By J.M.Barrie 1890.
SCENE.- The Library of a Piccadilly club for high thinking and bad dinners. Time midnight. Four eminent novelists of the day regarding each other self -consciously They are (1) a Realist,(2) a Romancist , (3) an Elsmerian, (4) a Stylist . The clock strikes thirteen, and they all start. REALIST (staring at the door and drawing back from it. ‘I thought I heard-something? STYLIST -I-the--(pauses to reflect on the best way of saying it was only the clock). (A step is heard on the stair.) ELSMERIAN.-Hark! It must be him and them. (Stylist shudders). I knew he would not fail us. RoMANCIST (nervously ).-It may only be some member of the club. ELSMERIAN The hall-porter said we would be safe from intrusion in the library. REALIST I hear nothing now. (His hand comes in contact with a bookcase). How cold and clammy to the touch these books are. A. strange place, gentlemen, for an eerie interview. ( To Elsmerian). You really think they will come? You have no religious doubts about the existence of Elysian Fields ? ELSMERJAN. I do not believe in Elysium, but I believe in him. REALIST Still if-- (The door is shaken and the handle falls off.) RoMANCIST Ah! Even I have never imagined anything so weird as this. See, the door opens! (Enter an American novelist.) OMNES 0nly you! AMERICAN (looking around him self-consciously).- I had always suspected that there was a library, though I have only been a member for a few months. Why do you look at me so strangely ? ELSMERIAN (after whispering with the others).-We are agreed that since you have found your way here you should be permitted to stay; on the understanding, of course, that we still disapprove of your methods as profoundly as we despise each other. AMERICAN But what are you doing here, when you might be asleep downstairs? ELSMERIAN (impressively) -Have you never wished to hold converse with the mighty dead ? AMERICAN I don't know them. ELSMERIAN.-I admit that the adjective was ill-chosen, but listen: the ghosts of Scott and some other novelists will join us presently. We are to talk with them about their work. REALIST And ours. ELSMERIAN And ours. They are being brought from the Grove of Bay-trees in the Elysian Fields. AMERICAN But they are antiquated, played out and, besides, they will not come. RoMANCIST You don't understand. Stanley has gone for them. AMERICAN Stanley! ELSMERIAN It was a chance not to be missed. (Looks at his watch). They should have been here by this time; but on these occasions he is sometimes a little late. ( Their mouths open as a voice rings through the club crying, "I cannot stop to argue with you; I'll find the way myself.") REALIST It is he, but he may be alone. Perhaps they declined to accompany him? ELSMERIAN (with conviction) He would bring them whether they wanted to come or not. (Enter Mr. Stanley with five Ghosts.) Mr. STANLEY Here they are. I hope the row below did not alarm you. The hall-porter wanted to know if I was a member, so I shot him.Waken me when you are ready to send them back. (Sits down and sleeps immediately.) FIRST GHOST. I am Walter Scott. SECOND GHOST I am Henry Fielding. THIRD GHOST My name is Smollett. FOURTH GHOST Mine is Dickens. FIFTH GHOST They used to call me Thack. ALL THE GHOSTS (looking at the sleeper).-And we are a little out of breath. AMERICAN (to himself).-There is too much plot in this for me. ELSMERIAN (to the visitors).-Quite so. Now will you be so good as to stand in a row against that bookcase. (They do so.) Perhaps you have been wondering why we troubled to send for you ? Sir WALTER We-- ELSMERIAN -You need not answer me, for it really doesn't matter. Since your days a great change has come over fiction-a kind of literature at which you all tried your hands-and it struck us that you might care to know how we moderns regard you. REALIST And ourselves. ELSMERIAN And ourselves. We had better begin with ourselves, as the night is already far advanced. You will be surprised to hear that fiction has become an art. FIELDING I am glad we came, though the gentleman (looking at the sleeper) was perhaps a little peremptory. You are all novelists? ROMANCIST No, I am a Romancist, this gentleman is a Realist, that one is a Stylist, and-- ELSMERIAN We had better explain to you that the word novelist has gone out of fashion in our circles. We have left it behind us-- Sir WALTER I was always content with story-teller myself. AMERICAN Story-teller! All the stories have been told. Sir WALTER (wistfully). How busy you must have been since my day. ROMANCIST.-We have, indeed, and not merely in writing stories to use the language of the nursery. Now that fiction is an art, the work of its followers consists less in writing mere stories (to repeat a word that you will understand more readily than we) than in classifying ourselves and (when we have time for it) classifying you. THACKERAY But the term novelist satisfied us. ELSMERIAN There is a difference, I hope, between then and now. I cannot avoid speaking plainly, though I allow that you are the seed from which the tree has grown. May I ask what was your first step toward becoming novelists. SMOLLETT (with foolish promptitude) We wrote a novel. THACKERAY ( humbly) I am afraid I began by wanting to write a good story, and then wrote it to the best of my ability. Is there any other way? STYLIST But how did you laboriously acquire your style? THACKERAY I thought little about style. I suppose, such as it was, it came naturally. STYLIST Pooh! Then there is no art in it. ELSMERIAN And what was your aim? THACKERAY Well, I had reason to believe that I would get something for it. ELSMERIAN Alas! to you the world was not a sea of drowning souls, nor the novel a stone to fling to them, that they might float on it to a quiet haven. You had no aims, no methods, no religious doubts, and you neither analysed your characters nor classified yourselves. AMERICAN And you reflected so little about your art that you wrote story after story without realising that all the stories had been told. Sir WALTER But if all the stories are told, how can you write novels? A.MERICAN The story in a novel is of as little importance as the stone in a cherry. I have written three volumes about a lady and a gentleman who met on a car. Sir WALTER Yes, what happened to them? A.MERICAN Nothing happened. That is the point of the story. STYLIST Style is everything. The true novelist does nothing but think:, think, think about his style, and then write, write, write about it. I daresay I am one of the most perfect stylists living. Oh, but the hours: the days, the years of introspection I have spent in acquiring my style! THACKERAY (sadly). -If I had 011ly thought more of style! May I ask how many books you have written ? STYLIST Only one-and that I have withdrawn from circulation. Ah, sir, I am such a stylist that I dare not write anything. Yet I meditate a work. Sir WALTER A.story? STYLIST No, an essay on style. I shall devote four years to it. Sir WALTER And I wrote two novels in four months! STYLIST Yes, that is still remembered against you. Well, you paid the penalty, for your books are still popular. DICKENS But is not popularity nowadays a sign of merit? STYLIST To be popular is to be damned. Sir WALTER. I can see from what you tell me that I was only a child. I thought little about how novels should be written. I only tried to write them, and as for style, I am afraid I merely used the words that came most readily. ( Stylist groans.) I had such an interest in my characters (American groans), such a love for them (Realist groans), that they were like living beings to me. Action seemed to come naturally to them, and all I had to do was to run after them with my pen. RoMANCIST In the dark days you had not a cheap press, nor scores of magazines and reviews. Ah, we have many opportunities that were denied to you. FIELDING We printed our stories in books. RoMANCIST I was not thinking of the mere stories. It is not our stories that we spend much time over, but the essays, and discussions and interviews about our art. Why, there is not a living man in this room, except the sleeper, who has not written as many articles and essays about how novels should be written as would stock a library. SMOLLETT But we thought that the best way of showing how they should be written was to write them. REALIST ( bitingly ) And as a result, you cannot say at this moment whether you are a Realist, a Romancist, an American Analyst., a Stylist, or an Elsmerian! Your labours have been fruitless. SMOLLETT What am I ? RoMANCIST -I refuse to include you among novelists at all, for your artistic views (which we have discovered for you) are different from mine. You are a Realist. Therefore I blot you out. Sir WALTER (anxiously). I suppose I am a Romancist? REALIST Yes, and therefore I cannot acknowledge you. Your work has to go. AMERICAN It has gone. I never read it. Indeed, I can't stand any of you. In short, I am an American Analyst. DICKENS (dreamily).-One of the most remarkable men in that country . AMERICAN Yes, sir, I am one of its leading writers of fiction without a story-along with Silas K. Weekes, Thomas John Hillocks, William P. Crinkle, and many others whose fame must have reached the Grove of Bay-trees. We write even more essays about ourselves than they do in this old country. ELSMERIAN Nevertheless, Romanticism, Realism, and Analysis are mere words, as empty as a drum. Religious doubt is the only subject for the novelist nowadays; and if he is such a poor creature as to have no religious doubts, he should leave fiction alone. STYLIST Style is everything. I can scarcely sleep at nights for thinking of my style. FIELDING This, of course, is very interesting to us who know so little, yet, except that it enables you to label yourselves, it does not seem to tell you much. After all, does it make a man a better novelist to know that other novelists pursue the wrong methods? 'You seem to despise each other cordially, while Smollett and I, for instance, can enjoy Sir Walter. We are content to judge him by results, and to consider him a great novelist because he wrote great novels. ELSMERIAN You will never be able to reach our standpoint if you cannot put the mere novels themselves out of the question. The novelist should be considered quite apart from his stories. REALIST It is nothing to me that I am a novelist, but I am proud of being a Realist. That is the great thing. ROMANCIST Consider, Mr. Smollett, if you had thought and written about yourself as much as I have done about myself you might never have produced one of the works by which you are now known. That would be something to be proud of. You might have written romances, like mine and Sir Walter's. ELSMERIAN Or have had religious doubts. STYLIST Or have become a Stylist, and written nothing at all. REALIST And you, Sir Walter, might have become one of us. THACKERAY But why should we not have written simply in the manner that suited us best ? If the result is good, who cares for the label? ROMANCIST (eyeing Sir Walter severely) No one has any right to be a Romancist unconsciously. Romance should be written with an effort -as I write it. I question, sir, if you ever defined romance? Sir WALTER (weakly) I had a general idea of it, and I thought that perhaps my books might be allowed to speak for me. ROMANCIST We have got beyond that stage. Romance (that is to say, fiction) has been defined by one of its followers as "not nature, it is not character, it is not imagined history; it is fallacy, poetic fallacy; a lie, if you like, a beautiful lie, a lie that is at once false and true-false to fact, true to faith." (The Ghosts look at each other apprehensively). Sir WALTER Would you mind repeating that? (Romancist repeats it) And all my novels all that? To think of their being that, and I never knew! I give you my word, sir; that when I wrote '' Ivanhoe," for example, I merely wanted to tell a story. REALIST Still, in your treatment of the Templar, you boldly cast off the chains of Romanticism and rise to Realism. ELSMERIAN. To do you justice, the Templar seems to have religious doubts. STYLIST I once wrote a little paper on your probable reasons for using the word ''wand" in circumstances that would perhaps have justified the use of ''reed." I have not published it. Sir WALTER This would be more gratifying to me if I thought that I deserved it. AMERICAN I remember reading '' Ivanhoe" before I knew any better; but even then I thought it poor stuff. There is no analysis in it worthy of the name. Why did Rowena drop her handkerchief? Instead of telling us that, you prance off after a band of archers. Do you really believe that intellectual men and women are interested in tournaments? Sir WALTER You have grown so old since my day. Besides, I have admitted that the Waverley novels were written simply to entertain the public. ELSMERIAN No one, I hope, reads my stories for entertainment. We have become serious now. A.MERICAN I have thought at times that I could have made some thing of "Ivanhoe." Yes, sir, if the theme had been left to me I would have worked it out in a manner quite different from yours. In my mind's eye I can see myself developing the character of' the hero. I would have made him more like ourselves. The Rebecca, too, I would have reduced in size. Of course the plot would have had to go overboard, with Robin Hood and Richard, and we would have had no fighting. Yes, it might be done. I would call it, let me see, I would call it, ''Wilfrid: a Study." THACKERAY ( timidly).