FR 
 
 ^/^ 
 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 ENGLISH COLLECTION 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 JAMES MORGAN HART 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH 
 
 j^.sqs/^f 
 
Cu 
 
 W6I N!i: eS j^ / 
 
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 3 1924 075 056 170 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924075056170 
 
V^<13IV-5' 
 
 THE 
 
 CORNHILL MAGAZINE. 
 
 SEPTEMBEE, 1881. 
 
 %, <^t^t front a C^orit. 
 
 Bt JAMES PAYN. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 Theust and Parky. 
 
 Ill I High Garden (as it 
 was called) at Barton, 
 though on an elevated 
 bpot as its name implied,' 
 was considerably lower 
 than the ground about 
 It ; it was like a large 
 tircular pond, which, in- 
 "^tead of water, contained 
 beds of beautiful flowers. 
 1 hese were arranged in 
 the modern style, in 
 masses of red, white, and 
 blue, and had a charm- 
 ing effect. A terrace ran 
 round the whole, from 
 which walks descended 
 at right angles, and 
 crossed the garden in 
 prim and formal fashion, 
 80 that it almost resembled a figure in Euclid. The air, shut in and 
 warmed by the high walls, was heavy with scent, and very still ; except 
 for the murmurous hum of bees there was not a sound to be heard ; and 
 the flag on the castle tower was the pnlj^ object from the outside world 
 VOL. xuv. — mo. 261. 13. 
 
258 A GEAPE PEOM A THOEN. 
 
 that intruded itself. On one of tlie terraces were two gardeners at work, 
 whom Ella was more pleased to see than she would have liked to have 
 owned to herself ; if she had known the place had been so retired, she 
 would certainly not have accepted Mr. Heyton's invitation to explore 
 it ; there was something of familiarity in his manner, which she had not 
 at first observed, which annoyed her. " This is our little Paradise," 
 he said, " wherein, not choosing to take our walks abroad, like other 
 people, we take our pleasure, and fancy ourselves monarchs of all we 
 survey." , --—*»«. 
 
 The reference to his Highness was manifest, but Ella was resolved to ' 
 ignore all such allusions. 
 
 " I don't wonder at such a spot being a favourite with you, or indeed 
 with anybody," was her guarded reply. " I suppose," she added, pointing 
 to the southern comer, where a number of glass-roofed buildings twinkled 
 in the sun, " those are the green-houses." 
 
 " What made you think that 1 " he inquired quickly. 
 
 " "What else can they be ? " she answered with surprise. 
 
 " True, it was a very natural supposition. No ; they are orchard- 
 houses. I will take you through them." 
 
 " Thank you, I had rather not," said Ella, quietly ; " I dislike the 
 heat of such places." 
 
 She began to entertain a vague apprehension of her companion ; his 
 tone was not actually rude, but it fell little short of it. It was the 
 manner of a superior to an inferior ; very diflferent, however, from that 
 which his Highness exhibited. If he had been presuming upon their 
 disparity of years, treating her as if she had been a mere child, she could 
 easily have borne it ; but the feeling of resentment she experienced was 
 too strong to have arisen from such a cause j she felt a dread she had 
 never felt before, that this man might say something impertinent to her, 
 and she was more than ever thankful for the presence of the gardeners. 
 
 " You dislike heat, do you 1 " he answered ; " so do I. The worst of 
 this place is, that it has no shade. That door on the north terrace opens 
 into the pine-wood ; on the hottest day it is always cool there." 
 
 " Indeed ! " 
 
 " Yes; and what's very curious, if but a very little vand is bio wing- 
 as to-day, for instance — ^the fir-trees make just the same music as the 
 distant murmur of the sea. Should you like to hear it ? " 
 
 " No ; at least not now. I must be going indoors, as my aunt will 
 wonder what has become of me." 
 
 " Oh ! Miss Burt is your aunt, Ls she 1 " 
 
 The colour rushed into Ella's face ; she felt the blood coursing through 
 all her veins, and also a pang of shame. 
 
 This man then had^or would, at all events, imagine he had — caught 
 her out in an act of duplicity. It had not struck her at the moment 
 that the fact of her relationship to Miss Burt had not been disclosed to 
 Mr. Heyton. 
 
A GRAPE FROM A THOBN. 259 
 
 " Yes ; Miss Burt is my aunt, sir." 
 
 " Then your grandmother must have married twice," remarked her 
 companion coolly; " since your mother's name was Vallance." 
 
 " You seem to have possessed yourself of a great deal of information 
 about my family," said Ella with a faint smile. She did not know what 
 harm she might have done by the admission she had just been led into ; 
 but as a punishment for her own want of caution, as much as to avoid 
 further mischief, she resolved, if possible, that she would have no quarrel 
 ■with this man. 
 
 " Anything that concerns you. Miss Josceline, must naturally be of 
 interest to other people," he said with his outspread hand upon his breast, 
 as though it had been an order. " But in this instance I can hardly claim 
 for myself the knowledge of your ancestry. His BQghness himself was 
 my informant. It is the one business of his life to keep himself informed 
 concerning the birth and parentage of every member of the British 
 aristocracy, to which, you know, you belong." And again he chuckled 
 to himself even more significantly than before. Again Ella felt her 
 face flush, and this time with indignation. "What, to her sensitive ears, 
 the chuckle seemed to imply, was the incongruity between her station 
 as regarded birth, and her present condition — which was certainly 
 humble enough. And yet something told her that it was no part of 
 her companion's intention to insult her, but rather to remind her (per- 
 haps for her own good, since it could hardly be for his) of her position 
 in their common patron's establishment. 
 
 " I sometimes wonder," he went on, with that old touch of cynical 
 humour in his tone, " whether his Highness's solicitude about such 
 matters is merely an abnormal development of a natural devotion to 
 the peerage, or whether it has a more personal origin." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " inquired EUa ; not that she cared what he 
 meant, but because she was anxious to turn the conversation from the 
 discussion of her own affairs. 
 
 " Well, you see, his Highness has great hopes ; and just as the Pope 
 is said to file a list of aU our Ohurch endowments against the day we aU 
 become Catholics again, so he keeps account of all the nobiHty that will 
 one day-^perhaps — ^acknowledge their allegiance to him."- 
 
 He uttered the word " perhaps " with such a mark of contempt (the 
 garden walls fairly echoed to it) that Ella could not forbear saying, 
 " You do not seem to think very highly of his Highness!s claims, 
 Mr. Heytonl" 
 
 " His claims ? Miss JosceUne, you astonish me ! " exclaimed the other, 
 with well affected indignation ; " when have I said one word that could 
 authorise — I mean, encourage you — to make such an observation. I was 
 alluding — solely — to the unlikelihood of their receiving amy public 
 acknowledgment. At present, no one save you and me, who are in his 
 confidence, and about his person, and perhaps half-a-dozen others, are 
 po much as aware of their existence. It is necessary in these days 
 
 13—2 
 
260 A GEAPE FEOM A THOEN. 
 
 for one who would attain any kind of eminence to be extensively 
 advertised. If the distinguished personage whom we have in our minds 
 would go about in a coach-and-six, with a French horn (to give the affair 
 a Court-of- Versailles flavour), he would invite perhaps enough of believers 
 to form a party. The other Claimant — I mean the Tichbome — has 
 done it even with a van and drums ; but here we live, not indeed ' a 
 violet by the mossy stone half-hidden from the eye,' but in solitary state, 
 without so much as a weekly organ to advocate our rights. I wish we 
 had one. By Jingo, I should like to edit it," grinned the little man. 
 " And I tell you where we have made another omission," he continued, 
 obviously with great enjoyment of his own humorous conceit : " we 
 ought to belong to the old religion. That is the only genuine article 
 for the last of the Stuarts. Without a father confessor the whole affair 
 is incomplete. "We ought to have masses twice a day or so, for the 
 repose of our great-great-grandfather's soul." 
 
 Under other circumstances Ella might have been unable to restrain 
 a smile at these suggestions ; but when she called to mind the relation 
 of the man who made them to the object of his satire, and how the very 
 claims he scoffed at procured his daily bread, she blushed for shame. 
 " Is it possible, Mr. Heyton, that you can thus turn into ridicule pre- 
 tensions from which you yourself" — she hesitated, then added — " and 
 indeed all of us, derive advantage.'' 
 
 " Oh, then, you believe in them, do you 1 " returned he, sharply ; 
 " now, that is very satisfactory. I was afraid — that is, I thought it 
 possible — not, of course, that I took you for a sceptic, but that just at 
 first the notion of a new claimant to the throne of England — the last of 
 all the Stuarts — might have been — dear me — a little " 
 
 It is impossible to reproduce the provoking way in which Mr. Heyton 
 hung and hesitated upon every word, waiting, as it seemed, for her to 
 interpose with some expression of incredulity or doubt. 
 
 " I did not say, Mr. Heyton, that I believed in the claims at which 
 you have hiiited ; I have never said so." 
 
 " Not in words," he put in quickly ; " but surely, at least on one 
 occasion, you have admitted them by tacit consent." 
 
 She knew, of course, that he was referring to her late interview 
 with their common patron, and for the third time the tell-tale colour 
 came into her cheeks. The taunt, if not whoUy undesei-ved, was most 
 disingenuous, and, in the mouth of him who spoke it, in the worst 
 taste. 
 
 " You are mistaken, sir," she said. " His Highness will tell you, if 
 you choose to ask him, that I came here absolutely ignorant of his 
 position, almost of his existence." 
 
 " Just so," replied the secretary with a sly smile, that contrasted 
 provokingly with the seriousness of his tone. " It is the suddenness of 
 your conversion that makes it, as I have said, so eminently satisfactory 
 Now your aunt — for she is your aunt, it seems — was very incredulous j 
 
A GBAPE FROM A THOBN. 277 
 
 " I am not going any longer to be morbid, at all events," she answered 
 cheeifuUy. " What did you say was the dinner hour i " 
 
 " Well, the ordinary time is seyen, but you are to have your meals 
 just when you like." 
 
 " Then that is at seven, with the rest of the — the Household, if you 
 please, aunt. I am not going to mope any longer. I had rather do 
 just like other people." 
 
 " What ! Will you dine with me and Mr. Heyton t " 
 
 "Certainly — that is, I want no difference to be made on my ac- 
 count." 
 
 " But you are not to think — his BKghness particularly said so — that 
 you are putting any one to inconvenience. On the other hand, it will 
 certainly be better for you not to shut yourself up alone." 
 
 " It will be much better, dear aunt," said Ella brightly. " Will these 
 letters be in time for the post ] " 
 
 " They wUl be just in time ; but have you not written to Mr. 
 Felspar 1 " 
 
 " I did not think there was any necessity." She endeavoured to 
 speak carelessly, but the effort it cost her convinced her how wise was 
 her resolve to fly from reflection on certain matters. 
 
 " Well, well, no doubt you are the best judge, dear; else I thought 
 his letter very kind, and it doesn't do to break with old friends." 
 
