September

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_ IN THE BAG, August 30th.

At the village shop you may procure milk, butter, eggs, peppermints, trowsers, sun-bonnets, marbles, coloured handkerchiefs, and a number of other necessaries, including the London papers. But if you wish to pick and choose, you had better buy trowsers than the London papers; for this is less likely to bring you into conflict with the lady who owns the shop and asserts a prior claim on its conveniences. One of us (I will call him X) went ashore and asked for a London 'daily.' "Here's _Lloyd's Weekly News_ for you," said the lady; "but you can't have the daily, for I haven't finished reading it myself." "Very well," said I, when this was reported; "if I cannot read the news I want, I will turn to and write it." So I descended to the shop, and asked for a bottle of ink; since, oddly enough, there was none to be found on board. The lady produced a bottle and a pen. "But I don't want the pen," I objected. "They go together," said she: "Whatever use is a bottle of ink without a pen?" For the life of me I could discover no answer to this. I paid my penny, and on returning with my purchases to the boat, I propounded the following questions:--

(1) _Quaere_. If, as the lady argued, a bottle of ink be useless without a pen, by what process of reasoning did she omit a sheet of paper from her pennyworth?

(2) Suppose that I damage or wear out this pen before exhausting the bottle of ink, can she reasonably insist on my taking a second bottle as a condition of acquiring a second pen?

(3) Suppose, on the other hand, that (as I compute) one pen will outlast two and a half bottles of ink; that one bottle will distil thirty thousand words; and that the late James Anthony Froude (who lived close by) drew his supply of writing materials from this shop: how many unused pens (at a guess) must that distinguished man have accumulated in the process of composing his _History of England?_

We sailed into Salcombe on Saturday evening, in a hired yacht of twenty-eight tons, after beating around the Start and Prawl against a sou'westerly wind and a strong spring tide. Now the tide off the Start has to be studied. To begin with, it does not coincide in point of time with the tide inshore. The flood, or east stream, for instance, only starts to run there some three hours before it is high water at Salcombe; but, having started, runs with a vengeance, or, to be more precise, at something like three knots an hour during the high springs; and the consequence is a very lively race. Moreover, the bottom all the way from Start Point to Bolt Tail is extremely rough and irregular, which means that some ten or twelve miles of vicious seas can be set going on very short notice. Altogether you may spend a few hours here as uncomfortably as anywhere up or down Channel, with the single exception of Portland Race. If you turn aside for Salcombe, there is the bar to be considered; and Salcombe bar is a danger to be treated with grave respect. The _Channel Pilot_ will tell us why:--

"There is 8 ft. water at L.W. springs on the bar at the entrance, but there are patches of 6 feet. Vessels drawing 20 ft. can cross it (_when the sea is smooth_) at H.W. springs, and those of 16 ft. at H.W. neaps. In S. gales there is a breaking, heavy sea, and no vessel should then attempt the bar; in moderate S. winds vessels may take it at high water."

The bearing of these observations on the present narrative will appear anon. For the present, entering Salcombe with plenty of water and a moderate S.W. breeze, we had nothing to distract our attention from the beauty of the spot. I suppose it to be the most imposing river-entrance on the south coast; perhaps the most imposing on any of the coasts of Britain. But being lazy and by habit a shirker of word-painting, I must have recourse to the description given in Mr. Arthur Underhill's _Our Silver Streak_, most useful and pleasant of handbooks for yachtsmen cruising in the Channel:--

"As we approach Salcombe Head (part of Bolt Head), its magnificent form becomes more apparent. It is said to be about four hundred and thirty feet in height, but it looks very much more. Its base is hollowed out into numerous caverns, into which the sea dashes, while the profile of the head, often rising some forty or fifty feet sheer from the water, slopes back at an angle of about forty-five degrees in one long upward sweep, broken in the most fantastic way into numerous pinnacles and needles, which remind one forcibly of the _aiguilles_ of the valley of Chamounix. I do not think that any headland in the Channel is so impressive as this."

