XLII

I have just returned from a few days in town, feeling that it is good to have been there, if only for the sake of the return to the cool silence of these solitary fields. I am not ungrateful for all the kindness which I have received, but I cannot help thinking of the atmosphere which I have left with a kind of horror.

The friend with whom I have been staying is a man of considerable wealth. He has no occupation but the pursuit of culture. He is married to a charming wife, also wealthy; but they are childless, and the result is that they have nothing to expend their energies upon except books and art and society. At long intervals my friend produces a tiny volume, beautifully printed and bound, which he presents to his friends. Last year it was an account of some curious religious ceremonies which he came across in a tour in Brittany. I dare say I am wrong, but it seems to me that the only charm of these grotesque and absurd rites is that country people should practise them quietly and secretly, as a matter of old and customary tradition. The moment that the cultivated stranger comes among them with his philological and sociological explanations, their pretty significance seems to me to be gone. I do not care a brass farthing what they are all about; they are old, they are legendary; as performed by people who have grown up among them, and seen them practised from childhood as a matter of course, they have a certain grace of congruity about them, as the schoolmen say. But printed gravely in a book they seem to me to be nothing but barbarous and foolish games of childish import.

Another year he found some Finnish legends when he was on a yachting cruise, which he translated into an ungainly English. The tales are utterly worthless, not a spark of romance from beginning to end, only typical of an age which I humbly thank God we have left behind.

This year he is full of Balearic music; he played me a number of dreary and monotonous tunes, which he said were so characteristic. But if they were characteristic, and I have no reason to doubt his word, they only seem to me to prove that those islanders are destitute of musical taste and instinct to a quite singular degree.

While I was up in town, my friends certainly did their best to amuse me; they had agreeable people of a literary type to luncheon, tea, and dinner. We heard some music, we went to a play or two, we went to look at some pictures. But I confess to having laboured under an increasing depression, because the whole thing was conducted by rule and line, and in a terribly businesslike way; we knew beforehand exactly what we were to look out for. We did not go in a liberal and expectant spirit, hoping that we might find or see or hear some unexpectedly beautiful thing, but we went in a severely critical spirit, to see if we could detect how the painters and musicians, whose art we were to inspect, deviated from received methods. We went, indeed, not to gain an impression of originality and personality, but to look out for certain tabulated qualities; it depressed me too, perhaps unduly, to hear the jargon with which these criticisms were heralded. The triumph appeared to be to use a set of terms, appropriate to one art, of the effects produced by the others; thus in music we went in search of colour and light, of atmospheric effect and curve; in painting it seemed we were in search of harmony, rhythm, and tone. I should not have minded if I had felt that these words really meant anything in the minds of those who used them; but it seemed to me that the critics were more in love with their terminology than with the effects themselves; and still more, that they went not to form novel impressions, but to search for things which they had been told to expect.

It was the same with the treatment of literature; it all seemed reduced to a game played with counters. There was no simplicity of apprehension; the point seemed to be to apply a certain set of phrases as decisively as possible. I never heard a generous appreciation of a book; what I rather heard was trivial gossip about the author, followed by shallow, and I thought pedantic, judgments upon an author's lack of movement or aerial quality. If one of the approved authors under discussion seemed to me painfully sordid and debased, one was told to look out for his tonic realism and his virile force. How many times in those sad hours was I informed that the artist had no concern with ethical problems! If I maintained that an artist's concern is with any motives that sway humanity, I was told smilingly that I wanted to treat art in the spirit of a nursery governess. If, on the other hand, a book appeared to me utterly unreal and false, I was told that it was typical and spiritual, and that the conception of the artist must not be limited by his experience, but that he arrived at correct intuitions by the force of penetrating insight and by the swift inference of genius.

What seemed to me to be absent from it all was the spirit of liberty, of frank enjoyment, of eager apprehension. I do not say that my friends seemed to me to admire all the wrong things; they had abundant appreciation for certain masters, both in art and music; but I felt that they swallowed masters whole, without any discrimination, and that the entire thing was a matter of tradition and rule and precept and authority, not of irresponsible and ardent enjoyment. It was all systematised and regulated; there was no question of personal preferences. The aim of the perceptive man was to find out what was the correct standard of good taste, and then to express his agreement with it in elaborate phrases. Most of the party were of the same type. Not that they were oddly-dressed, haggard, affected women or long-haired, pretentious, grotesque men. I have been at such coteries, too, where they praised each other's work with odd, passionate cries and wriggling, fantastic gestures. That is terrible too, because that is culture which has turned rancid. But at my friend's house it was not rancid at all, it was simply unassimilated. My friend himself handed out culture in neat pieces, carefully done up, as a vendor of toffee might hand it out to purchasers; and the people who came there, well-dressed, amiable, quiet, courteous people, would have been delightful if they had not been so cultivated. Culture lay about in lumps; it had never soaked in. The result was that I felt I could never get to know any of these agreeable people at all. One tried to talk, and one was met with a proffer of a lump of culture. Then, as I say, it was all in pieces; it was not part of a plan or an attitude of mind; it had all been laboriously collected, and it was just as it had been discovered; it did not seem to have undergone any mental process.

And then, further, I felt that it was all too comfortable—it was all built on a foundation of comfort; that lay really at the bottom of it all. The house was too full of beautiful things; the dinner was too long and too good; the wine was too choice. I am not going to pretend that I do not like comfort; but I do not like luxury, and this was luxurious. I do not want to have a long and elaborate dinner; it should be simplex munditiis, as Horace said. And beautiful pictures and furniture are more beautiful if there is not too much of them. One felt, in this warm, fragrant house, with every room and wall crammed with charming objects, with every desire anticipated, the dinner-table bright with flowers and silver, with "orient liquor in a crystal glass," as if one stifled under a load of delights; I yearned for plainer rooms and simpler fare, and for freer and more genuine talk. One felt that the aim of the circle was satisfaction rather than beauty; to be sheltered and caressed rather than to be invigorated and tranquillised.

I was standing in a drawing-room one night before dinner, already sated with the food, the talk, the music, and the art of the day, as the guests began to arrive: such clean, brilliant men, faultlessly appointed; such beautiful and delicate women, with a vague sense of fragrance and jewels, came stealing in. Suddenly among the company there came stalking in a great literary man, an old friend of my own; handsome, too, and well-appointed enough, but with a touch of roughness and vigour that made him, I thought, like a chieftain among courtiers; and wearing the haggard air of the man who toils at his art, and cannot achieve his incommunicable hopes or capture his divine dreams. He came up to me, smiling, in a secluded corner. "Hullo," he said, "mon vieux! who would have thought of finding you here in the island of Circe?"

"I might ask the same question," I said. "But perhaps I have the sacred herb, moly, the 'small unsightly root' in my bosom, to guard me against the spells."

"The leaf has prickles on it," he said, with a smile; "there is nothing prickly about our friends here."

This was mere sword-play, of course, not real talk; and then we had five minutes' talk which I will not put down, because I should betray secrets, and secrets too in their rough, uncut form, the gems of art, which must be cut before they are presented. But I got more out of those five minutes than I did out of the rest of my visit.

Presently we went in to dinner, and the performance began. How skilfully it was all guided and modulated by our host, who was in his best form. What delicate flies he threw over his fish; how softly they rose to them. The talk flashed to and fro; the groups formed, broke, re-formed. But it was a shallow stream; there was no zeal or vehemence; it was all polished, deft, superficial, conventional. It was like playing an agile and elaborate game; and I felt that those who took part in it were congratulating themselves on the brilliance of the affair. Education, religion, art, poetry, music—we had something to say about all; and yet I felt that no light had been thrown upon anything. A lady of high rank gave me her views upon the writing of English prose, with the air of one speaking condescendingly from Olympus, which, as we know, was above even Parnassus. In the middle I caught the eye of the great man, who was opposite me; he gave me a mournful smile, and I read his thoughts. When the ladies had withdrawn, my host, with a determined air as of a man above prejudice, started the conversation on rather more virile lines; and the result was a certain amount of delicately risque talk. But even here we felt that it was not human nature that was revealed. It was Voltairean rather than Rabelaisian; and I dislike both. Then afterwards we sank into luxurious chairs in the rich perfumed drawing-room; we talked low and impressively to charming ladies; there was some exquisite music, so pure and sweet that it seemed to me to put to shame the complex and elaborate pageant of life in which we took part; and outside, one remembered, there were the rain-splashed streets, the homeless wind; and the toiling multitudes that made such delights possible, and gave of their dreary, sordid labour that we might sit thus at ease. The whole thing seemed artificial, soulless, hectic, unreal. One could not help thinking of Dives and Lazarus, that strange parable that has so stern a moral. "But now he is comforted and thou art tormented." It is not suggested there that vice is punished and virtue rewarded; merely that wealth is penalised and poverty compensated.

