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Title: Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett Author: Maurice Hewlett Release Date: July 4, 2021 [eBook #65757] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAST ESSAYS OF MAURICE HEWLETT*** E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) from page images digitized by the Google Books Library Project (https://books.google.com and generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/) Note: Images of the original pages are available through HathiTrust Digital Library. See https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015031235537 Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett London William Heinemann, Ltd First Published 1924 Second Impression May 1924 Printed in England at The Westminster Press, Harrow Road London, W.9 NOTE Lovers of Mr. Hewlett’s work will understand that these Essays have not been subjected to the severe revision which Mr. Hewlett would undoubtedly have given them before publication in this book. In one or two minor points his Executors have felt doubtful about the deletion or insertion of a passage, but in these cases the decision has always been the same—that his readers would prefer to have the Essays in Mr. Hewlett’s original form. Thanks are due to the editors of “The Times” and “The Evening Standard”; “The London Mercury,” “The Cornhill Magazine,” “The Nineteenth Century,” and other periodicals, for permission to reprint certain of these Essays. CONTENTS PAGE A Return to the Nest 1 “And now, O Lord ...” 7 The Death of the Sheep 12 The Solitary Reaper 16 Interiors 19 The Plight of Their Graces 25 The Village 30 The Curtains 39 Happiness in the Village 43 Otherwhereness 48 The Journey to Cockaigne 54 Suicide of the Novel 59 Immortal Works 65 Ballad-Origins 69 Real and Temporal Creation 77 Peasant Poets 82 Doggerel or Not 88 The Iberian’s House 93 Scandinavian England 99 Our Blood and State in 1660 103 “Merrie” England 109 Endings—I 115 “ II 124 Beaumarchais 132 The Cardinal de Retz 148 “L’Abbesse Universelle”: Madame de Maintenon 166 Pierre de L’Estoile 172 La Bruyère 191 Couleur de Rose 211 Art and Heart 217 A Novel and a Classic 223 The Other Dorothy 229 Realism with a Difference 247 Mr. Pepys His Apple-cart 253 One of Lamb’s Creditors 269 Crocus and Primrose 278 Daffodils 285 Windflowers 291 Tulips 297 Summer 304 The Lingering of the Light 310 A RETURN TO THE NEST Why it was that my great-grandfather left the village in Somerset in and on which his forefathers, I believe, had lived from the time of Domesday, why he forsook agriculture and cider for the law, married in Shoreditch, settled in Fetter Lane, went back to Somerset to bury his first child, and returned to London to beget my grandfather, be ultimately responsible for me, and break finally with his family cradle, I never understood until the other day when, in good company, I took the road, left the bare hills—how softly contoured, how familiar, and how dear—of South Wilts, topped the great rock on which Shaftesbury lifts, dived down into Blackmore Vale, and so entered my county of origin at its nearest point, namely Wincanton (where I saw, by the by, a palæolithic man alive and walking the world)—to find myself in a land of corn and wine and oil, or so it seemed, such a land as those who love deep loam, handsome women, fine manners and a glut of apples more than most things in this life (and there are few things better), would never leave if they could help it. That is a long sentence with which to begin an essay, but it expresses what I did, and very much how I did it. In a word, I left Broadchalke and drove to Yeovil, within ten miles of which thriving town the family to which I belong itself throve and cultivated its virtues, if any. My great-grandfather and I were not acquainted; but I remember my grandfather perfectly well, and can testify that he had virtues. He was on the tall side of the mean height, a deep- chested, large-headed old man, with hair snowy white, a rosy face, and cool, extremely honest blue eyes. He was hasty in his movements (and in his temper), trundled about rather than walked. I used to think as a boy that it could not be wholesome, and must be most inconvenient, to have such clean hands, such dazzling linen, and such polished pink filberts instead of finger-nails. I never saw him otherwise dressed than in black broadcloth, with shoes polished like looking-glasses, and a shirt-collar just so starched that it stood up enclosing his chin, yet so little that it took on the contours of his cheeks where they pressed it. He had a deep voice, with a cheer in it. I remember—for he had little else to say to me—how he used to put his hand on my head and murmur, as if to himself, “My boy, my boy,” in such a way that I felt in leaving him, as perhaps Jacob did with Isaac, that it would be impossible ever to do anything wrong again and betray such a noble affection. One other thing struck me, even then, young and ungracious as I was, and that was his extraordinarily fine manners. Since then, whenever I have considered manners, I have compared them with his. He is for me the staple of courtesy. They were the manners which bring a man more than half-way to meet you. He used them to all the