As we passed it, its needles stood out darkly against a rare amber sky-- such a glow as is only seen for a brief while before a sunset following much rain; and it had been raining, off and on, for a week past. I daresay that to the weatherwise this glow signified yet dirtier weather in store; but we surrendered ourselves to the charm of the hour. Unconscious of their doom the little victims played. We crossed the bar, sailed past the beautiful house in which Froude spent so many years, sailed past the little town, rounded a point, saw a long quiet stretch of river before us, and cast anchor in deep water. The address at the head of this paper is no sportive invention of mine. You may verify it by the Ordnance Map. We were in the Bag.

I awoke that night to the hum of wind in the rigging and the patter of rain on deck. It blew and rained all the morning, and at noon took a fresh breath and began to blow viciously. After luncheon we abandoned our project of walking to Bolt Head, and chose such books from the cabin library as might decently excuse an afternoon's siesta. A scamper of feet fetched me out of my berth and up on deck. By this time a small gale was blowing, and to our slight dismay the boat had dragged her anchors and carried us up into sight of Kingsbridge. Luckily our foolish career was arrested for the moment; and, still more luckily, within handy distance of a buoy--laid there, I believe, for the use of vessels under quarantine. We carried out a hawser to this buoy, and waited until the tide should ease and allow us to warp down to it. Our next business was with the peccant anchors. We had two down--the best anchor and kedge; and supposed at first that the kedge must have parted. But a couple of minutes at the capstan reassured us. It was the kedge which had been holding us, to the extent of its small ability. And the Bag is an excellent anchorage after all, but not if you happen to get your best anchor foul of its chain. We hauled up, cleared, warped down to the buoy; and then, hoisting mizzen and headsails, cast loose and worked back to our old quarters.

The afternoon's amusement, though exciting enough in its way, was not what we had come to Salcombe to seek. And since the weather promised nothing better, and already a heap of more or less urgent letters must be gathering dust in the post office at Plymouth, we resolved to beat over the bar at high water next morning (_this_ morning), and, as Mr. Lang puts it, 'know the brine salt on our lips, and the large air again': for there promised to be plenty of both between Bolt Head and the Mewstone.

'Shun delays, they breed remorse,' and 'Time wears all his locks before' (or, as the Fourth-form boy translated it in pentameter, "_Tempus habet nullat posteriori comas_"). The fault was mine for wasting an invaluable hour among the 'shy traffickers' of Salcombe. By the time we worked down to the bar the tide had been ebbing for an hour and a half. The wind still blew strong from the south-west, and the seas on the bar were not pleasant to contemplate. Let alone the remoter risk of scraping on one of the two shallow patches which diversify the west (and only practicable) side of the entrance, it one of those big fellows happened to stagger us at the critical moment of 'staying' it would pretty certainly mean disaster. Also the yacht (as I began by saying) was a hired one, and the captain tender about his responsibility. Rather ignominiously, therefore, we turned tail; and just as we did so, a handsome sea, arched and green, the tallest of the lot, applauded our prudence. All the same, our professional pride was wounded. To stay at anchor is one thing: to weigh and stand for the attempt and then run home again 'hard up,' as a sailor would say, is quite another. There was a Greek mariner, the other day, put on his trial with one or two comrades for murder and mutiny on the high seas. They had disapproved of their captain's altering the helm, and had pitched him incontinently overboard. On being asked what he had to say in his defence, the prisoner merely cast up his hands and sobbed, "Oh, cursed hour in which we put about!" We recalled this simple but apposite story.

Having seen to our anchor and helped to snug down the mainsail, I went below in the very worst of tempers, to find the cabin floor littered with the contents of a writing-case and a box of mixed biscuits, which had broken loose in company. As I stooped to collect the _debris_, this appeal (type-written) caught my eye:--

"Dear Sir,--Our paper is contemplating a Symposium of literary and eminent men--"

(Observe the distinction.)

"--On the subject of 'What is your favourite Modern Lyric?' I need not say how much interest would attach to the opinion of one who," etc.