Well, it is a great mystery. No uneasy doubt as to the rightness of things, as they are, ever troubled the mind of my serene host or his gracious wife. The following morning I went away; I was sped on my way with courteous kindness; but all the attention I received lies somewhat heavy on my heart. I do not know how I could express to my friends what I felt; they would not understand it if I tried to explain it. They think of me as a queer rustic being, fond of a lonely life; they feel, unconsciously enough, that they are conferring a benefit upon me by enabling me to set foot in so cultured a circle; and there is no sense of patronage about this—nothing but real kindness. But they feel that they are in possession of the higher and more beautiful life, and I have no sort of doubt that they believe I regard their paradise with envy; that I would live the same life if I had the means. I fully admit that I am not nearly so perfectly equipped with culture as my friends. I have not got a quarter of their stock or of their experience; but yet I am as absolutely sure that I, with all my deficiencies and ignorances, negligences, incompletenesses, am inside the sacred circle of art, as I am certain that they are without it. To me beauty is a holy and bewildering passion; a divine spirit, that sometimes heaps treasures upon me with both hands, and sometimes denies the least hint of her influence. But they, I feel, mistake craftsmanship and accomplishment and technique for the inner spirit of art; they have never felt the awful rapture, the overwhelming impulse. And thus, as I say, I return with a sense of weary gratitude to my lonely house with its austere rooms; to my old piano, my old books; to my wide fields and leafless trees, as of one returning home to worship at a quiet shrine, after being compelled to play a part in a pageant which is not concerned with the things of the soul.



XLIII

It must have been just about a year ago to-day that I received one morning a letter from an old acquaintance of mine, Henry Gregory by name, telling me that he was staying in my neighbourhood—might he come over to see me? I asked him to come to luncheon.

I do not remember how I first came to know Gregory, but I was instrumental in once getting him a little legal work to do, since when he has shown a dangerous disposition to require similar services of me, and even to confide in me. I am quite incapable—not on principle, but from a sort of feeble courtesy—of rejecting such overtures. It does more harm than good, because I am unable to help him in any way; and the result of our talks is only to send him away disappointed and annoyed, and to leave me both bored and compassionate, with that wholly ineffectual compassion which is a mere morbid sentiment. Judge between him and me! I will tell the whole story.

Gregory is a man of real ability, conscientious, clear-headed, accurate. He was one of a large family; his father a country solicitor, I think. He was at a public school and at the University; he has a small income of his own, perhaps L150 a year; and he drifted to the bar. I don't think he ever made friends with anyone in his life—he is constitutionally incapable of friendship. I have seen him in the company of one or two unaccountably dreary men, himself the dreariest of the party. He is long-winded, exact in statement, ponderous. He has no sort of imagination, and no touch of humour. He can be depended upon to give you a mass of detailed information on almost any point, and every subject that he touches turns to lead before your eyes. One has a sense of mental indigestion for a day or two after one has seen him, until one has forgotten his statements. If I desired to think ill of a writer, I should ask Gregory his opinion of him; he would extinguish once and for all my interest in the subject. He has been wholly unsuccessful at the bar; he lives in London lodgings, and I cannot conceive how he employs his time. There is a club I sometimes visit (I fear I should visit it oftener if Gregory were not a member), where he sits like a moulting condor in a corner, or wanders about seeking a receptacle for his information. I got him, as I have said, a piece of legal work; it was done, I believe, admirably; but the solicitor whom I referred to Gregory has since told me that he cannot employ him again. "I simply have not the time," he said; "our consultations took longer than I could have conceived possible; there was not a single contingency in heaven and earth that Gregory did not foresee and describe!"

This has gone on until Gregory has reached the mature age of fifty-five. He has no work and no friend. His relations cannot tolerate him. He is a deeply aggrieved man, bitterly conscious of his failure, and the worst of it is that it has never yet occurred to him that he may be himself to blame. He is so virtuous, so laborious, so just, so entirely free from faults of every kind, that he cannot possibly have even the grim satisfaction of self-censure. He has instinctively obeyed every copy-book maxim that was ever written; he is one of the very few men who cannot sincerely join in the Confession, because it is impossible for him to say that he has done those things that he ought not to have done; and yet, with all his powers and virtues, he is simply a tragic failure. No one has a word to say for him; he can get no work; he is an absolutely unnecessary person. Yet there are positions which he could have held with credit. He would have been an excellent clerk, and a competent official. But now he is simply a briefless barrister, without a friend in the world.

He arrived very punctually to luncheon. He is a small, sturdy man, with a big head, of a uniform, dull tint, as if it were carved out of a not very successfully boiled chicken. He is bald, and wears spectacles. He was rather primly dressed, and everything about him gave a sense of careful and virtuous economy, from the uncompromising hardness of his heavy grey suit to the emphatic solidity of his great boots. I had two rather lively young men staying with me, and they behaved with remarkable kindness. But Gregory put the garden-roller over us all in a very few minutes. One of my young friends asked a silly question about current politics. Gregory looked at him blankly, and said, "I am afraid that that question betrays a very superficial acquaintance with the elements of political economy. May I ask if you picked that up at Cambridge?" He gave a short mirthless laugh, and I understood that he was trying his hand at a little light social badinage. However, it flattened out my young friend, while Gregory ruthlessly told us the elements, and a good deal more than the elements, of that science. He was diverted from his lecture by the appearance of some ham. Gregory commented upon the inferiority of English hams, and described the process of curing hams in Westphalia, which, unfortunately for us, he had personally witnessed. So it went on. It was impossible to stop him or to divert him. When he ceased for a moment, to swallow a mouthful, I interjected a remark about the weather. Gregory replied, "Yes; and then they have a method of packing the hams which is said to have the effect of retaining their flavour in a remarkable degree. Imagine a strip of sacking revolving upon two metal objects somewhat resembling fishing-reels." So it continued; and it was delivered, moreover, in a tone of voice which it was somehow impossible to elude; it compelled a sort of agonised attention. After luncheon, while we were smoking, one of my young friends, who could bear passivity no longer, played a few chords of Wagner on a piano. Gregory poured into the gap like a great cascade, and we had a discourse on the origins of the Wagnerian librettos.

After it was over and we were trying to banish the subject from our minds, I sent the other two out for a walk—this had been agreed upon previously—and prepared to face the music alone. But they only just escaped, for Gregory followed them to the gate, determined that they should take a particular walk, to notice the geological formation of the country. We then went out for a stroll together, and Gregory said that he must talk business, and drew a strip of paper from his pocket. This contained a series of commissions for me to execute.

I was to get him some introductions to editors or Members of Parliament; I was to propose him at a club; I was to find him some pupils in law; I was to read a manuscript for him and place it. I raised feeble objections. "You seem to make a great number of unnecessary difficulties," said Gregory. "I don't think that any of my requests can be called unreasonable. You know enough of me to be able to say that I should discharge any duty I undertook thoroughly and competently." "Yes, I know," I said; "but one cannot force people's hands in these matters." "I don't ask you to force their hands," said Gregory; "I merely ask you to give me these introductions, and to write a perfectly truthful account of me." Perhaps I ought to have been more firm; but I could not find any adequate reason for objecting. I could not tell him that the all-embracing and all-sufficing reason against his possibility of success was that he was himself. When it came to placing his manuscript, I said that such things did not go by favour—and plucking up a desperate courage, said that we all had to make our own position in literature. I suggested that he must send his articles to editors like anyone else, and that they were only too anxious to secure the sort of things they wanted, "No," said Gregory; "there is an element of uncertainty about that which will not do for me. I have tried editor after editor, and have invariably had my articles returned. I will venture to say—and I do not think you will contradict me—that they are all thorough, sound, and accurate pieces of work, far more reliable than much of the stuff which appears every day; all I want is just the personal touch with an editor or two; but, of course, if you will not help me, I must try elsewhere—but I must confess that I am very much disappointed," He looked drearily at me, leaning on his stick. I do not think he had any idea where we were, nor had he seen any single object which we had passed; but at this moment he noticed a flower in the hedge, and looked tenderly at it. "Ha! there is ailanthus vulgaris," he said—"very unusual. Excuse my interrupting you, but botany is rather a passion of mine. It may interest you to hear..." and I had a few minutes' botany thrown in. "But we must return to our muttons," he said, after a short pause, with a convulsion of the jaw that was meant for a smile; and we did. He went over the whole ground again—and then suddenly came a human cri du coeur which gave me one of those fruitless pangs which are the saddest things in the world. He was dusting the sleeve of his coat, and I could not help feeling with what unnecessary conscientiousness he was doing it. He turned to me, "Do help me, if you can. I really have done my best, but I can't get any work to do. I have not the position to which I may fairly say my abilities and diligence entitle me. I don't understand why it is—I can't see where I am to blame." Of course I promised to do what I could, and Gregory handed me a corresponding slip of paper to his own which he had prepared for me.