world: to me, to the servants, to the crossing-sweeper, to the clerks from his office who used to come for papers when he was too old to go into London. I know now where he got them. They were traditional West Country manners; and sure enough when I walked the village street where, if my grandfather never walked, my great-grandfather did, the first man of whom I asked information met me with just the same forwardness of service, and seemed to know tentacularly what precisely lay behind the question which I put him. I had always been proud of my grandfather; now I was proud of my county. For if manners don’t make a man, they make a gentleman. Let me call the village Bindon St. Blaise, to give myself freedom to say that I don’t remember to have seen one more beautiful than it looked on that sunny autumn day, drowsing, winking in the heat of noon. The houses are of stone—and that stone saturated, as it seemed, in centuries of sunlight. Yes, I have seen Bibury in Gloucestershire, and Broadway in Worcestershire, Alfriston in Sussex, and Teffont in Wilts; and Clovelly, and Boscastle, and Ponteland, and many another haunt of peace; but never yet a place of grey and gold so established, so decent in age, so recollected, so dignified as Bindon St. Blaise, which my great-grandfather unwillingly, I am sure, forsook in 1780 or thereabouts. Nobody could tell me which of its many fair houses he had forsworn. The fancy could play with them at large. There was a long-roofed farm with gables many and deep, with two rows of mullioned, diamonded windows, each with its perfect dripstone, which I should like to think was once ours, except that it faces north, and therefore has gathered more moss than we should care about now. Perhaps it was ours, and he left it, seeking the sun. But would he have gone to look for it in Fetter Lane? No, no. I incline, however, to a smaller house facing full south, with a walled garden full of apple trees, and a pear tree reaching to the chimney stack, and a portico—whereover a room looking straight into the eye of the sun. There was a radiant eighteenth-century house for a man to have been born in! Could I have brought myself to leave such a nest? Well, we shall see. [Pg 1] [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] After luncheon at the Boulter Arms (let us call it), and an indication where we should find “the Great House,” we went instead to see the house of God, which lay on our road to it, almost within its park. Like all that I have seen in Somerset, it is a spacious, well-ordered church, mainly perpendicular, with the square tower and lace-worked windows which belong to the type. The churchyard was beautifully kept, planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order, numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce, in death were sprawled upon by their masters. Hannah Goodbody, for instance, “for forty years in the service of the Right Hon. John Charles Ferdinand, sixth Earl Boulter, Viscount and Baron Boulter of Bindon St. Blaise”—had she not earned quietus, and need all that be remembered against her? Percival Slade, “for twenty years Groom of the Chambers to Ferdinand Charles John, seventh Earl”; Matilda Swinton, housekeeper; Peter Wain, gamekeeper; Thomas Duffey, storekeeper—I began to see what had been the matter with my great-grandfather. Inside, the church revealed itself as a family vault so encumbered with the dead that the living must have been incommoded. In the midst of life they were in death indeed. Earls in effigy slept (like Priam’s sons in the Iliad) beside their chaste wives—flat in brasses, worn smooth in basalt, glaringly in plaster, as might be. A side-chapel was so full of them that the altar was crowded out: and why not? They were altar and sacrifice and deity in one. They spilled over on to the floor, splayed out on the walls in tablets as massy as houseleeks; and on the bosses of the vaulted roof one found the Boulter arms implanted in the heart of the Mystic Rose. O too much Boulter—but we were not shut of them yet. Discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies where the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble apartment, a withdrawing room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some club-chairs, and a deeply padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray, a match-stand—one missed them. There is, no doubt, a comic side to all this. “J’ai trente mille livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé de Bonport. The same amazement might come upon an entrenched Earl Boulter at any minute in the midst of his cushioned ease. Neither coat-armour nor a private stove will ward off the mortal chills. However, I forgive them their quality, but not their oppression of other people’s tombstones. For we too were oppressed, and not diverted. We were seeking our ancestors, but they were not here. They had fled to Fetter Lane, and I cannot blame them. The doubt about my great-grandfather is solved. He left the village of Bindon St. Blaise because he saw no other way of escape from an Earl on his tomb. He married, his wife bore him a son, which died young. Moved then by piety, he brought down the innocent to be buried, secure that upon that unknown life no great name could intrude. I should have done the same thing, I believe. “AND NOW, O LORD ...” “And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium, if better there be. Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered, dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient, bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same clay as the children of light. You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair and far they were come—but there they were at it, hammer and tongs. I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific, for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam, until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth. Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and oared away towards the bridge. I would have [Pg 5] [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] given a good deal to see that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings. What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky? Against that extreme example of the picturesque I could only advance that I had seen an elm-tree fall on a man in Gray’s Inn and kill him instantly. Or that, at the corner of Montague Place, I saw a runaway brewer’s dray barge into a four-wheeler. It missed the cab (on whose box the driver sat intact), but caught the horse full and knocked him and the shafts with him down some area steps across the pavement—where indeed he remained as in his stall until he could be built up from below. Extreme urgency had hurtled him down the steps, but no persuasion, fore or aft, would move him up again. So they built him up with trusses of straw. Nothing quite so good as that ever happened to me in a four- wheeler; but I haven’t done so badly either. I was driving once through Paris very early in the morning from the Gare de Lyon to Saint-Lazare. You are lucky to get a cab at all at such times, and I thought myself so to have a crazy old victoria and a horse tied together with string. We did not exactly go, but we got, into the rue Lafayette, where, without any warning, the victoria parted amidships. The driver on his box and two wheels went on with the horse; I and my companion fell forward into the road and the hood of the thing atop of us. I set up a yell, half-laughter, half-alarm, which caused our man to look round. When he saw what had happened he pulled up, and very carefully descended from his perch. Did he come to help us? Not so. He went directly and deliberately into a cabaret, without any notice taken of any kind, and we saw him put away a noggin, or whatever it is, of cognac. Then, with the same meditated method, he came to extricate his charges. They, however, had by that time extricated themselves, and considered themselves shut of him. When a Frenchman begins to drive anything, horse or motor, he seems to become intoxicated with progress, and content just to drive, not to guide, and never, at any rate, to stop. I have been the victim also of that generous ardour. It was in Algiers, ages ago, but not such ages that there were not tramcars along the sea-front. A baker in his covered cart was taking us to see some sight or other; and along the sea-front held his course magnificently indifferent to everything but the speed and joy of it all—aided not a little thereto by the fine afternoon, the business of the road, and the café tables hemming it, dense with customers. For it was the hour of absinthe. The trams flashed past us, coming or going, but little cared he for that. His object was to pass them, and he did pass one or two. Presently, however, at a curve he flogged his horse to pass one, on the wrong side, and just as he drew level, behold, another bearing swiftly down upon us! I confess that I blenched—but he did not; rather held on his way, and not until the last tick of our last minute on earth did it strike him that he must do something. And what did he do? He gave a wild shout and turned his horse sharply to the left. On his left was the overflow of a café—tin tables, bentwood chairs, syphons, opal-brimmed glasses, citizens in straw hats, with straws to their mouths, with cigars or newspapers—as thick as a flock of sheep. Into the midst of this, as once Don Quixote hurled himself, we plunged, horse, cart and passengers. Tables flew right and left, citizens were upset, glasses shivered, waiters wrung their hands. You never saw such a sight. And what did we do? I and my companion sat where we were, laughing ourselves ill, fighting for breath. Our driver slowly dismounted and looked round. He disregarded entirely the havoc he had made, and thought only of his honour. The driver of the tram was waiting for him. They met, and each lifted a bunched hand, in which all the finger-tips met and formed a little cage, to within an inch of the other’s nose. Then began des injures, which could only have ended in one of two ways. The arrival of the gendarmes decided in which of the two it was to end. THE DEATH OF THE SHEEP Alfred de Vigny, it seems, wrote a poem of stoic intention called La Mort du Loup, in which he apostrophised in his eloquent way that particular among other sublimes animaux. I have never read a line of it myself, but can well understand, when Sainte-Beuve regrets that it should have been written too much from the standpoint