I put my head up the companion and addressed a friend who was lacing tight the cover of the mainsail viciously, with the help of his teeth.

"Look here, X," I said. "What is your favourite Modern Lyric?"

"That one," he answered (still with the lace between his teeth), "which begins--

"'Curse the people, blast the people,
Damn the lower orders!'"

X as a rule calls himself a Liberal-Conservative: but a certain acerbity of temper may be forgiven in a man who has just assisted (against all his instincts) in an act of poltroonery. He explained, too, that it was a genuine, if loosely remembered, quotation from Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer. "Yet in circumstances of peril," he went on, "and in moments of depression, you cannot think what sustenance I have derived from those lines."

"Then you had best send them up," said I, "to the _Daily Post_. It is conducting a Symposium."

"If two wrongs do not make a right," he answered tartly, "even less will an assembly of deadly dry persons make something to drink."

That evening, in the cabin, we held a symposium on our own account and in the proper sense of the term, while the rain drummed on the deck and the sky-lights.

X said, "The greatest poem written on love during these fifty years--and we agree to accept love as the highest theme of lyrical poetry--is George Meredith's _Love in the Valley_. I say this and decline to argue about it."

"Nor am I disposed to argue about it," I answered, "for York Powell--peace to his soul for a great man gone--held that same belief. In his rooms in Christ Church, one night while _The Oxford Book of Verse_ was preparing and I had come to him, as everyone came, for counsel. . . . I take it, though, that we are not searching for the absolute best but for our own prime favourite. You remember what Swinburne says somewhere of Hugo's _Gastibelza_:--

"'Gastibelza, l'homme a la carabine,
Chantait ainsi:
Quelqu'un a-t-il connu Dona Sabine?
Quelqu'un d'ici?
Dansez, chantez, villageois! la nuit gagne
Le mont Falou--
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou!'

"'The song of songs which is Hugo's,' he calls it; and goes on to ask how often one has chanted or shouted or otherwise declaimed it to himself, on horseback at full gallop or when swimming at his best as a boy in holiday time; and how often the matchless music, ardour, pathos of it have not reduced his own ambition to a sort of rapturous and adoring despair--yes, and requickened his old delight in it with a new delight in the sense that he will always have this to rejoice in, to adore, and to recognise as something beyond the reach of man. Well, that is the sense in which our poem should be our favourite poem. Now, for my part, there's a page or so of Browning's _Saul_--"

"What do you say to Meredith's _Phoebus with Admetus?_" interrupted X.

I looked up at him quickly, almost shamefacedly. "Now, how on earth did you guess--"

X laid down his pipe, stared up at the sky-light, and quoted, almost under his breath:--

"'Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!'"

Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith--whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only 'dull fools' suppose--beside the great poets who have been his contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later.

"Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have hold of a man. You know--as surely, for example, as while you are listening to Handel--that the stuff is masculine, and great at that."

"That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why? Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand write _Christabel_ and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may, on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as the saying is) nobly to the last, and vex us all the while with his asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet. Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is, They have philosophy."

"You are on the old tack again: the old 'to katholoy'!"

"Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch land, so you may e'en fill another pipe and play the interlocutor. . . . You remember my once asking why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for that their stuff is rotten we agreed). The reason is, they are engaged in mistaking the part for the whole, and that part a non-essential one; they are setting up the present potency of Great Britain as a triumphant and insolent exception to laws which (if we believe in any gods better than anarchy and chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and may even regulate 'the most ancient heavens.' You may remember my expressed contempt for a recent poem which lauded Henry VIII because--"

"'He was lustful, he was vengeful, he was hot and hard and proud;
But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.'

"--A worse error, to my mind, than Froude's, who merely idolised him for chastising the clergy. Well, after our discussion, I asked myself this question: 'Why do we not as a great Empire-making people, ruling the world for its good, assassinate the men who oppose us?' We do not; the idea revolts us. But why does it revolt us?