We drew near to the little wayside station where he was to catch a train. It was a summer day of extraordinary loveliness. The great green fen slept peacefully in the sun, and the low green hills beyond lay quivering in the haze. Gregory, lost in bitter musings, in his careful threadbare clothes, rather unpleasantly hot, hopelessly bewildered as to his place in the universe, conscious of virtue, equipped with information, desiring neither pity nor affection, but only work and due recognition, was a sad blot upon nature. The whole business of his creation and preservation seemed an ugly and a heartless one, and his redemption beyond the power of imagination. The train came in, and he got wearily in, shook hands, and immersed himself in a book. He said no more, made no sign, waved no hand of farewell. He did not feel any sentimental emotion; he had come on business, and he went away on business.

Of course it was of no use. I wrote a few letters, read Gregory's manuscript, and had to take a course of Sherlock Holmes in order to obliterate the nauseous memory of its dulness. Nothing came of it all, except a very offensive letter from Gregory about my ineffectiveness and general duplicity.



Why do I venture, it may be asked, to print this dreadful sketch of a man who may see it and recognise it? He will not see it, and for the best of sad reasons. But on reflection I do not know that the reason is a sad one. Gregory died rather suddenly in his lodgings a few months later, and so the curtain came down upon rather a dismal comedy, or a deplorable tragedy, according to one's taste in classification. The only marvel is why the sad drama was ever put on the stage, and why it was allowed to have so long a run. There is hope in this world for the Prodigal, who has a sharp and evil lesson, and comes crawling home to claim the love he had despised; but for the elder brother, with his blameless service and his chilly heart, what hope is there for him? He must content himself—and perhaps it is not so lean a benediction after all—with the tender words, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."



XLIV

There has been staying with me for the last few days a perfectly delightful person; an old man—he is nearly eighty—who is exactly what an old man ought to be, and what one would desire to be if one were to grow old. Old people are not as a rule a very encouraging spectacle. One is apt to feel, after seeing old people, that it is rather a tragic thing when life outruns activity, and to hope that one may never have the misery of octogenarianism. Sometimes they are peevish and ill-at-ease, disagreeably afflicted and obviously broken; and even when they bear their affliction bravely and courageously, it is a melancholy business. It seems a sad kind of spitefulness in nature that persons should have so much trouble to bear when they are tired and faint-hearted and only wish for repose. One feels then that it ought to be somehow arranged that people should have their share of trouble in youth or manhood, when trouble is not wholly uninteresting, and when there is even a sort of grim pleasure in fighting it; but when it comes to having no distractions, to being obliged to sit still and suffer with no hope of alleviation; when affection dies down like an expiring flame, and the failing nature seems involved in a helpless sort of selfishness, planning for little comforts, enjoying tiny pleasures with a sort of childlike greediness, it is a very pitiful thing, I remember an old lady who lived with her son in a small parsonage full of boisterous children. They were very good to her, but she was sadly in the way. She herself had lost almost all interest in life; she was deaf and infirm and cross. She was condemned to eat the plainest of food; and I used to see her mumbling little slices of stale bread, and looking with malignant envy at the children eating big hunches of heavy cake. It was impossible to give her any pleasure, and she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to have on any human soul. She was not improved by suffering—she grew daily more callous and spiteful before one's eyes. One of her few pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when all the family were out, and tell tales of the gardener for neglecting his work, and of the maid-servants for picking the strawberries. Yet she had been a shrewd and kindly woman once, and had brought up her children well. If she had died a dozen years before she would have been truly and tearfully mourned, and now when everyone tacitly felt that she had outstayed her welcome, she lingered on. She had a bad illness at one time, and when I saw her, for the first time after her recovery, in the family circle, and said something commonplace about being glad to see her so well, "Yes," she said, looking round with an air of malicious triumph, "they can't get rid of me just yet—I know that is what they all feel, but they have to pretend to be glad I am better."

And then, too, there is another type of age which is hardly less painful, and that is the complacent and sententious old person, intolerably talkative and minutely confidential, who lays down the law about everything, and takes what he calls the privileges of age, a sort of professional patriarch, ruddy and snowy-haired and wide-awake, a terrible specimen of a well-made machine, which goes on working long after heart and brain alike are atrophied. I have known an old man of this kind. He insisted on everything being done for his convenience. He breakfasted very late, and would allow no one to have any food earlier, saying that it did young people good to wait; that he had always done work before breakfast, and that there was nothing like an empty stomach for keeping the head clear. He would not allow the morning paper to be opened till he came down; and he sate an intolerable time after breakfast reading extracts from it, often stopping in the middle of a sentence because some other paragraph had caught his eye. He had a horrible way of saying, "Guess what has happened to one of our friends; I will give you ten guesses each"; and he would insist on all kinds of conjectures being hazarded, while he chuckled over the absurdities suggested. He took a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries, and an even franker pleasure in the deaths of his juniors. Then he had one of his long-suffering daughters to write letters for him, and would dictate long, ungrammatical sentences to her; but he would permit of no erasures, and letter after letter would have to be torn up and re-written. He made all the party walk with him before luncheon, and at his pace, the same little walk every day. I think he mostly slept in the afternoon, or read his banking book; his talk was almost wholly about himself, his virtues, his astonishing health, his perspicacity; and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with incredible insolence. The clergyman's life was made a burden to him, and the doctor's as well. Though he was the most luxurious and comfort-loving old wretch, his great text was the value of Spartan discipline for everyone else. If any dish was not exactly to his mind, he would allow no one to taste it, send it away, and complain bitterly that even his simple wants could not be supplied. Even when he got more infirm and took most of his food in seclusion, he ordered the meals for the rest of the household; he could not bear to think of their having anything to eat of which he did not himself approve. He used to make everyone go to bed before him, and would even look into their rooms to see that they were not reading in bed. It was all so virtuous and sensible that it was impossible to argue with him, and I used to suffer from an insane desire to pull his chair away from under him while he sate lecturing the company about the way to attain old age. Here, too, it was impossible to see the purpose with which the unhappy old man was being encouraged by nature and destiny to this hideous and tyrannical self-deception, this ruthless piling up of the materials for disillusionment in a higher sphere. It seemed as if he were being by his very vigour and virtue deliberately trained for ineradicable conceit and complacency. If his relations came to see him, they were lectured on their inefficiency; if they stayed away, they were reproached for their want of natural affection. It seemed absolutely impossible to bring any conception home to him, wrapped as he was in armour of impenetrable self-satisfaction.

But the old friend of whom I spoke is entirely removed from either of these shadows of age. He is infirm, but not ill; he is infinitely courteous and gracious, grateful for the smallest kindness, determined not to interfere with anyone's convenience. My servants simply adore him, welcome him like an angel, and see him depart with tears. He knows all about them, and keeps all the details of their families in his mind. He never talks of himself, but has a perfectly genuine and unaffected interest in other people. He is endlessly tolerant and sweet-tempered; and sometimes will drop a little sweet and mellow maxim, the ripest fruit of sunny experience. One feels in his presence that this is what life is meant to do for us all, if it were not for the strange admixture of irritabilities and selfishnesses, so natural and yet so ugly, which lie in wait for so many of us. One of the most beautiful things about him is his tenderness. He talks of his old friends who have taken their departure before him with a perfect simplicity, while I have seen the tears gather and suddenly overbrim his eyes. He seems to have no personal regrets or hopes; but to have transferred them all to other people. Yet he does not keep his friends in mind in a professional way as a matter of duty; his thoughts are simply full of them. He does no work, writes few letters, reads a little; he sometimes smilingly accuses himself of being lazy; and yet his presence and his unconscious sweetness are the most powerful influence for good I have ever seen. He makes it appear unreasonable and silly to fret or fuss or fume; and yet he is shrewd and humorous, and enjoys the display of human weaknesses. He is never shocked at anything, nor ashamed of anyone. He likes people to follow their bent and to do things in their own way. He never seems in the way; he loves to have children about him, and they talk to him as they talk to each other. One has no sense of rigid morality or righteousness in his presence; it only seems the most beautiful thing in the world to be good and kind, as well as the easiest. I do not think that he was always a very happy man; he had an anxious and rather sombre temperament. He said to me once, laughing, that the lines:

"There's not a joy the world can give Like those it takes away,"

were, in his experience, quite untrue, and he added that his own old age had been like a pleasant holiday to him.

It is strange to reflect how seldom such a figure of gracious age has ever been represented in a book. I cannot recall a single instance. In Dickens the old are generally either malignant or hypocritical, or simply imbecile; in Thackeray they are either sentimental or of the wicked fairy type, full of indomitable relish for life. In Shakespeare they are shadowy and broken; in Wordsworth they relentlessly improve the occasion. What one desires to see depicted is some figure that has gained in gentleness and tolerance without losing, shrewdness and perception; who is as much interested as ever in seeing the game played, without being enviously desirous to take a hand. The thing is so perfectly beautiful when it occurs in real life that it is hard to see why it should not be represented.



XLV

I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the lower; it was labelled the Monkey-eating Eagle. Its food lay untasted on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops without the fun!

But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the Eagle-eating Monkey by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people. I had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a number of celebrated persons.