of seeking in nature at all costs subjects of meditative poetry, that Sainte-Beuve may have been right. The pathetic fallacy is a stumbling-block to the egoistic travellers we are. De Vigny on his dead wolf may have been lifted as far, or nearly as far, as Sterne on his dead donkey. Personally, I am busking for a short excursion on a dead sheep; but although there were elements of the high sublime in the climax, and of the horrid in the anti-climax of the tragedy, it is not on their account that I wish to relate it; rather because it seemed to me at the time to be representative, exactly to prefigure the countryside in which I saw it all done. It may stand up as type, or as symbol, of the fells and the life lived there; it has in it much of their lonely grandeur and savagery, of their harshness and plainness, of their entire absence of amenity; in a word, of their Nordic quality which does not so much insist as take for granted, in a way disconcerting to the Southerner, that neither man nor woman, dog nor sheep more or less makes one straw’s worth of difference to the day’s work, but that we are all alike rolled round, as Wordsworth said, “with stocks and stones and trees.” He himself, Nordic to the bone, saw nothing amiss with it; and no doubt it is all right. The sheep must have died rather suddenly in the late afternoon. When I went down the fell-side, at six, to fish in the river there was nothing but greenness to be seen; when I came up again, round about eight o’clock, I saw, or thought I saw, a grey rock where had been no rock before. It was the sheep, and quite cold. She must have felt her time at hand, withdrawn herself from her companions, and descended the hill deliberately to be alone with fate. Then, as I see it now, she stood there, facing down the hill, which in health her kind never does, and awaited the end of all things. Then, as the [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] chills crept up, she lay down and put her muzzle flatlings to that rooty earth which in life she had so diligently sought, and with the scent of it to comfort her (the best thing she knew) given up what ghost she had. She looked, as I stood over her, to be asleep—asleep with large, bare eyelids covering her blank amber eyes—and grandly indifferent to me and the rest of us. I left her, a warrior taking her rest. There she lay all night; and in the morning, her former mates feeding all about her, there she was. A windless silver rain was falling, straight as rods of glass. The fell was blanched with it, as with hoar frost; but she took no notice of the rain. A crow or two wheeled about, and bore off in the haze as soon as I showed myself. I went down to look at the sheep. She lay easily, her nose to the ground, while others of her nation gazed at me, foolishly serious, heaving at the side. Whatever had taken place at that supreme hour of yesterday evening, it had changed this corruptible into something other than a sheep. Sheep-nature had gone; she had not a sheep’s face any more. Her dead eyes looked wiselier through their lids than their empty ones unveiled, and fuller, too, as if charged with weightier news. Sterner, too, she appeared—with her lips curled back; the rabbit-look gone. There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race, and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall—much, I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale. In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However, I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife. She said—merely humouring my queasiness—that the remains should be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil. THE SOLITARY REAPER The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence. I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder- high, heavy in ear, bolt upright; a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social, but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests: the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy, thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies—all gone now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just begun. One man was reaping it. Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain: O listen! for the vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. It was indeed! For “she” was a machine. “It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said, munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The children’s holidays [Pg 14] [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is now a forlorn convention—a mere vestige like the human appendix. For the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles, as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands—that is all there is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the “solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage, and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears—why, then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors. I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s automata are not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart. INTERIORS Now is the time of year when you see interiors at their best—interiors and all that they involve and imply. The warmth