"We send our armies to fight, with the certainty (if we think at all) that we are sending a percentage to be killed. We recently sent out two hundred thousand with the sure and certain knowledge that some thousands must die; and these (we say) were men agonising for a righteous cause. Why did it not afflict us to send them?--whereas it would have afflicted us inexpressibly to send a man to end the difficulty by putting a bullet or a knife into Mr. Kruger, who _ex hypothesi_ represented an unrighteous cause, and who certainly was but one man.

"Why? Because a law above any that regulates the expansion of Great Britain says, 'That shalt do no murder.' And that law, that Universal, takes the knife or the pistol quietly, firmly, out of your hand. You send a battalion, with Tom Smith in it, to fight Mr. Kruger's troops; you know that some of them must in all likelihood perish; but, thank your stars, you do not know their names. Tom Smith, as it happens, is killed; but had you known with absolute certainty that Tom Smith would be killed, you could not have sent him. You must have withdrawn him, and substituted some other fellow concerning whom your prophetic vision was less uncomfortably definite. You can kill Tom Smith if he has happened to kill Bob Jones: you are safe enough then, being able to excuse yourself--how? By Divine law again (as you understand it). Divine law says that whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed--that is to say, by you: so you can run under cover and hang Tom Smith. But when Divine law does not protect you, you are powerless. At the most you can send him off to take his ten-to-one chance in a battalion, and when you read his name in the returns, come mincing up to God and say: 'So poor old Tom's gone! How the deuce was _I_ to know?'

"I say nothing of the cowardice of this, though it smells to Heaven. I merely point out that this law 'Thou shalt do no murder'--this Universal-- must be a tremendous one, since even you, my fine swashbuckling, Empire-making hero, are so much afraid of it that you cannot send even a Reservist to death without throwing the responsibility on luck--_nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_--and have not even the nerve, without its sanction, to stick a knife into an old man whom you accuse as the wicked cause of all this bloodshed. If you believed in your accusations, why couldn't you do it? Because a universal law forbade you, and one you have to believe in, truculent Jingo though you be. Why, consider this; your poets are hymning King Edward the Seventh as the greatest man on earth, and yet, if he might possess all Africa to-morrow at the expense of signing the death-warrant of one innocent man who opposed that possession, he could not write his name. His hand would fall numb. Such power above kings has the Universal, though silly poets insult it who should be its servants.

"Now of all the differences between men and women there is none more radical than this: that a man naturally loves law, whereas a woman naturally hates it and never sees a law without casting about for some way of dodging it. Laws, universals, general propositions--her instinct with all of them is to get off by wheedling the judge. So, if you want a test for a masculine poet, examine first whether or no he understands the Universe as a thing of law and order."

"Then, by your own test, Kipling--the Jingo Kipling--is a most masculine poet, since he talks of little else."

"I will answer you, although I believe you are not serious. At present Mr. Kipling's mind, in search of a philosophy, plays with the contemplation of a world reduced to law and order; the law and order being such as universal British rule would impose. There might be many worse worlds than a world so ruled, and in verse the prospect can be made to look fair enough:--"

"'Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!'

"Clean and wholesome teaching it seems, persuading civilised men that, as they are strong, so the obligation rests on them to set the world in order, carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its bloodstained corners. Yet as a political philosophy it lacks the first of all essentials, and as Mr. Kipling develops it we begin to detect the flaw in the system:--

"'The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is his own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.
Etc.'

"What is wrong with this? Why, simply that it leaves Justice altogether out of account. The system has no room for it; even as it has no room for clemency, mansuetude; forbearance towards the weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it--even verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations are obliged to put constraint upon uncivilised ones which shock their moral sense beyond a certain point--as by cannibalism or human sacrifice. But such interference should stand upon a nice sense of the offender's rights, and in practice does so stand. The custom of polygamy, for instance (as practised abroad), horribly offends quite a large majority of His Majesty's lieges; yet Great Britain tolerates polygamy even in her own subject races. Neither polygamy nor uncleanliness can be held any just excuse for turning a nation out of its possessions.