The stupid book is tiresome enough, because it ends by making one feel that there is a real human being whom one cannot get at behind all the tedious paragraphs, like some one stirring and coughing behind a screen—or even more like the outline of a human figure covered up with a quilt, so that one can just infer which is the head and which the feet, but with the outlines all overlaid with a woolly padded texture of meaningless words. Such biographers as these are hardly eagle-eating monkeys. They are rather monkeys who would eat a live eagle if they could catch one, and will mangle a dead one if they can find him. The marvel is that with material at their command, with friends of their victim to interrogate, and sometimes even with a personal knowledge of him, they can yet contrive to avoid telling one anything interesting or characteristic. The only points which seem to strike them are the points in which their hero resembled other people, not the points in which he differed from others. They tell you that they remember an interesting conversation with the great man, and go on to say that no words could do justice to the charm of his talk. Or they will tell you his views on Free Trade or the Poor Law, and quote long extracts from his speeches and public utterances. But they never admit one behind the scenes, either because they were never there themselves, or did not know it when they were. Or, worse still, they will say that they do not think it decorous to violate the privacy of his domestic circle, with the result that there comes out a figure like the statue of a statesman in a public garden, in bronze frock-coat and trousers, with a roll of paper in his hand, addressing the world in general, with the rain dripping from his nose and his coat-tails.

That is a very bad kind of biography; and the worst of it is that it is often the result of a pompous consciousness of virtue and fidelity, which argues that because a man disliked personal paragraphs about his favourite dishes and his private amusements, when he was alive, he would therefore resent a picture of his real life being drawn when he was dead; and this inconvenient decorum arises from a deep-seated poverty of imagination, which regards death as converting all alike into a species of angels, and which can only conceive of heaven as a sort of cathedral, with the spirits of eminent men employed as canons in perpetual residence. Thus it is bad biography because it is false biography, emphasising virtues and omitting faults, and, what is almost worse, omitting characteristic traits.

But it is not the worst kind of biography. The joy of the real eagle-eating biographer is to do what Tennyson bluntly described as ripping up people like pigs, and violating not privacy but decency; sweeping together odious little anecdotes, recording meannesses and weaknesses and sillinesses, all the things of which the subject himself was no doubt heartily ashamed and discarded as eagerly as possible. Such biographies give one the sense of a man diving in sewers, grubbing in middens, prying into cupboards, peeping round corners. To try as far as possible to surprise your hero, and to catch him off his guard, is a very different thing from being frank and candid. I remember once coming upon the track of one of these ghouls. He was writing a Life of a somewhat eccentric politician, and wrote to me asking me to obtain for him a sight of a certain document. I forwarded his letter to the relatives of the man in question. What was my surprise when they replied that the biographer was not only wholly unauthorised by themselves, but that they had written to him to remonstrate against his expressed intention, and to beg him to desist. I forwarded the letter to him, and added some comments of my own. The only result was that he replied regretting the opposition of the relatives, saying that the life of a public man was public property, and that he thought it his duty to continue his researches. The book appeared, and a vile rag-bag it was, like the life of a man written by a private detective from the reminiscences of under-servants. The worst of it is that such a compilation brings a man money, because there are always plenty of people who like to dabble in mud; and a ghoul is the most impervious of beings, probably because a ghoul of this species regards himself merely as an unprejudiced seeker after truth, and claims to be what he would call a realist.

The reason why such realism is bad art is not because the details are untrue, but because the proportion is wrong. One cannot tell everything in a biography, unless one is prepared to write on the scale of a volume for each week of the hero's life. The art of the biographer is to select what is salient and typical, not what is abnormal and negligible; what he should aim at is to suggest, by skilful touches, a living portrait. If the subject is bald and wrinkled, he must be painted so. But there is no excuse for trying to depict his hero's toe-nails, unless there is a very valid reason for doing so. And there is still less excuse for painting them so big that one can see little else in the picture! Ex ungue leonem, says the proverb; but it is a scientific and not an artistic maxim.

One sometimes wonders what will be the future of biographies; how, as libraries get fuller and records increase, it will be possible ever to write the lives of any but men of prime importance. I suppose the difficulty will solve itself in some perfectly simple and obvious manner; but the obstacle is that, as reading gets more common, the circle of trivial people who are interested in trousers and toe-nails and in little else does undoubtedly increase. Moreover, instead of fewer biographies being written, more and more people seem to be commemorated in stodgy volumes; and further, the selection could not be made by authority, because the kind of lives that are wanted are not the lives of dull important people, but the lives of interesting and unimportant people who have given their vividness and originality to life itself, to talk and letters and complex relationships; we do not want the lives of people who have prosed on platforms and bawled at the openings of bazaars. They have said their say, and we have heard as much as we need to hear of their views already. But I know half-a-dozen people, of whose words and works probably no record whatever will be made, whose lives, if they could be painted, would be more interesting than any novel, and more inspiring than any sermon; who have not taken things for granted, but have made up their own minds; and, what is more, have really had minds to make up; who have said, day after day, fine, humorous, tender, illuminating things; who have loved life better than routine, and ideas-better than success; who have really enriched the blood of the world, instead of feebly adulterating it; who have given their companions zest and joy, trenchant memories and eager emotions: but the whole process has been so delicate, so evasive, so informal, that it seems impossible to recapture the charm in heavy words. A man who would set himself to write the life of one of these delightful people, instead of adding to the interminable stream of tiresome romances which inundate us, might leave a very fine legacy to the world. It would mean an immense amount of trouble, and the cultivation of a Boswellian memory—for such a book would consist largely of recorded conversations—but what a hopeful and uplifting thing it would be to read and re-read!

The difficulty is that to a perceptive man—and none but a man of the finest perception could do it,—an eagle-eating eagle, in fact—it would seem a ghoulish and a treacherous business. He would feel like an interviewer and like a spy. It would have to be done in a noble, self-denying sort of secrecy, amassing and recording day by day; and he would never be able to let his hero suspect what was happening, or the gracious spontaneity would vanish; for the essence of such a life and such talk as I have described is that they should be wholly frank and unconsidered; and the thought of the presence of the note-taking spectator would overshadow its radiance at once.

There is a task for a patient, unambitious, perceptive man! He must be a man of infinite leisure, and he must be ready to take a large risk of disappointment; for he must outlive his subject, and he must be willing to sacrifice all other opportunities of artistic creation. But he might write one of the great books of the world, and win a secure seat upon the Muses' Hill.



XLVI

I have been reading all the old Shelley literature lately, Hogg and Trelawny and Medwin and Mrs. Shelley, and that terrible piece of analysis, The Real Shelley. Hogg's Life of Shelley is an incomparable book; I should put it in the first class of biographies without hesitation. Of course, it is only a fragment; and much of it is frankly devoted to the sayings and doings of Hogg; it is none the worse for that. It is an intensely humorous book, in the first place. There are marvellous episodes in it, splendid extravaganzas like the story of Hogg's stay in Dublin, where he locked the door of his bedroom for security, and the boy Pat crept through the panel of the door to get his boots and keep them from him, and a man in the room below pushed up a plank in the floor that he might converse, not with Hogg, but with the man in the room above him; there is the anecdote of the little banker who was convinced that Wordsworth was a poet because he had trained himself to write in the dark if he woke up and had an inspiration. There is the story of the Chevalier D'Arblay, and his departure to France; and the description of his correspondence, in which he said for years that he was inconsolable and suffering inconceivable anguish at being obliged to absent himself from his wife; yet never able to assign any reason for his stay. Then, too, the whole book is written in the freshest and most crisp style, with a rare zest, that gives the effect of the conversation of an irrepressibly impudent and delightful person. The picture of Shelley himself is delightfully drawn; it is a perfect mixture of rapturous admiration of Shelley's fine qualities, with an acute perception of his absurdities. The picture of Shelley at Oxford, asleep before the fire, toasting his little curly head in the heat, or reading the Iliad by the glow of the embers, seems to bring one nearer to the poet than anything else that is recorded of him. I cannot think why the book is not more universally known; it seems to me one of the freshest pieces of biography in the language.

Trelawny's Memorials are interesting, and contain the solemn and memorable scene of the cremation of Shelley's remains—one of the most vivid and impressive narratives I know. Then there are the chapters of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography which deal with Shelley, a little overwrought perhaps, but real biography for all that, and interesting as bringing out the contrast between the simplicity and generosity of Shelley and the affectation, bad breeding, and unscrupulous selfishness of Byron. Medwin's Biography and Mrs. Shelley's Memorials are worthless, because they attempt to idealise and deify the poet; and then there is The Real Shelley, which is like a tedious legal cross-examination of a highly imaginative and sensitive creature by a shrewd and boisterous barrister.