and light of the earth concentre there, and he is unhappy—a figure for Hans Andersen—who has not hearth to reach and household gods to await him. Meantime, however he be hastening towards them, he will look, not without longing, through still uncurtained windows, mark the leaping fire, the shaded lamp, the tea-table and its attendant guests, and feel a glow and (I am sure) a momentary pang. Perhaps we are exorbitant lovers, perhaps we dread to know how lonely we are. I don’t care to say. But certainly we are creatures of the light; and where that is, there must we be. Familiar as we are with ourselves, and often enough bored to tears with the fellow, we are so blankly ignorant of each other that we can set no bounds to our curiosity. Thence comes part, at least, of the charm of lit interiors, that we think to surprise the inhabitants at their mysteries, catch them unawares and find out what they do when no one is looking at them—or they believe it. This is no case for Peeping Tom of Coventry: the need is much too urgent for unwholesome prying. Honestly, we require to be certified that we are not alone, unique in the world. Besides, inspection, you may say, is invited; or it is ignored. Your hastening steps down a village street at dusk may lead you through a picture- gallery, so free are the indwellers of their concerns: I have been gladdened by enchanting scenes through narrow window-frames or magic casements. Once it was of children—four little girls in pinafores, in a row behind a long table, all stooped over bread and milk in yellow bowls. The eldest I put at about ten; from her they ran down to four or five. So good, and so busy—“forty feeding like one!” But there were only four of them so far as I could see. As they stooped, their hair fell forward to curtain their faces. It was what the French call cendré, very glossy and smooth, and curling at the ends. They did not speak, just shovelled; but just as I passed I saw the little one at the bottom of the row perform the feat of turning a pretty large spoon completely round in a pretty small mouth; and as she did it she looked sideways at someone hidden from me (presiding, no doubt, over the tea-cups), to ascertain if she had been caught in the act. I declare that I saw triumph and anxiety contending in her eyes. And she had been caught, not by the president, but by her elder sister at the other end of the line. There too I saw reproof hovering. Happy, busy, neat little creatures! I tell you I felt myself an exile as I passed that haunt of peace and warmth! And so one always does, I believe, whatsoever welcome await you at the end of your journey. You ask—or I did—How come they to leave me outside in the dark? Don’t they know that I am one with them all? I have seen a mother reading to her girls at work, and longed to know what the book was, whether I had read it. If, as I believed, it was Miss Alcott, then I was all right. I have seen a boy rigging a three-masted vessel at a table, and knew by the way he was biting his tongue how happy he was. And I have seen comedies for Molière. I saw topers once in a tap-room, and a man in a cut-away coat and a shocking hat standing up and trying to make good and not succeeding. He did not belong to their parts—that was evident. I guessed him to be an outlier from some race-meeting or other. But there he was, inside, warm, and at least smelling the good cheer, and there he hoped to remain. He was doing it, or trying it, on his gift—which was tongues. I don’t suppose that I was thirty seconds passing that window, if so much; yet I could see decisively that he wanted them to believe in him, and how badly. They, a plain-faced, weather-seamed row, were not taking any. They were tired with their day’s work, leaned to the wall, their legs, I am sure, stretched out at length. Each with one horny hand held his pipe in its place; one and all they looked down at their feet, and listened, and judged him for a poor thing. The things you see! They are not always so pleasant. Sometimes they can be pretty tragic when you come to work them out. I passed a house once on the outskirts of a country town, and across a laurel hedge and iron fence, and between the branches of a monkey-puzzler, could see into a lighted room. Not much to be seen, you might think. Gas was burning in a central chandelier behind ground-glass globes. An engraving in a gilt frame on a green wall; something in a tall glass case before the window. I did not see the aspidestris, which must have been there. Then, on one side of the fire a man in a black coat, asleep, and on the other a woman in a white shawl, asleep—and that was all. Yes, but wait. I remember a trial at some Assizes years ago, where a man was arraigned for killing his wife. He pleaded not guilty, as of course; but the evidence was clear. He had killed her with a chopper in the scullery. He was convicted and sentenced to death, having had nothing to say. Before his execution, but not long before it, he told the chaplain of the gaol what he had done, and [Pg 18] [Pg 19] [Pg 20] [Pg 21] [Pg 22] why. He said that he had been married to the woman for twenty years; that they did not quarrel, but had got out of the way of speaking to one another, and, in fact, practically never did. It had not affected