 EUa gave some dumb sign of acquiescence. If she had spoken, she 
 felt that the tears would have fallen that tell far more than words. 
 
 " However, perhaps you will see him again some day," added Aunt 
 Esther cheerfully ; " who knows 1 Then you can give him your thanks 
 in person, with one of your own pretty smiles." 
 
 Ella shut her lips, and once more nodded assent. It was marvel- 
 lous to her that so kind a creature as Aunt Esther did not perceive that 
 the topic she had chosen was a distressing one. 
 
 " I will just put your letters in the hall box, as there is no time to 
 lose," continued the old lady. " There is the gong for dressing — not 
 that you want to put on anything to make you look nicer, my dear, I'm 
 sure j I shall come to take you in to dinner instead of a cavalier." 
 
278 
 
 '§,nmblm umariQ §00^3. 
 
 No. III. — The Essayists. 
 
 One of our national characteristics, we are told, is a love of sermons of 
 all varieties, from sermons in stone to sermons in rhyme. We have no 
 reason, that I can see, to be ashamed of) our taste. We make an awk- 
 ward figure -when we disavow or disguise it. The spectacle of a solid 
 John Bull trying to give himself the airs of a graceful, sensitive, pleasure- 
 loving creature, indifferent to the duties of life and content with the 
 spontaneous utterance of emotion, is always ridiculous. We cannot do 
 it — whether it be worth doing or not. We try desperately to be aesthetic, 
 but we can't help laughing at ourselves in the very act : and the only 
 result is that we sometimes [substitute painfully immoral for painfully 
 moral sermons. We are just as clumsy as before, and a good deal less 
 natural. I accept the fact without seeking to justify it, and I hold that 
 every Englishman loves a sermon in his heart. We grumble dreadfully, 
 it is true, over the quality of the sermons provided by the official repre- 
 sentatives of the art. In this, as in many previous long vacations, there 
 will probably be a lively discussion in the papers as to the causes of the 
 dulness of modern pulpits. I always wonder, for my part, that our 
 hard-worked clergy can turn out so many entertaining and impressive 
 discourses as they actually do. 
 
 At present I have nothing to say to the sermon properly so called. 
 There is another kind of sermon, the demand for which is conclusively 
 estabUshed by the exuberance of the supply. Pew books, I fancy, 
 have been more popular in modern times than certain lay-sermons, 
 composed, as it seems to scoffers, of the very quintessence of common- 
 place. If such popularity were an adequate test of merit, we should 
 have to reckon amongst the highest intellectual qualities the power 
 of pouring forth a gentle and continuous maundering about things in 
 general. We swallow with unfailing appetite a feeble dUution of harm- 
 less philanthropy mixed with ^a little stiugless satirising of anything 
 that interrupts the current of complacent optimism. We like to hear 
 a thoroughly comfortable person purring contentedly in his arm- 
 chair, and declaring that everything must be for the best in a world 
 which has provided him so liberally with buttered rolls and a blazing 
 fire. He hums out a satisfactory little string of platitudes as soothing 
 as the voice of his own kettle singing on the hob. If ^a man of sterner 
 nature or more daring intellect breaks in with a harsh declaration that 
 there are evUs too deep to be remedied by a letter to the Times, mocks 
 at our ideal of petty domestic comfort, and even swears that some of our 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 279 
 
 heroes are chai'latans and our pet nostrums mere quackery, we are inex- 
 pressibly shocked, and unite to hoot him down as a malevolent cynic. 
 He professes, in sober earnest, to disbelieve in us. Obviously he must 
 be a disbeliever in all human virtue ; and so, having settled his business, 
 we return to our comfortable philosopher, and lap ourselves in his gentle 
 eulogies of our established conventions. I do not know, indeed, that 
 we change very decidedly for the better when we turn up our noses at 
 a diet of mere milk and water, and stimulate our jaded palate with an 
 infusion of literary bitters. The cynic and the sentimentalist who preach 
 to us by turns in the social essay, often diflfer very slightly in the intrinsic 
 merit or even in the substance of their discourses. Eespondent and 
 opponent are really on the same side in these little disputations, though 
 they make a great show of deadly antagonism. I have often felt it 
 to be a melancholy reflection that some of the most famous witticisms 
 ever struck out — the saying about the use of language or the definition 
 of gratitude — have been made by what seems to be almost a mechanical 
 device — the inversion of a truism. Nothing gives a stronger impression 
 of the limited range of the human intellect. In fact, it seems that the 
 essay write^ has to make his choice between the platitude and the para- 
 dox. If he wishes for immediate success he will probably do best by 
 choosing the platitude. One of the great secrets of popularity — though 
 it requires a discreet application — is not to be too much afraid of boring 
 your audience. The most popular of modern writers have acted upon 
 the principle. You may learn from Dickens that you cannot make 
 your jokes too obvious or repeat them too often ; and from Macaulay 
 that you should grudge no labour spent in proving that two and two 
 make four. The public should be treated as a judicious barrister treats 
 a common jury. It applauds most lustily the archer who is quite certain 
 of hitting a haystack at ten paces : not the one who can sometimes split 
 a wUlow wand at a hundred. Even the hardened essayist feels a little 
 compunction at times. He is conscious that he has been anticipated in 
 the remark that life is uncertain, and doubts whether he can season it 
 with wit enough to get rid of the insipidity. " Of all the vices which 
 degrade the human character," said the youthful Osborne in the essay 
 which Amelia produced to Dobbin, " selfishness is the most odious arid 
 contemptible. An undue love of self leads to the most monstrous 
 crimes, and occasions the greatest misfortunes both to States and 
 families." Young Osborne succeeded in staggering through two or 
 three sentences more, though he ends, it is true, by dropping into some- 
 thing like tautology. But really, when I consider the difficulty of 
 saying anything, I am half-inclined to agree with his tutor's opinion 
 that there was no office in the Bar or the Senate to which the lad might 
 not aspire. How many sermons would reduce themselves to repeating 
 this statement over and over again for the prescribed twenty minutes ! 
 And yet some skilful essayists have succeeded in giving a great charm 
 to such remarks ; and I rather wonder that amongst the various selec- 
 
280 RAMBLES AMONG BOOKS. 
 
 tions now so fashionable, some one has not thought of a selection of our 
 best periodical essays. Between the days of Bacon and our own, a suffi- 
 cient number have been produced to furnish some very interesting 
 volumes. 
 
 The essay writer is the lay preacher upon that vague mass of doc- 
 trine which we dignify by the name of knowledge of life or of human 
 nature. He has to do with the science in which we all graduate as we 
 grow old, when we try to pack our personal observations into a few 
 sententious aphorisms not quite identical with the old formulse. It is 
 a strange experience which happens to some people to grow old in a day, 
 and to find that some good old saying^ — " vanity of vanities," for ex- 
 ample — which you have been repeating ever since you first left college 
 and gave yourself the airs of a man of the world, has suddenly become 
 a vivid and striking impression of a novel truth, and has all the force 
 of a sudden discovery. In one of Poe's stories, a clever man hides an 
 important document by placing it exactly in the most obvious and con- 
 spicuous place in the room. That is the principle, it would sometimes 
 seem, which accounts for the preservation of certain important secrets of 
 life. They are hidden from the uninitiated just because the phrases in 
 which they are couched are so familiar. ^We fancy, in our youth, that 
 our elders must either be humbugs — which is the pleasantest and most 
 obvious theory — or tJiat they must have some little store of esoteric 
 wisdom which they keep carefully to themselves. The initiated become 
 aware that neither hypothesis is true. Experience teaches some real 
 lessons ; but they are taught in the old words. The change required is 
 in the mind of the thinker, not in the symbols of his thought. "Worldly 
 wisdom is summed up in the famiHar currency which has passed from 
 hand to hand through the centuries ; and we find on some catastrophe, 
 or by the gradual process of advancing years, that mystic properties 
 lurk unsuspected in the domestic halfpenny. 
 
 The essayist should be able, more or less, to anticipate this change, 
 and make us see what is before our eyes. It is easy enough for the mere 
 hawker of sterile platitudes to imitate his procedure, and to put on airs 
 of superhuman wisdom when retailing the barren exuvice of other men's 
 thought. But there are some rare books, in reading which we slowly 
 become aware that we have to do with the man who has done ail that 
 can be done in this direction — that is, rediscovered the old discoveries 
 for himself. Chief, beyond rivalry, amongst all such performances, in our 
 own language at least, is Bacon's Essays. Like Montaigne, he repre- 
 sents, of course, the mood in which the great aim of the ablest thinkers 
 was precisely to see facts for themselves instead of taking them on trust. 
 And though Bacon has not the delightful egotism or the shrewd humour 
 of his predecessors, and substitutes the tersest method of presenting his 
 thought for the discursive rambling characteristic of the prince of all 
 essayists, the charm of his writing is almost equally due to his un- 
 ponscious revelation of character. One can imagine a careless reader, 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 281 
 
 indeed, skimming the book in a hurry, and setting down the author as a 
 kind of Polonius — a venerable old person with a plentiful lack of wit and 
 nothing on his tongue but "words, words, words." In spite of the 
 weighty style, surcharged, as it seems, with thought and experience, we 
 might quote maxim after maxim from its pages with a most suspicious 
 air of Polonius wisdom ; and though Polonius, doubtless, had been a 
 wise man in his day, Hamlet clearly took him for an old bore, and 
 dealt with him as we could all wish at moments to deal with bores. 
 " He that is plentiful in expense of all kinds will hardly be preserved 
 from decay." Does it require a " large-browed Verulam," one of the 
 first " of those that know," to give us that valuable bit of information ? 
 Or — to dip into his pages at random — could we not have guessed for 
 ourselves that if a man " easily pardons and remits offences, it shows " — 
 what 1 — " that his mind is planted above injuries ; " or, again, that " good 
 thoughts are little better than good dreams except they be put in act; " or 
 even that a man " should be sure to leave other men their turns to 
 speak." " Here be truths," and set forth as solemnly as if they were 
 calculated to throw a new light upon things in general. But it would 
 be hard to demand even of a Bacon that he should refrain from all that 
 has been said before. And the impression — if it ever crosses the mind 
 of a perverse critic — that Bacon was a bit of a windbag, very rapidly 
 disappears. It would be far less difficult to find pages free from plati- 
 tude than to find one in which there is not some condensed saying which 
 makes us acknowledge that the mark has been hit, and the definitive 
 form imposed upon some ha2y notion which has been vaguely hovering 
 about the mind, and eluding all our attempts to grasp it. We have not 
 thought just that, but something which clearly ought to have been that. 
 Occasionally, of course, this is due to the singular power in which Bacon, 
 whatever his other merits or defects, excels all other philosophic 
 writers; the power which springs from a unique combination of the 
 imaginative and speculative faculties, of finding some vivid concrete 
 image to symbolise abstract truths. It is exhibited again in the per- 
 verted, but often delightful, ingenuity with which he reads philosophical 
 meanings into old mythological legends, entirely innocent, as a matter of 
 fact, of any such matter / which often makes us fancy that he was a new 
 incarnation of ^sop, able to construct the most felicitous parables at a 
 moment's notice, to illustrate any conceivable combination of ideas ; a 
 power, too, which is connected with his weakness, and helps to explain 
 how he could be at once an almost inspired prophet of a coming scientific 
 era, and yet curiously wanting in genuine aptitude for scientific inquiry. 
 It is, perhaps, the more one-sided and colourless intellect which is best 
 fitted for achievement, though incapable of clothing its ambition in the 
 resplendent hues of Bacon's imagination. 
 