- Have you found out what I am ? AMERICAN You are intolerably prosy. STYLIST Some people called Philistines maintain that you are a Stylist; but evidently you forgot yourself too frequently for that. ROMANCIST You were a cynic, which kills romanticism. REALIST And men allow their wives to read you, so you don't belong to us. AMERICAN (testily ) No, sir, you need not turn to me. You and I have nothing in common. DICKENS I am a--? REALIST It is true that you wrote about the poor; but how did you treat them? Are they all women of the street and brawling ruffians? Instead of dwelling for ever on their sodden misery, and gloating over their immorality, you positively regard them from a genial standpoint. I regret to have to say it, but you are a Romancist. ROMANCIST No, no, Mr. Dickens, do not cross to me. You wrote with a purpose, sir. Remember Dotheboys Hall. ELSMERIAN A novel without a purpose is as a helmless ship. DICKENS (aghast) Then I am an Elsmerian? ELSMERIAN Alas! you had no other purpose than to add to the material comforts of the people. Not one of your characters was troubled with religious doubts. Where does Mr. Pivkwick pause to ask himself why he should not be an atheist ? You cannot answer. In these days of earnest self-communion we find Mr. Pickwick painfully wanting. How can readers rise from his pages in distress of mind? You never give them a chance. THACKERAY No, there is nothing sickly about Pickwick. ELSMERIAN Absolutely nothing. He is of a different world (I am forced to say this) from that in which my heroes move. Not, indeed, that they do move much. Give me a chair and a man with doubts, and I will give you a novel. He has only to sit on that chair-- STYLIST As I sit on mine, thinking, thinking, thinking about my style. DICKENS Young people in love are out of fashion in novels nowadays, I suppose? ELSMERIAN Two souls in doubt may meet and pule as one. THACKERAY As a novelist I had no loftier belief than this-that high art is high morality, and that the better the literature the more ennobling it must be. REALIST And this man claimed to be one of us! DICKENS I wrote for a wide public (Stylist sighs), whom I loved (Realist sighs) . I loved my characters, too (American sighs), they seemed so real to me ( Romancist sighs), and so I liked to leave them happy. I believe I wanted to see the whole world happy (Elsmerian sighs). Sir WALTER I also had that ambition. THACKERAY. Do you even find Mr. Pickwick's humour offensive nowadays? ROMANCIST To treat a character with humour is to lift him from his pedestal to the earth. ELSMERIAN We have no patience with humour. In these days of anxious thought humour seems a trivial thing. The world has grown sadder since your time, and we novelists of today begin where you left off. Were I to write a continuation of ''The Pickwick Papers," I could not treat the subject as Mr. Dickens did; I really could not. STYLIST Humonr is vulgar. AMERICAN Humour, sir, has been refined and chastened since the infancy of fiction, and I am certain that were my humorous characters to meet yours mine would be made quite uncomfortable. Mr. Pickwick could not possibly be received in the drawing-room of Sara H. Finney, and Sam Weller would be turned out of her kitchen. I believe I am not overstating the case when I say that one can positively laugh at your humour . DICKENS They used to laugh. AMERICAN Ah, they never laugh at mine. DrcKENS But if I am not a Realist, nor a Romancist, nor an Elsmerian,, nor a St-- AMERICAN Oh, we have placed you. In Boston we could not live without placing everybod y, and you are ticketed a caricaturist. DICKENS (sighing ) I liked the old way best, of being simply a novelist. AMERICAN That was too barbarous for Boston . We have analysed your methods, and found them puerile. You have no subtle insight into character. You could not have written a novel about a lady's reasons for passing the cruet. Nay, more, we find that yon never drew either a lady or a gentleman. Your subsidiary characters alone would rule you out of court. To us it is hard work to put all we have to say about a lady and gentleman who agree not to become engaged into three volumes. But you never send your hero twelve miles in a coach without adding another half -dozen characters to your list. There is no such lack of artistic barrenness in our school. SMOLLETT (enthusiastically) What novels you who think so much about the art must write nowadays! You will let us take away a few samples? (The live novelists cough.) REALIST (huskily) You-you have heard of our work in the Grove of Bay-trees? Sir WALTER (apologetically). You see we are not in the way of hearing-(politely). But we look forward to meeting you there some day. THACKERAY And resuming this conversation. None of you happens to be the gentleman who is rewriting Shakespeare and Homer, I suppose? It is of no consequence; I only thought that if he had been here I would have liked to look at him. That is all. FIELDING (looking at the sleeper ) He said he would take us back. (The novelists shake Mr. Stanley timidly, but he sleeps on.) STYLIST (with a happy inspiration).- Emin-- Mr. STANLEY (starting to his feet ). -You are ready ? Fall in behind me. Quick mar-- Sir WALTER You won't mind carrying these books for us ? (Gives Stanley samples of Realism, Elsmerism, &c.) Mr. ST.ANLEY. Right. I shall give them to the first man we meet in Piccadilly to carry. ROMANCIST (foolishly). He may refuse. Mr. STANLEY (grimly ) I think not. Now then-- ELSMERIAN (good-naturedly) A moment, sir. We have shown these gentlemen how the art of fiction has developed since their day, and now if they care to offer us a last word of advice. Sir WALTER We could not presume. THACKERAY As old-fashioned novelists of some repute at one time, we might say this: that perhaps if you thought and wrote less about your styles and methods and the aim of fiction, and, in short, forgot yourselves now and again in your stories, you might get on better with your work. Think it over. Mr. STANLEY Quick march. (The novelists are left looking at each other self -consciously.) Prince of romancers, and as essayist full of narrative description, ideas, Robert Louis Stevenson is nevertheless, first of all, a stylist. Writers there are – Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, even Macaulay and Emerson in a degree –whose work has an atmosphere of books, who convey the impression that they see the world only through the refracting medium of literature. No such dabbler in the secondary and derived is Stevenson. He faced the primaries, the essential first-hand facts of life. Sailing around the Scottish coasts as a boy in his father’s visits to the light-houses; engineer’s apprentice at Anstruther harbour works: living a rackety life as an Edinburgh student; briefless barrister of the Parliament House; going the rounds of the New York publishing offices soliciting dreary employment; sick almost unto death, and alone, at a goat-ranch in the San Lucia mountains, where for two nights he lay under a tree in a stupor, till rescued and nursed back to health by a bear-hunter; canoeing with a single companion on French and Belgian rivers; sleeping out of doors on cold autumn nights in the highlands of France, accompanied only by an exasperating she ass; living in the Latin Quarter; roughing it in the steerage of an Atlantic liner; roughing it in an emigrant train; roughing it, with his wife, in a deserted mining shanty on the Californian hills; voyaging into the South Seas; contending with the jungle, the natives, and the politicians at Vailima and Apia – surely no novelist ever had such an equipment of varied experience, such a storehouse of novel reality, to exploit for the purposes of his art. Yet when all is said, we read him less for the story he has to tell than for the vivid language and the gay spirit in which he tells it. One Use of Style. The great value of the stylist is that he augments the resources of language by his own practice, while his example stirs the dialectic conscience of the reader. He sets the example of eschewing the language of formula; and from admiration to imitation is said to be but a step. The verbal currency of society, trade, and the newspapers is – perhaps naturally enough – for the most part a fumble with a limited set of terms. Anyone who has had occasion to write asking a business house to explain a clerical error or technical defect must have realised the utility of expecting anything outside the set phrases of Commercial Correspondence, which have nothing for the unusual contingency. The commercial traveller who in an interview will gush and tell stories and make jokes becomes limp and colourless with a pen in his hand. The growth of ingenious and striking advertising has not weaned the business man from stereotype; the writing of advertisements has simply become a business by itself and in the counting-house the formula still reigns. In society a young person who has shed a score of defects and taken on a score of qualities in their place is merely ‘much improved’ a lecture is always simple ‘interesting’ although a lecture may be interesting in any one or more of a dozen different ways; one has even heard a rollicking, resourceful comedian described, in a burst of prim enthusiasm, as ‘an able fellow.’ In municipal language a speech is always ‘neat,’ or ‘eloquent’, or is ‘a few appropriate remarks,’ though the average speech is not neat, may have many merits in which neatness has no part, and although eloquence is of many diverse kinds. In the press a singer ‘appeared to advantage,’ or ‘gave a good account of himself,’ without any hint of the how; and the reporter who describes a graphic and rousing speaker as having received ‘a patient hearing’ often balances the account of his malapropism by saying of an audience that was dead silent and but half-awake that it listened with ‘rapt attention.’ Even to the grave we are pursued by fumbling formula and the tombstone of the man who never went to church bears witness that he was ‘of unostentatious piety.’ The Note of Stevenson’s style. To this tepid, unexpressive phrasing, which does not necessarily correspond to tepid feeling and obtuse perception, but simply indicates mental laziness or wrong conceptions as to the function of language, Stevenson offers a supreme antidote, would the tepid folk but read the lesson. The note of his style is vividness. His periods throb with life. He observed keenly, he heard acutely, he felt intensely, and his language reflects this high mental tension. What, indeed, is all literary genius but an extra sensitiveness to the impact of ‘things as they are’? While the desire of the average man, when he starts to write, is to find ‘the correct word,’ the recognised, well-established phrase, Stevenson enriches his vocabulary with unusual words, uses customary words in an unaccustomed significance, and avoids hackneyed phrases save in the way of humorous mimicry. Not Always Correct. His style is not always unexpungnable on the score of correctness. He uses the pleonastic ‘from thence,’ instead of ‘thence’ merely; he sometimes drops into siblilant ‘amongst,’ though in the same page one finds ‘among’ pleasant and simple; he writes ‘the swords rung together’ instead of rang; and the adjective ‘leisurely’ he treats as an adverb, telling us that ‘the Prince turned away and strolled leisurely in the direction of Montmartre.’ He even, in his healthy hankering after fresh, crisp terms, alights on an expression so amusing as the use of ‘pot herbs’ (kitchen stuff) to denote the ‘pot plants’ of the florist. Unusual Words. But as a rule his instinct for the strongest, happiest word is unerring. Style is by no means a matter of vocabulary, though Shakespeare, Milton and Carlyle have all three and exceptional range of words. It is said, by someone of a calculating bent, that Shakespeare had 15,000 words, Milton 8,000 and Carlyle 7,500, while the average good writer uses four to five thousand. Stevenson would at least run his fellow-countryman hard. Many of his effects are secured by the use of unusual words. In the story of the two Edinburgh sisters who, inhabiting the same room, lived at deadly enmity with each other, he represents them as praying for each other ‘with marrow emphasis.’ A less cunning artist would have written ‘unctuous,’ ‘suggestive,’ or some other relatively feeble because more conventional adjective. In few writers should we expect to find a frail man described as ‘debile,’ the novel word suggesting a person as he is at the end of a process of debilitation, enfeeblement. ‘Marish’ for ‘marshy’ carries no special suggestion, but has its justification in the euphony and novelty of the new-old word. ‘Poured forth among the sea’ has, similarly, only an arrestive unwontedness. ‘Degusting tenderly’ covers the whole meaning one would convey in the more cumbrous phrase ‘digesting and assimilating with infinite relish.’ The sustained song of a north-east wind is effectively suggested in ‘the high canorous note of the north-easter.’ An old man who holds up his hands in entreaty figures as ‘raising his hands in obsecration.’ The operation of tearing up by the roots is effectively rendered as ‘deracinating.’ A short, snapping sound is indicated as ‘the crepitation of the little wooden drum that beats to church’ in Samoa. Instead of weakly describing mountains shorn of their timber as deforested, Stevenson writes: ‘The displumed hills stood clear against the sky.’ Even in a familiar letter to a friend a common disability of authors is to set down as ‘scrivener’s cramp,’ and another friend is whimsically asked to ‘appoint with an appointment’ a certain day for a gathering of Stevenson’s friends to meet him at dinner on his way through London. Verbal Surprises. Sometimes we are inclined to question the accuracy of these verbal surprises. When we read that ‘frogs sang their ungainly chorus’ we feel that ‘ungainly’ applies rather to appearances than to sounds; but derivatively the word means ‘of no effect,’ uncouth, and the alternative approved words - ‘unmelodious’ or ‘hoarse’ – are both relatively unexpressive; for the tr-r-onk of the bull-frog is not really hoarse and is not only not melodious, but has an element of positive travesty in it that the word ‘ungainly’ not inaptly conveys. Stevenson has tried to find a word which is positively rather than negatively descriptive, and the arrestiveness of ‘ungainly’ is a further justification. The Little Things. Le no one make light of the effects produced by this scattering of cunning unusual words. Style is an appeal to the senses as well as to the intellect; and in the things of sense we are slaves to the little things. We are haunted for life by the memory of a woman’s once-heard happy, ululating laugh. A city suggests its peal of bells. A farm-stead as big as a little town lives on the mental retina only by its tun-shaped dovecot. The elderly Scotswoman who was captivated and held in intellectual bondage by ‘that blessed word Mesopotamia,’ as pronounced by Dr. Chalmers, was not, perhaps, such an exceptional person as we have been invited to consider her. A Word. Stevenson’s most enthralling short tale, ‘The Pavilion on the Links,’ grips me, after years, mainly by three items – two words and a passage. One of these words occurs in a few sentences describing a lonely bay bounded by two low promontories, with a beach of quicksands reputed to be able to ‘swallow a man in four minutes and a half; but the may have been little ground for this precision. The district was live with rabbits, and haunted by gulls which made a continual piping about the pavilion…at sundown in September, with a high wind, and a heavy surf rolling in close along the links, the place told of nothing but dead mariners and sea disasters. A ship beating to windward on the horizon and a huge truncheon of wreck half buried in the sands at my feet, completed the innuendo of the scene.’ ‘Truncheon of wreck’ seems at first thought an unlicensed usage. A truncheon is, you say, a fashioned weapon, not a remnant of wreckage. Even then, the word is a good mouthful; and turning to the dictionary (but not until the whole exciting story is read!) you find the literal meaning of truncheon is ‘a piece of wood cut off.’ Another. That, then, is my one memorable word in this tale. The other is the epithet ‘Traditore!’ (traitor) shouted in a formidable voice through the shutters of the lonely pavilion to terrify a fugitive in hiding there who has embezzled the funds of an Italian revolutionary society. It is night on these lonely links. The fugitive, his daughter, and two men who are standing by him for the daughter’s sake, are at dinner when their attention is taken by a sound like the rubbing of a wet finger on the window-glass. Then, like a bombshell, comes the stentorian ‘Traditore!’ from one of the enraged desperadoes who are haunting these remote and lonely downs in wait for their well-guarded prey. A Passage. ‘Truncheon’ and traditore are the two catchwords of this obsessing tale; and here is the haunting passage: The Sea-Wood of Graden had been planted to shelter the cultivated fields behinds and check the encroachments of the blowing sand. As you advanced into it from coastward elders were succeeded by other hardy shrubs; but the timber was all stunted and bushy; it led a life of conflict; the trees were accustomed to swing there all night long in fierce winter tempests; and even in early spring the leaves were already flying, and autumn was beginning, in this exposed plantation. Divorced from its context, the passage may seem ordinary; but in situ it strikes the reader as profoundly suggestive of elemental strife and desolation. The passage is not merely staring, straightforward description, like that which we notably find in Defoe and Gilbert White; it has elements of artifice in it as well. Consider, for instance, the expression ‘The trees were accustomed to swing there all night long in fierce winter tempests.’ The trees, of course, swung by day as well as by night; but the cunning artificer realised the touch of eeriness that would be lent by the feeling of darkness superadded to the other horrors of the scene. Here, also, as in Stevenson’s prose as a whole, the light punctuation – the semicolons instead of full stops at the end of each complete simple sentence – have an effect of breathless haste, as if the whole scene could not be flashed upon you fast enough with sufficient unity of effect. The Little More or the Little Less. It is wonderful – perhaps to a plain man a little pitiful – how much of style is an affair of the little more or the little less. ‘What ails the folk at my sermons, John?’ said the old minister to the beadle – a tailor. ‘I give them learning, zeal and sound doctrine.’ ‘It’s the cut, minister,’ said the beadle. With a few inspired dabs and dashes of the brush, the pot-boiler takes an individuality denied to the fortnight’s moil of mediocrity. Several degrees of slope put upon two over-rounded lines transform the tubby craft into a rakish condor of the seas that will have five knots more of speed to the hour in addition to all the difference between squab ugliness and fleet beauty. With a few touches of excision, addition, substitution, Stevenson could so suffuse with his own genius the prose of his wife or stepson that their work cannot be told from his. The Short Sentence. Stevenson does not write short periods. Since Macaulay’s day the simple sentence has had a great vogue, and in the interests of lucidity that is perhaps all to the good. But the content of a sentence counts for something as well as its clearness. In description, sententiousness may be natural; for description is in its essence the cataloguing of more or less separate and distinct things. But in analysis or argument a number of interacting elements combine to form the complete concept, and to chop these up into short sentences, repeating the noun or pronoun in each, is to purchase clearness at the expense of force. As one heavy projectile may effect a gaping breach in the wall which stood unharmed against a storm of petty pellets of multitudinous small arms, so a well-rounded period, built up of a number of clearly connected contributory clauses, has a dynamic force denied to a succession of mincing sentences. Stevenson was good at imitation, and had he cared to write in short sentences he could have excelled in that style; but he let his matter determine whether his form of words should be sententious and simple or should be more complex and brilliant. ‘Brevity is good, whether you are or are not understood,’ wrote Byron. Stevenson desired his language not only to be understood – a very elementary, albeit necessary attribute of language – but also to be enjoyed; and so far is he from cultivating staccato brevity of expression that even where he might have put full stops he pointed with colons and semicolons; and, eschewing the stiffness secured by the easy device of dropping out ‘and’ and ‘but’ he made the full natural use of the conjunction. This gives his prose a fluidity and continuity denied to the short, choppy style of diction, which has a tendency to beget periods that are either pompous or inconsequential. Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ – an extreme example of the sententious manner - is viciously pert as English. Wide glancing Picturesqueness. Probably no writer has carried to such perfection as Stevenson the art of gathering together in one passage a number of suggestively picturesque details which have their effect heightened, both severally and jointly, by the mere juxtaposition, somewhat as a bevy of but moderately good-looking sisters in one household produce a cumulative impression of dazzling glamour upon the bachelor imagination, and send each other triumphantly off. What could be more wide-glancing yet more truly cognate than the details of this passage from ‘Will of the Mill’? – One evening he asked the miller where the river went… It goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walking up and down before the door. And it goes under bridges, with stone men upon them looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folk leaning on their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring tobacco and parrots from the Indies. The river stands as the sufficient thread for all these pearls. General Characteristics All this relates, of course, only to the mechanism of Stevenson’s prose. The imagination which conceived, and the constructive faculty which fashioned, a little world in each romance form another story. The pretty or forceful arrangement of words, or anything of the nature of ‘swallowing a dictionary,’ can be but a part of the secret of an imaginative writer’s charm, or simple Bunyan and slovenly Sir Walter would not be the enchanters they are. As romancer, Stevenson’s outstanding qualities are graphic, swiftness in handling details, with the implied exclusion of the unessential; trenchant directness and compactnmess; the flashing in of such unexpected eerie features, such as the pirate Pew, with his unerring rapid gait and uncanny tapping stick – so startling, yet so feasible; and through all sustained sympathy with his creations and unflagging plausibility. In his familiar letters, when he had no time, and there seemed to be no reason, for careful picking of terms, his hankering after virility of expression is shown by his recourse to Scottisism, ‘swear words,’ and tags of the pigeon English spoken to and by the Samoans. The ‘bad words’ are often nothing much beyond such indeterminate expletives as ‘be jowned to you!’ And as to the Scottisicms, here is an illustrative passage (from the Vailima Letters’) :- We are all seedy, bar Lloyd; Fanny, as per above, self, nearly extinct; Belle, utterly overworked and bad toothache; Cook, down with a bad foot; Butler, prostrate with a bad leg. Eh, what a faim’ly! As essayist his indulgent insight, culture and whimsical humour do not exclude an occasional strain of puritan severity (derived from his father); but the prevailing note is the animated optimism he had from his fun-loving mother, who wrote the characteristic motto for a friend’s guest-list: The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings. PART TWO TO FOLLOW IN NEXT MONTH'S GATEWAY Crockett’s memorial piece in ‘The Bookman’ of January 1895.
Sitting alone by the sea in the mid days of November, I wrote a little article on what I loved most in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and it was set in type for the January Bookman. In itself a thing of no value, it pleased me to think that in his far island my friend would read it, and that it might amuse him. I have tried and failed to revise it in the gloom of the night that has come so swiftly to those who loved him. It would not do. How could one alter and amend the light sentences with the sense of loss in one's heart? How sit down to write a "tribute " when one has slept, and started, and awaked all night with the dull ache that lies below Sleep saying all the time, "Stevenson is dead! Stevenson is dead!"? It is true also that I have small right to speak of him. I was little to him ; but then he was very much to me. He alone of mankind saw what pleased him in a little book of boyish verses. Seven years ago he wrote to tell me so. He had a habit of quoting stray lines from it in successive letters to let me see that he remembered what he had praised. Yet he was ever as modest and brotherly as if I had been the great author and he the lad writing love verses to his sweetheart. Without reproach and without peer in friendship, our king-over-the-water stood first in our hearts because his own was full of graciousness and tolerance and chivalry. I let my little article be just as I wrote it for his eye to see, before any of us guessed that the dread hour was so near the sounding which should call our well-beloved "home from the hill." S. R . CROCKETT. Penicuik, Midlothian. December 19th, 1894 MR. STEVENSON'S BOOKS. By S. R. CROCKETT. (Bookman, January 1895) In sunny Samoa, more thousands of miles away than the ungeographical can count, sits "The Scot Abroad." For thus Burton the historian, sane, sage, and wise, wrote of Mr Robert Louis Stevenson before his time. It is the wont of Scotland that her sons, for adventure or merchandise, should early expatriate themselves. The ships of the world in all seas are engineered from the Clyde, and a "doon-the watter" accent is considered as necessary as lubricating oil, in order that the plunging piston rods may really enjoy their rhythmic dance. If you step ashore anywhere "east of Suez and the Ten Commandments," ten to one the first man of your tongue who greets you, will hail in the well-remembered accent of the Scotch gardener who chased you out of the strawberry plots of your unblessed youth. But to us who "stop at home, on flowery beds of ease," made aware of ourselves only when the east wind blows and we think that we are back in St. Andrews, the typical "Scot Abroad " is neither Burton's Gentleman Companion at Arms nor the oily chief engineer, but Mr. Stevenson. On high in a cool bowery room on the hillside, looking down on the league-long rollers forming themselves to be hurled on the shore, sits one with his heels on the coco matting of Samoa, but his head over the Highland border. The chiefs gather for palaver (or whatever they are pleased to call hunkering-and blethering out there), and they tell the Tale-teller of heads taken and plantations raided. And be stays his pen and arbitrates, or he "leaves for the front," as though he were plenipotentiary of the Triple Alliance. But all the while it is James More Macgregor who is marching out arrayed in a breech-clout and a Winchester "to plunder and to ravish"-or carry off an heiress lass from the lowlands as was good Macgregor use and wont. They call the beautiful new complete "Stevenson " which Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. Charles Baxter have contrived and organised, the "Edinburgh " edition, because though the stars of the tropics glow like beacons, and