him for some time, he said; but one evening, suddenly, it did. One evening he was struck with horror, palsy-struck with the reflection: “Good God! I have sat dumb before this woman, she dumb before me, for twenty years, and we may have to sit so for another twenty.” He said that from that moment the thought never left him, that the horror of the prospect daunted him, and that by and by his heart failed him. He knew then that he could not do it. Some wild resentment, some hot inconsiderate grudge wrought madness in him—to that shocking end. By ordinary we do not use our imagination, and so escape very likely as much misery as happiness, glory and the like. But if the picture-making faculty awake of itself, blaze the future at us, so vividly that we cannot doubt of its truth—what then? Why, then, as often as not, despondency and madness. I had no envy of that gas-illumined room, and was contented to be a stranger to that disgruntled pair. I have seen other things of sharper savour, where passion clearly was involved, and, as it seemed, the creatures themselves uncurtained as well as the room they occupied. Two of them, related long ago, I shall always remember: the first, seen by chance from a window of the Army and Navy Stores, which looked out over the purlieus of Westminster towards the river. That showed me a mean second-floor bedroom just over the way, and a little maid-servant in it, down at heels, draggled, her cap awry, dusting and tidying up. All familiar, uninteresting, a matter of routine, until suddenly I saw her throw her head up—a gesture of real abandonment—and fall on her knees beside the bed. She buried her face in her bare arm; and I moved away. That was no place for me. Startling though, to be jolted out of the smooth apparatus of shopping, away from obsequious service and the accepted convention, in return for my half- crowns, that I was a temporary lord of the earth. All a sham, that; but there across the street, in a frowsy bedroom, was reality—a soul and its Disposer face to face. The other was revealed when, as a very young man, I had chambers in Old Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn. My bedroom there backed upon slums, but was above them, being almost in the roof of a tall old house. One night, very late, I was going to bed, and leaned far out of my window to get air and see the stars. Before, and below me rather, rose a dark wall of houses, entirely blind but for one lighted window. That revealed a shabby sitting-room—a table with a sewing-machine and paraffin lamp; little else. There was a man sitting by the table in his shirt-sleeves; he was smoking while he read the evening paper. Then a door opened and a tall, youngish woman came in. She was in white—evidently in her nightdress —and her loose hair was about her shoulders. She stood between door and table, resting her hand; I don’t think that she spoke. The man, aware or unaware, went on reading. But presently he looked up: their eyes met. He threw down pipe and paper and went to her. He dropped to his knees, clasped hers, and bent his head to his hands. All that I had seen before—I knew what I was doing—but I saw no more. What did it mean? Husband and wife? Sinner and saviour? What do I know? THE PLIGHT OF THEIR GRACES The mills of God grind as the poet has declared, and they grind to the same measure both the illustrious and the obscure. Naturally one hears more of the sorrows of the great. The wailing of a duke will carry the length of the realm, and since America is now interested domestically in that estate it will reverberate in the Western continent also. The Duke of Bedford has lately exhibited a part of his case to readers of The Times, the Duke of Portland more explicitly his to his friends and neighbours. Both their graces say in effect that the thing can’t be done. They do not tell us why not; but we can infer it. To do things properly, Welbeck and Woburn require some thirty housemaids; and how are they to find thirty housemaids, or, having found them, as things now are, pay for them? They do not ask, but the question follows for the plainer sort, why should a man stand in the ridiculous position of requiring thirty housemaids? It so happens that I have just been to Woburn for the first time in my life, have made the circuit of the great wall, some ten feet high and, I daresay, ten miles round, have entered at one fine gate and issued at another after a traverse of the noble spaces of the park, in which herds of deer, occasional ostriches, lamas, bisons, remote and solitary buffaloes, and heaven knows what, were to be seen peacefully feeding, as if no kind of anxiety was fretting the peace and amplitude of it all. The trees, the boscages, the lake, the great piled grey house unapproachable of the vulgar, the model villages with their cottage-fronts all stamped with a crowned B—all these splendid established things passed by me like an opium- eater’s dream: all so seeming secure, inevitable and right; all, actually, so shaky, doomed, and infernally wrong. And with the Lord of Welbeck’s wail in my ears, I also saw that, truly, it could not be done. It is not a matter of housemaids alone. It is a matter of gardeners, of woodmen, of a permanent staff of masons and bricklayers—for with a wall