and you tyrannically limit men's devotional impulses. I am told that the clergy frown upon house-to-house carolling, because they believe it encourages drunkenness. Why then, let them take the business in hand and see that too much drink is neither taken nor offered. This ought not to be very difficult. But, as with the old plays, so with carol-singing, it is easier and more consonant with the Puritan temper to abolish a practice than to elevate it and clear away abuses: and the half-instructed mind is taught with fatal facility to condemn use and abuse in a lump, to believe carol-singing a wile of the Evil One because Bill once went around carol-singing and came home drunk.

In parishes where a more tolerant spirit prevails I am glad to note that the old custom, and even a taste for the finer ditties, seem to be reviving. Certainly the carollers visit us in greater numbers and sing with more evidence of careful practice than they did eight or ten years ago: and friends in various parts of England have a like story to tell. In this corner the rigour of winter does not usually begin before January, and it is no unusual thing to be able to sit out of doors in sunshine for an hour or so in the afternoon of Christmas Day. The vessels in sight fly their flags and carry bunches of holly at their topmast-heads: and I confess the day is made cheerfuller for us if they are answered by the voices of carollers on the waterside, or if, walking inland, I hear the note of the clarionet in some 'town-place' or meet a singing-party tramping between farm and farm.

That the fresh bloom of the carol was evanescent and all too easily destroyed I always knew; but never realised its extreme fugacity until, some five years ago, it fell to me to prepare an anthology, which, under the title of The Oxford Book of English Verse, has since achieved some popularity. I believed that previous English anthologists had unjustly, even unaccountably, neglected our English carols, and promised myself to redress the balance. I hunted through many collections, and brought together a score or so of pieces which, considered merely as carols, were gems of the first water. But no sooner did I set them among our finer lyrics than, to my dismay, their colours vanished; the juxtaposition became an opposition which killed them, and all but half a dozen had to be withdrawn. There are few gems more beautiful than the amethyst: but an amethyst will not live in the company of rubies. A few held their own— the exquisite 'I sing of a Maiden' for instance—

"I sing of a Maiden That is makeles;[1] King of all kings To her son she ches.[2]

"He came al so still There his mother was, As dew in April That falleth on the grass.

"He came al so still To his mother's bour, As dew in April That falleth on the flour.

"He came al so still There his mother lay As dew in April That falleth on the spray.

"Mother and maiden Was never none but she; Well may such a lady Goddes mother be."

[1] Without a mate. [2] Chose.

Or 'Lestenyt, lordings,' or 'Of one that is so fair and bright;' and my favourite, 'The Seven Virgins,' set among the ballads lost none of its lovely candour. But on the whole, and sorely against my will, it had to be allowed that our most typical carols will not bear an ordeal through which many of the rudest ballads pass safely enough. So it will be found, I suspect, with the carols of other nations. I take a typical English one, exhumed not long ago by Professor Flugel from a sixteenth century MS. at Balliol College, Oxford, and pounced upon as a gem by two such excellent judges of poetry as Mr. Alfred W. Pollard and Mr. F. Sidgwick:—

"Can I not sing but Hoy! The jolly shepherd made so much joy! The shepherd upon a hill he sat, He had on him his tabard[1] and his hat, His tar-box, his pipe and his flagat;[2] And his name was called jolly, jolly Wat, For he was a good herd's-boy, Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy."

"The shepherd upon a hill was laid His dog to his girdle was tayd, He had not slept but a little braid But Gloria in excelsis was to him said Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy.

"The shepherd on a hill he stood, Round about him his sheep they yode,[3] He put his hand under his hood, He saw a star as red as blood. Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy."