Through The Magic Door / Doyle, Arthur Conan

Arthur Conan Doyle: Through the Magic Door
==========================================
    a machine-readable transcription 

Version 1.0:	1993-02-08
	1.1:	1993-04-07	corrected a number of transcription
				errors

This is a machine-readable transcription of Arthur Conan Doyle's
`Through the Magic Door', published by Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.:
London, [1919].  It was first published by Smith, Elder & Co.: London,
1907.

Transcription principles:
-------------------------
The index of the printed text has been deleted as being of fairly
little interest for an e-text edition.

Each line in the file correspond to a line in the book, except that
end-of-line hyphenation has been removed. Page breaks have not been
retained.

Dropped capitals have been converted to ordinary capitals. The
immediately following words in caps have been converted to lower- and
upper-case letters as appropriate.

Italics have been placed inside underscore characters (_). Three
hyphens (---) represent an em dash. Longer sequences of hyphens
represent correspondingly longer dashes.

Accented characters have been represented by the following encoding:

	<e'>	e acute
	<e`>	e grave
	<e:>	e diaeresis
	<o^>	e circumflex
	<ae>	ae ligature
	<OE>	OE ligature
	<oe>	oe ligature

I trust the principles are fairly clear.

There is one possible printing error in the book, which has been left
uncorrected: 'Paraquay'.

The transcription and proof-reading was done by Anders Thulin,
Rydsvagen 288, S-582 50 Linkoping, Sweden. 
Email: ath@linkoping.trab.se.

I'd be grateful to learn of any errors you find in the text.

	THROUGH THE
	MAGIC DOOR

	    BY

     ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

   THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR.

            I.

  I care not how humble your bookshelf may
be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. 
Close the door of that room behind you, shut
off with it all the cares of the outer world,
plunge back into the soothing company of the
great dead, and then you are through the
magic portal into that fair land whither worry
and vexation can follow you no more. You
have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid
behind you. There stand your noble, silent
comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your
eye down their files. Choose your man. And
then you have but to hold up your hand to
him and away you go together into dreamland. 
Surely there would be something eerie about
a line of books were it not that familiarity has
deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified
soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron
of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a
true book enfolds the concentrated essence of
a man. The personalities of the writers have
faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies
into impalpable dust, yet here are their very
spirits at your command.

  It is our familiarity also which has lessened
our perception of the miraculous good
fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that
we were suddenly to learn that Shakespeare
had returned to earth, and that he would
favour any of us with an hour of his wit and
his fancy. How eagerly we would seek him
out! And yet we have him---the very best
of him---at our elbows from week to week,
and hardly trouble ourselves to put out our
hands to beckon him down. No matter what
mood a man may be in, when once he has
passed through the magic door he can summon
the world's greatest to sympathize with
him in it. If he be thoughtful, here are the
kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are
the masters of fancy. Or is it amusement
that he lacks? He can signal to any one of
the world's great story-tellers, and out comes
the dead man and holds him enthralled by the
hour. The dead are such good company that
one may come to think too little of the living. 
It is a real and a pressing danger with many
of us, that we should never find our own
thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed
by the dead. Yet second-hand romance
and second-hand emotion are surely better
than the dull, soul-killing monotony which
life brings to most of the human race. But
best of all when the dead man's wisdom and
strength in the living of our own strenuous
days.

  Come through the magic door with me,
and sit here on the green settee, where you
can see the old oak case with its untidy lines
of volumes. Smoking is not forbidden. 
Would you care to hear me talk of them?
Well, I ask nothing better, for there is no
volume there which is not a dear, personal
friend, and what can a man talk of more
pleasantly than that? The other books are
over yonder, but these are my own favourites
---the ones I care to re-read and to have near
my elbow. There is not a tattered cover
which does not bring its mellow memories
to me.

  Some of them represent those little sacrifices
which make a possession dearer. You
see the line of old, brown volumes at the
bottom? Every one of those represents a
lunch. They were bought in my student days,
when times were not too affluent. Threepence
was my modest allowance for my midday sandwich
and glass of beer; but, as luck would
have it, my way to the classes led past the
most fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside
the door of it stood a large tub filled with
an ever-changing litter of tattered books, with
a card above which announced that any volume
therein could be purchased for the identical
sum which I carried in my pocket. As I approached
it a combat ever raged betwixt the
hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring
and omnivorous mind. Five times out of
six the animal won. But when the mental
prevailed, then there was an entrancing five
minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs,
volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms,
until one found something which made
it all worth while. If you will look over these
titles, you will see that I did not do so very
badly. Four volumes of Gordon's ``Tacitus''
(life is too short to read originals, so long
as there are good translations), Sir William
Temple's Essays, Addison's works, Swift's
``Tale of a Tub,'' Clarendon's ``History,''
``Gil Blas,'' Buckingham's Poems, Churchill's
Poems, ``Life of Bacon''---not so bad for
the old threepenny tub.

  They were not always in such plebeian company.
Look at the thickness of the rich
leather, and the richness of the dim gold
lettering. Once they adorned the shelves of
some noble library, and even among the odd
almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces
of their former greatness, like the faded silk
dress of the reduced gentlewoman, a present
pathos but a glory of the past.

  Reading is made too easy nowadays, with
cheap paper editions and free libraries. A
man does not appreciate at its full worth the
thing that comes to him without effort. Who
now ever gets the thrill which Carlyle felt
when he hurried home with the six volumes
of Gibbon's ``History'' under his arm, his
mind just starving for want of food, to devour
them at the rate of one a day? A book should
be your very own before you can really get the
taste of it, and unless you have worked for it,
you will never have the true inward pride of
possession.

  If I had to choose the one book out of all
that line from which I have had most pleasure
and most profit, I should point to yonder
stained copy of Macaulay's ``Essays.'' It
seems entwined into my whole life as I look
backwards. It was my comrade in my student
days, it has been with me on the sweltering
Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble
kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. 
Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their
brains over it, and you may still see the grease
stains where the second engineer grappled
with Frederick the Great. Tattered and dirty
and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound volume
could ever take its place for me.

  What a noble gateway this book forms
through which one may approach the study
either of letters or of history! Milton,
Machiavelli, Hallam, Southey, Bunyan,
Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive, Hastings,
Chatham---what nuclei for thought!
With a good grip of each how pleasant and
easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion,
the exact detail, they all throw a glamour
round the subject and should make the least
studious of readers desire to go further. If
Macaulay's hand cannot lead a man upon those
pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
all hope of ever finding them.

  When I was a senior schoolboy this book
---not this very volume, for it had an even
more tattered predecessor---opened up a new
world to me. History had been a lesson
and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and the
drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted
land, a land of colour and beauty,
with a kind, wise guide to point the path. 
In that great style of his I loved even the
faults---indeed, now that I come to think of
it, it was the faults which I loved best. No
sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery,
and no antithesis too flowery. It
pleased me to read that ``a universal shout
of laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed
the Pope that the days of the crusades
were past,'' and I was delighted to learn that
``Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which
people placed foolish verses, and Mr. Dash
wrote verses which were fit to be placed in
Lady Jerningham's vase.'' Those were the
kind of sentences which used to fill me with
a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords
which linger in the musician's ear. A man
likes a plainer literary diet as he grows older,
but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled
with admiration and wonder at the alternate
power of handling a great subject, and of adorning
it by delightful detail---just a bold sweep of
the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. 
As he leads you down the path, he for ever
indicates the alluring side-tracks which branch
away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
literary and historical education
night be effected by working through every
book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should
be curious, however, to know the exact age of
the youth when he came to the end of his
studies.

  I wish Macaulay had written a historical
novel. I am convinced that it would have
been a great one. I do not know if he had
the power of drawing an imaginary character,
but he certainly had the gift of reconstructing
a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look
at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives
us Johnson and his atmosphere. Was ever a
more definite picture given in a shorter space---

  ``As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stand the omelet
for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. 
There are assembled those heads which live
for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There
are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin
form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk
and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon
tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with
his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is
that strange figure which is as familiar to us
as the figures of those among whom we have
been brought up---the gigantic body, the huge
massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings,
the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the
dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving
with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy
form rolling; we hear it puffing, and then
comes the `Why, sir!' and the `What then,
sir?' and the `No, sir!' and the `You
don't see your way through the question,
sir! ' ''

  It is etched into your memory for ever.

  I can remember that when I visited London
at the age of sixteen the first thing I did after
housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
to Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster
Abbey, just under the shadow of Addison,
and amid the dust of the poets whom he
had loved so well. It was the one great object
of interest which London held for me. And
so it might well be, when I think of all I owe
him. It is not merely the knowledge and the
stimulation of fresh interests, but it is the
charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal
outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of
prejudice. My judgment now confirms all
that I felt for him then.

  My four-volume edition of the History
stands, as you see, to the right of the Essays. 
Do you recollect the third chapter of that
work---the one which reconstructs the England
of the seventeenth century? It has always
seemed to me the very high-water mark
of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous
mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. 
The population of towns, the statistics of
commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all
transmuted into wonder and interest by the
handling of the master. You feel that he
could have cast a glamour over the multiplication
table had he set himself to do so. Take
a single concrete example of what I mean. 
The fact that a Londoner in the country, or
a countryman in London, felt equally out of
place in those days of difficult travel, would
seem to hardly require stating, and to afford
no opportunity of leaving a strong impression
upon the reader's mind. See what Macaulay
makes of it, though it is no more. than a hundred
other paragraphs which discuss a hundred
various points---

  ``A cockney in a rural village was stared
at as much as if he had intruded into a kraal
of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the
lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor
appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily
distinguished from the resident population as
a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his
accent, the manner in which he gazed at the
shops, stumbled into gutters, ran against the
porters, and stood under the waterspouts,
marked him out as an excellent subject for
the operations of swindlers and banterers.
Bullies jostled him into the kennel, Hackney
coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
thieves explored with perfect security the huge
pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood
entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's
Show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's
tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared
to him the most honest friendly gentlemen
that he had ever seen. Painted women,
the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone
Park, passed themselves on him for countesses
and maids of honour. If he asked his way to
St. James', his informants sent him to Mile
End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly
discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything
that nobody else would buy, of second-hand
embroidery, copper rings, and watches that
would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable
coffee-house, he became a mark for
the insolent derision of fops, and the grave
waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified,
he soon returned to his mansion, and
there, in the homage of his tenants and the
conversation of his boon companions, found
consolation for the vexations and humiliations
which he had undergone. There he was once
more a great man, and saw nothing above himself
except when at the assizes he took his seat
on the bench near the Judge, or when at the
muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.''

  On the whole, I should put this detached
chapter of description at the very head of his
Essays, though it happens to occur in another
volume. The History as a whole does not, as
it seems to me, reach the same level as the
shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it
is a brilliant piece of special pleading from a
fervid Whig, and that there must be more to
be said for the other side than is there set forth. 
Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt,
by his own political and religious limitations. 
The best are those which get right away into
the broad fields of literature and philosophy. 
Johnson, Walpole, Madame D'Arblay, Addison,
and the two great Indian ones, Clive
and Warren Hastings, are my own favourites. 
Frederick the Great, too, must surely stand
in the first rank. Only one would I wish to
eliminate. It is the diabolically clever criticism
upon Montgomery. One would have
wished to think that Macaulay's heart was
too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so
bitter an attack. Bad work will sink of its
own weight. It is not necessary to souse
the author as well. One would think more
highly of the man if he had not done that
savage bit of work.