"And another reason for insisting upon the strictest reading of justice in these dealings between nations is the temptation which the least laxity offers to the stronger--a temptation which Press and Pulpit made no pretence of resisting during the late war. 'We are better than they,' was the cry; 'we are cleanlier, less ignorant; we have arts and a literature, whereas they have none; we make for progress and enlightenment, while they are absurdly conservative, if not retrogressive. Therefore the world will be the better by our annexing their land, and substituting our government for theirs. Therefore our cause, too, is the juster.' But therefore it is nothing of the sort. A dirty man may be in the right, and a clean man in the wrong; an ungodly man in the right, and a godly man in the wrong; and the most specious and well-intentioned system which allows justice to be confused with something else will allow it to be stretched, even by well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying and flat piracy.

"Are you trying to prove," demanded X, "that Mr. Kipling is a feminine poet?"

"No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion that in his worse mood he is a sham-masculine one. The 'Recessional' proves that, man of genius that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. But too often he is trying to dodge it with sham law. A woman would not appeal to law at all: she would boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an undoubted but misguided man, has to find some other way out; so he takes a twopenny-halfpenny code as the mood seizes him--be it the code of a barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew--and hymns it lustily against the universal code: and the pity and the sin of it is that now and then by flashes--as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat'--he sees the truth.

"You remember the figure of the Cave which Socrates invented and explained to Glaucon in Plato's 'Republic'? He imagined men seated in a den which has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are turned to the wall of the den, and they sit with necks and legs chained so that they cannot move. Behind them, and between them and the light, runs a raised way with a low wall along it, 'like the screen over which marionette-players show their puppets.' Along this wall pass men carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, others silent; and as the procession goes by the chained prisoners see only the shadows passing across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the voices echoed from it, suppose that the sound comes from the shadows.

"To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse one might take this famous picture and make one fearsome addition to it. There sits (one might go on to say) among the prisoners a young man different from them in voice and terribly different to look upon, because he has two pairs of eyes, the one turned towards the light and realities, the other towards the rock-face and the shadows. Using, now one, now the other of these two pairs of eyes, he never knows with which at the moment he is gazing, whether on the realities or on the shadows, but always supposes what he sees at the moment to be the realities, and calls them 'Things as They Are.' Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of the greater vision, and he speaks enchantingly when he discourses of the shadows on the rock, thereby deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom his genius has played the crimp to, enticing them into the den and hocussing and chaining them there. For, seeing the shadows pass to the interpretation of such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed behold Things as They Are, and that these are the only things worth knowing.

"The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:--"

"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God,
I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three;
I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell,
And--ye--would--make--a Knight o' me!'"

"Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this for his pains:--

"'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old--I am
seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in
heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye.
I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do--with a
palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as
anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other
times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.'

"He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole--his novels and poems together--this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise it--for it is far too multifarious and complex--but to say the first and the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his own into the warning, _ne tu pueri contempseris annos_. He has never grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish, for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':--"

"'Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house.'

"To him this is at once a duty and a 'sustainment supreme,' and perhaps the bitterest words this master of Comedy has written are for the seniors of the race who--

"'On their last plank,
Pass mumbling it as nature's final page,'

"And cramp the young with their rules of 'wisdom,' lest, as he says scornfully:--

"'Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay,
Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,
And ancients musical at close of day.'

"'Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet:--

"'Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.'

"But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges gall, is usually cheerful with the cheerfulness of health. Sometimes he consciously expounds it; oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always (I believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at the base of everything he writes.

"The next thing to be noted is that he does not hope in youth because it is a period of license and waywardness, but because it is a period of imagination--

"'Days, when the ball of our vision
Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,'

"And because it therefore has a better chance of grasping what is Universal than has the prudential wisdom of age which contracts its eye to particulars and keeps it alert for social pitfalls--the kind of wisdom seen at its best (but its best never made a hero) in Bubb Doddington's verses:--

"'Love thy country, wish it well,
_Not with too intense a care_;
'Tis enough that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.'