 In the Essays the compression of the style keeps this power in 
 subordination. Analogies are suggested in a pregnant sentence, not 
 elaborated and brought forward in the pomp of stately rhetoric. Only, 
 
 VOL. XLIV. — NO. 261. 14. 
 
282 EAMBLES AMONG- BOOKS. 
 
 as we become familiar with the book, we become more aware of the 
 richness and versatility of intellect which it implies, and conscious of 
 the extreme difficulty of characterising it or its author in any com- 
 pendious phrase. That has hardly been done ; or, what is worse, it has 
 been misdone. Eeaders who do not shrink from Mr. Spedding's* seven 
 solid volumes may learn to know Bacon ; and will admit at least that 
 the picture drawn by that loving hand differs as much from Macaulay's 
 slapdash blacks and whites as a portrait by a master from the audacious 
 caricature of a contemporary satirist. But Mr. Spedding was charac- 
 teristically anxious that his readers should draw their own conclusions. 
 He left it to a successor, who has not hitherto appeared, to sum up the 
 ' total impressions of the amazingly versatile and complex character, and 
 to show how inadequately it is rej)resented by simply heaping together a 
 mass of contradictions, and calling them a judgment. Perhaps a thorough 
 study of the Essays would be enough by itself to make us really intimate 
 with their author. For we see as we read that Bacon is a typical 
 example of one of the two great races between whom our allegiance is 
 generally divided. He would be despised by the Puritan as worldly, 
 and would retort by equal contempt for the narrow bigotry of Puritanism. 
 You cannot admire him heartily if the objects of your hero-worship are 
 men of the Cromwell or Luther type. The stern imperious man of 
 action, who aims straight at the heart, who is efficient in proportion as 
 he is one-sided, to whom the world presents itself as an internecine 
 struggle between the powers of light and darkness, who can see nothing 
 but eternal truths on one side and damnable lies on the other, who 
 would reform by crushing his opponents to the dust, and regards all 
 scruples that might trammel his energies as so much hollow cant, is un- 
 doubtedly an impressive phenomenon. But it is also plain that he must 
 have suppressed half his nature ; he has lost in breadth what he has 
 gained in immensity ; and the merits of a Bacon depend precisely upon 
 the richness of his mind and the width of his culture. He cannot help 
 sympathising with all the contemporary cui-rents of thought. He is 
 tempted to injustice only in regard to the systems which seem to imply 
 the stagnation of thought. He hates bigotry, and bigotry alone, but 
 bigotry in every possible phase, even when it is accidentally upon his 
 own side. His sympathies are so wide that he cannot help taking all 
 knowledge for his province. The one lesson which he cannot learn is 
 Goethe's lesson of " renouncing." The whole universe is so interesting 
 that every avenue for thought must be kept open. He is at once a 
 philosopher, a statesman, a lawyer, a man of science, and an omnivorous 
 student of literature. The widest theorising and the minutest experi- 
 ment are equally welcome; he is as much interested in arranging a 
 masque or laying out a garden, as in a political intrigue or a legal re- 
 
 * They may learn as much from the admirable Evenings with a Reviewer, -which 
 unfortunately remains a privately-printed hook, not easy to get sight of. 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 283 
 
 form or a logical speculation. Tke weakness of such a man in political 
 life is grossly misinterpreted when it is confounded with the baseness of 
 a servile courtier. It is not that he is without aims, and lofty aims ; but 
 that they are complex, far-reaching, and too wide for vulgar comprehen- 
 sion. He cannot join the party of revolution or tlie party of obstruction, 
 for he desires the equable development of the whole organisation. The 
 danger is not that he will defy reason, but that he will succeed in find- 
 ing reasons for any conceivable course. The world's business, as he well 
 knows, has to be carried on with the help of the stupid and the vile ; 
 and he naturally errs on the side of indulgence and compliance, hoping 
 to work men to the furtherance of views of which they are ^unable to 
 grasp the importance. His tolerance is apt to slide into worldUness, and 
 his sensibility to all manner of impulses makes him vulnerable upon 
 many points, and often takes the form of timidity. The time-serving of 
 the profligate means a desire for personal gratification ; the time-serving 
 of a Bacon means too great a readiness to take the world as it is, and to 
 use questionable tools in the pursuit of vast and elevated designs. 
 
 The Essays reflect these characteristics. They are the thoughts of a 
 philosopher who is not content to accept any commonplace without in- 
 dependent examination; but who is as little disposed to reject an opinion 
 summarily because it has a slightly immoral aspect as to reject a scien- 
 tific experiment because it contradicts an established theory. We must 
 hear what the vicious man has to say for himself, as well as listen to the 
 virtuous. He shows his tendency in the opening essay. The dearest of 
 all virtues to the philosophic mind is truth, and there is no sincerer lover 
 of such truth than Bacon. But he will not overlook the claims of false- 
 hood. " Truth may, perhaps, come to the price of a pearl, that showeth 
 best by day ; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, 
 that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add 
 pleasure." That famous sentence is just one of the sayings which the 
 decorous moralist is apt to denounce or to hide away in dexterous ver- 
 biage. Bacon's calm recognition of the fact is more impressive, and, 
 perhaps, not really less moral. The essay upon Simulation and Dis- 
 simulation may suggest more qualms to the rigorous. Dissimulation, 
 it is true, is condemned as a " faint kind of policy and wisdom ; " it is 
 the " weaker sort of politicians that are the great dissemblers." But 
 this denunciation has to be refined and shaded away. For, in the first 
 place, a habit of secrecy is both " moral and politic." But secrecy im- 
 plies more ; for " no man can be secret except he give himself a little 
 scope of dissimulation ; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of 
 secrecy." But if secrecy leads to dissimulation, will not dissimulation 
 imply downright simulation — in plain English, lying 1 " That," replies 
 Bacon, " I hold more culpable and less politic, except it be in rare and 
 great matters." He enumerates their advantages, and their counter- 
 balancing disadvantages ; and the summing-up is one of his characteristic 
 sentences. " The best composition and temperature is to love openness in 
 
 14—2 
 
284 EAMBLES AMONG BOOKS. 
 
 fame and opinion ; secrecy in habit ; dissimulation in seasonable use ; 
 and a power to feign if tbere be no remedy." 
 
 How skilfully the claims of morality and policy are blended ! How 
 delicately we slide from the virtue of holding our tongues to the advisa- 
 bility of occasional lying ! " You old rogue ! " exclaims the severe 
 moralist, " your advice is simply — don't lie, unless you can lie to your 
 advantage, and without loss of credit.'' And yet it really seems, if we 
 follow Mr. Spedding's elaborate investigations, that Bacon lied remarkably 
 little for a statesman — especially for & timid statesman — in an age of 
 elaborate intrigues. I fancy that the student of recent history would 
 admit that the art of dexterous equivocation had not fallen entirely out 
 of use, and is not judged with great severity when an opponent asks an 
 awkward question in Parliament. A cynic might even declare the chief 
 difference to be that we now disavow the principles upon which we really 
 act, and so lie to ourselves as well as to others ; whereas Bacon was at least 
 true to himself, and, if forced to adopt a theory of expediency, would not 
 blink the fact. It is this kind of sincerity to which the Assays owe part 
 of their charm to every thoughtful reader. "We must not go to them 
 for lofty or romantic morality — for sayings satisfactory to the purist or 
 the enthusiast. We have a morality, rather, which has been refracted 
 through a mind thoroughly imbued with worldly wisdom, and ready to 
 accept the compromises which a man who mixes with his fellows on 
 equal terms must often make with his conscience. He is no hermit to 
 renounce the world, for the world is, after all, a great fact ; nor to retire 
 to a desert because the air of cities is tainted by the lungs of his fellows. 
 He accepts the code which is workable, not that which is ideally pure. 
 He loves in all things the true via media. He objects to atheism, for 
 religion is politically useful ; but he is quite as severe upon superstition, 
 which is apt to generate a more dangerous fanaticism. He considers 
 love to be a kind of excusable weakness, so long as men " sever it wholly 
 from their serious affairs and actions of life ; " but he is eloquent and 
 forcible in exalting friendship, without which a man may as well "quit 
 the stage." In this, indeed, Bacon (we will take Mr. Spedding's view of 
 that little affair about Essex) seems to have spoken from his own ex- 
 perience ; and in spite of the taint of worldliness, the feeling that there 
 is something tepid in their author's nature, a certain want of cordiality 
 in the grasp of his hand — we feel that the Essays have a merit beyond 
 that which belongs to them as genuine records of the observation of life 
 at first hand by a man of vast ability and varied and prolonged ex- 
 perience. They show, too, a marvellously rich and sensitive nature, 
 capable of wide sympathies, with all manner of interests, devoted to a 
 grand and far-reaching ambition, though not sufSciently contemptuous 
 of immediate expediency, and fully appreciative of the really valuable 
 elements in human life. If he has the weaknesses — he has also in a 
 surpassing degree, the merits — of a true cosmopolitan, or citizen of 
 this world, whose wisdom, if not as childlike as the Christian preacher 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 285 
 
 requires, is most certainly not childish. When We add the literary 
 genius which has coined so many pregnant aphorisms, and stamped even 
 truisms with his own image and superscription, we can understand why 
 the Essays have come home to men's business and bosoms. 
 