  I don't know why talking of Macaulay always
makes me think of Scott, whose books
in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf,
you see, of their own. Perhaps it is that they
both had so great an influence, and woke such
admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real
similarity in the minds and characters of the
two men. You don't see it, you say? Well,
just think of Scott's ``Border Ballads,'' and
then of Macaulay's ``Lays.'' The machines
must be alike, when the products are so similar.
Each was the only man who could possibly
have written the poems of the other. 
What swing and dash in both of them! What
a love of all that is and noble and martial!
So simple, and yet so strong. But there
are minds on which strength and simplicity
are thrown away. They think that unless a
thing is obscure it must be superficial, whereas
it is often the shallow stream which is turbid,
and the deep which is clear. Do you
remember the fatuous criticism of Matthew
Arnold upon the glorious ``Lays,'' where he
calls out ``is this poetry?'' after quoting---

   ``And how can man die better
     Than facing fearful odds
    For the ashes of his fathers
     And the Temples of his Gods?''

In trying to show that Macaulay had not
the poetic sense he was really showing that
he himself had not the dramatic sense. The
baldness of the idea and of the language had
evidently offended him. But this is exactly
where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving
the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded
soldier appeals to two comrades to
help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
sentiment would have been absolutely
out of character. The lines are, I think, taken
with their context, admirable ballad poetry,
and have just the dramatic quality and sense
which a ballad poet must have. That opinion
of Arnold's shook my faith in his judgment,
and yet I would forgive a good deal to the
man who wrote---

    ``One more charge and then be dumb,
      When the forts of Folly fall,
     May the victors when they come
      Find my body near the wall.'

Not a bad verse that for one's life aspiration.

  This is one of the things which  human
society has not yet understood---the value of
a noble, inspiriting text. When it does we
shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate
places, and our progress through the
streets will be brightened and ennobled by one
continual series of beautiful mental impulses
and images, reflected into our souls from the
printed thoughts which meet our eyes. To
think that we should walk with empty, listless
minds while all this splendid material is running
to waste. I do not mean mere Scriptural
texts, for they do not bear the same meaning
to all, though what human creature can fail to
be spurred onwards by ``Work while it is
day, for the night cometh when no man can
work.'' But I mean those beautiful thoughts---
who can say that they are uninspired thoughts?
---which may be gathered from a hundred
authors to match a hundred uses. A fine
thought in fine language is a most precious
jewel, and should not be hid away, but be
exposed for use and ornament. To take the
nearest example, there is a horse-trough across
the road from my house, a plain stone trough,
and no man could pass it with any feelings
save vague discontent at its ugliness. But
suppose that on its front slab you print the
verse of Coleridge---

  ``He prayeth best who loveth best
    All things, both great and small
   For the dear Lord who fashioned him
    He knows and loveth all.''

I fear I may misquote, for I have not ``The
Ancient Mariner'' at my elbow, but even as it
stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?
We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for
ourselves. There are few men who have not
some chosen quotations printed on their study
mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. 
Carlyle's transcription of ``Rest! Rest! Shall
I not have all Eternity to rest in!'' is a pretty
good spur to a weary man. But what we need
is a more general application of the same thing
for public and not for private use, until people
understand that a graven thought is as beautiful
an ornament as any graven image, striking
through the eye right deep down into the soul.

  However, all this has nothing to do with
Macaulay's glorious lays, save that when you
want some flowers of manliness and patriotism
you can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. 
I had the good fortune to learn the Lay of
Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and
it stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that
even now I can reel off almost the whole of it. 
Goldsmith said that in conversation he was like
the man who had a thousand pounds in the
bank, but could not compete with the man who
had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So the
ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs
the whole bookshelf which waits for reference. 
But I want you now to move your eye a little
farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green
volumes. That is my edition of Scott. But
surely I must give you a little breathing space
before I venture upon them.

		    II.

  It is a great thing to start life with a small
number of really good books which are your
very own. You may not appreciate them at
first. You may pine for your novel of crude
and unadulterated adventure. You may, and
will, give it the preference when you can. 
But the dull days come, and the rainy days
come, and always you are driven to fill up the
chinks of your reading with the worthy books
which wait so patiently for your notice. And
then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch
in your life, you understand the difference. 
You see, like a flash, how the one stands for
nothing, and the other for literature. From
that day onwards you may return to your
crudities, but at least you do so with some
standard of comparison in your mind. You
can never be the same as you were before. 
Then gradually the good thing becomes more
dear to you; it builds itself up with your
growing mind; it becomes a part of your
better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I
do now, at the old covers and love them for all
that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was
the olive-green line of Scott's novels which
started me on to rhapsody. They were the
first books I ever owned---long, long before I
could appreciate or even understand them. But
at last I realized what a treasure they were. In
my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends
in the dead of the night, when the sense of
crime added a new zest to the story. Perhaps
you have observed that my ``Ivanhoe'' is of a
different edition from the others. The first
copy was left in the grass by the side of a
stream, fell into the water, and was eventually
picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed,
upon a mud-bank. I think I may say,
however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. 
Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some
years before it was replaced, for my instinct was
always to read it again instead of breaking fresh
ground.

  I remember the late James Payn telling the
anecdote that he and two literary friends agreed
to write down what scene in fiction they thought
the most dramatic, and that on examining the
papers it was found that all three had chosen
the same. It was the moment when the unknown
knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past
the pavilions of the lesser men, strikes with the
sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to mortal
combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. 
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What
matter that no Templar was allowed by the
rules of his Order to take part in so secular
and frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is
the privilege of great masters to make things
so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. 
Was it not Wendell Holmes who described
the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room
with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs
at his heels, ready to let them loose on
any play of fancy? The great writer can never
go wrong. If Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to
Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack---well, it was
so, and that's an end of it. ``There is no second
line of rails at that point,'' said an editor to a
minor author. ``I make a second line,'' said
the author; and he was within his rights,
if he can carry his readers' conviction with
him.

  But this is a digression from ``Ivanhoe.''
What a book it is! The second greatest historical
novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration
for it. Scott's soldiers are always as good as
his women (with exceptions) are weak; but
here, while the soldiers are at their very best,
the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems the
female side of the story from the usual commonplace
routine. Scott drew manly men because
he was a manly man himself, and found
the task a sympathetic one.

  He drew young heroines because a convention
demanded it, which he had never the
hardihood to break. It is only when we get
him for a dozen chapters on end with a minimum
of petticoat---in the long stretch, for example,
from the beginning of the Tournament
to the end of the Friar Tuck incident---that we
realize the height of continued romantic narrative
to which he could attain. I don't think in
the whole range of our literature we have a finer
sustained flight than that.

  There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of
redundant verbiage in Scott's novels. Those
endless and unnecessary introductions make the
shell very thick before you come to the oyster. 
They are often admirable in themselves, learned,
witty, picturesque, but with no relation or proportion
to the story which they are supposed
to introduce. Like so much of our English
fiction, they are very good matter in a very
bad place. Digression and want of method
and order are traditional national sins. Fancy
introducing an essay on how to live on nothing
a year as Thackeray did in ``Vanity Fair,'' or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has
dared to do. As well might a dramatic author
rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes
while his play was suspending its action
and his characters waiting wearily behind him. 
It is all wrong, though every great name can
be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form
is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned
with the rest. But get past all that to a crisis
in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase,
the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you
remember when the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons
stands at last before the grim Puritan,
upon whose head a price has been set: ``A
thousand marks or a bed of heather!'' says he,
as he draws. The Puritan draws also: ``The
Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!'' says he. 
No verbiage there! But the very spirit of
either man and of either party, in the few stern
words, which haunt your mind. ``Bows and
Bills!'' cry the Saxon Varangians, as the Moslem
horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse
and businesslike was the actual battle-cry of the
fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day
when they fought under the ``Red Dragon of
Wessex'' on the low ridge at Hastings. ``Out!
Out!'' they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic---
the very genius of the race was in the cry.

  Is it that the higher emotions are not there?
Or is it that they are damped down and covered
over as too precious to be exhibited? Something
of each, perhaps. I once met the widow
of the man who, as a young signal midshipman,
had taken Nelson's famous message from the
Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the
ship's company. The officers were impressed. 
The men were not. ``Duty!'' they muttered. 
``We've always done it. Why not?'' Anything
in the least highfalutin' would depress,
not exalt, a British company. It is the under
statement which delights them. German troops
can march to battle singing Luther's hymns. 
Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our
martial poets need not trouble to imitate---or at
least need not imagine that if they do so they
will ever supply a want to the British soldier. 
Our sailors working the heavy guns in South
Africa sang: ``Here's another lump of sugar
for the Bird.'' I saw a regiment go into action
to the refrain of ``A little bit off the top.'' The
martial poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius
and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted
a good deal of ink before he had got down to
such chants as these. The Russians are not
unlike us in this respect. I remember reading
of some column ascending a breach and singing
lustily from start to finish, until a few survivors
were left victorious upon the crest with the song
still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous
chant it was which had warmed them to
such a deed of valour, and he found that the
exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated,
was ``Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages.''
The fact is, I suppose, that a mere monotonous
sound may take the place of the tom-tom of
savage warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into
valour.

  Our cousins across the Atlantic have the
same blending of the comic with their most
serious work. Take the songs which they sang
during the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic
race has ever waged---the only war in
which it could have been said that they were
stretched to their uttermost and showed their
true form---``Tramp, tramp, tramp,'' ``John
Brown's Body,'' ``Marching through Georgia''
---all had a playful humour running through
them. Only one exception do I know, and that
is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. 
Even an outsider in time of peace can hardly
read it without emotion. I mean, of course,
Julia Ward Howe's ``War-Song of the Republic,''
with the choral opening line: ``Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the
Lord.'' If that were ever sung upon a battle-field
the effect must have been terrific.

  A long digression, is it not? But that is the
worst of the thoughts at the other side of the
Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was
Scott's soldiers that I was talking of, and I was
saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing,
no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and
the simple manly ways, with every expression and
metaphor drawn from within his natural range
of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his
keen appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little
of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries---
the finest, perhaps, that the world has
ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the
great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one
piece of hackwork of his career. How could a
Tory patriot, whose whole training had been
to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon,
do justice to such a theme? But the Europe of
those days was full of material which he of all
men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. 
What would we not give for a portrait of one of
Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier
of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold
strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the
archers of the French King's Guard in ``Quentin
Durward''?

  In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen
many of those iron men who during the preceding
twenty years had been the scourge and also
the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers
who scowled at him from the sidewalks in 1814
would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad
knights or ruffling cavaliers of his novels. A
picture from the life of a Peninsular veteran,
with his views upon the Duke, would be as
striking as Dugald Dalgetty from the German
wars. But then no man ever does realize the
true interest of the age in which he happens to
live. All sense of proportion is lost, and the
little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a
distance. It is easy in the dark to confuse the
fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the
Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours,
or St. Sebastians, while Columbus was
discovering America before their very faces.

  I have said that I think ``Ivanhoe'' the best
of Scott's novels. I suppose most people would
subscribe to that. But how about the second
best? It, speaks well for their general average
that there is hardly one among them which
might not find some admirers who would vote
it to a place of honour. To the Scottish-born
man those novels which deal with Scottish life
and character have a quality of raciness which
gives them a place apart. There is a rich
humour of the soil in such books as ``Old Mortality,''
``The Antiquary,'' and ``Rob Roy,''
which puts them in a different class from the
others. His old Scottish women are, next to
his soldiers, the best series of types that he has
drawn. At the same time it must be admitted
that merit which is associated with dialect has
such limitations that it can never take the same
place as work which makes an equal appeal to
all the world. On the whole, perhaps, ``Quentin
Durward,'' on account of its wider interests,
its strong character-drawing, and the European
importance of the events and people described,
would have my vote for the second place. It
is the father of all those sword-and-cape novels
which have formed so numerous an addition
to the light literature of the last century. The
pictures of Charles the Bold and of the unspeakable
Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I
can see those two deadly enemies watching the
hounds chasing the herald, and clinging to each
other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth,
more clearly than most things which my eyes
have actually rested upon.

  The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his
cruelty, his superstition and his cowardice is
followed closely from Comines, and is the more
effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
rival. It is not often that historical characters
work out in their actual physique exactly
as one would picture them to be, but in the
High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies
of Louis and Charles which might have walked
from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin, ascetic,
varminty; and Charles with the head of
a prize-fighter. It is hard on us when a portrait
upsets all our preconceived ideas, when,
for example, we see in the National Portrait
Gallery a man with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic
face, and with a start read beneath it that it is
the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally, however,
as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. 
I have before me on the mantelpiece yonder a
portrait of a painting which represents Queen
Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. 
Mark the big head, fit to conceive large schemes;
the strong animal face, made to captivate a sensitive,
feminine woman; the brutally forceful
features---the mouth with a suggestion of wild
boars' tusks behind it, the beard which could
bristle with fury: the whole man and his life-history
are revealed in that picture. I wonder
if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs
at the Hepburn family seat?

  Personally, I have always had a very high
opinion of a novel which the critics have used
somewhat harshly, and which came almost the
last from his tired pen. I mean ``Count Robert
of Paris.'' I am convinced that if it had been
the first, instead of the last, of the series it would
have attracted as much attention as ``Waverley.''
I can understand the state of mind of the expert,
who cried out in mingled admiration and despair:
``I have studied the conditions of Byzantine
Society all my life, and here comes a
Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear
to me in a flash!'' Many men could draw
with more or less success Norman England, or
medi<ae>val France, but to reconstruct a whole
dead civilization in so plausible a way, with
such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is,
I should think, a most wonderful tour de force. 
His failing health showed itself before the end
of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the
first, and contained scenes of such humour as
Anna Comnena reading aloud her father's exploits,
or of such majesty as the account of the
muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the
Bosphorus, then the book could not have been
gainsaid its rightful place in the very front rank
of the novels.

  I would that he had carried on his narrative,
and given us a glimpse of the actual progress of
the First Crusade. What an incident! Was
ever anything in the world's history like it? It
had what historical incidents seldom have, a
definite beginning, middle and end, from the
half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall
of Jerusalem. Those leaders! It would take
a second Homer to do them justice. Godfrey
the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the
unscrupulous and formidable, Tancred the ideal
knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad
hero! Here is material so rich that one
feels one is not worthy to handle it. What
richest imagination could ever evolve anything
more marvellous and thrilling than the actual
historical facts?

  But what a glorious brotherhood the novels
are! Think of the pure romance of ``The
Talisman''; the exquisite picture of Hebridean
life in ``The Pirate''; the splendid reproduction
of Elizabethan England in ``Kenilworth'';
the rich humour of the ``Legend of Montrose';
above all, bear in mind that in all that splendid
series, written in a coarse age, there is not one
word to offend the most sensitive car, and it is
borne in upon one how great and noble a man
was Walter Scott, and how high the service
which he did for literature and for humanity.

  For that reason his life is good reading, and
there it is on the same shelf as the novels. 
Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his
admiring friend. The ideal biographer should
be a perfectly impartial man, with a sympathetic
mind, but a stern determination to tell the absolute
truth. One would like the frail, human
side of a man as well as the other. I cannot
believe that anyone in the world was ever quite
so good as the subject of most of our biographies. 
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes,
or had a keen eye for a pretty face, or
opened the second bottle when they would have
done better to stop at the first, or did something
to make us feel that they were men and brothers. 
They need not go the length of the lady who
began a biography of her deceased husband
with the words---``D------ was a dirty man,''
but the books certainly would be more readable,
and the subjects more lovable too, if we had
greater light and shade in the picture.

  But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott
the more one would have admired him. He
lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country,
and I have not a doubt that he took an
allowance of toddy occasionally of an evening
which would have laid his feeble successors
under the table. His last years, at least, poor
fellow, were abstemious enough, when he sipped
his barley-water, while the others passed the
decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of
honour, translating itself not into empty phrases,
but into years of labour and denial! You remember
how he became sleeping partner in a
printing house, and so involved himself in its
failure. There was a legal, but very little moral,
claim against him, and no one could have blamed
him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy,
which would have enabled him to become a rich
man again within a few years. Yet he took the
whole burden upon himself and bore it for the
rest of his life, spending his work, his time, and
his health in the one long effort to save his
honour from the shadow of a stain. It was
nearly a hundred thousand pounds, I think,
which he passed on to the creditors---a great
record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
life thrown in.

  And what a power of work he had! It was
superhuman. Only the man who has tried to
write fiction himself knows what it means when
it is recorded that Scott produced two of his
long novels in one single year. I remember
reading in some book of reminiscences---on
second thoughts it was in Lockhart himself---
how the writer had lodged in some rooms in
Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on
the blind of the opposite house. All evening
the man wrote, and the observer could see the
shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from
the desk to the pile at the side. He went to
a party and returned, but still the hand was
moving the sheets. Next morning he was told
that the rooms opposite were occupied by
Walter Scott.

  A curious glimpse into the psychology of the
writer of fiction is shown by the fact that he
wrote two of his books---good ones, too---at a
time when his health was such that he could
not afterwards remember one word of them,
and listened to them when they were read to
him as if he were hearing the work of another
man. Apparently the simplest processes of
the brain, such as ordinary memory, were in
complete abeyance, and yet the very highest
and most complex faculty---imagination in its
supreme form---was absolutely unimpaired. It
is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered
over. It gives some support to the feeling
which every writer of imaginative work must
have, that his supreme work comes to him in
some strange way from without, and that he is
only the medium for placing it upon the paper. 
The creative thought---the germ thought from
which a larger growth is to come, flies through
his brain like a bullet. He is surprised at his
own idea, with no conscious sense of having
originated it. And here we have a man, with
all other brain functions paralyzed, producing
this magnificent work. Is it possible that we
are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite
reservoir of the unknown? Certainly it is
always our best work which leaves the least
sense of personal effort.

  And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible
that frail physical powers and an unstable
nervous system, by keeping a man's materialism
at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent
for these spiritual uses? It is an old tag that

    ``Great Genius is to madness close allied,
      And thin partitions do those rooms divide.''

But, apart from genius, even a moderate
faculty for imaginative work seems to me to
weaken seriously the ties between the soul and
the body.

  Look at the British poets of a century ago
Chatterton, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Byron. 
Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band, yet
Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed
away, ``burned out,'' as his brother terribly
expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died by accident,
and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is
in itself a sign of a morbid state. It is true that
Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he
was banker first and poet afterwards. Wordsworth,
Tennyson, and Browning have all raised
the average age of the poets, but for some reason
the novelists, especially of late years, have a
deplorable record. They will end by being
scheduled with the white-lead workers and other
dangerous trades. Look at the really shocking
case of the young Americans, for example. 
What a band of promising young writers have
in a few years been swept away! There was
the author of that admirable book, ``David
Harum''; there was Frank Norris, a man who
had in him, I think, the seeds of greatness more
than almost any living writer. His ``Pit''
seemed to me one of the finest American novels. 
He also died a premature death. Then there
was Stephen Crane---a man who had also done
most brilliant work, and there was Harold
Frederic, another master-craftsman. Is there
any profession in the world which in proportion
to its numbers could show such losses as that?
In the meantime, out of our own men Robert
Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton
Merriman, and many another.

  Even those great men who are usually spoken
of as if they had rounded off their career were
really premature in their end. Thackeray, for
example, in spite of his snowy head, was only
52; Dickens attained the age of 58; on the
whole, Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life,
although he never wrote a novel until he was
over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer
working career than most of his brethren.

  He employed his creative faculty for about
twenty years, which is as much, I suppose, as
Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
example of the limited tenure which Genius has
of life, though I believe that he outlived the
greater part of his own family, who were not
a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of
some nervous disease; that is shown by the progressive
degeneration of his signature. Probably
it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special
scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet,
and how many more, were its victims. As
to the tradition, first mentioned long after his
death, that he died of a fever contracted from
a drinking bout, it is absurd on the face of it,
since no such fever is known to science. But
a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint
to a disastrous end.

  One other remark upon Scott before I pass
on from that line of green volumes which has
made me so digressive and so garrulous. No
account of his character is complete which does
not deal with the strange, secretive vein which
ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
the truth on many occasions in order to conceal
the fact that he was the author of the famous
novels, but even intimate friends who met him
day by day were not aware that he was the man
about whom the whole of Europe was talking. 
Even his wife was ignorant of his pecuniary
liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm
told her for the first time that they were sharers
in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this
strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish
Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep
their irritating secret through the long chapters
of so many of his novels.

  It's a sad book, Lockhart's ``Life.'' It
leaves gloom in the mind. The sight of this
weary giant, staggering along, burdened with
debt, overladen with work, his wife dead, his
nerves broken, and nothing intact but his honour,
is one of the most moving in the history
of literature. But they pass, these clouds, and
all that is left is the memory of the supremely
noble man, who would not be bent, but faced
Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a
whimper. He sampled every human emotion. 
Great was his joy and great his success, great
was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all
the sons of men I don't think there are many
greater than he who lies under the great slab at
Dryburgh.

                    III.

We can pass the long green ranks of the
Waverley Novels and Lockhart's ``Life''
which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in
the four big grey volumes beyond. They are
an old-fashioned large-print edition of Boswell's
``Life of Johnson.'' I emphasize the large
print, for that is the weak point of most of
the cheap editions of English Classics which
come now into the market. With subjects
which are in the least archaic or abstruse you
need good clear type to help you on your way. 
The other is good neither for your eyes nor for
your temper. Better pay a little more and have
a book that is made for use.

  That book interests me---fascinates me---
and yet I wish I could join heartily in that
chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old
bully has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow
his own advice and to ``clear one's mind of
cant'' upon the subject, for when you have
been accustomed to look at him through the
sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell,
it is hard to take them off, to rub one's eyes,
and to have a good honest stare on one's own
account at the man's actual words, deeds, and
limitations. If you try it you are left with the
oddest mixture of impressions. How could
one express it save that this is John Bull taken
to literature---the exaggerated John Bull of the
caricaturists---with every quality, good or evil,
at its highest? Here are the rough crust over
a kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance,
the insular narrowness, the want of sympathy
and insight, the rudeness of perception,
the positiveness, the overbearing bluster, the
strong deep-seated religious principle, and
every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher
John Bull who was the great grandfather of the
present good-natured Johnnie.