in Apia the electric light winks a-nights like glow worms amid a wilderness of green leaves, yet to the lad who sits aloft there are still "no stars like the Edinburgh street lamps." But my own local enthusiasm are duller, for the lastt night I was in Edinburgh I saw a wind (Rajputana and Edinburgh are the only two places where you can see wind)-I saw a wind, with the bit between its teeth, run off with itself down that romantic wall of hotels, which in the night looks like the thunder battered wall of the Dungeon of Buchan. I saw it snatch out a dozen gaps in the converging perspective of the gulamps, and bring down the chimney-cans crashing on the pavement like forest leaves in a November blast. So Mr. Stevenson, who does not live there, "for love and euphony " names his collected edition (to which be all good luck and fostering breezes) "The Edinburgh Edition.” I have just seen the first volume, which in its brightness and beauty seems a summary of all the perfections, and whose print recalls that in which the early novels of Scott were set up. Mr. Hole's portrait suffers a little from the excessive size of the hands, but in spite of this is by far the most characteristic Stevensonian portrait ever done, and represents him exactly as his friends remember him at the most productive period his genius has yet known . To me the most interesting thing in Mr. Stevenson's books is always Mr. Stevenson himself. Some authors (perhaps the greatest) severely sit with the more ancient gods, and serenely keep themselves out of their books. Most of these authors are dead now. Others put their personalities in, indeed; but would do much better to keep them out. Their futilities and pomposities, pose as they may, are no more interesting than those of the chairman of a prosperous limited company. But there are a chosen few who cannot light a cigarette or part their hair in a new place without being interesting. Upon such in this life, interviewers bear down in shoals with pencils pointed like spears; and about them as soon as they are dead-lo! begins at once the "chatter about Harriet." Mr. Stevenson is of this company. Rarest of all, his friends have loved_ and praised him so judiciously that he has no enemies. He might have been the spoiled child of letters. He is only "all the world's Louis." The one unforgivable thing in a chequered past is that at one time be wore a black shirt, to which we refuse to be reconciled on any terms. But when he writes of himself, how supremely excellent is the reading. It is good even when he does it intentionally, as in 'Portraits and Memories.' It is better still when he sings it, as in his 'Child's Garden .' He is irresistible to every lonely child who reads and thrills, and reads again to find his past recovered for him with effortless ease. It is a book never long out of my hands , for only in it and in my dreams when I am touched with fever, do I grasp the long, long thoughts of a lonely child and a hill-wandering boy thoughts I never told to any; yet which Mr. Stevenson tells over again to me as if he read them oft' a printed page. I am writing at a distance from books and collections of Stevensoniana, so that I cannot quote, but only vaguely follow the romancer through some of his incarnations. Of course every romancer, consciously or unconsciously, incarnates himself, especially if he writes his books in the first person . It is he who makes love to the heroine; he who fights with the Frenchman "who never can win"; he who climbs the Mountain Perilous with a dirk between his teeth. But Mr. Stevenson writes the fascination of his personality into all his most attractive creations, and whenever I miss the incarnation, I miss most of the magic as well. Jim Hawkins is only "the Lantern Bearer " of North Berwick Links translated into the language of adventure on the high seas -the healthier also for the change. I love Jim Hawkins. On my soul I love him more even than Alan Breck. He is the boy we should all like to have been, though no doubt David Ballfour is much more like the boys we were without the piety and the adventures. I read Stevenson in every line of 'Treasure Island.' It is of course mixed of Erraid and the island discovered by Mr. Daniel Defoe But we love anything of such excellent breed, and the crossing only improves it. Our hearts dance when Mr. Stevenson lands his cut-throats, with one part of himself as hero and the other as villain. John Silver is an admirable villain, for he is just the author genially cutting throat. Even when he pants three times as he sends the knife home, we do not entirely believe in his villainy. We expect to see the murdered seaman about again and hearty at his meals in the course of a chapter or two. John is a villain at great expense and trouble to himself; but we like him personally, and are prepared to sit down and suck an apple with him, even when he threatens to stove in our "thundering old blockhouse and them as dies will be the lucky ones." In our hearts we think the captain was a little hard on him. We know that it is Mr. Stevenson all the time, and are terrified exactly like a three-year-old who sees his father take a rug over his bead and "be a bear.'' The thrill is delicious, for there is just an off chance that after all the thing may turn out to be a bear; but still we are pretty easy that at the play's end the bearskin will be tossed aside, the villain repent, and John Silver get off with a comfortable tale of pieces of eight. No book has charted more authentically the topographical features of the kingdom of Romance than 'Treasure Island.' Is that island in the South or in the North Atlantic? Is it in the "Spanish main"? What is the Spanish main? Is it in the Atlantic at all? Or set a jewel somewhere in the wide Pacific, or strung on some fringe of the Indian Ocean? Who knows or cares? Jim Hawkins is there. His luck, it_is true, is something remarkable. His chances are phenomenal His imagination, like ours, is running free, and we could go on for ever hearing about Jim. We can trust Jim Hawkins, and void of care we follow his star. O for one hour of Jim in the ' Wrecker ' to clear up the mystery of the many captains, or honest and reputable John Silver to do for the poor Scot down below in a workman-like manner when he came running to him, instead of firing as it were "into the brown" till that crying stopped-a touch for which we find it hard to forgive Mr. Stevenson -pardon, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Again, Alan Breck is ever Alan, and bright shines his sword; but be is never quite Jim Hawkins to me. Nor does he seem even so point-device in 'Catriona ' as he was in the round house or with his foot on the heather. But wherever Alan Breck goes or David Balfour follows, thither I am ready to fare forth, unquestioning and all-believing. But when I do not care very much for any one of Mr. Stevenson's books, it is chiefly the lack of Mr. James Hawkins that I regret. Jim in doublet and hose-how differently he would have sped "The Black Arrow"! Jim in trousers and top hat-he would never have been found in the " Black Box," never have gone out with Huish upon the "Ebb Tide." John Silver never threw vitriol, but did his needs with a knife in a gentlemanly way, and that was because Jim Hawkins was there to see that he was worthy of himself. Jim would never have let things get to such a pass as to require Attwater's bullets splashing like hail in a pond over the last two pages to settle matters in any sort of way. I often think of getting up a petition to Mr. Stevenson (it is easy to get around Robin), beseeching "with sobs and tears " that he will sort out all his beach-combers and Yankee captains, charter a rakish saucy-sailing schooner, Ship Jim Hawkins as ship's boy or captain (we are not particular), and then up anchor with a Yo-Ho-Cheerily for the Isle of our Heart's Desire, where they load Long Toms with pieces of eight, and, dead or alive, nobody minds Ben Gunn. October 25th 1930
The Entrancing Life I was uplifted – how could it be otherwise? – when I found that my Alma Mater wanted me to come back for another course. But now that the lightnings are upon me I am riven with misgivings. What have I dared. Oh, why left I the eyry of a solitary to go wandering in the great unquiet places. This college of renown – for wherever I find myself today I feel that I am in the old College ; these walls dissolve, it is more like Masson’s lecture room, Campbell-Fraser raises his beard again, I hear Blackie singing – what has my old College been about in remembering me, she who was once so noted for her choice of pilots? All I can say to you in my defence is, yours the wite for having me. My anxious desire is to follow, very humbly as needs must, in the ways of my illustrious predecessor Lord Balfour. That word has a tang to it that is sweet to the Scottish ear. I once had an argument, across the waters that lie between us and Samoa, with Robert Louis Stevenson about which was the finest-sounding Scottish name. He voted for one who was a kinsman of his, Ramsay Traquair. But I thought, and still think, that Balfour is better. How like our great Chancellor to have the name as well as all the rest. I first saw him here, I mean in the old College, in my student days. He was addressing one of the University Societies on Philosophical Doubt; I cannot now recall with certainly which society, but it was the one I tried to become a member of, and they would not have me. However, I did contrive an entry that night, and the abiding memory is the dazzling presence of him, his charm; though, as Dr. Johnson never said, is there any Scotsman without charm? Lord Balfour’s charm has been talked of by some as if it was the man himself; but oh no, it was only his seductive introduction to us, playing around him, perhaps to guard against our ever getting nearer to ‘the man himself.’ It still played around him when he faced the blasts in his country’s cause. It loved the great adventure. Did you ever notice how much ground he covered with his easy stride? It was so also with the stride of his mind. So many offices did he adorn. I was once speaking to him about some past event, and he said, ‘Yes, I remember that – I was Prime Minister at the time – or was I? – at any rate, I was something of that kind.’ So light apparently his knapsack. I have seen him, towards the end, writing the memoirs of his early days that have just been published. It was in one of the loveliest of English gardens, and he was reclining, under a great tulip tree, on a long chair, swallows sailing round, jotting it down as if the life and times of Arthur Balfour were only another swallow flight. As for myself, I vowed, as the alarming day of the august ceremony drew near, to model my installation address on his: and on sitting down to read it, I found he had never made on. Instead, I see him today smiling charmingly at my predicament. The University is not now as it was when I matriculated. Even on that day the old College, which perhaps never wore an alluring beam of welcome on her face, seemed so formidable that a famous Edinburgh divine, Dr. Alexander Whyte, had to accompany me to her awful portals and thrust me in. For some time I hoped he would do this every day. I learn from the University of Edinburgh Journal, itself a notable growth, that since ten years after they got rid of me (they did not put it in that way) seventeen new chairs have been added. Many vast academic departments have arisen. The methods of lecturing, of examinations, have been overhauled. This magnificent Hall has sprung up, and all the avenues leading to graduation in it have been made appropriately stiffer and steeper. Unions and Hostels such as, alas, were not in my time, now give Edinburgh students that social atmosphere which seemed in the old days to be the one thing lacking; the absence of them maimed some of us for life. The number of students has increased by over a thousand. Perhaps greatest change of all, Women – yes. ‘Female forms whose gestures beam with mind.’ What a glory to our land has this University been since the first acorn, when one man – but what a man – Principal Rollock, did all its work single-handed near by the site of the Kirk of Field. No wonder that we in gratitude have erected a monument to him and called a chair after him. Or have we? I learn now, for history sleepeth not, that the Kirk of Field is famous for a marital rumbling close by, in which the aim of a husband was to blow up Mary Queen of Scots. That is the new theory. A more fitting one for us would be that some fearful Scot, himself on fire for a degree, made that explosion to clear the ground for a University. Whoever was responsible, a Queen or a Prince, or Andrew Souter M.A., a fire was lit that will last even longer than the controversy. Since that small beginning, Edinburgh of a daughter, the University has risen nobly to the grapple; she has searched the world for the best everywhere, to incorporate it in her own. How parochial if she had done otherwise. And now so much has been accomplished that one may ask what remains to do. It is easier to cry ‘onward’ than to say whither. We might go onward till we got clean out of Scotland. Many of our students are from across the Border, they come from every civilised land; and it is our proudest compliment, for it means that they think they get something here which is not to be got elsewhere. They are all welcome so long as we can contain them, and so long as they are satisfied that what is best for us is also best for them. But our universities must remain what our forebears conceived with such great travail, men of our smiddies and the plough, the loom and the bothies, as well as scholars, they must remain, first and foremost something to supply the needs of the genius of the Scottish people. Those needs are that every child born into this country shall as far as possible have an equal chance. The words ‘as far as possible’ tarnish the splendid hope, and they were not in the original dream. Some day we may be able to cast them out. It is by Education, though not merely in the smaller commoner meaning of the word, that the chance is to be got. Since the war various nations have wakened to its being the one way out; they know its value so well that perhaps the only safe boast left to us is that we knew it first. They seem, however, to be setting about the work with ultimate objects that are not ours. Their student from his earliest age is being brought up to absorb the ideas of his political rulers. That is the all of his education, not merely in his academic studies but in all his social life, all his mind, all his relaxations; they are in control from his birth, and he is to emerge into citizenship with rigid convictions which it is trusted will last his lifetime. The systems vary in different lands, but that seems to be their trend, and I tell you they are being carried out with thoroughness. Nothing can depart more from the Scottish idea, which I take to be to educate our men and women primarily not for their country’s good but for their own, not so much to teach them what to think as how to think, not preparing them to give as little trouble as possible in the future but sending them into it in the hope that they will give trouble. There is a small group of the Intelligensia very much afraid of any such creed, because its members are so despondent about their fellow-creatures. They are not little minds, they contain some of the finest brains in the country, but they are as gloomy as if this were their moulting season. They think their land may endure a little longer if they new generations are plied with soporifics. All they ask of us, especially of youth, is a little all-round despair. No more talk about hitching your waggon to that star. Few of us have waggons and there are no stars. How do you like it, you new graduates? Are those the resilient notions you are carrying away with you in your wallets? Is it Lochaber no more for you? I don’t believe it. The flavour cannot have gone out of the peat. The haggis can still charge uphill. I’ll tell you a secret. Have you an unwonted delicious feeling on the tops of your heads at this moment, as if an angel’s wing had brushed them half an hour or so ago? It did – I speak from memory; and it carried with it a message from your University; ‘All hopelessness abandon, ye who have entered here.’ She trusts your wallets contain, as her parting gift to you ‘those instruments with which high spirits call the future from its cradle.’ She hopes that you are also graduating in the Virtues, in which, being an old hand at granting academic honours she knows better than to expect more than a pass degree. It is quite possible that your time here has done you not good but harm. If it has made you vain, for instance, of your accomplishments, too solemnly serious about their magnitude. I have seen Lord Haldane sitting with his head in his hands because he knew so little. Mr. Einstein has a merry face; he looks at us almost mischievously, and no wonder. Has your learning taught you that Envy is the most corroding of vices and also the greatest power in any land? Are you a little more temperate in mind? Have you more charity? Do you follow a little better, say about as much as the rest of us, the dictates of kindness and truth? You may be very clever, destined for the laurel, and have smiled at the unfortunates who fought for bursaries or to pass in, failed, and had to give up their dear ambitions; but if their failures taught them those lessons, they may have found for themselves a better education than yours. You may discover in the end that your life is not unlike a play in three acts with the second act omitted. In the neatly constructed play of the stage each act moves smoothly to the next, they explain each other; but it may not be so with yours, it is not so with many of us. In less time than I hope you now think possible, for I would have you gay on your graduation morning, you will be far advanced in the final act. There has been a second, your longest one, but how little record you have probably kept of it. All you know may just be that this man or woman you have become is not what you set out to be in the days of the Firth of Forth. That may not even damp you much, if prosperity has made you gross to some old aspirations. You may not know how or when the thief came in the night, nor that it was you who opened the door to him. But something bad got into you in the middle act, and lay very still in you till it was your familiar. Slowly, furtively it pushed, never stopped pushing slowly, for it never tires, until it had you out and took your place. You may sometimes roam round the earthly tenement that once contained you, trying to get back. Perhaps you will get back. That sometimes happens. We may hope, however, that by the grace of God what entered was something good. All I can assure you is that in the second act, now about to begin, something will get in which is either to make or to destroy you. It has got in already if an uphill road dismays you. Would you care to know my guess at what is the entrancing life? It sums up most of what I have been trying to say today for your guidance. Carlyle held that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. I don’t know about genius, but the entrancing life, I think, must be an infinite love of taking pains. You try it. One word more. The ‘Great War’ has not ended. Don’t think that you have had the luck to miss it. It is for each one of you the war that goes on within ourselves for self-mastery. Those robes you wear today are your Khaki for that war. Your graduation day is your first stripe. Go out and fight. Don’t come back dishonoured as in many ways I do. Are we not all conscious, fitfully, of a white light that hovers for a moment before our lives? It comes back for us from time to time to the very gasp of our days. Come back for us – to take us where? So quickly fades, as if unequal to its undertaking, like an escaped part of ourselves. Are stars souls? The inaccessible star. If any one of ours has reached his star, it was our Lister. The inaccessible friendly star. If we could follow the white light. How I have been preaching. It is not usual to me. It is against the ‘stomach of my sense,’ I feel that it has gone to my head. I look around for others to preach to. My eyes fall on the honorary graduates. I refrain with difficulty. For the present it is goodbye. I wish I was a little less unworthy of this gown. I will do my best. I do not know how you have felt during these years, but I have repeatedly turned over in my mind the question "Is there any place I can emigrate to where the population is not composed of fools and bullies?" Disgusted with his country, Fletcher of Saltoun emigrated to Holland when the Scottish Parliament sold Scotland to England. Disgusted with England, Professor Goldwin Smith some years ago emigrated to Canada.
I have thought of Holland sometimes of late years; but even there, in the home of William the Silent, the people have been showing the presence of Dutch cheese in the head by the fuss they have made about a chit of a girl bearing the absurd name of Wilhelmina. Canada again is the most hypocritically "loyal " of all our colonies, and was not ashamed to send a contingent to take part in this blackguardly war; Germany puts up with Kaiser Wilhelm and his prosecutions for lese majeste; France has had its Dreyfus case; Russia has excommunicated Tolstoy, and still consents to do without a Constitution; Italy, Austria, Spain, the Balkan States are all equally hopeless. Switzerland keeps itself fairly unspotted among the family of nations; and if one could make watches or knew about Alpine climbing and the keeping of goats, Switzerland might be worth taking into consideration. How to get away from the fools, that is the question one asks oneself; and the best answer seems to be to wait at home and try to ameliorate them, refusing to desert the field and leave the blockheads in possession of it. That is one's duty, and although duty is sometimes a hard taskmaster, there has been much to console and hearten the friends of peace and progress during even the blackest hours of Britain's degradation. The prolonged and gallant stand made by those Dutch farmers in South Africa, and their surrender at last only upon terms, are a reproach to those who would weary in much easier well-doing. The very existence of a large minority of pro Boers openly professing their sympathy with their country's enemies was an absolutely new and unprecedented thing. It is true that during the American War we had politicians like Pitt and Burke and Robert Burns declaring their sympathy with the rebel colonists; that during the Crimean War John Bright opposed it; that, as already stated, we had Gladstone protesting against our warlike policy in '76-'78 ; and that our Egyptian War was received with protests in more than one quarter at home. John Bright resigned from the Gladstone Cabinet in protest, and Mr Seymour Keay's pamphlet, "Spoiling the Egyptains: A Tale of Shame," attracted considerable notice at the time and for some time afterwards. But never before have noblemen, party leaders, and a considerable section of the press, including several of the important daily newspapers, been opposed to a war waged by their own country while that war was in progress. The pro-Boer has run great risks and in many cases has suffered, loss and injury; but he has refused to outrage his own conscience and the Eternal Verities by approving a war, wicked, unnecessary, and inexpedient, as all war is, merely because it was waged by his own countrymen and kinsmen. Nineveh was destroyed for want of ten good men; but in these late days almost any town in Britain would have escaped Nineveh's fate if courage and integrity under difficult and trying conditions had been sufficient. Isaiah held that Israel would be saved by a faithful remnant, and as Israel was not saved, we are left to infer that the remnant was not to be found. Israel had no "traitors." Her citizens were all loyal. And so Israel went down the wind. But a faithful remnant, and a considerable remnant at that, was all along to be found in our cities during the thirty months of war, and Britain may not only escape the fate of Israel, but by virtue of that remnant-the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump-may well go on to brighter and juster conditions, when those who refused to bow the knee to the Baal of miscalled patriotism-that "last refuge of a scoundrel," as Johnson called it-will have their reward. But in spite of Tory Government and Liberal weakness and faintness of heart, in spite of cant and khaki, in spite of loyal rejoicings over the advent of another Charles Second, in spite of the fustian gush about Imperialism, and the rapid emigration to new and poor countries of men and women who are badly wanted at home, one branch of the national life has shown quiet and steady progress through the years. I refer to the silent, irresistible, beneficent spread of Collectivism. Need I tell a tale that has already been so often told? The tale, I mean, of how conspicuously public enterprise has beaten and continues to beat private enterprise! From the municipal history of every corporation in Britain I could give facts and figures showing how there is no useful function performed by the capitalist which the community in its organised capacity cannot perform infinitely better for itself. I could tell you of how you yourselves paid, under private enterprise, a water rate of 14 pence in the £ for an insufficient supply of "diluted sewage," but of how today, under corporation control, you get an abundant supply of pure and soft water from Loch Katrine for a water rate of 6d in the £, (A voice- Fivepence. The lecturer-Yes, fivepence and a penny.) I could tell you of how the gas consumers in Glasgow paid to the gas company 4s 7d per 1000 cubic feet, the gas stokers slaving 12 hours a-day on the two-shift plan, the consumers paying meter rents, and the shareholders bagging fat dividends ; whereas to-day under corporate management the price is, or was lately, 2s 2d as against 4s 7d, the stokers work eight hours a-day on the three-shift plan, the meter rents have been abolished, and the corporation makes an annual profit ranging between fifty and sixty thousand pounds, which goes into the public exchequer and comes back to the people in the form of relief from taxation. I could tell you of how Glasgow municipalised its tramcar service, sweeping off its streets the old unsightly trucks, run by the private company, on which men slaved a minimum day of 14 hours; of how the corporation halved the fares all over the system, reduced the men's hours to ten a-day, increased their wages, and supplied them with uniforms ; of how they abolished advertisements from the sides and ends of the cars-those announcements of Pears' Soap, Colman's Starch, Reckitt's Blue, Nixey's Black Lead, and Eno's Fruit Salt which made it so difficult to pick out the nameboard indicating the destination of the car; and finally of how the first eleven months' working showed a profit of £24,000, upon which every year since then has shown a steady and, in the aggregate, enormous improvement. I could tell you of the seven Corporation Lodging-Houses with their £4000 profit, and of the Municipal Tele phones with their £13,000 profit for nine months' working. In all of these concerns which can be compared with private enterprise the results show a striking improvement under collective control as compared with private management. The producer is better as producer-he has higher wages for less work ; the consumer is better as consumer-he