 It is amusing to compare Bacon with the always delightful Fuller, 
 in regard to whom Coleridge declares that his amazing wit has deprived 
 him of the credit due to his soundness of judgment. The statement does 
 not quite cover the ground. Fuller in the Holy and Profame State and 
 Bacon in the Essays have each given us a short sermon upon the text 
 Be angry and sin not. Fuller undoubtedly makes the greatest display of 
 intellectual fireworks. In half-a-dozen short paragraphs, he gets off as 
 many witticisms, good, bad, and inimitable. A man who can't be 
 angry, he says, is like the Caspian sea which never ebbs or flows : to be 
 angry on slight cause, is to fire the beacons at the landing of every 
 cockboat : you should beware of doing irrevocable mischief when you are 
 angry, for Samson's hair grew again, but not his eyes : he tells us that 
 manna did not corrupt when left over the Sabbath, whereas anger then 
 corrupts most of all : and then we have that irresistible piece of ab- 
 surdity which so delighted Charles Lamb ; we are warned not to take 
 too Uterally the apostle's direction not to let the sun go down upon our 
 wrath, for " then might our wrath lengthen with the days, and men in 
 Greenland, where day lasts above a quarter of the year, might have 
 plentiful scope of revenge." Undoubtedly Fuller's astonishing ingenuity 
 in striking out illustrations of this kind, excites, as Coleridge says, our 
 sense of the wonderful. If we read in search of amusement, we are 
 rewarded at every page ; we shall never fail to make a bag in beating his 
 coverts : and beyond a doubt we shall bring back as well a healthy liking 
 for the shrewd lively simplicity which has provided them. But it is 
 equally undeniable that FuUer never takes the trouble to distinguish 
 between an illustration which really gives light to our feet and a sudden 
 flash of brilliancy which disappears to leave the obscurity unchanged. 
 He cannot refrain from a ludicrous analogy, which is often all the more 
 amusing just because it is preposterously inapplicable. Here and there 
 we have a really brilliant stroke and then an audacious pun, not, 
 perhaps, a play upon words, but a play upon ideas which is quite as 
 superficial. At bottom we feel that the excellent man has expended his 
 energy, not in " chewing and digesting " the formula which serves him 
 for a text, but in overlaying it with quaint conceits. Bacon gives us no 
 such flashes of wit, though certainly not from inability to supply them ; 
 but he says a thing which we remember : " Men must beware that 
 they carry their anger rather with scorn than with fear, so that they may 
 seem to be rather above the injury than below it ; which is a thing easily 
 done, if a man will give a law to himself in it." The remark is doubtless 
 old enough in substance ; but it reveals at once the man who does not 
 allow a truism to run through his mind without weighing or testing it j 
 who has impartially considered the uses of anger and the proper mode 
 
286 RAMBLES AMONG- BOOKS. 
 
 of disciplining it ; and who can aid us with a judicious hint or two as 
 to the best plan of making others angry, an art of great utility, whatever 
 its morality, in many affairs of life. 
 
 The essay, as Bacon understood it, is indeed a trying form of utterance. 
 A man must be very confident of the value of his own meditations upon 
 things in general, and of his capacity for " looking wiser than any man 
 ever really was " before he should venture to adopt his form. I cannot 
 remember any English book deserving to be put in the same class, 
 unless it be Sir Henry Taylor's essays, the Statesman and Notes upon 
 Life, which have the resemblance at least of reflecting, in admirably 
 graceful English, the mellowed wisdom ,of a cultivated and meditative 
 mind, which has tested commonplaces by the realities of the world and its 
 business. But a few men have thoughts which will bear being pre- 
 sented simply and straightforwardly, and which have specific gravity 
 enough to dispense with adventitious aids. A Frenchman can. always 
 season his wisdom with epigram', and coins his reflections into the 
 form of detached pensees. But our language or our intellect is too 
 blunt for such jewellery in words. We cannot match Pascal, or Rochefou- 
 cauld, or Vauvenargues, or Chamfort. Our modes of expression are 
 lumbering, and seem to have been developed rather in the pulpit than in 
 the rapid interchange of animated conversation. The essay after Bacon 
 did not crystallise into separate drops of sparkling wit, but became 
 more continuous, less epigrammatic, and easier in its flow. Cowley just 
 tried his hand at the art enough to make us regret that he did not give 
 us more prose and fewer Pindarics. Sir William Temple's essays give 
 an interesting picture of the statesman who has for once realised the 
 dream so often cherished in vain, of a retirement to books and gardens ; 
 but the thought is too superficial and the style too slipshod for enduring 
 popularity ; and that sturdy, hot-headed, pugnacious, and rather priggish 
 moralist, Jertemy Collier, poured out some hearty, rugged essays, which 
 make us like the man, but feel that he is too much of the pedagogue, 
 brandishing a birch-rod wherewith to whip our sins out of us. The 
 genuine essayist appeared with Steele and Addison and their countless 
 imitators. Some salvage from the vast mass of periodicals which have 
 sunk into the abysses appears upon our shelves in the shape of forty odd 
 volumes, duly annotated and expounded by laborious commentators. It 
 is amusing to glance over the row, from the Tatler to the Looker-on, 
 from the days of Steele to those of Cumberland and Mackenzie, the 
 " Man of Feeling," and reflect upon the simple-mindedness of our great- 
 grandfathers. Nothing brings back to us more vividly the time of the 
 good old British " gentlewoman ; " the contemporary of the admirable 
 Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Carter, who even contributed short papers to the 
 Bambler, and regarded the honour as a patent of immortality; who 
 formed Richardson's court, and made tea for Johnson; who wrote 
 letters about the " improvement of the mind," and at times ventured 
 upon a translation of a classical moralist, but enquired with some 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 287 
 
 anxiety -whether a knowledge of Latin was consistent with the delicacy 
 of the female sex ; and thought it a piece of delicate flattery when a 
 male author condescended to write down to the level of their comprehen- 
 sion. Lady Mary seems to have been the only woman of the century 
 who really felt herself entitled to a claim of intellectual equality ; and 
 the feminine author was regarded much in the same way as a modern 
 lady in the himting-field. It was a question whether she should be 
 treated with exceptional forbearance, or warned off a pursuit rather too 
 rough for a true womanly occupation. Johnson's famous comparison of 
 the preaching women to the dancing dogs gives the general sentiment, 
 They were not admired for writing well, but for writing at all. 
 
 "We have changed all this, and there is Something pathetic in the 
 tentative and modest approaches of our grandmothers to the pursuits in 
 which their granddaughters have achieved the rights and responsibilities 
 of equal treatment. 
 
 But it is necessary to remember, in reading the whole Spectator and 
 its successors, that this audience is always in the background. It is 
 literature written by gentlemen for ladies — that is, for persons disposed to 
 sit at gentlemen's feet. Bacon is delivering his thoughts for the guidance 
 of thoughtful aspirants to fame; and Temple is acting the polished 
 statesman in the imagined presence of wits and courtiers. But Steele and 
 Addison make it their express boast that they write for the good of 
 women, who have hitherto been limited to an intellectual diet of 
 decent devotional works or of plays and romances. The Spectator is 
 to lie on the table by the side of the morning dish of chocolate ; and 
 every writer in a periodical knows how carefully he must bear ia mind 
 the audience for which he is catering. . The form once fixed was preserved 
 throughout the century with a persistency characteristic of the sheep-like 
 race of authors. Every successor tried to walk in Addison's footsteps. 
 The World, as somebody tells us, was the Ulysses' bow in which all the 
 wits of the day tried their strength. The fine gentlemen, like Chester- 
 field and Walpole, too nice to rub shoulders with the ordinary denizens 
 of Grub Street, ventured into this select arena with the encouragement 
 of some easily dropped mask of anonymity. It is amusing to observe on 
 what easy terms glory was to be won by such achievements. There was 
 the exemplary Mr. Grove, of Taimton, who wrote a paper in the Specta- 
 tor, which, according to Johnson, was " one of the finest pieces in the 
 English language,'' though I suppose but few of my readers can recollect 
 a word of it, and Mr. Ince, of Gray's Inn, who frequented Tom's Ooffee 
 House, and was apparently revered by other frequenters on the strength 
 of a compliment from Steele to some contributions never identified. 
 Nay, a certain Mr. Elphinstone, seen in the flesh by Hazlitt, was sur- 
 rounded for fifty years by a kind of faint halo of literary fame, because 
 he had discharged the humble duty of translating the mottoes to the 
 Rambler. The fame, indeed, has not been very enduring. We have 
 lost our appetite for this simple food. Very few people, we may suspect, 
 
288 RAMBLES AMOM BOOKS. 
 
 give tiieir days and nights to the study of Addison, any more than A 
 youthful versifier tries to catch the echo of Pope. We are rather disposed 
 to laugh at the classical motto which serves in place of a text, and must 
 have given infinite trouble to some unfortunate scribblers. The gentle 
 raillery of feminine foibles in dress or manners requires to be renewed 
 in every generation with the fashions to which it refers. The novelettes 
 are of that kind of literature which are too much like tracts, insipid 
 to tastes accustomed to the full-blown novel developed in later times. 
 A classical allegory or a so-called Eastern tale has become a puerility like 
 the old-fashioned pastoral. We half regret the days when a man with 
 a taste for fossils or butterflies was called a virtuoso, and considered an 
 unfailing butt for easy ridicule ; but we are too much under the thumb of 
 the scientific world to reveal our sentiments. And as for the criticism, 
 with its elaborate inanities about the unities and the rules of epic poetry, 
 and the authority of Aristotle and M. Bossu, we look down upon it from 
 the heights of philosophical aesthetics, and rejoice complacently in the 
 infallibility of modern tastes. Were it not for Sir Eager de Goverley, 
 the old-fashioned essay would be well-nigh forgotten, except by some 
 examiner who wants a bit of pure English to be turned into Latin prose. 
 Oblivion of this kind is the natural penalty of labouring upon 
 another man's foundations. There is clearly a presumption that the 
 form struck out by Addison would not precisely suit Fielding or John- 
 son or Goldsmith ; and accordingly we read Tom Jones and the Vicar 
 q/ Wakefield and the Lives of the Foets without troubling ourselves to 
 glance at the Champion or the Covent Garden Journal. We make a per- 
 functory study even of the £ee and the Citizen of the World, and are irre- 
 verent about the Rambler. We may find in them, indeed, abundant traces 
 of Eielding's rough irony and hearty common-sense, and of Goldsmith's 
 delicate humour and felicity of touch ; but Goldsmith, when forced to 
 continuous dissertation, has to spin his thread too fine, and Fielding 
 seems to be uncomfortably cramped within the narrow limits of the 
 essay. The Rambler should not have a superfluous word said against it ; 
 for the very name has become a kind of scarecrow ; and yet any one who 
 will skip most of the criticisms and all the amusing passages may suck 
 much profltable and not unpleasing melancholy out of its ponderous 
 pages. It is all the pleasanter for its contrast to the kind of jaunty 
 optimism which most essayists adopt as most congenial to easy-going 
 readers. I like to come upon one of Johnson's solemn utterances of a 
 conviction of the radical wretchedness of life. "The cure for the 
 greatest part of human miseries is not radical but palliative. Infelicity 
 is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all 
 attempts, therefore, to decline it wholly are useless and vain ; the armies 
 of pain send their arrows against us on every side ; the choice is only 
 between those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of 
 greater or less malignity ; and the strongest armour which reason can 
 supply will only blunt their points, but cannot , repel them." This 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 289 
 
 melailclioly monotone of sadness, coining from a brave and much- 
 enduring nature, is impressive, but it must be admitted that it would 
 make rather severe reading at a tea-table — even when presided over by 
 that ornament to her sex, the translator of Epictetus. And poor 
 Johnson, being painfully sensible that he must not deviate too far from 
 his Addison, makes an elephantine gambol or two with a very wry face ; 
 and is only comical by his failure. 
 