of ten feet by ten miles there will always be repairs. Other services in proportion. Where are we then? I avoid arithmetic for excellent reasons; but I do see that thirty housemaids at £50 a year apiece plus board come to £3,000 a year, and that the others will figure out accordingly. How is it to be done? It is not. And why should it be done? God knows. Whether their Graces know is another matter. I think that they are beginning to know—but even so, they are only at the beginning of the problem. For it is not so easy as it sounds just to drop Welbeck or Woburn and live en pension at Dieppe. What are you to do with Welbeck in the meantime? And if you don’t want it yourself, who, do you suppose, will want it? And let it be remembered that their Graces, besides Welbeck and Woburn, possess each another house, [Pg 23] [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] not made with hands, an indestructible house. They are dukes for ever after the order of Melchisedech. Like snails, wherever they go—to Dieppe, to a flat in the Temple, to a caravan, to the banks of the Susquehanna—they must carry that blazoned house on their backs. And I cannot imagine a more inhospitable or superfluous mansion for the life of me. The only nobility worth talking about is one of birth, and even that won’t bear talking about very seriously. Lord Chesterfield, the famous one of the family, had a gallery of ancestors which was a wonder to behold of completeness and splendour. But he was wise enough to correct it with two pictures: a scrubby old man, labelled Adam de Stanhope, and a scrubby old woman, Eve de Stanhope. He had the values straightened out thus wittily, at any rate for himself. Then there was the family-tree of the Wynns, or another Welsh house, which had an asterisk some distance down, with a note attached: “About this time the creation of the world took place.” This is perhaps all very foolish, but we can understand it. We supplemented that intelligible aristocracy in our country, first with an aristocracy of office, and then with one of rank; and it is on those in particular that the economic crisis presses. Noble birth is a matter of tradition and, so to speak, of God’s grace. If you are nobly born you may black boots, sell matches or beg at a church door. Hidalgos, grandees of Spain, do these things in their own country, and remain grandees of Spain. Even ignoble pursuits cannot stultify noble birth. There it is. Official nobility, too, is very well, while ability to office persists: but that kind died out because ability to office refused to be hereditary. The first Earls were governors of earldoms, that is of counties. The first Viscounts were Vicecomites, Sheriffs. But Lord Viscount Northcliffe is not a sheriff. If he is an aristocrat it is by virtue of rank. Now rank is not quite like beauty. Handsome is as handsome does, we know; but rank is as rank is able to be. You may make a man a duke, of course, but it is possible that he will make himself ridiculous; and if he does that, and if he does it often enough, and if there are enough of him, he will make the Fountain of Honour itself ridiculous. I don’t know who was the first of our kings to ennoble, his Quelconques, his “unfortunate females,” as Carlyle used to say: I think it was Henry VIII; but whoever he was he sowed the seed of a fungus in the ranks of the peers. One knows what the French kings did, what Charles II, what the Hanoverians did. Whether, when the politicians took control of the Fountain of Honour and commercialised its golden waters, they did any worse, it were hard to say. They made common what had already become vulgar. The peerage of late years is only less absurd because it is less conspicuous. That at least is to the good. Yet there remains this last thing to be said about it. An aristocracy of birth is self-sufficient, but one of rank demands self-evidence, quite a different matter. It drives you back upon wealth, without which it is an absurdity. A grandee of Spain selling matches will pass—but how about a Caroline or Georgian marquess driving a taxi, or taking his turn at a music-hall? M. Henri Lavedan wrote a novel upon that theme, a cynical, witty, bitter, rattling novel, too, called “Le Bon Temps.” A party of Parisians, men about town and their ladies, is lunching al fresco at Armenonville or some such on a fine morning in May. A hurdy-gurdy sounds a familiar air outside, which touches the tender top of some quill in one of the convives. “Let’s have the old chap in,” he moves the company. “He’s playing the Blue Danube, and will renew the youth for some of us.” They have him in, a tattered, bearded, bright-eyed vecchio, his instrument slung by a greasy strap to one shoulder, on the other a foolish little troubled monkey in a red velveteen petticoat. He lifts his old hat and recommences his grinding. One of the guests covers his eyes, and so remains until the grinder has gone. Then he lifts his head. “Do you know who that was?” “Not I indeed!” “That was the Duc d’Epervier.” Then he tells the story of Le Bon Temps: Wein, Weib, und Gesang, a rattling tale with a croak in it. “Why do the people imagine a vain thing?” This is a case for tags. THE VILLAGE The gardener told my housekeeper, and she told me, that the policeman’s