  If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much
we should hear now of his huge friend? With
Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
the whole world with his hero worship. It
was most natural that he should himself admire
him. The relations between the two men were
delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But
they are not a safe basis from which any third
person could argue. When they met, Boswell
was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his
fifty-fourth year. The one was a keen young
Scot with a mind which was reverent and impressionable.
The other was a figure from a
past generation with his fame already made. 
From the moment of meeting the one was bound
to exercise an absolute ascendency over the
other which made unbiassed criticism far more
difficult than it would be between ordinary
father and son. Up to the end this was the
unbroken relation between them.

  It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as
Macaulay has done, but it is not by chance
that a man writes the best biography in the
language. He had some great and rare literary
qualities. One was a clear and vivid style, more
flexible and Saxon than that of his great model. 
Another was a remarkable discretion which
hardly once permitted a fault of taste in this
whole enormous book where he must have had
to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of
him. They say that he was a fool and a coxcomb
in private life. He is never so with a pen
in his hand. Of all his numerous arguments
with Johnson, where he ventured some little
squeak of remonstrance, before the roaring
``No, sir!'' came to silence him, there are few
in which his views were not, as experience
proved, the wiser. On the question of slavery
he was in the wrong. But I could quote from
memory at least a dozen cases, including such
vital subjects as the American Revolution, the
Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and
so on, where Boswell's views were those which
survived.

  But where he excels as a biographer is in telling
you just those little things that you want
to know. How often you read the life of a man
and are left without the remotest idea of his
personality. It is not so here. The man lives
again. There is a short description of Johnson's
person---it is not in the Life, but in the
Tour to the Hebrides, the very next book upon
the shelf, which is typical of his vivid portraiture.
May I take it down, and read you
a paragraph of it?---

  ``His person was large, robust, I may say
approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy
from corpulency. His countenance was
naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but
somewhat disfigured by the scars of King's evil. 
He was now in his sixty-fourth year and was
become a little dull of hearing. His sight had
always been somewhat weak, yet so much does
mind govern and even supply the deficiencies
of organs that his perceptions were uncommonly
quick and accurate. His head, and
sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of
motion like the effect of palsy. He appeared to
be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive
contractions of the nature of that distemper
called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full
suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair
buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish
wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings
and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying
he wore boots and a very wide brown
cloth great-coat with pockets which might
almost have held the two volumes of his folio
dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large
English oak stick.'' You must admit that if
one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
that it is not Mr. Boswell's fault---and it is but
one of a dozen equally vivid glimpses which
he gives us of his hero. It is just these pen-pictures
of his of the big, uncouth man, with his
grunts and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite,
his twenty cups of tea, and his tricks with the
orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate
the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader
literary vogue than his writings could have
done.

  For, after all, which of those writings can be
said to have any life to-day? Not ``Rasselas,''
surely---that stilted romance. ``The Lives of
the Poets'' are but a succession of prefaces,
and the  ``Ramblers'' of ephemeral essays.
There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary,
a huge piece of spadework, a monument
to industry, but inconceivable to genius. 
``London'' has a few vigorous lines, and the
``Journey to the Hebrides'' some spirited
pages. This, with a number of political and
other pamphlets, was the main output of his
lifetime. Surely it must be admitted that it is
not enough to justify his predominant place in
English literature, and that we must turn to his
humble, much-ridiculed biographer for the real
explanation.

  And then there was his talk. What was it
which gave it such distinction? His clear-cut
positiveness upon every subject. But this is a
sign of a narrow finality---impossible to the man
of sympathy and of imagination, who sees the
other side of every question and understands
what a little island the greatest human knowledge
must be in the ocean of infinite possibilities
which surround us. Look at the results. 
Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the
race, stand convicted of so many incredible
blunders? It recalls the remark of Bagehot,
that if at any time the views of the most learned
could be stamped upon the whole human race
the result would be to propagate the most
absurd errors. He was asked what became of
swallows in the winter. Rolling and wheezing,
the oracle answered: ``Swallows,'' said he,
``certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
them conglobulate together by flying round and
round, and then all in a heap throw themselves
under water and lie in the bed of a river.''
Boswell gravely dockets the information. 
However, if I remember right, even so sound
a naturalist as White of Selborne had his doubts
about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson's
misjudgments of his fellow-authors. 
There, if anywhere, one would have expected
to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
would seem monstrous to a modern taste. 
``Shakespeare,'' he said, ``never wrote six
consecutive good lines.'' He would only admit
two good verses in Gray's exquisite ``Elegy
written in a Country Churchyard,'' where it
would take a very acid critic to find two bad
ones. ``Tristram Shandy'' would not live. 
``Hamlet'' was gabble. Swift's ``Gulliver's
Travels'' was poor stuff, and he never wrote
anything good except ``A Tale of a Tub.''
Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel.
Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon,
could not be honest men.

  And his political opinions! They sound now
like a caricature. I suppose even in those days
they were reactionary. ``A poor man has no
honour.'' ``Charles the Second was a good
King.'' ``Governments should turn out of the
Civil Service all who were on the other side.''
``Judges in India should be encouraged to
trade.'' ``No country is the richer on account
of trade.'' (I wonder if Adam Smith was in
the company when this proposition was laid
down!) ``A landed proprietor should turn
out those tenants who did not vote as he
wished.'' ``It is not good for a labourer to
have his wages raised.'' ``When the balance of
trade is against a country, the margin must be
paid in current coin.'' Those were a few of
his convictions.

  And then his prejudices! Most of us have
some unreasoning aversion. In our more generous
moments we are not proud of it. But
consider those of Johnson! When they were
all eliminated there was not so very much left. 
He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He
detested Nonconformists (a young lady who
joined them was ``an odious wench''). He
loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow
line, belching fire and fury at everything to the
right or the left of it. Macaulay's posthumous
admiration is all very well, but had they met
in life Macaulay would have contrived to unite
under one hat nearly everything that Johnson
abominated.

  It cannot be said that these prejudices were
founded on any strong principle, or that they
could not be altered where his own personal
interests demanded it. This is one of the weak
points of his record. In his dictionary he
abused pensions and pensioners as a means
by which the State imposed slavery upon
hirelings. When he wrote the unfortunate
definition a pension must have seemed a
most improbable contingency, but when
George III., either through policy or charity,
offered him one a little later, he made no
hesitation in accepting it. One would have
liked to feel that the violent expression of
his convictions represented a real intensity
of feeling, but the facts in this instance seem
against it.

  He was a great talker---but his talk was more
properly a monologue. It was a discursive
essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from
his subdued audience. How could one talk on
equal terms with a man who could not brook
contradiction or even argument upon the most
vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith
defend his literary views, or Burke his Whiggism,
or Gibbon his Deism? There was no
common ground of philosophic toleration on
which one could stand. If he could not argue
he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it:
``If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you
down with the butt end.'' In the face of that
``rhinoceros laugh'' there was an end of gentle
argument. Napoleon said that all the other
kings would say ``Ouf!'' when they heard he
was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that
the older men of Johnson's circle must have
given a sigh of relief when at last they could
speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
without the danger of a scene where ``Why, no,
sir!'' was very likely to ripen into ``Let us have
no more on't!'' Certainly one would like to
get behind Boswell's account, and to hear a
chat between such men as Burke and Reynolds,
as to the difference in the freedom and atmosphere
of the Club on an evening when the
formidable Doctor was not there, as compared
to one when he was.

  No smallest estimate of his character is fair
which does not make due allowance for the
terrible experiences of his youth and early
middle age. His spirit was as scarred as his
face. He was fifty-three when the pension
was given him, and up to then his existence had
been spent in one constant struggle for the first
necessities of life, for the daily meal and the
nightly bed. He had seen his comrades of
letters die of actual privation. From childhood
he had known no happiness. The half
blind gawky youth, with dirty linen and twitching
limbs, had always, whether in the streets of
Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the
coffee-houses of London, been an object of
mingled pity  and amusement. With a proud
and sensitive soul, every day of his life must
have brought  some bitter humiliation. Such
an experience must either break a man's spirit
or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the
secret of that roughness, that carelessness
for the sensibilities of others, which caused
Boswell's father to christen him ``Ursa Major.''
If his nature was in any way warped,
it must be admitted that terrific forces had
gone to the rending of it. His good was
innate, his evil the result of a dreadful experience.

  And he had some great qualities. Memory
was the chief of them. He had read omnivorously,
and all that he had read he remembered,
not merely in the vague, general way in which
we remember what we read, but with every
particular of place and date. If it were poetry,
he could quote it by the page, Latin or English. 
Such a memory has its enormous advantage,
but it carries with it its corresponding defect. 
With the mind so crammed with other people's
goods, how can you have room for any fresh
manufactures of your own? A great memory
is, I think, often fatal to originality, in spite of
Scott and some other exceptions. The slate
must be clear before you put your own writing
upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an
original thought, when did he ever reach forward
into the future, or throw any fresh light
upon those enigmas with which mankind is
faced? Overloaded with the past, he had space
for nothing else. Modern developments of
every sort cast no first herald rays upon his
mind. He journeyed in France a few years
before the greatest cataclysm that the world has
ever known, and his mind, arrested by much
that was trivial, never once responded to the
storm-signals which must surely have been
visible around him. We read that an amiable
Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery
and supplied him with statistics as to his
output of beer. It was the same foul-mouthed
Sansterre who struck up the drums to drown
Louis' voice at the scaffold. The association
shows how near the unconscious sage was to
the edge of that precipice and how little his
learning availed him in discerning it.

  He would have been a great lawyer or divine. 
Nothing, one would think, could have kept him
from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In
either case his memory, his learning, his dignity,
and his inherent sense of piety and justice,
would have sent him straight to the top. His
brain, working within its own limitations, was
remarkable. There is no more wonderful
proof of this than his opinions on questions
of Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used
by the latter before the Scotch judges. That
an outsider with no special training should
at short notice write such weighty opinions,
crammed with argument and reason, is, I think,
as remarkable a _tour de force_ as literature can
show.

  Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted
man, and that must count for much. His was
a large charity, and it came from a small purse. 
The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour
of refuge in which several strange battered hulks
found their last moorings. There were the blind
Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams,
and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old
and ailing---a trying group amid which to spend
one's days. His guinea was always ready for
the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so
humble that he might not preface his book
with a dedication whose ponderous and
sonorous sentences bore the hall-mark of their
maker. It is the rough, kindly man, the man
who bore the poor street-walker home upon
his shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least
forgive, the dogmatic pedantic Doctor of the
Club.

  There is always to me something of interest
in the view which a great man takes of old age
and death. It is the practical test of how far the
philosophy of his life has been a sound one. 
Hume saw death afar, and met it with unostentatious
calm. Johnson's mind flinched from
that dread opponent. His letters and his talk
during his latter years are one long cry of fear. 
It was not cowardice, for physically he was one
of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived. 
There were no limits to his courage. It was
spiritual diffidence, coupled with an actual belief
in the possibilities of the other world, which
a more humane and liberal theology has done
something to soften. How strange to see him
cling so desperately to that crazy body, with its
gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus' dance, and its
six gallons of dropsy! What could be the
attraction of an existence where eight hours of
every day were spent groaning in a chair, and
sixteen wheezing in a bed? ``I would give
one of these legs,'' said he, ``for another year
of life.'' None the less, when the hour did at
last strike, no man could have borne himself
with more simple dignity and courage. Say
what you will of him, and resent him how
you may, you can never open those four
grey volumes without getting some mental
stimulus, some desire for wider reading,
some insight into human learning or character,
which should leave you a better and a wiser
man.