 I take it, in fact, to be established that within his special and narrow 
 province Addison was unique. HazILtt and Leigh Hunt tried to exalt 
 Steele above his colleague. We can perfectly understand their affection 
 for the chivalrous, warm-hearted Irishman. When a virtuous person 
 rebukes the extravagance of a thoughtless friend by the broad hint of 
 putting an execution into his house, we naturally take part with the 
 offender. We have a sense that Addison got a little more than his deserts 
 in this world, whilst Steele got- a little less, and we wish to make the 
 balance even. And to some extent this applies in a literary sense. ' Steele 
 has more warmth and pathos than Addison ,' he can speak of women 
 without the patronising tone of his leader, and would hardly, like him, 
 have quoted for their benefit the famous theory of Pericles as to their 
 true glory. And, yet, it does not want any refined criticism to recognise 
 Addison's superiority. Steele's admirers have tried to vindicate for 
 him a share in Sir Roger ; but any one who reads the papers in which 
 that memorable character is described, will see that all the really fine 
 touches are contributed by Addison. Steele took one of the most pro- 
 mising incidents, the courtsliip of the widow, and the paper in which 
 this appears is the furthest below the general level. To have created Sir 
 Roger — the forefather of so many exquisite characters, for surely he is 
 closely related to Parson Adams,, and Uncle Toby, and Doctor Primrose, 
 and Colonel Newcome — is Addison's greatest achievement, and the most 
 characteristic of the man. Por it is impossible not to feel that some 
 injustice is done to Addison when grave writers like M. Taine, for ex- 
 ample, treat him seriously as a novelist or a political theorist, or even as 
 a critic. Judged by any severe standard, his morality and his political 
 dissertations and his critical disquisitions — the immortal papers, for ex- 
 ample, upon the Imagination and upon Paradise Lost — are puerile enough. 
 With all our love of sermons, we can be almost as much bored as M. 
 Taine himself by some of Addison's prosings. The charm of the man 
 is just in the admirable simplicity of which Sir Roger is only an imagin- 
 ative projection. Addison, it is true, smiles at the knight's little absur- 
 dities from the platform of superior scholarship. He feels himself to be 
 on the highest level of the culture of his time— a scholar, a gentleman — 
 fit to sit in council with Somers, or to interpret the speculations of 
 Locke. But at bottom he is precisely of the same material as the fine old 
 squire with whom he sympathises. His simplicity is not destroyed by 
 learning to write Latin verses or even by becoming a Secretary of State. 
 Sir Roger does not accept the teaching of his chaplain with more reve* 
 
 U— 5 
 
290 EAMBLES AMONG BOOKS. 
 
 rence thanAddison feels for Tillotson and the admirable Dr. Scott, whose 
 authority has become very faded for us. The squire accepts Baker's 
 chronicle as his sole and infallible authority in all matters of history ; but 
 Addison's history would pass muster just as little with Mr. Freeman or Dr. 
 Stubbs. We smile at Sir Soger's satisfaction with the progress of the 
 Church of England when a rigid dissenter eats plentifully of his Christ- 
 mas plum-porridge ; but there is something almost equally simple- 
 minded in Addison's conviction that the prosecutors of Sacheverell had 
 spoken the very last words of political wisdom, and even the good Sir 
 Roger's criticisms of the Distressed Mother are not much simpler in 
 substance, though less ambitious in form, than Addison's lectures upon 
 similar topics. Time has put us as much beyond the artist as the artist 
 was beyond his model, and, though he is in part the accomplice, he must 
 also be taken as partly the object of some good-humoured ridicule. We 
 cannot sit at his feet as a political teacher ; but we see that his politics 
 really mean the spontaneous sympathy of a kindly and generous nature, . 
 which receives a painful 'jar from the sight of bigotry and oppression. 
 His theology, as M. Taine rather superfluously insists, represents the 
 frigid and prosaic type of contemporary divines ; but it is only the ex- 
 ternal covering of that tender sentiment of natural piety to which we 
 owe some of the most exquisite hymns in the language. In short, the 
 occasional pretentiousness of the man, when he wants to deliver ex 
 catliedrd judgments upon points of criticism and morality, becomes a 
 very venial and rather amusing bit of affectation. It shows only the 
 docility — perhaps rather excessive — with which a gentle and rather 
 timid intellect accepts, at their own valuation, the accepted teachers of 
 his day ; and, having put away all thoughts of judging him by an . 
 inapplicable standard, we can enjoy him for what he really is without 
 further qualification ; we can delight in the urbanity which is the indi- 
 cation of a childlike nature unspoilt by familiarity with the world ; we 
 can admire equally the tenderness, guided by playful fancy, of the Vision 
 of Mirza, or the legend of Marraton and Yaratilda, and the passages in 
 which he amuses himself with some such trifle as ladies' patches, handling 
 his plaything so dexterously as never to be too ponderous, whilst some- 
 how preserving, by mere imconscious wit, an air as of amiable wisdom 
 relaxing for a moment from severer thought. Addison's imitators 
 flounder awkwardly enough, for the most part, in attempting to repeat 
 a performance which looks so easy after its execution ; but in truth, the 
 secret, though it may be an open one, is not easily appropriated. You 
 have only to acquire Addison's peculiar nature, his delicacy of percep- 
 tion, his tenderness of nature held in check by excessive sensibility, his 
 generosity of feeling which can never hurry him out of the safe entrench- 
 ment of thorough respectability, his intense appreciation of all that is 
 pure and beautiful so long as it is also of good report — you must have, 
 in short, the fine qualities along with the limitations of his character, 
 and then you will spontaneously express, in this kind of lambent 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 291 
 
 humour, the quiet, sub-sarcastic playfiihiess wlidch. could gleam out so 
 delightfully when he was alone with a friend, or with his' pen, and a 
 bottle of port to give him courage. 
 
 Essay-writing, thus understood, is as much one of the lost arts as 
 good letter-writing or good talk. We are too distracted, too hurried. 
 The town about which these essayists are always talking, meant a 
 limited society ; it has now become a vast chaos of distracted atoms, 
 whirled into momentary contact, but not coalescing into permanent 
 groups. A sensitive, reserved Addison would go to his club in the days 
 when a club meant a social gathering instead of an oppressive house of 
 call for 1,200 gentlemen, glaring mutual distrust across their newspaper. 
 He has his recognised corner at the coffee-house, where he could listen 
 undisturbed to the gossip of the regular frequenters. He would retire 
 to his lodgings with a chosen friend, and gradually thaw under the 
 influence of his bottle and his pipe of tobacco, till he poured out his 
 little speculations to his companion, or wrote them down for an audience 
 which he knew as a country parson knows his congregation. He could 
 make little confidential jokes to the public, for the pnbhc was only an 
 enlarged circle of friends. At the present day, such a man, for he was 
 a man of taste and reflection, finds society an intolerable bore. He 
 goes into it to be one of a crowd assembled for a moment to be dispersed 
 in a dozen different crowds to-morrow ; he is stuck down at a dinner- 
 table between a couple of strangers, and has not time to break the ice 
 or get beyond the conventional twaddle, unless, indeed, he meets some 
 intrepid talker, who asks him between the soup and the fish whether he 
 believes in the equality of the sexes or the existence of a Deity. He 
 is lucky if he can count upon meeting his best friends once in a fort- 
 night. He becomes famous, not to be the cherished companion of the 
 day, but to be mobbed by a crowd. He may become a recluse, nowhere 
 more easily than in London ; but then he can hardly write effective 
 essays upon life ; or he may throw himself into some of the countless 
 " movements " of the day, and will have to be in too deadly earnest for 
 the pleasant interchange of social persifflage with a skilful blending of 
 lively and severe. The little friendly circle of sympathetic hearers is 
 broken up for good or bad, dissolved into fragments and whirled into 
 mad confusion ; and the talker on paper must change his tone as his 
 audience is dispersed. Undoubtedly in some ways the present day is 
 not merely favourable to essay-writing but a very paradise for essayists. 
 Our magazines and journals are full of excellent performances. But 
 their character is radically changed. They are serious discussions of 
 important questions, where a man puts a whole system of philosophy 
 into a dozen pages. Or else they differ from the old-fashioned essay as 
 the address of a mob-orator differs from a speech to an organised 
 assembly. The writer has not in his eye a little coterie of recognised 
 authority, but is competing with countless rivals to catch the ear of 
 that vague and capricious personage, the general reader. Sometimes 
 
292 EAMBLES AMONG BOOKS. 
 
 the general reader likes slow twaddle, and sometimes a spice of scandal ', 
 but he is terribly apt to take irony for a personal insult, and to mistake 
 delicacy for insipidity. It is true, indeed, that one kind of authority 
 has become more imposing than ever. We are greatly exercised in our 
 minds by the claims of the scientific critic ; but that only explains why 
 it is so much easier to write about essay- writing than to write an essay 
 oneself. 
 
 Some men, indeed, have enough of the humourist or the philosopher 
 to withdraw from the crush and indulge in very admirable speculations. 
 Essays may be mentioned which, though less popular than some down- 
 right twaddle, have a better chance of endurance. But, apart from the 
 most modern performances, some of the very best of English essays came 
 from the school which in some sense continued the old traditions. The 
 " cockneys " of the first quarter of the century, still talked about the 
 "town," as a distinct entity. Charles Lamb's supper parties were 
 probably the last representatives of the old-fashioned club. Lamb, 
 indeed, was the pet of a little clique of familiars, standing apart from 
 the great world — not like Addison, the favourite of a society, including 
 the chief political and social leaders of the day. The cockneys formed 
 only a small and a rather despised section of society ; but they had not 
 been swamped and overwhelmed in the crowd. London was not a 
 shifting caravanserai, a vague aggregate of human beings, from which 
 all traces of organic unity had disappeared. Names like Kensington 
 or Hampstead still suggested real places, with oldest inhabitants and 
 local associations, not confusing paraphrases for arbitrary fragments 
 of S. or N. W. The Temple had its old benchers, men who had lived 
 there under the eyes of neighbours, and whose personal characteristics 
 were known as accurately as in any country village. The theatre of 
 Lamb's day was not one amongst many places of amusement, with only 
 such claims as may be derived from the star of the moment ; but a body 
 with imposing historical associations, which could trace back its continuity 
 through a dynasty of managers, from Sheridan to Garrick, and so to 
 Cibber and Betterton, and the companies which exulted in the name 
 of the King's servants. When sitting in the pit, he seemed to be 
 taking the very place of Steele, and might stUl listen to the old 
 " artificial comedy,'' for which we have become too moral or too 
 squeamish. To read Elia's essays is to breathe that atmosphere again ; 
 and to see that if Lamb did not write for so definite a circle as the old 
 essayists, he is still representing a class with cherished associations, and 
 a distinctive character. One should be a bit of a cockney fully to enjoy 
 his writing ; to be able to reconstruct the picturesque old London with 
 its quaint and grotesque aspects. For Lamb is nowhere more himself 
 than in the humorous pathos with which he dwells upon the rapidly 
 vanishing peculiarities of the old-fashioned world. 
 
 Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and HazUtt may be taken to represent this last 
 phase of the old town life before the town had become a wUdemess. 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 293 
 
 T?hey have all written admirable essays, thougli Huut's pure taste and 
 graceful style scarcely atone for the want of force or idiosyncrasy. No 
 such criticism could be made against his friends. Lamb was not only 
 the pet of his own clique, but the pet of all subsequent critics. To say 
 anything against him would be to provoke indignant remonstrance. An 
 attack upon him would resemble an insult to a child. Yet I will ven- 
 ture to confess that Lamb has some of the faults from which no favourite 
 of a little circle is ever quite free. He is always on the verge of affec- 
 tation, and sometimes trespasses beyond the verge. There is a self- 
 consciousness about him which in some moods is provoking. There is a 
 certain bigotry about most humourists (as of a spoilt child) which has 
 become a little tiresome. People have come to talk as if a sense of 
 humour were one of the cardinal virtues. To have it is to be free of a 
 privileged class, possessed of an esoteric system of critical wisdom. To 
 be without it is to be a wretched matter-of-fact utilitarian pedant. The 
 professed humourist considers the rest of mankind as though they 
 were deprived of a faculty, incapable of a relish for the finest literary 
 flavours. Lamb was one of the first representatives 'of this theory, and 
 is always tacitly warning off the profane vulgar, typified by the prosaic 
 Scotchman who pointed out that his wish to see Burns instead of Burns' 
 son was impracticable, inasmuch as the poet himself was dead. The 
 pretension is, of course, put forward by Lamb in the most amiable way, 
 but it remains a pretension. Most people are docile enough to accept at 
 his own valuation, or at that of his admirers, any man who claims a 
 special privilege, and think it wise to hold their tongues if they do not 
 perceive it to be fully justified by the facts. But I admit that, after a 
 certain quantity of Lamb, I begin to feel a sympathy for the unimagina- 
 tive Scotchman. I think that he has something to say for himself. 
 Lamb, for example, was a most exquisite critic of the authors in whom 
 he delighted. Nobody has said such admirable things about the old 
 English dramatists, and a little exaggeration may be forgiven to so 
 genuine a worshipper. But he helped to start the nuisance of " appre- 
 ciative criticism," which proceeds on the assumptive fancy that it neces- 
 sarily shows equal insight and geniality to pick up pebbles or real jewels 
 from the rubbish-heaps of time. Lamb certainly is not to be blamed 
 for the extravagance of his followers. But this exaltation of the tastes 
 or fancies of a little coterie has always its dangers, and that is what limits 
 one's affection for Lamb. Nobody can deUght too much in the essay 
 upon roast pig — ^the apologue in which contains as much sound philo- 
 sophy as fine humour — or in Mrs. Battle's opinions upon whist, or the 
 description of Christ's Hospital, or the old benchers of the Temple, or 
 Oxford in the Long Vacation. Only I cannot get rid of the feeling 
 which besets me when I am ordered to worship the idol of any small 
 sect. Accept their shibboleths, and everything will go pleasantly. The 
 underlying conceit and dogmatism will only turn its pleasanter side 
 towards you, and show itself in tinging the admirable sentiments with 
 
294 RAMBLES AMONG BOOKS. 
 
 a slight affectation. Yet, one wants a little more fresh air, and one 
 does not like to admire upon compulsion. Lamb's manner is inimit- 
 ably graceful ; but it reminds one just a little too much of an ancient 
 beau, retailing his exquisite compliments, and putting his hearers on 
 their best behaviour. Perhaps it shows the corruption of human nature, 
 but I should be glad if now and then he could drop his falsetto and come 
 out of his little entrenchment of elaborate reserve. I should feel cer- 
 tain that I see the natural man. " I am all over sophisticated," says 
 Lamb, accounting for his imperfect sympathy with Quakers, " with 
 humours, fancies craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pic- 
 tures, theatres, chitchat, scandal, jokes, antiquities, apd a thousand whim- 
 whams which their simpler taste could do without.'' There are times 
 when the simpler taste is a pleasant relief to the most skilful dandling 
 of whimwhams ; and it is at those times that one revolts not exactly 
 against Lamb, but against the intolerance of true Lamb worshippers. 
 
 The reader who is tired of Lamb's delicate confections, and wants a bit 
 of genuine nature, a straightforward uncompromising utterance of anti- 
 pathy and indignation, need not go far. Hazlitt will serve his turn ; 
 and for that reason I can very often read Hazlitt with admiration when 
 Lamb rather palls upon me. If Hazlitt has the weaknesses of a cockney, 
 they take a very different form. He could hardly have been the ideal of 
 any sect which did not enjoy frequent slaps in the face from the object of 
 its worship. He has acquired, to an irritating degree, the temper charac- 
 teristic of a narrow provincial sect. He has cherished and brooded over 
 the antipathies with which he started, and, from time to time, has added 
 new dislikes and taken up grudges against his old friends. He has not 
 sufficient culture to understand fully the bearings of his own theories ; 
 and quarrels with those who should be his allies. He has another charac- 
 teristic which, to my mind, is less pardonable. He is not onlyegotistical, 
 which one may forgive, but there is something rather ungentlemanlike 
 about his egotism. There is a rather offensive tone of self-assertion, 
 thickly masked as self-depreciation. I should be slow to say that he 
 was envious, for that is one of the accusations most easily made and 
 least capable of being proved, against any one who takes an independent 
 view of contemporary celebrities ; but he has the tone of a man with a 
 grievance; and the grievances are. the shocks which his vanity has 
 received from a want of general appreciation. There is something 
 petty in the spirit which takes the world into its confidence upon such 
 matters ; and his want of reticence takes at times a more offensive formi 
 He is one of the earliest "interviewers," and revenges himself upon 
 men who have been more poptilar than himself by cutting portraits of 
 them as they appeared to him. Altogether he is a man whom it is 
 impossible to regard without a certain distrust ; and that, as I fancy, 
 is the true reason for his want of popularity. No literary skill will 
 make average readers take kindly to a man who does not attract by 
 some amiable quality. 
 
THE ESSAYISTS. 295 
 
 In fact, some explanation, is needed, for otherwise we could hardly 
 account for the comparative neglect of some of the ablest essays in the 
 language. We may be very fine fellows now, but we cannot write like 
 Hazlitt, says a critic who is more likely than any one to falsify his own 
 assertions. And when I take up one of Hazlitt's volumes of essaya, I 
 am very much inclined at times to agree with the assertion. They are 
 apt, it is true, to leave a rather impleasant flavour upon the palate. 
 There is a certain acidity ; a rather petulant putting forwards of little 
 crotchets or personal dislikes ; the arrogance belonging to all cliquishness 
 is not softened into tacit assumption, but rather dashed in your face. 
 But, putting this aside, the nervous vigour of the writing, the tone of 
 strong conviction and passion which vibrates through his phrases, the 
 genuine enthusiasm with which he celebrates the books and pictures 
 which he really loves ; the intense enjoyment of the beauties which he 
 really comprehends, has in it something inspiring and contagious. 
 There is at any rate nothing finicking or afiected ; if he is crotchety, 
 he really believes in his crotchets ; if he deals in paradoxes, it is not 
 that he wishes to exhibit his skill, or to insinuate a claim to originality, 
 but that he is a vehement and passionate believer in certain prejudices 
 which have sunk into his mind or become ingrained in his nature. If 
 every essayist is bound to be a dealer in commonplace or/ in the inverse 
 commonplace which we call a paradox, Hazlitt succeeds in giving them 
 an interest, by a new method. It is not that he is a man of ripened 
 meditative wisdom who has thought over them and tested them for 
 himself; nor a man of delicate sensibility from whose lips they come 
 with the freshness of perfect simplicity ; nor a man of strong sense, who 
 tears away the conventional illusions by which we work ourselves into 
 complacency ; not a gentle humourist, who is plajdng with absurdities 
 and appeals to us to share his enjoyable consciousness of his own 
 nonsense ; it is simply that he is a man of marked idiosyncrasy whose 
 feelings are so strong, though confined within narrow channels, that his 
 utterances have always the emphatic ring of trae passion. When he 
 talks about one of his favourites, whether Rousseau or Mrs. Inchbald, 
 he has not perhaps much to add to the established criticisms, but he 
 speaks a» one who knows the book by heart, who has pored over it 
 like a lover, come to it again and again, relished the little touches 
 which escape the hasty reader, and in writing about it is reviving the 
 old passionate gush of admiration. He cannot make such fine remarks 
 as Lamb; and his judgments are still more personal and dependent 
 upon the accidents of his early studies. But they stimulate still more 
 strongly the illusion that one has only to turn to the original i order 
 to enjoy a similar rapture. Lamb speaks as the epicure; and lets 
 one know that one must be a man of taste to share his fine discrimina- 
 tion. But Hazlitt speaks of his old enjoyments as a traveller might 
 speak of the gush of fresh water which saved him from dying of thirst 
 in the wilderness. The delight seems so spontaneous and natural that 
 
296 RAMBLES AMOKa BOOKS, 
 
 ■we fancy — very erroneously for the most part — that the sprlilg miMt be 
 as refreshing to our lips as it was to his. We are ashamed after it when 
 we are bored by the Nouvelle HUoise. 
 
 There is the same kind of charm in the non-critical essays. We 
 share for the moment Hazlitt's enthusiasm for the Indian jugglers, or 
 for Cavanagh, the fives-player, whom he celebrates with an enthusiasm 
 astonishing in pre-athletic days, and which could hardly be rivalled by 
 a boyish idolater of Dr. Grace. We forget all our acquired prejudices 
 to throw ourselves into the sport of the famous prize-fight between the 
 gasman and Bill Neate ; and see no incongruity between the pleasure 
 of seeing one side of Mr. Hickman's face dashed into " a red ruin " by 
 a single blow, and of taking a volume of Rousseau's sentimentalism in 
 your pocket to solace the necessar'y hours of waiting. 
 