"Admirable caution! Now contrast it for a moment with, let us say, the silly quixotic figure of Horatius with the broken bridge behind him:--

"'Round turned he, as not deigning
Those craven ranks to see:
Nought spake he to Lars Porsena,
To Sextus nought spake he;
But he saw on Palatinus
The white porch of his home--'

"I protest I have no heart to go on with the quotation: so unpopular is its author, just now, and so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the boyish tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what Mr. Meredith chooses to trust rather than Bubb Doddington's, and he trusts it as being the likelier to apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius with an army in front and a broken bridge behind him was a nobler figure than Bubb Doddington wishing his country well but not with too intense a care; and not only nobler but--this is the point--more obedient to divine law, more expressive of that which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trusts youth, it is as a time of imagination; and if he trusts imagination, it is as a faculty for apprehending the Universal in life--that is to say, a divine law behind its shows and simulacra.

"In 'The Empty Purse' you will find him instructing youth towards this law; but that there may be no doubt of his own belief in it, as an order not only controlling men but overriding angels and demons, first consider his famous sonnet, 'Lucifer in Starlight'--to my thinking one of the finest in our language:--

"'On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of Heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.'"

"Suppose my contention--that poetry should concern itself with universals--to be admitted: suppose we all agreed that Poetry is an expression of the universal element in human life, that (as Shelley puts it) 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.' There remains a question quite as important: and that is, How to recognise the Universal when we see it? We may talk of a Divine law, or a Divine order--call it what we will--which regulates the lives of us poor men no less than the motions of the stars, and binds the whole universe, high and low, into one system: and we may have arrived at the blessed wish to conform with this law rather than to strive and kick against the pricks and waste our short time in petulant rebellion. So far, so good: but how are we to know the law? How, with the best will in the world, are we to distinguish order from disorder? What assurance have we, after striving to bring ourselves into obedience, that we have succeeded? We may agree, for example, with Wordsworth that Duty is a stern daughter of the Voice of God, and that through Duty 'the most ancient heavens,' no less than we ourselves, are kept fresh and strong. But can we always discern this Universal, this Duty? What is the criterion? And what, when we have chosen, is the sanction of our choice?

"A number of honest people will promptly refer us to revealed religion. 'Take (they say) your revealed religion on faith, and there you have the law and the prophets, and your universals set out for you, and your principles of conduct laid down. What more do you want?'

"To this I answer, 'We are human, and we need also the testimony of Poetry; and the priceless value of poetry for us lies in this, that it does _not_ echo the Gospel like a parrot. If it did, it would be servile, superfluous. It is ministerial and useful because it approaches truth by another path. It does not say ditto to Mr. Burke--it corroborates. And it corroborates precisely because it does not say ditto, but employs a natural process of its own which it employed before ever Christianity was revealed. You may decide that religion is enough for you, and that you have no need of poetry; but if you have any intelligent need of poetry it will be because poetry, though it end in the same conclusions, reaches them by another and separate path.

"Now (as I understand him) Mr. Meredith connects man with the Universal, and teaches him to arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding him that he is a child of Earth. 'You are amenable,' he says in effect, 'to a law which all the firmament obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied to one planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would apprehend the law, study your mother, Earth, which also obeys it. Search out her operations; honour your mother as legitimate children, and let your honour be the highest you can pay--that of making yourself docile to her teaching. So will you stand the best chance, the only likely chance, of living in harmony with that Will which over-arches Earth and us all.'

"In this doctrine Mr. Meredith believes passionately; so let there be no mistake about the thoroughness with which he preaches it. Even prayer, he tells us in one of his novels, is most useful when like a fountain it falls back and draws refreshment from earth for a new spring heavenward:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The breast (to quote from another poem)--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you," said X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM A CORNISH WINDOW, _Thursday, Sept. 2nd_.

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

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

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

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

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

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