                     IV.

Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons
---two editions, if you please, for my old
complete one being somewhat crabbed in the
print I could not resist getting a set of Bury's
new six-volume presentment of the History. 
In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped
in any way. You want fair type, clear
paper, and a light volume. You are not to read
it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose
and keenness for knowledge, with a classical
atlas at your elbow and a note-book hard by,
taking easy stages and harking back every now
and then to keep your grip of the past and to
link it up with what follows. There are no
thrills in it. You won't be kept out of your bed
at night, nor will you forget your appointments
during the day, but you will feel a certain sedate
pleasure in the doing of it, and when it is done
you will have gained something which you can
never lose---something solid, something definite,
something that will make you broader and
deeper than before.

  Were I condemned to spend a year upon a
desert island and allowed only one book for my
companion, it is certainly that which I should
choose. For consider how enormous is its
scope, and what food for thought is contained
within those volumes. It covers a thousand
years of the world's history, it is full and good
and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic,
its style dignified. With our more
elastic methods we may consider his manner
pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson's
turgid periods had corrupted our literature. 
For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's
pomposity. A paragraph should be measured
and sonorous if it ventures to describe the
advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a
Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with
this lucid and just spirit by your side upholding
and instructing you. Beneath you are warring
nations, the clash of races, the rise and fall of
dynasties, the conflict of creeds. Serene you
float above them all, and ever as the panorama
flows past, the weighty measured unemotional
voice whispers the true meaning of the scene
into your ear.

  It is a most mighty story that is told. You
begin with a description of the state of the
Roman Empire when the early C<ae>sars were on
the throne, and when it was undisputed mistress
of the world. You pass down the line of
the Emperors with their strange alternations of
greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally
to criminal lunacy. When the Empire
went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries
to corrupt the man behind the spear. 
Neither did a religion of peace affect him much,
for, in spite of the adoption of Christianity,
Roman history was still written in blood. The
new creed had only added a fresh cause of
quarrel and violence to the many which already
existed, and the wars of angry nations were
mild compared to those of excited sectaries.

  Then came the mighty rushing wind from
without, blowing from the waste places of the
world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly
through the old order, leaving broken chaos
behind it, but finally cleansing and purifying
that which was stale and corrupt. A storm-centre
somewhere in the north of China did
suddenly what it may very well do again. The
human volcano blew its top off, and Europe was
covered by the destructive _d<e'>bris_. The absurd
point is that it was not the conquerors who overran
the Roman Empire, but it was the terrified
fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle,
blundered over everything which barred their
way. It was a wild, dramatic time---the time of
the formation of the modern races of Europe. 
The nations came whirling in out of the north
and east like dust-storms, and amid the seeming
chaos each was blended with its neighbour so as
to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle
Gaul got his steadying from the Franks, the
steady Saxon got his touch of refinement from
the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life
from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt
Greek made way for the manly and earnest
Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a
great hand blending the seeds. And so one can
now, save only that emigration has taken the
place of war. It does not, for example, take
much prophetic power to say that something
very great is being built up on the other side of
the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic basis
you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian
being added, you feel that there is
no human quality which may not be thereby
evolved.

  But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is
the flight of Empire from Rome to Byzantium,
even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its
centre some day not in London but in Chicago
or Toronto. There is the whole strange story
of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the
south, submerging all North Africa, spreading
right and left to India on the one side and to
Spain on the other, finally washing right over
the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced
European fortress of the Moslem. Such
is the tremendous narrative covering half the
world's known history, which can all be acquired
and made part of yourself by the aid of that
humble atlas, pencil, and note-book already
recommended.

  When all is so interesting it is hard to pick
examples, but to me there has always seemed to
be something peculiarly impressive in the first
entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. 
It has something of the glamour which hangs
round the early youth of a great man. You
remember how the Russians made their _d<e'>but_---
came down the great rivers and appeared at the
Bosphorus in two hundred canoes, from which
they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys. 
Singular that a thousand years have passed and
that the ambition of the Russians is still to
carry out the task at which their skin-clad
ancestors failed. Or the Turks again; you may
recall the characteristic ferocity with which
they opened their career. A handful of them
were on some mission to the Emperor. The
town was besieged from the landward side by
the barbarians, and the Asiatics obtained leave
to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk
galloped out, shot a barbarian with his arrow,
and then, lying down beside him, proceeded to
suck his blood, which so horrified the man's
comrades that they could not be brought to face
such uncanny adversaries. So, from opposite
sides, those two great races arrived at the city
which was to be the stronghold of the one and
the ambition of the other for so many centuries.

  And then, even more interesting than the
races which arrive are those that disappear. 
There is something there which appeals most
powerfully to the imagination. Take, for example,
the fate of those Vandals who conquered
the north of Africa. They were a German
tribe, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere
in the Elbe country. Suddenly they,
too, were seized with the strange wandering
madness which was epidemic at the time. 
Away they went on the line of least resistance,
which is always from north to south and from
east to west. South-west was the course of
the Vandals---a course which must have been
continued through pure love of adventure, since
in the thousands of miles which they traversed
there were many fair resting-places, if that were
only their quest.

  They crossed the south of France, conquered
Spain, and, finally, the more adventurous
passed over into Africa, where they occupied
the old Roman province. For two or three
generations they held it, much as the English
hold India, and their numbers were at the least
some hundreds of thousands. Presently the
Roman Empire gave one of those flickers which
showed that there was still some fire among the
ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered
the province. The Vandals were cut
off from the sea and fled inland. Whither did
they carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair?
Were they exterminated by the negroes, or did
they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
brought back stories from the Mountains of the
Moon of a Negroid race with light eyes and
hair. Is it possible that here we have some
trace of the vanished Germans?

  It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements
in Greenland. That also has always
seemed to me to be one of the most romantic
questions in history---the more so, perhaps, as I
have strained my eyes to see across the ice-floes
the Greenland coast at the point (or near it)
where the old ``Eyrbyggia'' must have stood. 
That was the Scandinavian city, founded by
colonists from Iceland, which grew to be a considerable
place, so much so that they sent to
Denmark for a bishop. That would be in the
fourteenth century. The bishop, coming out to
his see, found that he was unable to reach it on
account of a climatic change which had brought
down the ice and filled the strait between Iceland
and Greenland. From that day to this no
one has been able to say what has become of
these old Scandinavians, who were at the time,
be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced
race in Europe. They may have been
overwhelmed by the Esquimaux, the despised
Skroeling---or they may have amalgamated with
them---or conceivably they might have held their
own. Very little is known yet of that portion
of the coast. It would be strange if some Nansen
or Peary were to stumble upon the remains
of the old colony, and find possibly in that
antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of
some bygone civilization.

  But once more to return to Gibbon. What
a mind it must have been which first planned,
and then, with the incessant labour of twenty
years, carried out that enormous work! There
was no classical author so little known, no
Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish
chronicle so crabbed, that they were not
assimilated and worked into their appropriate
place in the huge framework. Great application,
great perseverance, great attention to detail
was needed in all this, but the coral polyp
has all those qualities, and somehow in the
heart of his own creation the individuality of
the man himself becomes as insignificant and
as much overlooked as that of the little creature
that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon's
work for one who cares anything for
Gibbon.

  And on the whole this is justified by the
facts. Some men are greater than their work. 
Their work only represents one facet of their
character, and there may be a dozen others,
all remarkable, and uniting to make one complex
and unique creature. It was not so with
Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a
brain which seemed to have grown at the expense
of his heart. I cannot recall in his life
one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm,
save for the Classics. His excellent judgment
was never clouded by the haze of human emotion---
or, at least, it was such an emotion as
was well under the control of his will. Could
anything be more laudable---or less lovable?
He abandons his girl at the order of his father,
and sums it up that he ``sighs as a lover but
obeys as a son.'' The father dies, and he records
the fact with the remark that ``the tears
of a son are seldom lasting.'' The terrible
spectacle of the French Revolution excited in
his mind only a feeling of self-pity because
his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the
unhappy refugees, just as a grumpy country
gentleman in England might complain that
he was annoyed by the trippers. There is
a touch of dislike in all the allusions which
Boswell makes to Gibbon---often without even
mentioning his name---and one cannot read
the great historian's life without understanding
why.

  I should think that few men have been born
with the material for self-sufficient contentment
more completely within himself than Edward
Gibbon. He had every gift which a great
scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for
learning in every form, immense industry, a
retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic
temperament which enables a man to rise above
the partisan and to become the impartial critic
of human affairs. It is true that at the time he
was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the
matter of religious thought, but his views are
familiar to modern philosophy, and would
shock no susceptibilities in these more liberal
(and more virtuous) days. Turn him up in
that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word
is upon his contentions. ``Upon the famous
fifteenth and sixteenth chapters it is not necessary
to dwell,'' says the biographer, ``because
at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams
of denying the substantial truth of any of the
more important allegations of Gibbon. Christians
may complain of the suppression of some
circumstances which might influence the general
result, and they must remonstrate against the
unfair construction of their case. But they no
longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence
tending to show that persecution was less severe
than had been once believed, and they have
slowly learned that they can afford to concede
the validity of all the secondary causes assigned
by Gibbon and even of others still more discreditable.
The fact is, as the historian has
again and again admitted, that his account of
the secondary causes which contributed to the
progress and establishment of Christianity
leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural
origin of Christianity practically untouched.''
This is all very well, but in that
case how about the century of abuse which has
been showered upon the historian? Some
posthumous apology would seem to be called for.

  Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson
was large, but there was a curious affinity in
their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth,
was ulcerated and tortured by the king's evil,
in spite of the Royal touch. Gibbon gives
us a concise but lurid account of his own
boyhood.

  ``I was successively afflicted by lethargies
and fevers, by opposite tendencies to a consumptive
and dropsical habit, by a contraction
of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the bite
of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness. 
Every practitioner was called to my aid, the fees
of the doctors were swelled by the bills of the
apothecaries and surgeons. There was a time
when I swallowed more physic than food, and
my body is still marked by the indelible scars
of lancets, issues, and caustics.''

  Such is his melancholy report. The fact is
that the England of that day seems to have been
very full of that hereditary form of chronic
ill-health which we call by the general name of
struma. How far the hard-drinking habits in
vogue for a century or so before had anything to
do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection
between struma and learning; but one
has only to compare this account of Gibbon
with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred
face and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that
these, the two most solid English writers of
their generation, were each heir to the same
gruesome inheritance.