 It is the same, again, when Hazlitt comes to deal with the well-worn 
 topics of commonplace essayists. He preaches upon thi-eadbare texts, 
 but they always have for him a strong personal interest. A common- 
 place maxim occurs to him, not to be calmly considered or to be 
 ornamented with fresh illustrations, but as if it were incarnated in a 
 flesh and blood representative, to be grappled, wrestled with, overthrown 
 and trampled under foot. He talks about the conduct of life to his son, 
 and begins with the proper aphorisms about industry, civility, and so forth, 
 bat as he warms to his work, he grows passionate and pours out his own 
 prejudices with the energy of personal conviction. He talks about 
 " efieminacy," about the " fear of death," about the " main chance," about 
 " envy,'' about "egotism," about " success in life," about " depth and super- 
 ficiality," and a dozen other equally unpromising subjects. We know 
 too well what dreary and edifying meditations they v/ould suggest to some 
 popular essayists, and how prettily others might play with them. But 
 nothing turns to platitude with Hazlitt ; he is always idiosyncratic, racy, 
 vigorous, and intensely eager, not so much to convince you, perhaps, as to 
 get the better of you as presumably an antagonist. He does not address 
 himself to the gentle reader of more popular writers, but to an imaginary 
 opponent always ready to take up the gauntlet and to get the worst of 
 it. Most people rather object to assuming that position, and to be 
 pounded as if it were a matter of course that they were priggish 
 adherents of some objectionable theory. But if you can take him for 
 fie nonce on his own terms and enjoy conversation which courts 
 contradiction, you may be sure of a good bout in the intellectual ring. 
 And even his paradoxes are more than mere wanton desire to dazzle. 
 Read, for example, the characteristic essay upon The Pleasure of Hating, 
 with its perverse vindication of infidelity to our old friends, and old books, 
 and you feel that Hazlitt, though arguing himself for the moment into a 
 conviction which he cannot seriously hold, has really given utterance to 
 a genuine sentiment which is more impressive than many a volume of 
 average reflection. A more frequent contrast of general sentiment might, 
 indeed, be agreeable. And yet; in spite of the undertone of rather sullett 
 
. THE ESSAYISTS. 297 
 
 melanclioly, we must be hard to please if we are not charmed with the 
 occasional occurrence of such passages as these : "I remember once 
 strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with willows and flashing 
 ridges, in one of tho^e sequestered valleys on Salisbury plain, where the 
 monks of former ages had planted chapels and built hermit's cells. 
 There was a little parish church near, but tall elms and quivering alders 
 hid it from my sight; when, all of a sudden, I was startled by the 
 sound of a full organ pealing on the ear, accompanied by the rustic 
 voices and the rolling quire of village maids and children. It rose, 
 indeed, like an inhalation of rich distilled perfumes. The dew from a 
 thousand pastures was gathered in its softness, the silence of a thousand 
 years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of 
 death ; fancy caught the sound and faith mounted on it to the skies. It 
 filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and 
 stiU it swells upon the ear and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning 
 the noisy tumult of the world." 
 
 If the spirit of clique were invariably productive of good essay- 
 writing, we should never be in danger of any deficiency in our supplies. 
 But our modem cliques are so anxious to be cosmopolitan, and on a 
 level with the last new utterance of the accepted prophet, that somehow 
 their disquisitions seem to be wanting in individual flavour. Perhaps 
 we have unknown prophets amongst us whose works will be valued by 
 our grandchildren. But I will not now venture upon the dangerous 
 ground of contemporary criticism. 
 
298 
 
 ^imaxoBK, 
 
 " A LANDSCAPE-PAINTER leads a merry life. He has the wide world for 
 his studio and Nature herself for his mistress and model : a smijing 
 mistress, a patient and silent model, whose caprices, however discourag- 
 ing they may be, are never exasperating or senseless, like those of the 
 human subject. He can count upon a kind welcome wherever he may 
 roam, and it is seldom that he fails to meet with a joyous comrade or 
 two. He has the sunshine and the free air and an abundance of exercise 
 to keep him in health. He is independent, in a word, which is the 
 secret of all true happiness. There you have the one side of the medal : 
 the reverse is less gUttering. Independence is a very fine thing ; but it 
 is a luxury, and, like other luxuries, has to be paid for. If the Salon 
 looks coldly upon landscapes, and the public declines to buy them, your 
 poor landscape-painter is in a fair way to become independent of all 
 earthly requirements by means of the simple process of starvation. All 
 things considered, I don't complain of my trade. You may say what 
 you please about low forms of art ; but what I maintain is that no form 
 of art can be Iqw, though every kind of artist can be easily enough. 
 What do you maSee of Luca della Eobbia, may I ask ? And which do 
 you think is the greater man — Bernard Palissy, or that ass BrouUlon, 
 who flatters himself that he is a modern Michel-Angelo, and has never 
 produced a picture yet that has not been out of drawing ? Low form of 
 art indeed ! Stuflf, my good sir ! " 
 
 Victor Berthon could claim some acquaintance with the subject upon 
 which he descanted so fluently, having been himself a landscape-painter 
 for a matter of eight years, and having reaped but a meagre result from 
 his labours. So meagre, indeed, had it been that he had at last made 
 up his mind to accept an offer which he had more than once rejected, 
 and to bind himself to execute a certain number of studies annually for 
 the manufactory of pottery at Montigny, which had become, and is be- 
 coming, more and more widely known to lovers of ceramic excellence. 
 ISTobody answered his questions or disputed the conclusiveness of his 
 arguments, for the suflicient reason that nobody but himself heard them. 
 He was wandering among the hills and glades of the forest of Fontaine- 
 bleau, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his loose velvet 
 coat, and his pipe for his sole confidant ; and in spite of the expostulatory 
 tone of his soliloquy — which might have seemed to imply that the step 
 which he had taken stood in some need of justification — there was a 
 
NlfiMOEOSA. 299 
 
 good-humoured and contented smile about his eyes and lips such as might 
 be expected to irradiate the countenance of one who saw his way to a 
 clear seven hundred francs a month for the future. 
 
 " Pots and jugs and plates ! " he mused. " There wa? a time when I 
 should have thought it a very long way beneath me to paint such things ; 
 but there was a time when I was a young fool and mistook myself for a 
 genius. At thirty, one has pretty nearly done with illusions." 
 
 Convinced of his wisdom pertaining to that advanced age, M. Berthon 
 plunged more deeply into reflections and projects, and more deeply into 
 the shady wilderness. He had no more fear of losing his way in the 
 latter than in the former ; for the locality had been known to him for 
 many years past, as indeed it i^ to most French artists of his school. 
 As, however, he had on all previous occasions fixed his headquarters at 
 Barbison, and as Montigny happens to be situated at the opposite ex- 
 tremity of the forest, a good five miles away from that village, it was 
 hardly surprising that, towards sundown, he should suddenly have awoke 
 to the conviction that he had not the remotest idea of where he was. 
 
 The spot where he made this unpleasant discovery was an irregularly- 
 shaped clearing where four grassy bridle-paths met ; and while he was 
 twisting his moustache in perplexity and wondering which of these was 
 the most likely to lead him to his destination, he caught sight of some- 
 thing white flitting among the trees a hundred yards or so away ; which 
 something, approaching rapidly, developed itself into the tall figure of a 
 girl. Swinging her straw hat in her hand, she was passing from light 
 to shade with long, easy steps, and was evidently sure enough of her 
 whereabouts to be independent of beaten tracks. Presently she emerged 
 iipon the open space, and then, for the first time becoming aware of the 
 handsome young gentleman in the velvet coat and high-crowned wide- 
 awake who was gazing at her with admiring eyes, stopped short, and 
 looked him full in the face. 
 
 Victor Berthon 's eyes had every right and reason to express admira- 
 tion. This young wood-nymph, with her golden-brown hair, her blue 
 eyes, and her slim, lithe form, would under any circumstances have been 
 a specimen of humanity worth the looking at ; but just now the accident 
 of her sKghtly startled pose and the natural accessories of light and 
 background combined to produce an efiect especially delightful to the 
 aesthetic soul. From the thicket at her back rose the straight trunks of 
 some ancient Scotch firs, slate-coloured at their base and reddening to- 
 wards their summit ; a fiery ray of sunlight, falling aslant through the 
 dense foliage overhead, caught her hair, and converted it into the sem- 
 blance of a nimbus ; her left hand, which held her hat, hung by her side, 
 but her right was still ttplifted, holding back a spray of the undergrowth 
 through which she had come ; and during the second or two that she 
 stood thus, one of those bewildering recollections which come and go 
 like a flash of lightning passed through the artist's mind. The memory, 
 if such it had been, was dispelled by the movement of its subject, who 
 
300 N]gMOilOSA. 
 
 stepped forward, saying in a clear and pleasant voice, " Monsieur has 
 probably missed his way ? " 
 
 Victor took off bis hat, and bowed low. "Mademoiselle, I am 
 ashamed to say that I have ; and if you will have the kindness to tell 
 me towards which point of the compass Montigny lies " 
 
 " Very wUling, monsieur. I myself am going to Marlotte, so that 
 our way is the same. You have only to follow me." 
 
 And, without wasting more words about it, she struck into the thick 
 of the forest again, disdaining the paths that diverged on her right and 
 left, and moving with such deft rapidity that to follow her was a behest 
 more easily heard than obeyed. 
 
 Our friend Victor, however, was not the man to walk in dull silence 
 behind a pretty girl when, by dint of hopping, skipping, and floundering, 
 he could maintain an intermittent position by her side. This girl was 
 not only pretty but mysterious ; for, although her dress was that of the 
 people, her air and accent seemed to belong to a somewhat higher station ; 
 and the attractions of beauty have never yet been lessened by a touch of 
 mystery. Victor was determined to find out all about her ; and, for that 
 matter, she showed no disposition to baulk his curiosity. Her chief 
 desire was to get over the ground as quickly as possible, being, as she 
 presently confessed, in fear of reaching home too late for supper ; but 
 she answered without shyness or reticence the various hints and questions 
 addressed to her by her breathless companion, and once or twice put a 
 question on her own score. She herself was not at all out of breath. 
 
 " Monsieur is an artist," she remarked. But this was rather an 
 assertion than an interrogation ; and indeed M. Berthon's garb, his short 
 pointed beard, and his long locks bewrayed him. 
 
 " Mademoiselle, I am a very humble member of the craft. I have 
 often wished to be a great artist, but never more sincerely than I did a 
 few minutes ago, when you were standing under the fir-trees yonder. It 
 was a subject such as one does not come across every day. If I had the 
 power to do justice to it, and if I could obtain your permission, I would 
 paint you like that. It would be a short cut to immortality for us both." 
 She laughed. " You would come too late for one of us, monsieur. I 
 am immortal already." 
 
 Victor stared for a moment, and then struck his hands together. 
 " Ah ! now I have it ! I was certain we had met before, though not in 
 the flesh. You mtist be N6morosa." 
 
 " You have seen M. Royer's picture, then 1 " 
 
 " Of course, I have seen it; who has not ? You were right to say 
 that you are immortal; Eoyer will never paint the equal of that picture. 
 And so you are the original N^morosa!" repeated Victor under his 
 breath, with a sort of admiring awe. 
 
 " At your service, monsieur. And when I say at your service, I 
 mean at your service, you understand. I am at the service of all 
 artists ; and, without flattering myself, I hardly know what some of 
 
NEMOEOSA. 301 
 
 them would have done -without me. They would have never seen our 
 forest, that is certain. Since you have heard of me already, you will 
 be aware that the forest belongs to me, in a manner of speaking. There 
 is not a woodcutter from Chailly to Bourron, or from Arch^res to Bois- 
 le-Koi, who knows it as I do. ^ "When you want to see the real forest — 
 the forest as it used to be before they disfigured it with little winding 
 paths, and sign-posts telling people which are the parties wrtistiques 
 and at what points they ought to exclaim ' Sublime ! ' — you need only 
 go to the house of my aunt, Madame Vanne, at Marlotte — any one 
 will show it to you — and ask for Marguerite. But perhaps," she added, 
 checking herself, " you have not heard of me by that name after all." 
 