wife had a baby. I said, Splendid! or Good! —it was one or the other—which will show you that I knew what I was about. To have said less than that—to have said simply, “Oh,” or “Why not?” would have been to fail in tact. For in the village we take such a thing as a baby seriously. We call it Increase, not a baby, in the old fashion, and disregard the new probability that, while it may be so in one sense, there are several in which it may well be called Decrease. When a patriarch’s—or, I should say here, a Druid’s—wife had a baby, both she and the Druid knew that, barring accidents, it would work for him, if it was a boy, and in due course bring in a wife of its own, and Increase of its own—all to work for the Druid until he died. Or, if it was a girl, he would sell it to a neighbouring Druid for measures of corn or heads of cattle. Increase then all round, however it turned out. But it is different now. We have the name without the thing. If it is a boy, as in fact the policeman’s is, it will be no use to him until it is fifteen, and not much then. Suppose it gets a job somewhere handy, it will pay its mother, say, five shillings a week, a bare subsistence. At twenty, if still living at home, that may be increased to ten shillings. Clothes and a motor-bike will somehow come out of the rest. Precious little Increase there. And soon after twenty it will marry and disappear from the household. But still the village holds by the old fashion, and calls a boy- baby Increase. I have heard girls dignified by the same title, though it is not so invariable. Yet there is more chance of a girl proving useful to her parents than of a boy’s being so. It depends entirely on the mother, whether as the child grows up it finds out that she won’t stand any nonsense. There are still such mothers left—I know two or three; but their numbers diminish with every additional nonsense that crops up. [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] Not only do we take babies seriously, but we take each other so. The first is enforced upon us by custom, which is simply the unwritten village law; the other comes about by circumstance, which provides that whether we like it or not —and, on the whole, I am pretty sure that we do like it—we are simply a large family. I don’t necessarily mean that everybody is related to everybody else, though as a matter of fact he is, but rather that everybody, from the time he was anybody, has always known everybody else intimately: called him or her by his Christian name—within limits—known the exact state of his wardrobe, the extent of his earnings, the state of his pocket; what he had for dinner, or will have to-morrow, where he has been, what he was doing, whom he is courting, or by whom he is courted—and so on. I should fail entirely to make plain the sense in which this extreme and (to a townsman) extraordinary intimacy must be understood if I had not in reserve one crowning example of it, beyond which I defy anybody to carry intimacy. It is, then, the plain and literal fact that everybody in the village knows, or can find out, exactly the amount, condition, value and period of recurrence of everybody else’s underwear. There is no exception to that. It is, it can be, it must be exposed to view and subject to criticism every Monday afternoon in the garden of every cottage. When you have a community with such a mutual knowledge among its members, how can you help their taking each other seriously? Two of the fundamentals of village life have been expounded, I hope: Custom, which is the Law, and says that what you did the day before yesterday is sanction for doing it the day after to-morrow; that, and exact mutual knowledge of your own and your neighbours’ affairs. There is a third: common poverty. Everybody is poor—or if he is not, he must seem so. That is invariable, for where everyone is poor, and everyone’s affairs known to everyone else, a very jealous eye is kept for any variation from the standard. Poverty—and by poverty I mean the state where you never have quite enough for the week’s expenses, are never more than a week’s pay off “the Parish,” and have to trust to windfalls for mere necessaries—that kind of poverty is a state which can only be borne in company. In the village it is the general state, and while that is so the villagers will put up, it seems, with almost anything. Custom, which assures them that it was like that for their forefathers, enables them to accept their continual privations. I daresay there is nobody in the village, of cottage rank, who has ever known an ordinary day when he was not hungry after a meal. They say that that is good for you. My only comment is, Try it, and it won’t seem to be so. They will stand that; and being cold in bed; and letting the fire out when you are not cooking something—so that you come home wet and tired to cold ashes, and must chop kindling before you can be warm or dry; and working incessantly, as the women do, for almost nothing or literally nothing; and wearing the same clothes until they fall off you; and washing at the sink downstairs because you are too tired to take water upstairs; and having windows that won’t open, and doors that won’t shut—but why go on? Worse things than any of these are endured in the slums of...