  I wonder if there is any picture extant of
Gibbon in the character of subaltern in the
South Hampshire Militia? With his small
frame, his huge head, his round, chubby face,
and the pretentious uniform, he must have
looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was
there so round a peg in a square hole! His
father, a man of a very different type, held a
commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming
a soldier in spite of himself. War had
broken out, the regiment was mustered, and the
unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay,
was kept under arms until the conclusion of
hostilities. For three years he was divorced
from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he
resent it. The South Hampshire Militia never
saw the enemy, which is perhaps as well for
them. Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at
them; but after three years under canvas it is
probable that his men had more cause to smile
at their book-worm captain than he at his men. 
His hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle
than on a sword-hilt. In his lament,
one of the items is that his colonel's example
encouraged the daily practice of hard and even
excessive drinking, which gave him the gout. 
``The loss of so many busy and idle hours were
not compensated for by any elegant pleasure,''
says he; ``and my temper was insensibly soured
by the society of rustic officers, who were alike
deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the
manners of gentlemen.'' The picture of Gibbon
flushed with wine at the mess-table, with these
hard-drinking squires around him, must certainly
have been a curious one. He admits,
however, that he found consolations as well as
hardships in his spell of soldiering. It made
him an Englishman once more, it improved his
health, it changed the current of his thoughts. 
It was even useful to him as an historian. 
In a celebrated and characteristic sentence,
he says, ``The discipline and evolutions of
a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion
of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain
of the Hampshire Grenadiers has not
been useless to the historian of the Roman
Empire.''

  If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not
his fault, for he wrote no fewer than six accounts
of his own career, each differing from the other,
and all equally bad. A man must have more
heart and soul than Gibbon to write a good
autobiography. It is the most difficult of all
human compositions, calling for a mixture of
tact, discretion, and frankness which make an
almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite
of his foreign education, was a very typical
Englishman in many ways, with the reticence,
self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. 
No British autobiography has ever been frank,
and consequently no British autobiography has
ever been good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as
good as any that I know, but of all forms of
literature it is the one least adapted to the
national genius. You could not imagine a
British Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto
Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the
race that it should be so. If we do as much
evil as our neighbours we at least have grace
enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress its
publication.

  There on the left of Gibbon is my fine
edition (Lord Braybrooke's) of Pepys' Diary. 
That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in
our language, and yet it was not deliberately
written as such. When Mr. Pepys jotted down
from day to day every quaint or mean thought
which came into his head he would have been
very much surprised had any one told him that
he was doing a work quite unique in our literature.
Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled
for some obscure reason or for private
reference, but certainly never meant for publication,
is as much the first in that line of
literature as Boswell's book among biographies
or Gibbon's among histories.

  As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves
away ever to produce a good autobiography.
We resent the charge of national
hypocrisy, and yet of all nations we are the
least frank as to our own emotions---especially
on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the
heart, for example, which are such an index to
a man's character, and so profoundly modify
his life---what space do they fill in any man's
autobiography? Perhaps in Gibbon's case
the omission matters little, for, save in the
instance of his well-controlled passion for the
future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an
organ which gave him much trouble. The fact
is that when the British author tells his own
story he tries to make himself respectable,
and the more respectable a man is the less
interesting does he become. Rousseau may
prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini
may stand self-convicted as an amorous
ruffian. If they are not respectable they are
thoroughly human and interesting all the
same.

  The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that
a man should succeed in making himself seem
so insignificant when really he must have been
a man of considerable character and attainments.
Who would guess it who read all these
trivial comments, these catalogues of what he
had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences
---all the more interesting for their inanity!
The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque
character in a play, fussy, self-conscious,
blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud,
purse-proud, trimming in politics and
in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always
in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day
man, the year-by-year man was a very
different person, a devoted civil servant, an
eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable
musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated
3000 volumes---a large private library in those
days---and had the public spirit to leave them all
to his University. You can forgive old Pepys
a good deal of his philandering when you remember
that he was the only official of the Navy
Office who stuck to his post during the worst
days of the Plague. He may have been---indeed,
he assuredly was---a coward, but the
coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome
his cowardice is the most truly brave of
mankind.

  But the one amazing thing which will never
be explained about Pepys is what on earth
induced him to go to the incredible labour of
writing down in shorthand cipher not only all
the trivialities of his life, but even his own very
gross delinquencies which any other man would
have been only too glad to forget. The Diary
was kept for about ten years, and was abandoned
because the strain upon his eyes of the
crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his
sight. I suppose that he became so familiar
with it that he wrote it and read it as easily as he
did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge
labour to compile these books of strange manuscript.
Was it an effort to leave some memorial
of his own existence to single him out from all
the countless sons of men? In such a case he
would assuredly have left directions in somebody's
care with a reference to it in the deed by
which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. 
In that way he could have ensured having his
Diary read at any date he chose to name after
his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if
it had not been for the ingenuity and perseverance
of a single scholar the dusty volumes
would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not
his object. What could it have been? The
only alternative is reference and self-information.
You will observe in his character a
curious vein of method and order, by which
he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling
his possessions. It is conceivable that this
systematic recording of his deeds---even of his
misdeeds---was in some sort analogous, sprung
from a morbid tidiness of mind. It may be a
weak explanation, but it is difficult to advance
another one.

  One minor point which must strike the reader
of Pepys is how musical a nation the English
of that day appear to have been. Every one
seems to have had command of some instrument,
many of several. Part-singing was common.
There is not much of Charles the Second's
days which we need envy, but there, at least,
they seem to have had the advantage of us. It
was real music, too---music of dignity and tenderness---
with words which were worthy of
such treatment. This cult may have been the
last remains of those medi<ae>val pre-Reformation
days when the English Church choirs were, as
I have read somewhere, the most famous in
Europe. A strange thing this for a land which
in the whole of last century has produced no
single master of the first rank!

  What national change is it which has driven
music from the land? Has life become so
serious that song has passed out of it? In
Southern climes one hears poor folk sing for
pure lightness of heart. In England, alas, the
sound of a poor man's voice raised in song means
only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is
consoling to know that the germ of the old
powers is always there ready to sprout forth
if they be nourished and cultivated. If our
cathedral choirs were the best in the old Catholic
days, it is equally true, I believe, that our
orchestral associations are now the best in
Europe. So, at least, the German papers said
on the occasion of the recent visit of a north of
England choir. But one cannot read Pepys
without knowing that the general musical habit
is much less cultivated now than of old.

                    V.

It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to
George Borrow---from one pole of the human
character to the other---and yet they are in contact
on the shelf of my favourite authors. There
is something wonderful, I think, about the
land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending
out into the ocean has caught all sorts
of strange floating things, and has held them
there in isolation until they have woven themselves
into the texture of the Cornish race. 
What is this strange strain which lurks down
yonder and every now and then throws up a
great man with singular un-English ways and
features for all the world to marvel at? It
is not Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. 
Further and deeper lie the springs. Is it not
Semitic, Ph<oe>nician, the roving men of Tyre,
with noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations,
who have in far-off days forgotten their
blue Mediterranean and settled on the granite
shores of the Northern Sea?

  Whence came the wonderful face and great
personality of Henry Irving? How strong,
how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only
know that his mother was a Cornish woman. 
Whence came the intense glowing imagination
of the Bront<e:>s---so unlike the Miss-Austen-like
calm of their predecessors? Again, I only
know that their mother was a Cornish woman. 
Whence came this huge elfin creature, George
Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his
rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed,
a king among men? Where did he get that
remarkable face, those strange mental gifts,
which place him by himself in literature?
Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes,
there is something strange, and weird, and great,
lurking down yonder in the great peninsula
which juts into the western sea. Borrow may,
if he so pleases, call himself an East Anglian---
``an English Englishman,'' as he loved to term
it---but is it a coincidence that the one East
Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one who
showed these strange qualities? The birth
was accidental. The qualities throw back to
the twilight of the world.

  There are some authors from whom I shrink
because they are so voluminous that I feel that,
do what I may, I can never hope to be well read
in their works. Therefore, and very weakly,
I avoid them altogether. There is Balzac, for
example, with his hundred odd volumes. I am
told that some of them are masterpieces and the
rest pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which
is which. Such an author makes an undue
claim upon the little span of mortal years. Because
he asks too much one is inclined to give
him nothing at all. Dumas, too! I stand on
the edge of him, and look at that huge crop, and
content myself with a sample here and there. 
But no one could raise this objection to Borrow. 
A month's reading---even for a leisurely reader
---will master all that he has written. There
are ``Lavengro,'' ``The Bible in Spain,'' ``Romany
Rye,'' and, finally, if you wish to go
further, ``Wild Wales.'' Only four books---
not much to found a great reputation upon---
but, then, there are no other four books quite
like them in the language.

  He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced,
obstinate, inclined to be sulky, as wayward
as a man could be. So far his catalogue
of qualities does not seem to pick him as a
winner. But he had one great and rare gift. 
He preserved through all his days a sense of
the great wonder and mystery of life---the child
sense which is so quickly dulled. Not only did
he retain it himself, but he was word-master
enough to make other people hark back to it also. 
As he writes you cannot help seeing through
his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw or his
ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It
was all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning
struggling always to the light. If he
chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman
there was something arresting in the
words he said, something singular in her reply. 
If he met a man in a public-house one felt,
after reading his account, that one would wish
to know more of that man. If he approached
a town he saw and made you see---not a collection
of commonplace houses or frowsy streets,
but something very strange and wonderful, the
winding river, the noble bridge, the old castle,
the shadows of the dead. Every human being,
every object, was not so much a thing in itself,
as a symbol and reminder of the past. He
looked through a man at that which the man
represented. Was his name Welsh? Then
in an instant the individual is forgotten and
he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient
Britons, intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards,
Owen Glendower, mountain raiders and a thousand
fascinating things. Or is it a Danish
name? He leaves the individual in all his
modern commonplace while he flies off to huge
skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may remark
that I have examined the said skulls with some
care, and they seemed to me to be rather below
the human average), to Vikings, Berserkers,
Varangians, Harald Haardraada, and the innate
wickedness of the Pope. To Borrow all roads
lead to Rome.

  But, my word, what English the fellow could
write! What an organ-roll he could get into
his sentences! How nervous and vital and
vivid it all is!

  There is music in every line of it if you have
been blessed with an ear for the music of prose.
Take the chapter in ``Lavengro'' of how the
screaming horror came upon his spirit when he
was encamped in the Dingle. The man who
wrote that has caught the true mantle of Bunyan
and Defoe. And, observe the art of it,
under all the simplicity---notice, for example,
the curious weird effect produced by the studied
repetition of the word ``dingle'' coming ever
round and round like the master-note in a chime. 
Or take the passage about Britain towards the
end of ``The Bible in Spain.'' I hate quoting
from these masterpieces, if only for the very
selfish reason that my poor setting cannot afford
to show up brilliants. None the less, cost what
it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of
impassioned prose---

  ``O England! long, long may it be ere the
sun of thy glory sink beneath the wave of
darkness! Though gloomy and portentous
clouds are now gathering rapidly around thee,
still, still may it please the Almighty to disperse
them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in
duration and still brighter in renown than thy
past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that
doom be a noble one, and worthy of her who
has been styled the Old Queen of the waters!
May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst blood
and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more
than one nation to participate in thy downfall!
Of all fates, may it please the Lord to preserve
thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming,
ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for
those self-same foes who now, though they envy
and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay even against
their will, honour and respect thee. . . . Remove
from thee the false prophets, who have
seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed
thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may
fall; who see visions of peace where there is no
peace; who have strengthened the hands of the
wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad. 
Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either
shall thy end be a majestic and an enviable
one; or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon
the waters, thou Old Queen!''

  Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. 
It's too long for quotation---but read it, read
every word of it. Where in the language can
you find a stronger, more condensed and more
restrained narrative? I have seen with my own
eyes many a noble fight, more than one international
battle, where the best of two great
countries have been pitted against each other---
yet the second-hand impression of Borrow's
description leaves a more vivid remembrance
upon my mind than any of them. This is the
real witchcraft of letters.

  He was a great fighter himself. He has left
a secure reputation in other than literary circles
---circles which would have been amazed to
learn that he was a writer of books. With his
natural advantages, his six foot three of height
and his staglike agility, he could hardly fail to
be formidable. But he was a scientific sparrer
as well, though he had, I have been told, a
curious sprawling fashion of his own. And
how his heart was in it---how he loved the
fighting men! You remember his thumb-nail
sketches of his heroes. If you don't I must
quote one, and if you do you will be glad to read
it again---

  ``There's Cribb, the Champion of England,
and perhaps the best man in England; there
he is, with his huge, massive figure, and face
wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher,
the younger, not the mighty one, who is
gone to his place, but the Teucer Belcher, the
most scientific pugilist that ever entered a ring,
only wanting strength to be I won't say what. 
He appears to walk before me now, as he did
that evening, with his white hat, white great
coat, thin genteel figure, springy step, and keen
determined eye. Crosses him, what a contrast!
Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word for
nobody, and a hard blow for anybody. Hard!
One blow given with the proper play of his
athletic arm will unsense a giant. Yonder
individual, who strolls about with his hands
behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets,
undersized, and who looks anything but what
he is, is the king of the light-weights, so-called
---Randall! The terrible Randall, who has
Irish blood in his veins; not the better for that,
nor the worse; and not far from him is his last
antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten
by him, still thinks himself as good a man, in
which he is, perhaps, right, for it was a near
thing. But how shall I name them all? They
were there by dozens, and all tremendous in
their way. There was Bulldog Hudson, and
fearless Scroggins, who beat the conqueror of
Sam the Jew. There was Black Richmond---
no, he was not there, but I knew him well; he
was the most dangerous of blacks, even with a
broken thigh. There was Purcell, who could
never conquer until all seemed over with him. 
There was---what! shall I name thee last?
Ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last
of all that strong family still above the sod,
where mayst thou long continue---true piece of
English stuff---Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee,
Tom of Bedford, or by whatever name it may
please thee to be called, Spring or Winter!
Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown
eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot
bow at Flodden, where England's yeomen triumphed
over Scotland's King, his clans and chivalry. 
Hail to thee, last of English bruisers, after all the
many victories which thou hast achieved---true
English victories, unbought by yellow gold.''

  Those are words from the heart. Long
may it be before we lose the fighting blood
which has come to us from of old! In a world
of peace we shall at last be able to root it from
our natures. In a world which is armed to the
teeth it is the last and only guarantee of our
future. Neither our numbers, nor our wealth,
nor the waters which guard us can hold us safe
if once the old iron passes from our spirit. 
Barbarous, perhaps----but there are possibilities
for barbarism, and none in this wide world for
effeminacy.

  Borrow's views of literature and of literary
men were curious. Publisher and brother
author, he hated them with a fine comprehensive
hatred. In all his books I cannot recall a
word of commendation to any living writer,
nor has he posthumous praise for those of the
generation immediately preceding. Southey,
indeed, he commends with what most would
regard as exaggerated warmth, but for the rest
he who lived when Dickens, Thackeray, and
Tennyson were all in their glorious prime, looks
fixedly past them at some obscure Dane or forgotten
Welshman. The reason was, I expect,
that his proud soul was bitterly wounded by
his own early failures and slow recognition. 
He knew himself to be a chief in the clan, and
when the clan heeded him not he withdrew
in haughty disdain. Look at his proud, sensitive
face and you hold the key to his life.

  Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall
an incident which gave me pleasure. A friend
of mine read a pugilistic novel called ``Rodney
Stone'' to a famous Australian prize-fighter,
stretched upon a bed of mortal sickness. The
dying gladiator listened with intent interest but
keen, professional criticism to the combats of
the novel. The reader had got to the point
where the young amateur fights the brutal
Berks. Berks is winded, but holds his adversary
off with a stiff left arm. The amateur's
second in the story, an old prize-fighter, shouts
some advice to him as to how to deal with the
situation. ``That's right. By ---- he's got
him!'' yelled the stricken man in the bed. 
Who cares for critics after that?

  You can see my own devotion to the ring in
that trio of brown volumes which stand, appropriately
enough, upon the flank of Borrow. 
They are the three volumes of ``Pugilistica,''
given me years ago by my old friend, Robert
Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for
half an hour without striking it rich. Alas!
for the horrible slang of those days, the vapid
witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and its
fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit
of italicizing a word or two in every sentence. 
Even these stern and desperate encounters, fit
sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo,
become dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. 
You have to tum to Hazlitt's account of the
encounter between the Gasman and the Bristol
Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is
a hardened reader who does not wince even in
print before that frightful right-hander which
felled the giant, and left him in ``red ruin''
from eyebrow to jaw. But even if there be no
Hazlitt present to describe such a combat it is a
poor imagination which is not fired by the deeds
of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly
upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful
ones in these little-read pages. They were
picturesque creatures, men of great force of
character and will, who reached the limits of
human bravery and endurance. There is Jackson
on the cover, gold upon brown, ``gentleman
Jackson,'' Jackson of the balustrade calf
and the noble head, who wrote his name with
an 88-pound weight dangling from his little
finger.

  Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who
knew him well----

  ``I can see him now as I saw him in '84
walking down Holborn Hill, towards Smithfield.
He had on a scarlet coat worked in gold
at the buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace,
a small white stock, no collar (they were not then
invented), a looped hat with a broad black band,
buff knee-breeches and long silk strings, striped
white silk stockings, pumps and paste buckles;
his waistcoat was pale blue satin, sprigged with
white. It was impossible to look on his fine
ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if
anything too small), his large but not too large
hips, his balustrade calf and beautifully turned
but not over delicate ankle, his firm foot and
peculiarly small hand, without thinking that
nature had sent him on earth as a model. On
he went at a good five miles and a half an hour,
the envy of all men and the admiration of all
women.''

  Now, that is a discriminating portrait---a portrait
which really helps you to see that which
the writer sets out to describe. After reading
it one can understand why even in reminiscent
sporting descriptions of those old days, amid
all the Tonis and Bills and Jacks, it is always Mr.
John Jackson. He was the friend and instructor
of Byron and of half the bloods in town. Jackson
it was who, in the heat of combat, seized the
Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so ensured that
the pugs for ever afterwards should be a close-cropped
race. Inside you see the square face
of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of
the eighteenth century, the man whose humble
ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of
the Prussian Guard, and work his way through
the regiment. He had a chronicler, the good
Captain Godfrey, who has written some English
which would take some beating. How about
this passage?----

  ``He stops as regularly as the swordsman,
and carries his blows truly in the line; he steps
not back distrusting of himself, to stop a blow,
and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided
by his body, producing but fly-flap blows. 
No! Broughton steps boldly and firmly in,
bids a welcome to the coming blow; receives
it with his guardian arm; then, with a general
summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm
body seconding his arm, and supplying it with
all its weight, pours the pile-driving force upon
his man.''

  One would like a little more from the gallant
Captain. Poor Broughton! He fought once
too often. ``Why, damn you, you're beat!''
cried the Royal Duke. ``Not beat, your highness,
but I can't see my man!'' cried the blinded
old hero. Alas, there is the tragedy of the ring
as it is of life! The wave of youth surges ever
upwards, and the wave that went before is
swept sobbing on to the shingle. ``Youth will
be served,'' said the terse old pugs. But what
so sad as the downfall of the old champion!
Wise Tom Spring---Tom of Bedford, as Borrow
calls him---had the wit to leave the ring
unconquered in the prime of his fame. Cribb
also stood out as a champion. But Broughton,
Slack, Belcher, and the rest---their end was one
common tragedy.

  The latter days of the fighting men were
often curious and unexpected, though as a rule
they were short-lived, for the alternation of the
excess of their normal existence and the asceticism
of their training undermined their constitution.
Their popularity among both men
and women was their undoing, and the king of
the ring went down at last before that deadliest
of light-weights, the microbe of tubercle, or
some equally fatal and perhaps less reputable
bacillus. The crockiest of spectators had a
better chance of life than the magnificent young
athlete whom he had come to admire. Jem
Belcher died at 30, Hooper at 3I, Pearce, the
Game Chicken, at 32, Turner at 35, Hudson at
38, Randall, the Nonpareil, at 34. Occasionally,
when they did reach mature age, their lives took
the strangest turns. Gully, as is well known,
became a wealthy man, and Member for Pontefract
in the Reform Parliament. Humphries
developed into a successful coal merchant.
Jack Martin became a convinced teetotaller
and vegetarian. Jem Ward, the Black Diamond,
developed considerable powers as an
artist. Cribb, Spring, Langan, and many
others, were successful publicans. Strangest of
all, perhaps, was Broughton, who spent his old
age haunting every sale of old pictures and
bric-<a'>-brac. One who saw him has recorded
his impression of the silent old gentleman, clad
in old-fashioned garb, with his catalogue in his
hand---Broughton, once the terror of England,
and now the harmless and gentle collector.

  Many of them, as was but natural, died
violent deaths, some by accident and a few by
their own hands. No man of the first class
ever died in the ring. The nearest approach
to it was the singular and mournful fate which
befell Simon Byrne, the brave Irishman, who
had the misfortune to cause the death of his
antagonist, Angus Mackay, and afterwards met
his own end at the hands of Deaf Burke. 
Neither Byrne nor Mackay could, however, be
said to be boxers of the very first rank. It certainly
would appear, if we may argue from the
prize-ring, that the human machine becomes
more delicate and is more sensitive to jar or
shock. In the early days a fatal end to a fight
was exceedingly rare. Gradually such tragedies
became rather more common, until now even
with the gloves they have shocked us by their
frequency, and we feel that the rude play of
our forefathers is indeed too rough for a more
highly organized generation. Still, it may help
us to clear our minds of cant if we remember
that within two or three years the hunting-field
and the steeple-chase claim more victims
than the prize-ring has done in two centuries.

  Many of these men had served their country
well with that strength and courage which
brought them fame. Cribb was, if I mistake
not, in the Royal Navy. So was the terrible
dwarf Scroggins, all chest and shoulders, whose
springing hits for many a year carried all before
them until the canny Welshman, Ned Turner,
stopped his career, only to be stopped in turn
by the brilliant Irishman, Jack Randall. Shaw,
who stood high among the heavy-weights, was
cut to pieces by the French Cuirassiers in the
first charge at Waterloo. The brutal Berks
died greatly in the breach of Badajos. The
lives of these men stood for something, and that
was just the one supreme thing which the times
called for---an unflinching endurance which
could bear up against a world in arms. Look
at Jem Belcher---beautiful, heroic Jem, a manlier
Byron---but there, this is not an essay on the
old prize-ring, and one man's lore is another
man's bore. Let us pass those three low-down,
unjustifiable, fascinating volumes, and
on to nobler topics beyond!

                    VI.