 " Can you suppose me so ignorant 1 " cried Victor reproachfully. 
 
 But, in truth, the young lady's renown was less widely spread than 
 she imagined, and had certainly not reached the ears of her present com- 
 panion. Victor had iadeed, as he had said, seen Eoyer's celebrated 
 picture, entitled " N6morosa, Eeine des Bois," and had understood that 
 the nymph depicted therein was a tutelary deity of the forest of Fon- 
 tainebleau, to whom some legend of the middle ages, which he could not 
 recall at the moment, was attached. He had at once recognised" in the 
 fair Marguerite the original of that fabulous being; but up to the 
 moment of that recognition he had neither heard of nor suspected the 
 existence of such an original. This did not deter him from assuring 
 Mdlle. Marguerite Vanne that his meeting with her was the unhoped-for 
 fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, nor from accepting with warmest 
 thanks her gracious ofier of guidance. He was about to suggest a day 
 and hour for the carrying of the same into efiect when his leader cut 
 him short by pointing to a broad white track dimly visible through the 
 trees in the twilight. " There is the high road," she said ; " we part 
 here. My way lies to the right, yours to the left. Good-night, mon- 
 sieur." And, with a wave of her hand, she was gone. 
 
 The little village of Marlotte, situated on the outskirts of the forest, 
 shares with Barbison the patronage of Parisian landscape-painters. 
 There, every evening during the summer season, a jovial assembly of 
 bearded and oddly-costumed persons meets to enjoy a pipe and a glass 
 after the labours of the day ; and thither Victor Berthon, having disposed 
 of his supper somewhat more hastily than was his wont, betook himself 
 in the confident hope of obtaining a brotherly welcome, together with 
 fuller particulars as to the past and present life of Mdlle. Vanne. If be 
 was disappointed in either of these expectations, it was rather in the 
 former than in the latter. To desert a hard and ungrateful mistress 
 after years of constancy is an offence for which excuses may be found ; 
 but every one knows how difficult a matter it is to forgive a friend for 
 comiag into a fortune ; and as such the modest revenue which Victor 
 was now known to be earning appeared to many of his old comrades. 
 His reception, therefore, when he entered the long room where these 
 gentlemen were seated in conclave, was just a shade less cordial than it 
 
302 N^MOEOSA. 
 
 ■would have been a twelvemonth, before, and he had to listen to a few 
 ironical congratulations upon his good luck and to some banter of a kind 
 which might have tried the temper of a vain or touchy man. On the 
 other hand, he heard all that there was to hear about Mdlle. Vanne in a 
 quarter of an hour. As chance would have it, the great M. Royer him- 
 self — a good-humoured, grey-bearded veteran whom success had not wholly 
 estranged from Bohemia — was sitting at the head of the table, presiding 
 over the symposium ; but even in his absence Victor would have had no 
 trouble in gaining the required information. Everybody, it appeared, 
 knew Nemorosa ; and indeed the inquirer was given to understand that 
 she was of those whom not to know argues one's self unknown. 
 
 To arrive at an understanding of plain facts from the more or less 
 irrelevant testimony of twenty voices demands some patience and atten- 
 tion; but. as the result of i* all, Yictor managed to gather that his 
 wood-nymph was an orphan ; that her relations belonged to the well-to-do 
 peasant class ; that her father had become a promising artist and had 
 died young, leaving her a small independence ; that she now lived with 
 her aunt, la M6re Vanne, who sold poultry and eggs at the Fontaine- 
 bleau market ; that she had all her life been allowed to come and go as 
 she chose among the mazes of her beloved forest ; and that she enjoyed 
 an luidisputed right to be regarded as the guardian angel of all artists 
 who pUed their trade therein — especially of such as lodged at Marlotte. 
 
 Thus mush he had learnt when the door opened, and Mdlle. Vanne 
 herself walked in. Victor was surprised and a little disappointed. The 
 place, the hour, and the company were alike unsuitable, he thought, for 
 the apparition of young women. This young woman, however, evi- 
 dently held a different opinion. "Without any appearance of embarrass- 
 ment, she nodded smilingly at the company, saying, " Bon soir, messieurs," 
 and receiving a general " Bon soir, N^morosa " in reply ; and then, making 
 her way to the end of the table, seated herself upon the arm of M. 
 Royer 's chair, and began talking to him in an undertone. Presently 
 she raised her voice, and, pointing to Victor 
 
 " I found monsieur wandering about the forest, like a lost sheep, this 
 evening," said she ; " and he knew me almost immediately. You see, 
 Pere Royer, that one is famous beyond the limits of one's own village." 
 
 " Do not flatter yourself, my child. On the contrary, M. Berthon 
 has just been asking us who you are." 
 
 " He has been asking who Marguerite Vanne is, you mean : that is 
 possible. But he knew N^morosa, and admitted that she was immortal. 
 He admitted it a little reluctantly even ; for he had the kindness to say 
 that he would have liked to immortalise me himself" ■ 
 
 A unanimous shout of laughter greeted this announcement. " Upon 
 a milk-jug ? " asked one satirist, " or upon a flower-pot ] Can't you see 
 the public of the year 3,000 gazing reverently at a specimen of barbotiTie 
 signed by the illustrious Berthon 1 Subject — meeting of N6morosa and 
 the artist." 
 
N]gMOROSA. 303 
 
 A fire of similar pleasantries fell from all sides ujDon poor Victor, 
 ■who bore it philosophically enough. But Marguerite was pleased to 
 take up the cudgels on his behalf. 
 
 " I always thought," said she, " that an artist might use any material 
 that came to his hand. The old Italian masters worked upon the walls 
 of houses ; and did not Raphael paint one of his finest pictures upon the 
 top of a cask ? " 
 
 " Come, come ! you are not going to compare a fresco to the blurred 
 outlines of a bit of harbotine, I hope. I say nothing against barhotine : 
 it is pretty, the colours are not bad, and it has a good glaze ; but that 
 kind of thing is not art. No, .no, my dear Nemorosa ; you may be 
 thankful that your chance of going down to posterity does not rest with 
 the manufacture of Montigny ware. If such articles were to last for 
 ever, what would become of trade 1 Pots and pans are made to be 
 broken." 
 
 "And the varnish on the canvas cracks," said M. Iloyer, "and the 
 colours fade ; and so do youth and fame, and the roses on the cheeks of 
 girls who sit up too late. Go to bed, my child — you ought to have been 
 there an hour ago — and tell Madame Vanne that if she can spare her 
 donkey to carry my tent and easel a mile or two to-morrow afternoon, I 
 shall be much indebted to her. Now be off ! " 
 
 Marguerite shrugged her shoulders, and pouted a little. " An y one 
 who heard you would think I was a baby ! " she cried. Nevertheless, 
 she slid off the arm of M. Royer's chair obediently, and, with a sweeping 
 reverence to the company, vanished. 
 
 A few minutes later Victor Berthon followed her example. He was 
 lighting his pipe on the doorstep, preparatory to making a start home- 
 wards, when one of the young fellows who had been sitting near him 
 thought proper to slip out after him and catch him by the sleeve. 
 
 " Listen, my good Victor," said he. I saw you looking at N6morosa 
 in an odd way just now, when she was perched up beside old Royer 
 there. Ah, vieux farceur ! I know you. Yoti were asking yourself 
 what all that meant, eh ? "Well ; it meant nothing at all. Old Royer 
 treats her as a child. He has known her since she was eight years old, 
 and he forgets that she is now eighteen. The rest of us forget it too. 
 I don't know whether she always forgets it herself or not ; but that is 
 not the question. There are a score of tis here who consider her as our 
 sister; and if it should enter into the head of any handsome young 
 painter upon pottery to permit himself impertinences in that quarter — 
 you understand ? " 
 
 " The devil fly away with you fellows ! " shouted Victor. " Who is 
 thinking of being impertinent to your N^morosa ? I don't care if I 
 never see her again in my life. Do you think I am such a fool as to 
 confound Mdlle. Vanne with one of the young ladies whom one commonly 
 meets in your society ? You have sworn to make me lose my temper 
 to-night among you." 
 
304 NEMOEOSA. 
 
 " And it seems that we have succeeded at last," remarked the other 
 drily. " My poor friend, you have fallen in love with N^morosa ; there 
 is no doubt about it.'' 
 
 M. Berthon deigned no reply to this absurd accusation, and strode 
 away without so much as saying "Good night." Perhaps it was an 
 absurd accusation ; perhaps he was not in love with this picturesque 
 peasant-girl ; perhaps her championship of ceramic artists had not sent a 
 thrill of pleasure through him; perhaps he had not felt ridiculously 
 jealous of M. Eoyer, who was old enough to be the girl's grandfather; 
 and perhaps, as he had averred, he did not care if he never saw her again 
 in his life. It all came to much the same thing in the long run j for 
 before ten days were past, Victor Berthon had gone so far as to say to 
 himself that he would either marry Marguerite Vanne or remain for 
 ever single. The very form of this asseveration was a sufficient testi- 
 mony to the seriousness of his attachment ; for though Victor was not 
 without experience of the tender passion, he had never before contem- 
 plated even the distant eventuality of marriage. But the possession of 
 a settled income is apt to subvert a man's whole views of life and its 
 contingencies ; and a few excursions into the heart of the forest under 
 N^morosa's guidance, a few studies from nature, dashed off while she 
 glanced over his shoulder, a chance meeting or two, and sundry brief 
 interviews on Madame Vanne's doorstep in the starlight had done the 
 rest. The young artist's mind was made up ; and, although he did not 
 communicate his intentions to anybody, he had the entire little society 
 of Marlotte for his confidant. M. Royer knew all about it, and approved 
 of it ; as did also Madame Vanne, a hard-headed, soft-hearted old person, 
 who, after making certain preliminary inquiries at Montigny and else- 
 where, became a warm supporter of the pleasant young fellow who had 
 without much difficulty wormed himself into her good graces. As for 
 the confraternity of artists, they had been in possession of this open 
 secret from the outset, and, being good-natured fellows in the main, they 
 did not chaff their comrade more than was fair and reasonable under the 
 circumstances, while in the presence of N^morosa nothing could exceed 
 their respectful unconsciousness of the destiny that appeared to be in 
 store for her. Poor innocent ! poor little angel ! — they contemplated 
 her from that essentially French standpoint which will have it that 
 every woman must either be a saint or a very unequivocal kind of sinner, 
 and they watched the unfolding blossom of her life with the tender, 
 sentimental, and half-regretful interest which such spectacles have the 
 privilege of arousing. It was a pretty little idyl that they were looking 
 on at — a pretty little leisurely idyl, played under the greenwood tree to 
 the accompaniment of rustling leaves and cooing doA'es and the echoing 
 strokes of the woodman's axe and the far-away sound of human voices 
 and laughter in rocky dells and shady lanes. Victor took things easily, 
 not hurrying the progress of his courtship, and they were grateful to him 
 for his forbearance. At the end of the fine season, doubtless, there 
 
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