It would be very difficult to compose a formal biography of Shelley, because he was such a vague, imaginative, inconsistent creature. The documentary evidence is often wholly contradictory, for the simple reason that Shelley had no conception of accuracy. He did not, I am sure, deliberately invent what was not true; but he had a very lively imagination, and was capable of amplifying the smallest hints into elaborate theories; his memory was very faulty, and he could construct a whole series of mental pictures which were wholly inconsistent with facts. It seems clear, too, that he was much under the influence of opium at various times, and that his dreams and fancies, when he was thus affected, presented themselves to him as objective facts. But, for all that, it is not at all difficult to form a very real impression of the man. He was one of those strange, unbalanced creatures that never reach maturity; he was a child all his short life; he had the generosity, the affection, the impulsiveness of a child, and he had, too, the timidity, the waywardness, the excitability of a child. If a project came into his mind, he flung himself into it with the whole force of his nature; it was imperatively necessary that he should at once execute his design. No considerations of prudence or common-sense availed to check him; life became intolerable to him if he could not gratify his whim. His abandonment of his first wife, his elopement with Mary Godwin, are instances of this; what could be more amazing than his deliberate invitation to his first wife, after his flight with Mary, that she should come and join the party in a friendly way? He preserved, too, that characteristic of the child, when confronted with a difficult and disagreeable situation, of saying anything that came into his head which seemed to offer a solution; the child does not invent an elaborate falsification; it simply says whatever will untie the knot quickest, without reference to facts. If we bear in mind this natural and instinctive childlikeness in Shelley, we have the clue to almost all his inconsistencies and entanglements. Most people, as they grow up, and as the complicated fabric of society makes itself clear to them, begin to arrange their life in sympathy with conventional ideals. They learn that if they gratify their inclinations unreservedly, they will have a heavy price to pay; and on the whole they find it more convenient to recognise social limitations, and to get what pleasure they can inside the narrow enclosure. But Shelley never grasped this fact. He believed that all the difficulties of life and most of its miseries would melt away if only people would live more in the light of simple instinct and impulse. He never had any real knowledge of human beings. The history of his life is the history of a series of extravagant admirations for people, followed by no less extravagant disillusionments. Of course, his circumstances fostered his tendencies. Though he was often in money difficulties, he knew that there was always money in the background; indeed, he was too fond of announcing himself as the heir to a large property in Sussex. One cannot help wondering what Shelley's life would have been if he had been born poor and obscure, like Keats, and if he had been obliged to earn his living. Still more curious it is to speculate what would have become of him if he had lived to inherit his baronetcy and estates. He was anticipating his inheritance so fast that he would probably have found himself a poor man; but, on the other hand, his powers were rapidly maturing. He would have been a terrible person to be responsible for, because one could never have known what he would do next; all one could have felt sure of would have been that he would carry out his purpose, whatever it might be, with indomitable self-will. It is also curious to think what his relations would have been with his wife. Mrs. Shelley was a conventional woman, with a high ideal of social respectability. A woman who used to make a great point of attending the Anglican services in Italy was probably morbidly anxious to atone, if possible, for the one error of her youth. It is difficult to believe that Shelley would have continued to live with his wife for very long. Even his theory of free love was a very inconsistent one. The essence of it is that the two parties to the compact should weary of their union simultaneously. Shelley seems to have felt that he had a right to break off relations whenever he felt inclined; how he would have viewed it if his partner had insisted on leaving him for another lover, while his own passion was still unabated, is not so clear. He would no doubt have overwhelmed her with moral indignation.

But in spite of all his faults there is something indescribably attractive about the personality of Shelley. His eager generosity, his loyalty, his tenderness are irresistible. One feels that he would have always responded to a frank and simple appeal. A foil for his virtues is provided by the character of Byron, whose nauseous affectations, animal coarseness, niggardliness, except where his own personal comfort was involved, and deep-seated snobbishness, makes Shelley into an angel of light. Shelley seems to have been almost the only person who ever evoked the true and frank admiration of Byron, and retained his regard. On the other hand, Shelley, who began by idolising Byron, seems to have gradually become aware of the ugly selfishness of his character.

But Shelley himself evokes a sort of deep compassionateness and affection, such as is evoked by an impulsive, headstrong, engaging child. One desires to have sheltered him, to have advised him, to have managed his affairs for him; one ends by forgiving him all, or nearly all. His character was essentially a noble one; he hated all oppression, injustice, arrogance, selfishness, coarseness, cruelty. When he erred, he erred like a child, not coldly and unscrupulously, but carried away by intensity of desire. It may seem a curious image, but one cannot help feeling that if Shelley had been contemporary with and brought into contact with Christ, he would have been an ardent follower and disciple, and would have been regarded with a deep tenderness and love; his sins would have been swiftly forgiven. I do not wish to minimise them; he behaved ungratefully, inconsiderately, wilfully. His usage of his first wife is a deep blot on his character. But in spite of his desertion of her, and his abduction of Mary Godwin, his life was somehow an essentially innocent one. It is possible to paint his career in dark colours; it is impossible to say that his example is an inspiring one; he is the kind of character that society is almost bound to take precautions against; he was indifferent to social morality, he was regardless of truth, neglectful of commercial honesty; but for all that one feels more hopeful about the race that can produce a Shelley. We must be careful not to condone his faults in the light of his poetical genius; but for all that, if Shelley had never written a line of his exquisite poetry, I cannot help feeling that if one had known him, one would have felt the same eager regard for him. One cannot draw near to a personality by a process of logic. But one fact emerges. There is little doubt that one of the most oppressive, injurious, detestable forces in the world is the force of conventionality, that instinct which makes men judge a character and an action, not by its beauty or by its merits, but by comparing it with the standard of how the normal man would regard it. This vast and intolerable medium of dulness, which penetrates our lives like a thick, dark mist, allowing us only to see the object in range of our immediate vision, hostile to all originality, crushingly respectable, that dictates our hours, our occupations, our amusements, our emotions, our religion, is the most ruthless and tyrannical thing in the world. Against this Shelley fought with all his might; his error was to hate it so intensely as to fail to see the few grains of gold, the few principles of kindness, of honesty, of consideration, of soberness, that it contains. He paid dearly for his error, in the consciousness of the contempt and infamy which were heaped upon his quivering spirit. But he did undoubtedly love truth, beauty, and purity. One has to get on the right side of his sins and indulgences, his grotesque political theories, his inconsistencies; but when once one has apprehended the real character, one is never in any doubt again.



XLVII

There can surely be few pieces of literary portraiture in the world more unpleasant than the portrait drawn of Byron in 1822 by Leigh Hunt. It gave great offence to Byron's friends, who insisted upon his noble and generous qualities, and maintained that Leigh Hunt was taking a spiteful revenge for what he conceived to be the indignity and injustice with which Byron had treated him. Leigh Hunt was undoubtedly a trying person in some ways. He did not mind dipping his hand into a friendly pocket, and he had a way of flinging himself helplessly upon the good nature of his friends, a want of dignity in the way he accepted their assistance, which went far to justify the identification of him with the very disagreeable portrait which Dickens drew of him, as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. But for all that he was an affectionate, candid, and eminently placable person, and if it is true that he darkened the shadows of Byron's temperament, and insisted too strongly on his undesirable qualities, there is no reason to think that the portrait he drew of Byron was not in the main a true one; and it may be added that a vast amount of generosity and nobility require to be thrown into the opposite scale before Byron can be rehabilitated or made worthy of the least admiration and respect.

Byron had invited Leigh Hunt out to Italy, with the design of producing, with his assistance, a monthly Review of a literary type. Leigh Hunt came out with his wife and family, and accepted quarters under Byron's roof. Byron had already tired of the scheme and repented of his generosity. Leigh Hunt avers that Byron was an innately avaricious man, and that, though he occasionally lavished money on some favourite scheme, it was only because, though he loved money much, he loved notoriety more. The good angel of the situation was Shelley, who really made all the arrangements for Hunt's sojourn and presented him with the necessary furniture for his rooms. Shelley was certainly entirely indifferent to money, and profusely generous. He had begun by admiring Byron, with all the enthusiasm of hero-worship, but a closer acquaintance had revealed much that was distasteful and even repugnant to him, and it may safely be said that if he had lived he would soon have withdrawn from Byron's society. Shelley's ideas of morality were not conventional; his affection and enthusiasm for people burnt fiercely and waned, yet when he sinned, he sinned through a genuine passion. But Byron, according to Leigh Hunt, was a cold-blooded libertine, and had no conception of what love meant, except as a merely animal desire, which he abundantly gratified.

The awkward menage was established. Byron was at the Casa Lanfranchi at Pisa, and gave Leigh Hunt the ground floor. Leigh Hunt describes him as lounging about half the day in a nankeen jacket and white duck trousers, singing in a swaggering fashion, in a voice at once "thin and veiled," a boisterous air of Rossini's, riding out with pistols accompanied by his dogs, and sitting up half the night to write Don Juan over gin and water. He was living at the time with the Countess Guiccioli, who had married a man four times her age, had obtained a separation, and now lived as Byron's mistress, with her father and brother in the same house.

That Hunt should have been willing to bring his wife and a growing family under the same roof does not reflect much credit on him, especially when he found that Byron was not averse to saying cynical and even corrupting things to Hunt's boys, when Hunt himself was absent. Mrs. Leigh Hunt took a stronger line; she cordially disliked Byron from the first. On one occasion when Byron said to her that Trelawny had been finding fault with his morals, Mrs. Leigh Hunt said trenchantly that it was the first time she had ever heard of them.