Which are the great short stories of the
English language? Not a bad basis for a
debate! This I am sure of: that there are far
fewer supremely good short stories than there
are supremely good long books. It takes more
exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the
statue. But the strangest thing is that the two
excellences seem to be separate and even antagonistic.
Skill in the one by no means ensures
skill in the other. The great masters of our
literature, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
Reade, have left no single short story of outstanding
merit behind them, with the possible
exception of Wandering Willie's Tale in ``Red
Gauntlet.'' On the other hand, men who have
been very great in the short story, Stevenson,
Poe, and Bret Harte, have written no great book. 
The champion sprinter is seldom a five-miler as
well.

  Well, now, if you had to choose your team
whom would you put in? You have not really
a large choice. What are the points by which
you judge them? You want strength, novelty,
compactness, intensity of interest, a single
vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is
the master of all. I may remark by the way
that it is the sight of his green cover, the next
in order upon my favourite shelf, which has
started this train of thought. Poe is, to my
mind, the supreme original short story writer
of all time. His brain was like a seed-pod full
of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from
which have sprung nearly all our modern types
of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand,
prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to
repeat a success, but pushing on to some new
achievement. To him must be ascribed the
monstrous progeny of writers on the detection
of crime---``_quorum pars parva fui!_'' Each
may find some little development of his own,
but his main art must trace back to those admirable
stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful
in their masterful force, their reticence,
their quick dramatic point. After all, mental
acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed
to the ideal detective, and when that
has once been admirably done, succeeding
writers must necessarily be content for all time
to follow in the same main track. But not only
is Poe the originator of the detective story;
all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving yarns
trace back to his ``Gold Bug,'' just as all
pseudo-scientific Verne-and-Wells stories have
their prototypes in the ``Voyage to the Moon,''
and the ``Case of Monsieur Valdemar.'' If
every man who receives a cheque for a story
which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe
to a monument for the master, he would have a
pyramid as big as that of Cheops.

  And yet I could only give him two places in
my team. One would be for the ``Gold Bug,''
the other for the ``Murder in the Rue Morgue.''
I do not see how either of those could be bettered.
But I would not admit _perfect_ excellence
to any other of his stories. These two have a
proportion and a perspective which are lacking
in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea
intensified by the coolness of the narrator and
of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case
and Le Grand in the other. The same may be
said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short
story tellers who proved himself incapable of a
longer flight. He was always like one of his
own gold-miners who struck a rich pocket, but
found no continuous reef. The pocket was,
alas, a very limited one, but the gold was of the
best. ``The Luck of Roaring Camp'' and
``Tennessee's Partner'' are both, I think,
worthy of a place among my immortals. They
are, it is true, so tinged with Dickens as to be
almost parodies of the master, but they have a
symmetry and satisfying completeness as short
stories to which Dickens himself never attained. 
The man who can read those two stories without
a gulp in the throat is not a man I envy.

  And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two
places also, for where is a finer sense of what the
short story can do? He wrote, in my judgment,
two masterpieces in his life, and each of
them is essentially a short story, though the one
happened to be published as a volume. The
one is ``Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,'' which,
whether you take it as a vivid narrative or as
a wonderfully deep and true allegory, is a
supremely fine bit of work. The other story
of my choice would be ``The Pavilion on the
Links''---the very model of dramatic narrative. 
That story stamped itself so clearly on my brain
when I read it in _Cornhill_ that when I came
across it again many years afterwards in volume
form, I was able instantly to recognize two small
modifications of the text---each very much for
the worse---from the original form. They were
small things, but they seemed somehow like
a chip on a perfect statue. Surely it is only a
very fine work, of art which could leave so definite
an impression as that. Of course, there are a
dozen other of his stories which would put the
average writer's best work to shame, all with
the strange Stevenson glamour upon them, of
which I may discourse later, but only to those
two would I be disposed to admit that complete
excellence which would pass them into such a
team as this.

  And who else? If it be not an impertinence
to mention a contemporary, I should certainly
have a brace from Rudyard Kipling. His
power, his compression, his dramatic sense,
his way of glowing suddenly into a vivid flame,
all mark him as a great master. But which are
we to choose from that long and varied collection,
many of which have claims to the highest?
Speaking from memory, I should say that the
stories of his which have impressed me most
are ``The Drums of the Fore and Aft,'' ``The
Man who Would be King,'' ``The Man who
Was,'' and ``The Brushwood Boy.'' Perhaps,
on the whole, it is the first two which I should
choose to add to my list of masterpieces.

  They are stories which invite criticism and
yet defy it. The great batsman at cricket is the
man who can play an unorthodox game, take
every liberty which is denied to inferior players,
and yet succeed brilliantly in the face of his
disregard of law. So it is here. I should think
the model of these stories is the most dangerous
that any young writer could follow. There is
digression, that most deadly fault in the short
narrative; there is incoherence, there is want
of proportion which makes the story stand still
for pages and bound forward in a few sentences. 
But genius overrides all that, just as the great
cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the
straight one to leg. There is a dash, an exuberance,
a full-blooded, confident mastery
which carries everything before it. Yes, no
team of immortals would be complete which
did not contain at least two representatives of
Kipling.

  And now whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne
never appealed in the highest degree to me. 
The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always
seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me. 
It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect. Indeed,
I have been more affected by some of the
short work of his son Julian, though I can
quite understand the high artistic claims which
the senior writer has, and the delicate charm
of his style. There is Bulwer Lytton as a
claimant. His ``Haunted and the Haunters''
is the very best ghost story that I know. As
such I should include it in my list. There was
a story, too, in one of the old _Blackwoods_---
``Metempsychosis'' it was called, which left so
deep an impression upon my mind that I should
be inclined, though it is many years since I read
it, to number it with the best. Another story
which has the characteristics of great work is
Grant Allen's ``John Creedy.'' So good a
story upon so philosophic a basis deserves a
place among the best. There is some first-class
work to be picked also from the contemporary
work of Wells and of Quiller-Couch
which reaches a high standard. One little
sketch---``Old <OE>son'' in ``Noughts and
Crosses''---is, in my opinion, as good as anything
of the kind which I have ever read.

  And all this didactic talk comes from looking
at that old green cover of Poe. I am sure that
if I had to name the few books which have
really influenced my own life I should have to
put this one second only to Macaulay's Essays. 
I read it young when my mind was plastic. It
stimulated my imagination and set before me a
supreme example of dignity and force in the
methods of telling a story. It is not altogether
a healthy influence, perhaps. It turns the
thoughts too forcibly to the morbid and the
strange.

  He was a saturnine creature, devoid of
humour and geniality, with a love for the grotesque
and the terrible. The reader must himself
furnish the counteracting qualities or Poe
may become a dangerous comrade. We know
along what perilous tracks and into what deadly
quagmires his strange mind led him, down to
that grey October Sunday morning when he
was picked up, a dying man, on the side-walk
at Baltimore, at an age which should have seen
him at the very prime of his strength and his
manhood.

  I have said that I look upon Poe as the
world's supreme short story writer. His nearest
rival, I should say, was Maupassant. The
great Norman never rose to the extreme force
and originality of the American, but he had a
natural inherited power, an inborn instinct towards
the right way of making his effects, which
mark him as a great master. He produced
stories because it was in him to do so, as naturally
and as perfectly as an apple tree produces
apples. What a fine, sensitive, artistic touch it
is! How easily and delicately the points are
made! How clear and nervous is his style,
and how free from that redundancy which disfigures
so much of our English work! He
pares it down to the quick all the time.

  I cannot write the name of Maupassant without
recalling what was either a spiritual interposition
or an extraordinary coincidence in my
own life. I had been travelling in Switzerland
and had visited, among other places, that
Gemmi Pass, where a huge cliff separates a
French from a German canton. On the summit
of this cliff was a small inn, where we broke
our journey. It was explained to us that,
although the inn was inhabited all the year
round, still for about three months in winter
it was utterly isolated, because it could at any
time only be approached by winding paths on
the mountain side, and when these became
obliterated by snow it was impossible either to
come up or to descend. They could see the lights
in the valley beneath them, but were as lonely as
if they lived in the moon. So curious a situation
naturally appealed to one's imagination,
and I speedily began to build up a short story
in my own mind, depending upon a group of
strong antagonistic characters being penned up
in this inn, loathing each other and yet utterly
unable to get away from each other's society,
every day bringing them nearer to tragedy. For
a week or so, as I travelled, I was turning over
the idea.

  At the end of that time I returned through
France. Having nothing to read I happened
to buy a volume of Maupassant's Tales which
I had never seen before. The first story was
called ``L'Auberge'' (The Inn)---and as I ran
my eye down the printed page I was amazed
to see the two words, ``Kandersteg'' and
``Gemmi Pass.'' I settled down and read it
with ever-growing amazement. The scene was
laid in the inn I had visited. The plot depended
on the isolation of a group of people
through the snowfall. Everything that I imagined
was there, save that Maupassant had
brought in a savage hound.

  Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear
enough. He had chanced to visit the inn, and
had been impressed as I had been by the same
train of thought. All that is quite intelligible. 
But what is perfectly marvellous is that in that
short journey I should have chanced to buy the
one book in all the world which would prevent
me from making a public foot of myself, for who
would ever have believed that my work was not
an imitation? I do not think that the hypothesis
of coincidence can cover the facts. It is
one of several incidents in my life which have
convinced me of spiritual interposition---of the
promptings of some beneficent force outside
ourselves, which tries to help us where it can. 
The old Catholic doctrine of the Guardian
Angel is not only a beautiful one, but has in it,
I believe, a real basis of truth.

  Or is it that our subliminal ego, to use the
jargon of the new psychology, or our astral, in
the terms of the new theology, can learn and
convey to the mind that which our own
known senses are unable to apprehend? But
that is too long a side track for us to turn
down it.

  When Maupassant chose he could run Poe
close in that domain of the strange and weird
which the American had made so entirely his
own. Have you read Maupassant's story called
``Le Horla''? That is as good a bit of _diablerie_
as you could wish for. And the Frenchman
has, of course, far the broader range. He
has a keen sense of humour, breaking out beyond
all decorum in some of his stories, but
giving a pleasant sub-flavour to all of them. 
And yet, when all is said, who can doubt that
the austere and dreadful American is far the
greater and more original mind of the two?

  Talking of weird American stories, have you
ever read any of the works of Ambrose Bierce?
I have one of his works there, ``In the Midst
of Life.'' This man had a flavour quite his own,
and was a great artist in his way. It is not
cheering reading, but it leaves its mark upon
you, and that is the proof of good work.

  I have often wondered where Poe got his
style. There is a sombre majesty about his
best work, as if it were carved from polished
jet, which is peculiarly his own. I dare say if
I took down that volume I could light anywhere
upon a paragraph which would show you what
I mean. This is the kind of thing---

  ``Now there are fine tales in the volumes
of the Magi---in the iron-bound melancholy
volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are
glorious histories of the heaven and of the
earth, and of the mighty sea---and of the genius
that overruled the sea, and the earth, and the
lofty heaven. There were much lore, too, in the
sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy,
holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves
which trembled round Dodona, but as Allah
liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as
he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I
hold to be the most wonderful of all.'' Or this
sentence: ``And then did we, the seven, start
from our seats in horror, and stand trembling
and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the
shadow were not the tones of any one being,
but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in
their cadences from syllable to syllab