has better service at less cost; and the ratepayer is better as ratepayer since the profits made in these public departments came back to him in public improvements or in relief from taxation. Now, the believers in the Co-operative Commonwealth maintain that if the public can supply itself thus advantageously with gas and water, there is no reason why it should not supply itself with coal and milk. As matter of fact, Bradford has just decided to provide itself with a municipal coal store. The motion adopted on this head was moved by a member of the Independent Labour Party, who pointed out that the coal burned in the Mayor's Parlour of the Townhouse cost 11s to 14s per ton, whereas the current price outside was 2ls. . If a corporation can run trams and tele phones it can manage the baking of bread, the building and letting of houses, cab-hiring, the slaughter of cattle and the sale of butcher meat-so long as we continue to eat dead animals ; in short, the State, the Municipalities, and the Parish Councils could carry on any and every species of business worth while. By putting an end to the warfare of competition, which wastes more wealth in a year than lethal strife wastes in a century, we should become richer to a degree which is at present incalculable. By becoming gradually and steadily the sole landlords and the only capitalists the Municipalities and the State could make an end of rent, interest, and profit. All the idle hands and heads would in the course of a few generations be forced to turn to work. By the closing of unnecessary shops and offices enormous body of clerks and shop assistants would be set free for useful and really necessary work-the making of things instead of the mere selling of them or the writing about the sales. With distance practically annihilated, the population might be scattered over the countryside, men travelling three or thirty miles to and from work daily. If we continue to have towns and cities as places of residence they will be garden towns and cities, with wide streets, plenty of open spaces, and palatial buildings. They will be as different as possible from the present congeries of stone and brick boxes, with slate lids, which passes for a city. And the insides of the houses will be as much improved as the outsides. Instead of the present collections of gimcrack and veneer furniture, of dusty bulrushes and peacocks' feathers stuck in vases on the mantelpiece, china dogs, wax apples in glass cases, with antimacassars on the seats, and plush-covered brackets and framed calendars on the walls, the interiors of the future will be roomy and comfortable, and genuine art, both in furniture and decorations, will be the rule, since there will no longer be any motive to produce shoddy or jerry work, and the people will have the wherewithal to buy genuine products. Our capitalistic system has enormously increased the output of mere commodities; but much of our production is rubbish, made to sell at a profit rather than to use and enjoy. For the rest, our capitalistic system has produced that joke the millionaire. That is all. The workman is pretty much where he was. The difference even between 15s and 50s of a weekly wage is a bagatelle in comparison with the increase of our wealth-producing power. The workman got a subsistence wage a century ago, and if his wage is doubled, and its purchasing power has also greatly increased since then, it is but a subsistence wage still. Yet the increase in productive power is any thing from two to twenty fold or more. In Professor Leone Levi's "Work and Pay " we read that "Seventy years ago, with the old-fashioned handloom, one weaver could produce six yards, narrow width, per day. With the steam-power loom to-day at Accrington a weaver attending to four looms can produce 160 yards every day-that is, the amount of labour is 1/27th now of what it was 70 years ago." This is more or less typical of the improvement in production which has been going on all round ; but what all this has chiefly meant has been the creation of fortunes for the possessors of the machinery. Clearly the moral, then, is let the whole people get possession of the machinery. The conquest of the means of labour, which are the means of life-that is, in brief, the specific method by which the Hope of the Ages, the most important thing in the world, is to be realised. The community in its organised capacity has simply to carry on the process it has already begun-extending its sphere of control and administration steadily, gradually, without confiscation, without violence done to vested interests, without dislocation of industry, commerce, or social life. The Revolution is even now in progress. The pharisees were told that the Kingdom of God cometh not .with observation ; but the coming of the Co-operative Commonwealth may be observed by many tokens, and to the latter-day inquirer we may indeed say "Lo here and lo there " for the beginnings of it. PART TWO
London Entered. There was no need to carry the bridge gates by storm. The friends of the rebels within, estimated at 30,000, urged the guards to open the gates. ‘These honest men are our friends and yours,’ said they to the soldiers. ‘What they do is for our good.’ In no long time the gates were opened, and Tyler and Ball, with 20,000 of a following, then entered the city. The rebels set fire to the palace of John of Gaunt in the Savoy, the Duke himself being absent in Scotland; they burned the new house of the Knights Templars of St. John; and they co-operated with the townspeople in similar reprisals upon the hated Flemish merchants. On the way in they had thrown open the gates of the Marshalsea Prison. It was probably one of the liberated prisoners who was found making off with a piece of silver plate from the Duke of Lancaster’s house. Declaring that they were ‘seekers of truth and justice, not thieves and robbers,’ the insurgents threw the plunderer and his booty back into the flames - a circumstance which contrasts oddly with the alleged pillaging of the Archbishop’s palace at Canterbury. There would doubtless be more than one set of opinions represented among the revolutionists. With his training in the French wars, Wat Tyler would have a soldier’s manners, and this would account for his taking the life of Richard Lyon, a rich citizen to whom Tyler had been servant in France. ‘Having once beaten him,’ says Froissart, ‘the varlet had never forgotten it.’ Panic. That night the insurgents encamped in front of the Tower, which, slenderly garrisoned, contained the king and the court party. During the night a council of war was held within the Tower, at which William Walworth and others proposed to fall upon the rebels while they slept, co-operating in this with a number of men skilled in arms who were guarding their houses in the city. It was reported at the council that the services of 8000 fighting men could be counted upon. But panic had seized the courtiers, and Lord Salisbury’s advice to the king was taken. The Earl advised Richard to go and temporise with the insurgents; ‘for,’ said he, ‘should we begin what we cannot go through, it will be all over with us and our heirs, and England will be a desert.’ Horse-Play with a Grave Sequel. In the morning the rebels threatened to attack the Tower if the king did not come forth to them. Alarmed by the threat of utter extermination to all within, the king asked the besiegers to withdraw to Mile-End, promising to meet them there and grant their demands. Tyler and Ball, however, feeling, doubtless, that they could learn the nature of the king’s promises without being present at the interview, not caring to abandon the ground they had won, and probably caring as little for any promises Richard might make, remained with a strong force after the king had left. The gates of the Tower had not closed behind the outgoing king when a party of the insurgents forced their way in, tugged the beards of the knights in the garrison in ‘upland’ horse-play, cut the bedding of the Princess and greatly frightened her, though she was allowed to go unmolested to a house called the Wardrobe, where she remained till the following day. But the proceedings in the Tower were not confined to horse-play. When the Treasurer and the Chief Commissioner in connection with the poll-tax were found in the chapel, the insurgents dragged them from their sanctuary, and beheaded them on Tower Hill, along with the hated Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Broken Pledge. The young king, meanwhile, rode to Mile-End. ‘I am your king and lord, good people,’ said he to the assembled peasants. ‘What will ye?’ ‘We will that ye free us for ever,’ was the answer, ‘us and our lands, and that we be never named nor held for serfs.’ ‘I grant it,’ said Richard, at the same time bidding them go home, and pledging his word to issue charters of freedom and amnesty. Richard advised that two or three representatives from each parish be left behind to receive and carry home these letters, and he further promised to give one of his banners each to Kent, Essex, Sussex, Bedford, Suffolk, Cambridge, Stafford, and Lincoln. The meadow rang with shouts of joy at these concessions made in pleasing tones by the diplomatic youth, and the great gathering proceeded to break up. Thirty clerks were set to the writing out of charters and pardons, and Richard rode off well pleased, we may assume, with his morning’s work. Well-Founded Misgivings. But Tyler and Ball, having, doubtless, their well-founded misgivings as to the efficacy of the king’s redress of grievances, remained in the city with 30,000 followers. According to Green, they stayed ‘to watch over the fulfilment of the royal pledges.’ There are several good reasons for believing the leaders had much more in view. The chronicler says: ‘These all continued in the city without any wish to receive the letters or the king’s seal.’ And he adds that they declared the king’s letters would be of no use to them. Their case, the case of the Kentish men as a whole, was different from that of the men of other counties, who had revolted against villeinage among other grievances, whereas the men of Kent were not villeins. The rising could in no sense be said to be at an end. Those who had gone home were chiefly the men of Essex. The bands from the more northerly counties had been summoned by the Kentish leaders, and were still only on the road to London. Among those expected to put in an appearance were Vaquier and Litster, with their contingents; and some of the Kentish men are alleged to have spoken of not leaving the city to be pillaged by the newcomers. In the Provinces. While London is in the hands of ‘the true commons of England,’ there is rioting at St. Albans, at Bury St. Edmunds, at Winchester, Cambridge and York, at Beverley and Scarborough, in Surrey, Sussex, and even as far west as Devonshire. At Bury St. Edmunds the villeins killed the Prior and Chief-Justice Cavendish, ‘the biggest of all the furred cats of the law.’ At Norwich the rebels, headed by William Litster, and numbering forty thousand of the men of three surrounding shires, sought to induce Sir Robert Salle to be their leader. Salle was the son of a mason, but had been made a knight for his ability and courage in the wars. He ‘was one of the handsomest and strongest men in England,’ and the men of the east strove to persuade him that a man of his birth ought to be on the popular side. ‘Begone, false traitors,’ said the mason’s son. ‘Would you have me desert my natural lord for such a company of knaves as you are. I would rather have you all hanged; for that must be your end.’ So saying, Sir Robert would have mounted and ridden off; but, missing his stirrup and his horse taking fright, he was surrounded and cut to pieces, though not without scaith to the men whose rage he had roused by his spurning of them and their cause. To St. Albans William Grindecobbe returned with one of the king’s letters absolving the villeins from the oppressive privileges exercised over them by the abbot. Forcing their way into the abbey precincts, the men of St. Albans commanded the abbot to surrender the charters that bound them as serfs to his house. A badge of their servitude consisted of the millstones, retained in the abbey after a law-suit in which the monks make good their claim to be the sole possessors of milling rights in the town. These millstones were wrenched from the floor, and broken into small pieces, ‘like blessed bread in church,’ that each man ‘might have something to show of the day when their freedom was won again.’ After leaving Mile-End, Richard rode to the Wardrobe, in Carter Lane, to which his mother had flown early in the day, and we can well imagine that the meeting between them would be anxious enough. On the Saturday morning the boy king went to Westminster, heard mass, and paid his devotions at the shrine of Our Lady there – ‘a statue . . . in which the kings of England have much faith,’ says the French chronicler, innocent of sarcasm. The King, attended by some sixty horsemen, returned across Smithfield, where 20,000 of the insurgents were encamped. It is said he meant to fly into the country; but, apart from the fact that there does not seem to have been any place to which he could have escaped, the course of the morning’s ride does not warrant the view that he sought to avoid the rebels. It might very well seem to him that he had got over the most critical stage. Murder of Tyler. Seeing the royal cavalcade approach, Tyler rode forward to confer with the King. Froissart, willing to put the rebel leader as much in the wrong as possible, represents him as advancing so rudely that his charger’s head touched the crupper of the king’s horse. It is, indeed, not improbable that Tyler sought to provoke an altercation, in order to give his followers a pretext for seizing the king’s person: with Richard in the rebel camp, the ‘true commons’ would have had a show of legality for all their acts. The mistake he made, from his point of view, was in leaving his followers too far in the rear. After a good deal of provocative talk, and a quarrel fastened at length upon a squire in the king’s following, Tyler ended with a threat. Addressing the squire, he said, as reported, ‘By my troth, I will not eat this day before I have thy head.’