Leigh Hunt soon perceived that he and Byron had very little in common. Byron disliked his familiarity and his airs of equality; while he himself was not long in discovering Byron to be egotistical to the verge of insanity, childishly vain of his rank, ill-natured, jealous, coarse, inconsiderate, disloyal, a blabber of secrets, mean, deceitful. But the glamour of Byron's fame, the romance that surrounded him, his rank, which Leigh Hunt valued almost pathetically, kept the amiable invalid—for such Leigh Hunt was at this time—hanging on to Byron's skirts and claiming his protection. The Review began with a flourish of trumpets, but soon broke down; and finally the very uncongenial partnership was dissolved.

One cannot pardon Leigh Hunt at any stage. He ought never to have accepted the original invitation; he ought never to have retained the undignified position of a sort of literary parasite. He endeavoured to protect his own self-respect by adopting a tone of easy familiarity with Byron, which only resulted in galling his host; and he ought not to have written his very damaging reminiscences of the period, though it is quite clear that he felt under no obligation whatever to Byron.

Still it is a deeply interesting piece of portraiture, and probably substantially accurate. The painful fact is that Byron was a very ill-bred person. He had drawn a prize in the lottery of life, and had obtained, so to speak, by accident of birth, a position that gave him fortuitously the consequence which numbers of ambitious men spend their lives in trying to obtain. And then, too, we must not lose sight of Byron's genius, though it is abundantly clear that all there was of noble and beautiful in Byron's nature was entirely given to his art, and that outside of his art there remained nothing but a temperament burdened with all the ugliest faults of the artistic nature, artificially forced and developed by untoward circumstance. There remains the perennial mystery of genius, which can put into glowing words and exquisite phrases emotions which it can conceive but cannot feel. Leigh Hunt's deliberate view of Byron is that he did everything for effect, that his vanity was boundless and insatiable, and that even his raptures were stage raptures. There is little reason to doubt it. Byron's tumultuous agonies of soul were little more than the rage of the spoilt child, who cannot bear that things should go contrary to its desires. Byron, by concealing the causes of his melancholy, and attaching to it a nobler motive, made himself into a Hamlet when he was in reality only a Timon. What view are we to take of Byron's intervention in the affairs of Greece? To fling oneself into a revolutionary movement, to sacrifice money and health, to suffer, to die, is surely an evidence of enthusiasm and sincerity? Leigh Hunt would have us believe that this, too, was nothing but a pose. He tells us how the gift of ten thousand pounds to the Greek Revolutionaries, which was publicly announced by Byron's action, was reduced to a loan of four thousand. He tells the story of the three gilded helmets, bearing the family motto, "Crede Byron," which the poet offered to show him, that he had had made for himself and Trelawny and Count Pietro Gamba. The conclusion is irresistible that there was a large infusion of vanity in the whole scheme, and that Byron had his eye upon the world, here as elsewhere. The Greek expedition would exhibit him in a chivalrous and romantic light; it might provide him with some excitement, though Leigh Hunt maintains that Byron was physically and morally a coward; and indeed, judging from what one knows of Byron, it is hard to believe that his enthusiasm was an unselfish one, or that he was deeply stirred with patriotic emotions, though he was perhaps swayed by a certain artistic sympathy.

It may be asked, is it not better to put the most generous construction upon Byron's acts, to believe that his was a nature of high enthusiasms as well as of violent passions, and that the needle fluctuated between the two?

All depends upon the mood in which one approaches a character. I confess myself that the one thing which seems to me important and interesting is to get at the truth about a man. In the investigation of character there is nothing to be said for being a partisan and for indulging in special pleading, so as to minimise faults and magnify virtues. My own belief is that Byron was an essentially worthless character, the prey of impulse, the slave of desire, thirsting for distinction above everything. There is nothing in his letters or in his recorded speech that would make one think otherwise; his life was devoted to the pursuit of pleasurable excitement, and he cared little what price he paid for it He never seems to me to have admired gentleness or self-restraint or modesty, or to have desired to attain them. Indeed, I think he gives the lie to all the theories that assert that genius and influence must be based on some essential worthiness and greatness of soul.



XLVIII

It is often said that poets have no biographies but their own works, but that is only a half-truth. It is to me one of the most delightful things in the world to follow the footsteps of a poet about, in scenes perhaps familiar to myself; to see how the simple sights of earth and sky struck fire from his mind, to realise what he thought about under commonplace conditions. I have often stayed, for instance, at Tan-yr-allt in North Wales, where Shelley spent some months, and where the strange adventure of the night-attack by the assassin occurred—a story never satisfactorily unravelled; it was a constant pleasure there to feel that one was looking at the fine crags which Shelley loved, so nobly weather-stained and ivy-hung, that one was threading the same woodland paths, and rambling on the open moorland where he so often paced. The interest, the inspiration of the process comes from the fact that one sees how genius transmutes the dull elements of life, those elements which are in reach of all of us, into thoughts rich and strange. I often think of the plum-tree in the tiny garden of Wentworth Place, where Keats, one languid spring day, sate to hear the nightingale sing, and scribbled the Ode on loose half-sheets of paper, careless if they were preserved or no. It makes one discern the quality of genius to realise how there is food for it everywhere, and how little right one has to blame one's surroundings for not being more suggestive. Indeed, I cannot help feeling that the very vulgarity of Keats' circle, with its ill-flavoured jokes, its provincial taint, is even more impressive than the romance in which Shelley lived, because it marks his genius more impressively. Shelley was at least in contact with interesting personalities, while Keats' circle was on the whole a depressing one.

But the point which has been deeply borne in upon me, and which we are apt, in reflecting on the posthumous glories of men of genius, to forget, is the reflection how extraordinarily scanty was the recognition which both Keats and Shelley met with in their lifetime. Keats was nothing more than an obscure poetaster; he had a few friends who believed in him, but which of them would have dared to predict the volume and magnitude of his subsequent fame? Shelley was in even worse case, for he was regarded by ordinary people as a monster of irreligion and immorality, the custody of whose children had been denied him by the most respectable of Lord Chancellors, on account of his detestable opinions and the infamy of his mode of life. There are, I will venture to say, a hundred living English writers who have more, far more, of the comfortable sense of renown, and its tangible rewards, than either of these great poets enjoyed in their lifetime. Byron himself, who by the side of Shelley cuts so deplorable a figure, had at least the consciousness of being an intensely romantic and mysterious figure, quickening the emotional temperature of the world and making its pulse beat faster. But Keats and Shelley worked on in discouragement and obscurity. It is true that they judged their own work justly, and knew within themselves that there was a fiery quality in what they wrote. But how many poets have fed themselves in vain on the same hopes, have thought themselves unduly contemned and slighted! There is hardly a scribbler of verse who has not the same delusion, and who has not in chilly and comfortless moments to face the fact that he does not probably count for very much, after all, in the scheme of things. How hard it is in the case of Keats and Shelley to feel that they had not some inkling of all the desirous worship, the generous praise, that has surrounded their memory after their death! How hard it is to enter into the bitterness of spirit which fell upon Shelley, not once nor twice, at the acrid contempt of reviewers! How hard it is to put oneself inside the crushing sense of failure that haunted Keats' last days, with death staring him in the face! Of course, one may say that a writer ought not to depend upon any consciousness of fame; that he ought to make his work as good as he can, and not care about the verdict. That is a fine and dignified philosophy; but at the same time half of the essence of the writer's work lies in its appeal. He may feel the beauty of the world with a poignant emotion; but his work is to make others feel it too, and it is impossible that he should not be profoundly discouraged if there is no one who heeds his voice. It is not that he craves for stupid and conventional praise from men who can only applaud when they see others applauding. What he desires is to express the kinship, the enthusiasm of generous hearts, to make an echo in the souls of a few like-minded people. He may desire this—nay, he must desire it, if he is to fulfil his own ideal at all. For in the minds of poets there is the hope of achievement, of creation; he dedicates time and thought and endeavour to his work, and the test of its fineness and of its worth is that it should move others. If a man cannot have some faint hope that he is doing this, then he had better sink back into the crowd, live the life of the world, earn a wage, make a place for himself. Indeed, he has no justification for refusing to shoulder the accustomed burden, unless he is sure that the task to which he devotes himself is better worth the doing; a poet must always be haunted by the suspicion that he is but pleasing himself and playing indolently at a pretty game, unless he can believe that he is adding something to the sum of beauty and truth. These visions of the poet are very faint and delicate things; there is little of robust confidence about them, while there are plenty of loud and insistent voices on every side of him to tell him that he is shirking the work of the world, and that he is not lifting a finger in the cause of humanity and progress. There are some self-conscious artists who would say that the cause of humanity and progress is not the concern of the artist at all; but, on the other hand, you will find but few of the great artists of the ages who have not been thrilled and haunted with the deep desire to help others, to increase their peace and joy, to interpret the riddle of the world, to give a motive for living a fuller life than the life of the drudge and the raker of stones and dirt.

But this very absence of recognition and fame was what made the lives of these two great poets so intensely beautiful; there is hardly a great poet who has achieved fame who has not been in a degree spoilt by the consciousness of worth and influence. Tennyson, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth—how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit! Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged his fault in despair and tears. But such poets as did not guess their own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and gentler is their example, walking humbly in the company of the mighty, and hardly seeming to guess that they are of the happy number. And thus we may rank it amongst the greatest gifts that were given to Keats and Shelley, though they did not know their own felicity, that they were never overshadowed by the approbation of the world, and had no touch of the complacent sense of greatness that so disfigures the spirit of a mortal.



XLIX

I have been reading all to-day the Letters of Keats, a thing which I do at irregular intervals. Perhaps what I am going to say may sound affected, but it is perfectly true: it is a book that always has a very peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few books that give one, in the first place, more of the author's own heart. Is there in the world any book which gives so fully the youthful, ebullient thoughts of a man of the highest poetical genius as this? I cannot recall any. Keats, to his brothers, his sister, and to one or two intimate friends, allowed his long, vague letters to be an absolutely intimate diary of what he was thinking. You see his genius rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes. Not to multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament, differentiating it from what he calls the "Wordsworthian Character—the egotistically sublime." He goes on to say that he feels that he has no identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently. He adds in a fine elation that "the faint conceptions that he has of poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead."

Such a letter as this admits one to the very penetralia of the supremely artistic mind—but the wonder of Keats' confession is that he saw himself as clearly and distinctly as he saw everyone else. And further, I do not think that there is anything in literature that gives one a sharper feeling of the reality of genius than to find the immortal poems, such as La Belle Dame sans Merci, copied down in the middle of a letter, as an unconsidered trifle which may amuse his correspondent.

Now, in saying this, I do not for a moment say that Keats was an entirely admirable or even a wholly lovable character—though his tenderness, his consideration, his affectionateness constantly emerge. He had strongly marked faults: his taste is often questionable; his humour is frequently deplorable. He makes and repeats jokes which cause one to writhe and blush—he was, and I say it boldly, occasionally vulgar; but it is not an innate vulgarity, only the superficial vulgarity which comes of living among second-rate suburban literary people. One cannot help feeling every now and then that some of Keats' friends were really impossible—but I am glad that he did not feel them to be so, that he was loyal and generous about them. There have been great critics, of whom Matthew Arnold was one, who have said frankly that the aroma of Keats' letters is intolerable. That does not seem to me a large judgment, but it is quite an intelligible one. If one has been brought up in a certain instinctive kind of refinement, there are certain modes of life, certain ways of looking at things, which grate hopelessly upon one's idea of what is refined; and perhaps life is not long enough to try and overcome it, to try and argue oneself out of it. I think it is quite possible that if one had only known Keats slightly, one might have thought him a very underbred young man, as when he showed himself suspicious and ill at ease in the company of Shelley, because of his social standing. "A loose, slack, ill-dressed youth," was Coleridge's impression of Keats, when he met him in a lane near Highgate. But I honestly believe that this would have been only an external and superficial feeling. Again, Keats as a lover is undeniably disconcerting. His zealousness, his uncontrolled luxuriance of passion, though partly attributable to his fevered and despondent condition of health, are lacking in dignity. But as a friend, Keats seems to me almost above praise; and I can imagine that if one had been of his circle, and had won his regard, it would have been difficult not to have idealised him. He seems to me to have displayed that frank, affectionate brotherliness, untainted by sentimentality, which is the essence of equal friendship; and then, too, he gave his heart and his thoughts and his dreams to his friends so prodigally and lavishly—not egotistically, as some have given—with no self-absorption, no lack of sympathy, but in the spirit of the old fisherman in Theocritus, who says to his comrade, "Come, be a sharer of my dreams as of my fishing," and then tells his pretty vision. With no lack of sympathy, I say, because the lavish generosity with which Keats bestowed his money upon his friends, when he had but a small store left and when financial difficulties were staring him in the face, is one of the finest things about him. There is a correspondence with that strange, selfish spendthrift Haydon, which shows the endless trouble Keats would take to raise money for a friend when he was in worse straits himself. Haydon treated him with insolent frankness, and hinted that Keats was parsimonious and ungenerous; even so, Keats never lost his temper, but described with perfect simplicity the extraordinary difficulties he was himself involved in, with as much patience and good-humour as though he had been himself the borrower; and the delicious letters that he wrote, all through his own anxieties, to his little sister Fanny, then a girl at a boarding-school, reveal, like nothing else, the faithful and-tender spirit of the boy—for he was hardly more than a boy. Of course there are letters, like those of Lamb and FitzGerald, which bring one very close to the spirit of the writer; but with this difference, that they rarely seem to lay bare their inmost thought; but Keats had no reserve with his best friends. He put into words the very things that we most of us are ashamed, from a fear of being accused of pose and affectation, to reveal—his loftiest hopes and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life, the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art. I do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and worships art, however fitfully, can register a few. There is a little picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the Ode to the Nightingale. He sits on one chair, with his arm on the back of another, his hand upon his hair, reading a volume of Shakespeare with a smile of satisfaction. He is neatly dressed, and has pumps with bows on his feet. That picture, like the letters, seems to bring Keats curiously near to life; I always fancy-that Severn must have had in his mind a charming passage in one of Keats' letters to his sister Fanny, where he says he would like to have a house with a big bow-window with some stained glass in it, looking out on the Lake of Geneva, with a bowl of gold-fish by his side, where he would sit and read all day, like a portrait of a gentleman reading. The picture is somehow so characteristic that one feels for a moment in his presence.

Well, what do I deduce from all this? Partly that Keats was a man of incomparable genius; partly that he was a man whom one could have loved for himself; partly, too, that one ought not to be ashamed of one's far-reaching thoughts, if one is fortunate enough to have them, and that one receives and gives more good by telling them frankly and unsuspiciously than if one keeps them to oneself for fear of being thought a fool.

Of course the whole career of Keats opens a door to a host of uneasy speculations. If the purpose of our Creator is to educate the world on certain lines, if he desires by the memory and the utterance of men of high genius to kindle the human spirit to fine and generous dreams and to the appreciation of beauty, it is terribly hard to discern why he should have created a spirit so fiery-sweet as that of Keats, and then cut short his career by a series of hard strokes of misfortune and disease just when he was finding fullest utterance. One looks round upon the world, and one sees temperaments of all kinds—religious, artistic, philosophical temperaments on the one hand; commercial; commonplace, animal, selfish temperaments on the other. The percentage of the higher spirits is few and does not seem to increase; yet the human race owes much of its advance in purity, nobility, and kindliness to them. We cannot be wholly mistaken in thinking that it is these rare spirits which sustain, enliven, and enrich the world. And yet they seem to be regarded with no special favour by the Creator; they have to contend with insuperable obstacles; the very sensitiveness of their spirit is a torturing disability. The selfish, worldly, hard, brutal temperaments have almost invariably a far better time of it in the world; yet both the exalted spirit and the brutal spirit are undeniable facts; the lofty, unselfish, pure spirit is as real and existent as the vile and sensual spirit. Are we all under a lamentable mistake in the matter? Is the heart of God more on the side of what is noble and pure and enthusiastic than it is on the side of what is base and vile; or is it only the enthusiasts who think so? If an enlightened nation is engaged in a war with a brutal nation, do not the patriots on both sides pray with equal fervour and hope to God to protect what they call the right? Do not both sides hope and believe that he will support them and confound their opponents?

These are dark mysteries of thought; but if we argue in the cold light of reason we dare not, it seems, think that God has any favourites in the battle. He silences the poet, he smites the preacher down; while he sustains in wealth and comfort and honour the man of low and selfish ambitions. The Psalmist said that he saw the wicked flourishing like a green bay-tree, and he was pleased to observe a little after that he was gone and that his place was no more to be found. If he had looked a little closer he might have seen the virtuous man oppressed, and presently removed as indifferently as the wicked. One cannot feel the justice or the mercy in the case of Keats. He was made to give utterance to a certain pure and delicate music of the mind, which has refreshed and inspired many a yearning spirit; but he was swept away ruthlessly at the very height of his genius, and it is still more bewildering to reflect that his life was probably sacrificed to his devoted tendance on his consumptive brother.

Perhaps these are but fruitless reveries! but it is hard to resist them. The only course is to hold fast to one's faith in what is pure and beautiful, and to give thanks that such spirits as the spirit of Keats are allowed to pass in flame across the dark heaven, calling from horizon to horizon among the interstellar spaces; and to be sure that the glow, the ardour, the aspirations that they impart to the soul are real and true—an essential part of the mind of God, however small a part they may be of that Eternal and all-embracing Will.