* At this, William Walworth, closely accompanied by a dozen men armed beneath their robes, rode forward, and Walworth cut the rebel down with his dagger, a weapon still, perhaps appropriately, preserved among the valuables of the London Fishmongers’ Company. The other horsemen, surrounding the fallen rebel to conceal what was going on from his followers, a squire, John Standwich, thrust his sword through Tyler’s belly, ‘so that he died.’ When the rebels found their leader slain, they drew their bows upon the king and his company. Richard boldly rode forward to the menacing ranks, and at the cry, ‘They have killed our captain,’ he said: ‘I am your king and captain. Remain peaceable.’ Demoralised by the death of their leader, the rebels allowed the king to ride back to his friends without effort to detain him. Some of the lords present advised taking to the fields; but Walworth again proved the strong man. Declaring that they had done what was right, he advised the king and his followers to remain where they were, and assured them that speedy assistance was likely to arrive from the city. Another account represents Tyler as having called for a pitcher of ale, which he proceeded to drink in the presence of royalty - a breach of etiquette which aroused the loyal ire of Walworth. Demoralization of the Insurgents. Alarmist messengers ran towards the city crying, with a not uncommon faculty for reversing the order of things, ‘They are killing our king and mayor.’ Presently there arrived, one after the other, various contingents of the king’s supporters, among them Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Perducas d’Albret, ‘well attended’; Nicholas Bamber, the king’s draper, ‘with a large force of foot’; and several aldermen at the head of 600 men-at-arms, the entire muster being put at seven to eight thousand. With amazing helplessness, the rebels allowed this rally of the king’s party to assemble on the ground, apparently without any attempt at resistance. Sir Robert Knolles suggested an immediate attack on the insurgents; but Richard forbade this, saying he would have his revenge later in the day. He, however, demanded the return of the banner which he had given the Kentishmen the previous day, as well as the letters of exemption and indemnity. The letters were at once torn up before the faces of the insurgents, who now rapidly dispersed, many leaving their arms on the field. Overjoyed at the fortunate turn affairs had unexpectedly taken for him, the king knighted Walworth, Standwich, and Bamber for their share in the day’s proceedings. Returning to the Wardrobe, Richard was received with tears of joy by his mother. ‘Ah, ah, fair son, what pain and anguish have I not suffered for you this day,’ said the Princess. ‘Rejoice and thank God, madam,’ replied the king; ‘I have this day regained my inheritance - the kingdom of England, which I had lost.’ Reprisals. The same night proclamation was made that all who had not been resident in the city for a year must leave it; and reprisals set in generally. With an army of forty thousand men, Richard marched through Essex and Kent, doing summary execution. The bands on the march to London, hearing of the collapse of the movement, returned to their homes. But the revolt was not yet suppressed. The Norwich dyer Litster was still surrounded by a large army, and, under the title of King of the Commons, had been compelling captured noblemen to act as his meat-tasters and to serve him at table on their knees, as their own servitors had been expected to serve them. At Billericay the villagers sought the same rights as had been granted to the rebels at Mile-End, and, on being refused, betook themselves to the woods, and fought two stubborn engagements with the royal troops. In Essex if was difficult to get juries to convict rebels brought before them. Even bourgeois sympathy was with the rebels. All they wanted was political intelligence and a leader, but lacking this how great was their lack. Ball, taken to prison in Coventry, was tried and sentenced to be hanged. Jack Straw is said to have been beheaded in London, where his hiding-place was betrayed by the men whom he had sought to serve. Richard’s Breach of Faith. The Essex men, who had gone home from Mile-End in good faith, sent a deputation to Richard to plead that their charters of manumission might be confirmed. But Richard had been alarmed, and his anger now was in proportion. ‘Villeins you were and villeins you are,’ he replied; ‘in bondage you shall abide, and that, not your old bondage, but a worse.’ A Noble Miller. William Grindecobbe, the noble miller of St. Albans, was promised pardon if he would persuade his townsmen to restore the charters they had taken from the monks. Turning, on the day of his trial, to his late followers, he exhorted them to make no sacrifice for his sake. ‘If I die,’ he said, ‘I shall die in the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to end my life by such a martyrdom, Do, then, to-day as ye would have done had I been killed yesterday.’ Parliament and the People’s Demands. Impressed by the stubbornness of the rebels, and fearing to press matters to the uttermost extreme, the Royal Council submitted the question of enfranchisement to Parliament, which met on the 16th of September. The Treasurer, Sir Hugh Segrave, informed the Commons that ‘the king had been forced to grant the insurgents letters patent under the Great Seal, enfranchising to a considerable extent those who were only bond servants and villeins of the realm, for which the King, knowing it to be against law, directs them to seek remedy and provide for the confirmation or revocation thereof. If they desire to enfranchise and manumit their villeins by common consent he will assent to it.’ But the landlord Parliament unanimously answered ‘That all grants of liberties and manumissions to the said villeins and bond tenants, obtained by force, are in disherison of them the Lords and Commons, and to the destruction of the realm, and therefore null and void, and this consent,’ they ended, ‘we shall never give to save ourselves from perishing all together on one day.’ In this mood they passed statutes providing that all releases made during the late tumult should be void, and that a remedy should be provided for all who made complaints regarding ‘charters, releases, obligations, and other deeds and muniments burnt, destroyed, or otherwise eloined [made away with] on their furnishing sufficient proof of the muniments so lost and of the form and tenor of the same.’ (In proof of the continued scarcity of labour and the arrogant vindictiveness of the landlords, Parliament in 1387 enacted - though their enactment came to little in the result - that any boy or girl who had served at the plough or cart till the age of twelve should thenceforth abide at the same labour; that it should be illegal for them to be taught any other mystery or handicraft.) Not wholly abortive. Thus ended the great movement of ‘the true commons of England’ - a movement which put the landholders of England in the sorest strait in their history. And yet not altogether thus. The process of enfranchisement did go on. Cruel tyrant as he was, Richard came to favour manumission of the serfs, and the Church, which maintained its hold on its own serfs, did its best to induce deathbed penitents to free theirs. By 1391 the king allows the sons of serfs to be admitted at the Universities - a proof that not only their social but also their economic status was no longer what it had been. Still, it is impossible to agree with those writers who claim that all the demands of the insurgents realised within fifty years. Actual manorial records testify to the continuance of forced labour till far into the sixteenth century, Elizabeth found serfs to emancipate on the royal manors as late as 1574; and this is no isolated instance. Last month I said my piece (or did my pieces) about restoring the reputation of Samuel Rutherford Crockett. Another month, another contemporary whose reputation is in serious need of a restoration project. James Matthew Barrie. Like Crockett he came from humble origins, in Barrie’s case the son of a Kirriemuir weaver, but unlike Crockett he lived long and prospered. Barrie became inconceivably rich during his lifetime on account of his tremendous skill at writing work that crossed the barrier (or blurred the boundaries) between literary and popular. He started off as a journalist in Nottingham and ended up as a dramatist taking the London stage by storm time and again. He became Sir J.M.Barrie Bart. He was a well known philanthropist of his day – and still the only may I know who has managed to ‘control’ and re-write copyright law – he gave the rights to Peter Pan in perpetuity to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. This has caused some ‘issues’ over the years and is an example of how difficult the whole copyright thing is. Barrie was undoubtedly offering a philanthropic gesture, quite in keeping with his many other financial gifts both to individuals and to families. It doubtless seemed like a good idea at the time. But what we do in life is impossible to control after our death and the fearful combination of copyright and commercialisation has caused many a problem for Barrie. Perhaps more of a worry though, is that (as I’ve written about elsewhere) he was pretty much hoist with his own petard. Peter Pan is now the only thing that many people know about him. Well, there’s one more thing – a still circulating and ill-founded rumour that he was a paedophile. People believe the strangest things, but to my mind it’s the sign of a sickness in society that it cannot accept the spirit and nature of a man who gave so generously that it has to find not just fault but to completely destroy a man’s reputation because it does not understand the nature of his nature. It’s time to bring Barrie out of the shadows. Crockett (and Barrie to a lesser extent) were damned by the ill-fitting Kailyard soubriquet, even in their lifetimes, though both ‘outgrew’ it if you actually read their writing. (Again, read my earlier pieces for a more prolonged comment on Kailyard). Crockett died and was condemned to obscurity. Barrie lived - but after he died he was subject to the even more damning indictment, bred from nothing of substance, of being shall we say ‘inappropriate.’ Now one thing that you could say about Barrie is that yes, he was often inappropriate. In actuality it’s a hallmark of his writing. But the inappropriateness of his writing is simply that of a man who refused to conform to the standards and was experimental beyond the comprehension of many of his contemporaries (and most since!) This in turn created its own jealousies and the wee man with the big dog was given the worst of names. Stuck in the eternal return of lies, lies and damned falsehoods simply because he stood apart and was in most cases streets ahead of many of his contemporary writers, we have lost sight of everything to do with him except his character Peter Pan. How right I was last month when I suggested that the higher they climb the further they fall. Now don’t get me wrong. The character of Peter Pan is every bit as complex as the character of J.M.Barrie himself, and the story (and character) which developed over many years of writing, are fascinating on many, many levels both narrative and dramatic. But this is not what most people think of when they think of Peter Pan. They think Disney. They take the soundbites ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’ and ‘the boy who wouldn’t grow up’ and never look any further. Or if they look further they attempt some cod psychology which never quite stacks up to any proper interrogation. This is a massive shame. Barrie’s work defies categorisation – and that stands for both his prose and his dramatic works. They are quite unique in the pantheon of late 19th century/ early 20th century writing. They give an insight into questions of identity, flexibility of narrative, they play with dramatic form, and yet the writing is spare, comic and easy to read. You can engage with Barrie on many, many levels but you never quite come to an understanding – either of the man or his work – through the endeavour. Barrie plays God in his writing and plays with the reader – consciously. Maybe this is part of why he got such a bad press? Because he dared to go that little bit further than most writers ever dare. He was beyond honest – he didn’t just stare reality in the face, he dug into it, explored it and in exploring it uncovered much of what it is to be human – warts and all. That’s both a difficult and a dangerous thing for a writer to do. But you won’t know any of this unless you read some Barrie. And where do you start when everything is hidden behind Peter Pan? This is the conundrum the recently formed J.M.Barrie Literary Society (of which I am a founder member) seeks to address. The goal is to spread the word both digitally and in ‘reality’ by hosting reading and reviewing of Barrie texts as well as by encouraging members and the wider world to engage and form opinions based on what they read rather than on what they believe. Barrie was a chameleon of form (narrative and dramatic) and in setting up the website the aim is to try and, if not copy him, then take his innovation as an inspiration to try new ways and forms of communicating creatively. How will it develop? That all depends on