L

I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a schoolboy would designate as "buffers," inviting the public to come forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley. I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the proposal. In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of our great English poets in Rome, of all places—that is fantastic enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,"—could anything be more inappropriate? It is not too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period of his short life. If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have been purchased,—the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom, Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,—there would have been some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in fact, if the Dumfries inn had been purchased, it might have been made a Keats-Burns museum, if the idea was to kill two birds with one stone—for to associate Shelley with Keats in the house at Rome is another piece of well-meaning stupidity. Their acquaintance was really of the slightest, though Shelley was extraordinarily kind and generous to Keats, offering to receive him into his own house as an invalid, and of course regarding him with the deepest admiration, as the Adonais testifies. But Keats never took very much to Shelley, and was always a little suspicious that he was being patronised; and consequently he never opened his heart and mind to Shelley as he did to some of his friends. Indeed, Shelley knew very little of Keats, and supposed him to be a very different character to what he really was. Shelley supposed that Keats had had both his happiness and his health undermined by severe criticism; as a matter of fact Keats had been, for a young and unknown poet, respectfully enough criticised—and his letters show how extremely indifferent he was to external criticism of any kind. Keats said—and there is no reason to doubt the truth of the words, because they are borne out by many similar sayings in his most candid and most intimate letters—that his own perception of his poetical deficiencies had given him far more pain than the strictures of any critic could possibly do. The fact that the two poets both happened to die in Italy is no reason for selecting Italy as the place in which to give them a permanent joint memorial.

But one can excuse the inappropriateness and the tactlessness of commemorating the two poets together in Italy, because it is so well-meant and sincere an attempt to do them honour. What one finds it harder to do is to pardon the solemnity, the snobbishness, of the whole proceeding. The names of those eminent people who have signed the letter include a certain number of eminent men of letters, but they include also the names of people like the Headmaster of Eton, presumably because Shelley was at Eton. When one remembers how Shelley was treated at Eton, and the sentiments which he entertained about the place, one cannot help recalling the verse about the men who built the sepulchres of the prophets whom their forefathers had stoned. An almost incredible instance of this occurred at Oxford. Shelley, as is well known, was at University College. He lived his own life there, tried his chemical experiments, took long walks in the neighbourhood, in the company of Hogg, for the purpose of practising pistol-shooting or sailing paper boats. No one took the slightest trouble to befriend or advise him, though he was one who responded eagerly to affectionate interest. When he published his atheistical pamphlet, which was the whim of a clever, fantastic, and isolated young man, the authorities expelled him with scorn and fury; and now that he has become a great national poet; they have commemorated him there by setting up a very beautiful figure of a drowned youth in a state of nudity, though Shelley's body was naturally found clothed when it was recovered on the seabeach—indeed it is recorded that he had a volume of Keats and a Sophocles in his pocket. This figure is placed in a singular shrine, lighted by a dome, that somehow contrives to suggest a mixture between a swimming-bath and the smoking-room of a hotel. Well, it may be said that the least we can do is to give posthumous honour to those whom we bullied and derided in their lifetime. A memorial placed in a seat of learning and education is a sort of stimulus to the young men who are trained there to go and do likewise; but do the worthy men who placed this memorial at Oxford really wish their students to emulate the example of Shelley? If a sensitive young man of wild ideas went up to Oxford now, how would he be treated? Probably nowadays some virtuous and enthusiastic young tutor would feel a certain sense of responsibility for the young man. He would endeavour to influence him; he would implore him to play games, to go to lectures, to attend early chapel. He would do his best to check any symptom of originality or free thought. He would try to make him dutiful and orthodox, and to discourage all his fantastic theories.

Which of these eminently respectable gentlemen who have brought before the public the necessity of commemorating two great poets are on the lookout for talent of the kind that Keats and Shelley exhibited? How many of them, if they came across a latter-day young poet, indolent, unconventional, crude, fantastic, would encourage him to be true to his ideas and to work out his own salvation on his own lines? Which of them, if they had been confronted with our two poets in the flesh, would have encouraged Keats to be Keats and Shelley to be Shelley? Would they not rather have done their best to inculcate into them their own tamer conceptions of culture and righteousness?

Of course there is something impressive in the posthumous fame of these two men of genius collecting in their wake a crowd of adoring respectabilities, like the people in the German story who touch the magic spear carried by the young hero, and are unable to withdraw their hands, but trot grotesquely behind their conqueror through street and market-place. The melancholy part of the situation is that one feels that these excellent people, for all their admiration, have not learnt the real lesson of the incident in the least. They would be prepared to browbeat and contemn originality just as vigorously as their predecessors. They would speak of a modern Keats as a self-indulgent dilettante; of a modern Shelley as an immoral Republican. The fact that the two have stepped silently into Parnassus, receiving nothing but contempt and neglect from those whose duty it was to encourage them, does not seem to enlighten the minds of those who are ready enough to applaud as soon as they find the world applauding. Of course teachers are in a difficult position. There are always at school and college a certain number of wild, fantastic, crude young men, who indulge in unconventional speculations, who have not the genius of Keats and Shelley in the background, but who share their distaste and disgust for the conventionality, the tameness, the vulgarity of the world. It is the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens, Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which the man of genius plays are so tremendous. It is the applause of a nation, the approbation of connoisseurs, the heart-felt gratitude of idealists if you win; and if you fail, a contemptuous pity for gifts wasted and misapplied. But one of the reasons why we are so unintellectual, so conventional, so commonplace a nation is because we do not care for ideas, we do not admire originality, we do not want to be made to think and feel; what we admire is success and respectability; and if a poet can so far force himself upon the attention of timid idealists, who worship beauty in secret, as to sell large editions of his works and make a good income, then we reward him in our clumsy way with glory and worship. It is horrible to reflect that if Shelley had succeeded to his father's baronetcy he would probably have had at once an increased circulation. If Keats had been a peer like Byron, he would have been loaded with vapid commendation. We still cling pathetically in our seats of education to the study of Greek, but whenever the Greek spirit appears, that insatiable appetite for impressions of beauty, that intense desire for mental activity, we think it rather shocking and disreputable. We are at heart commercial Puritans all the time; we loathe experiments and originality and independence; we think that God rewards respectability, because we believe that material rewards—wealth, comfort, position—are the only things worth having. We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty. But let us at least make up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a disgusting compromise. Our way is to persecute genius living and to crown it dead. Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to shout with the largest?



LI

I have been reading the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that is there revealed. He was a well-to-do manufacturer—of vitriol, too, of all the incongruous things. He belonged to a cultivated suburban circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish. He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea. In the evening he wrote and read aloud. The only thing that made him different from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the first occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather coppery in hue. There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the face by large, thin, fly-away whiskers of the kind that used to be known as "weepers" or "Dundrearies." He had then just dawned upon the world as a celebrity. I had myself as an under-graduate read and re-read and revelled in John Inglesant, and I was intensely curious to see him and worship him. But he was not a very worshipful man. He gave the impression of great courtesy and simplicity; but his stammer was an obstacle to any sense of ease in his presence. I seem to recollect that instead of being brought up, as most stammerers are, by a consonant, it took the form with Shorthouse of repeating the word "Too—too" over and over again until the barrier was surmounted; and in order to help himself out, he pulled at his whiskers alternately, with a motion as though he were milking a cow. Some years after I saw him again; he was then paler and more worn of aspect. He had discarded his whiskers, and had grown a pointed beard. He was a distinguished-looking man now, whereas formerly he had only been an impressive-looking one. I do not remember that his stammer was nearly so apparent, and he had far more assurance and dignity, which had come, I suppose, from his having been welcomed and sought after by all kinds of eminent people, and from having found that eminent people were very much like any other people, except that they were more simple and more interesting. I was still conscious of his great kindness and courtesy, a courtesy distributed with perfect impartiality.

But the mystery about him is this. The Life reveals, or seems to reveal, a very commonplace man, cultivated, religious, "decent not to fail in offices of tenderness" like Telemachus, but for all that essentially parochial. His letters are heavy, uninteresting, banal, and reveal little except a very shaky taste in literature. The Essays which are reproduced, which he wrote for Birmingham literary societies, are of the same quality, serious, ordinary, prosaic, mildly ethical.

Yet behind all this, this pious, conscientious man of business contrived to develop a style of quite extraordinary fineness, lucid, beauty-haunted, delicate and profound. John Inglesant is not a wholly artistic hook, because it is ill-proportioned and the structure is weak—the middle is not in the centre, and it leaves off, not because the writer appears to have come to the end, but because it could not well be longer. There is no balance of episodes. It has just the sort of faults that a book might be expected to have which was written at long intervals and not on any very carefully conceived plan. It looks as if Shorthouse had just taken a pen and a piece of paper and had begun to write. Yet the phrasing, the cadence, the melody of the book are exquisite. I do not think he ever reached the same level again, though his other books are full of beautiful passages, except perhaps in the little introduction to an edition of George Herbert, which is a wonderfully attractive piece of writing.

Shorthouse had an extraordinary gift for evoking a certain sort of ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who is discharging a task of almost overwhelming sweetness, to which he consecrates the early purity of the awakening day.