the membership. A community literally is the sum of its members and the growing J.M.Barrie Literary Society as Community hopefully wil create a place for open discussion and the sharing of knowledge and opinion in a way that I’ve not seen elsewhere. It’s something beyond Goodreads and online book groups – or at least it may be. The Society launched at Kirriemuir, where Barrie was born, on the 9th May – his 157th anniversary – at the Barrie Pavilion. The building was gifted by Barrie to the town on the occasion of him being granted freedom of Kirriemuir in 1930. Being Barrie there is much more to the building (now ably run by the Kirriemur Regeneration Group) than the outside suggests. It is part cricket pavilion, part camera obscura. It remains as an important legacy of the fact that Barrie left much more than copyright and money – he thought carefully about the needs of the community and tied them with his own interests. He was passionate about cricket, setting up the first celebrity cricket team which became known as the Allahakbarries. And he thought (rightly) that a camera obscura is exactly the sort of thing that would entertain a huge range of people whether they liked cricket or not. If you get the chance to go to Kirriemuir, you should definitely visit the Pavilion, his Birthplace (managed by National Trust for Scotland) and the Gateway to the Glens museum which houses many Barrie artefacts including the ‘freedom casket’ (run by AngusAlive)as well as the graveyard where Barrie and his family are buried. There are spectacular views to be found all round, but the camera obscura on a clear day is both achingly beautiful and mind-blowingly clever. Lest this seems to read too much like a travelogue, I shall point out that reading Barrie will surpass even the delights of Kirriemuir, if you give yourself up to it and forget everything you think you know about him. Whether you read the Thrums stories, or the Tommy novels, or whether you explore Barrie through his full length dramas or the shorter dramatic form, there is plenty to amaze and excite you and most of all to make you think, and re-think your previous knowledge (and prejudices?) To find out more about Barrie’s work you should definitely check out the Literary Society www.jmbarriesociety.co.uk where you can be sure of a warm welcome. At the launch event we were given a speech which paid tribute to Barrie and exhorted us to read and talk about Barrie’s work. We were reminded that reading is not just for children and that the range and depth of our adult reading and debating on literary issues is reflective of and indeed a part of our very creative nature as well as the a significant factor in the development of our society. I often worry that we are in danger of losing all our critical faculties and most of all our pleasure in reading these days. Barrie is a writer who can pick you up, give you a slap round the face, and remind you why you used to find reading such a necessary part of life. Do us all a favour and give him a go. If you want a quick ‘entry’ you can read the short story in this month’s Gateway HERE. If that takes your fancy, why not head over to McStorytellers where more of An Edinburgh Eleven is being serialised. You can also check out ‘Better Dead’ an early Barrie work which gives quite an insight into his youthful mind and modus operandi. It’s not the finished article by any means, but that’s what is so good about Barrie, he never ‘finished’ he is always open to interpretation and discussion. And if all of that isn’t enough, M’Connachie’s Talking shop is in the throes of opening at the Literary Society website – where you can find other free texts and suggestions of what to read – and the opportunity, once you’ve done so, to add your own thoughts. So what are you waiting for…? Orraman. ‘It is the business of the drama to hold the mirror up to nature not merely as she is, but to show her as she ought to be.’ This month sees the publication, for the first time in their entirety, of Leatham’s seventeen Shakespeare Studies and the above quote from Leatham’s study of Henry V lays out his theory of drama. His literary critiques, of which there are plenty, are generally written from a socialist perspective and his Shakespeare studies are no different. As such they offer a quite unusual interpretation of the work of The Bard. That in itself might be justification, as part of the Deveron Press Centenary Collection, for this new edition. By bringing the studies together into one volume the reader is able to engage with Leatham’s theory in a way previously very difficult if not impossible. Leatham’s studies were commissioned in the early 1900’s for a girls school in Turriff. He explains how and why this commission came about in his autobiography 60 Years of World-Mending: ‘The Westwood Magazine was nominally the school journal of Westwood, an old private boarding and day school in Turriff; but the principal, Mrs Margaret Fergusson, had ideas about education for which the publishers of schoolbooks did not seem to provide. She had lived in England and Australia. She thought that education was not sufficiently literary and that civics were neglected. The Oxford and Cambridge Board, whose examiners periodically visited this school, used to set, as a test of the teachers’ intelligence, many subjects on which no direct help was to be got from the regular school textbooks. It was Miss Fergusson’s idea that these subjects should be discussed in the Westwood Magazine, which might become a lesson book, not only for her pupils, but for those of other private schools supposed to be conducted more or less in accordance with the Oxford and Cambridge Syllabus...’ Over the following decades Leatham’s studies were published and republished – in Gateway and as a small series of pamphlets. There is no doubt they were revised, sometimes substantially between the original versions and those in the second edition of the 1920s. However the focus of this new edition is not to find definitive answers but rather to bring them together as a body of work for a modern reader to reflect on.
To parody a famous quote regarding poetry and pity, in this volume we discover the Socialism that is in the Shakespeare. This comes not just in Leatham’s justification for printing his studies as pamphlets: ‘Schoolbooks have always been comparatively dear, and to have the origins, merits, and upshot of a Shakespeare play discussed in a threepenny magazine or a twopenny pamphlet was an economical way of covering a good deal of ground. It was found that these papers induced quite a proportion of readers to the authors themselves by bringing a Keats, Coleridge, Milton, or Chaucer down out of the rarefied academic air which makes the masterpieces, ‘Eng. Lit,’ thereafter to be forgotten. A busy lawyer said he did not realise how supremely human and racy Shakespeare could be till reading our study of ‘King John’ led him to the original.’ but also in the content of his critiques. Generally the studies run to an average of 2000 words apiece, and Leatham invariably (but not always) starts by giving the background and history of the play to contextualise it. He often criticises contemporary critics and he can’t help but get political about his interpretations. His criticism of Shakespeare is at times unsettling to the modern reader for whom Shakespeare has achieved a revered, beyond criticism status. Four hundred years on from the death of Shakespeare one thing is certain – Shakespeare has become the ultimate commodity. As such, when we think about how the Bard ‘speaks’ to us today, we have to consider not just the man and his work but also subsequent cliché and commodification. In the 21st century I suggest we tend to use Shakespeare as a mirror – holding him up to our own present condition and trying to retro-fit – much in the way that Shakespeare himself was doing in writing the plays in the 17th century from earlier stories and different times. But this is not how Leatham sees it. A century ago, Leatham, while appreciating Shakespeare’s genius, does not categorise it or commodify it as we do today, although I suggest that he does point towards the dangers of deifying and commodifying in equal measure. In Leatham’s Shakespeare Studies we get a different and thought-provoking interpretation, quite unlike the one with which those of us ‘schooled’ in Shakespeare since the Second World War are familiar. Leatham consistently presents a view which I suggest is in keeping with his socialist principles. He can separate morality from creativity without condemnation, as in his study on Hamlet: ‘Morally one brackets Shakespeare the showman with the enterprising newspaper proprietors of the present day...,’ I suggest that in reading these studies you will not find Leatham trying to define or redefine Shakespeare as a socialist dramatist. Rather, he offers a socialist response to the plays. Thus soldiers, and especially monarchs and their behaviour are presented to us in a way quite different to that which was the acceptable response when I was a student of Shakespeare. And that is quite refreshing. One thing I can promise you – whether you agree, disagree, are shocked or charmed by Leatham’s opinions – you won’t have read Shakespeare critiques like these before. And that has to be a good thing. Rab Christie. [This piece is an abridged version of the Introduction to Leatham’s Shakespeare Studies, published by the Deveron Press on 23rd April 2017 and available NOW from Unco.] March is the birth month of William Morris. Born 24th March 1834 in the 180+ years since his birth and the 121 years since his death he has become a perfect example of the commodified artist – known and loved by all and sundry. Can there really be any more to say? Any side unexplored? Well, two new editions by Deveron Press suggest so. The first official biographer of William Morris was Mackail. Writing the ‘official’ version soon after his death, this has become the standard – but it is, as all ‘official’ accounts, somewhat partial and does not give full credence to Morris the Socialist. Morris’s Socialist convictions were often found embarrassing to his contemporaries and seen as a ‘phase’ or fancy. Without an insight into this part of his later life however, the a rounded picture of the man who has become a myth, cannot be given. James Leatham can actually claim to have published the first biographical account of Morris since his William Morris, Master of Many Crafts came out before Mackail’s in 1897. It is a slight tome, a personal take on a real man, no myth making, no ‘official’ story and it is all the better for that. Leatham, does not benefit from the fulsome Wikipedia entry allotted to Morris though he has plenty to add to this description. Why don’t we find Leatham on Wikipedia? It is always worth remembering that ubiquitous as it seems, Wikipedia is constructed – by people of course – who are able to work out the editing protocols. It’s knowledge Jim, but not as we used to know it. It is broader, looser and a bit more egalitarian than encyclopedias of old, but it does not hold all the useful, interesting or important information in the world. Nor does Google. Search engines are not there to support socialism after all. Profit is the bottom line. This is somewhat off our topic, but the heads up is that if you want to find out about James Leatham via Google you have to put in James Leatham Socialist to stand any kind of chance. Therefore, some knowledge is required before you can begin. By the same token, instead of just hitting Wikipedia, try William Morris Socialist in Google and it’ll take you to a load of places just typing William Morris won’t. That’s a good analogy for the Deveron Press republications. They will show you a different side to William Morris (perhaps even a different William Morris) to the official biographers. James Leatham’s tribute shows a young man looking at an older one. There is an element of hero worship, perhaps even of awe, but Leatham is too grounded to let this vision run away with him. And so in William Morris, Master of Many Crafts we learn a lot about Morris (and in the process a fair amount about the young Leatham) In the book Leatham says of Morris his ‘memory must be a lifelong inspiration to all who have known him and felt the spirit of his influence.’ It’s easy to experience Morris fatigue, reading modern biographies and critical works about him. He seems less man and more myth, but Leatham, for all his personal take, brings us back to the heart and spirit of the man. Leatham covers Morris’s poetry, Prose, his Arts Craftsmanship (including print/publishing – a topic close to Leatham’s own heart) his Socialism and personal belief system. It is the immediate response of a friend who grieves a loss. It is this freshness, honesty and immediacy which still touches the reader today and offers a unique and different perspective to the Morris we all think we know and love. Leatham wrote his Morris tribute in his early 30s. But Morris and his ideas would not let him go. Thus nearly quarter of a century later when the opportunity arose for him to publish another biography of Morris – this time by John Bruce Glasier – he took it. Glasier is another overlooked figure in the early history of Socialism. Who today has heard of him? He does have a brief Wikipedia entry as ‘Scottish Politician.’ Even the Google trick of John Bruce Glasier Socialist doesn’t take you far. So the best way to find out about him is directly from his own writing. William Morris and the early days of the Socialist Movement was essentially Glasier’s death bed project, written we might feel, to pay proper tribute not just to a friend but to a political comrade. Glasier’s portrait offers a picture of the older Morris as a committed Socialist. Thus contextualised it is possible to make sense of Morris in a way the ‘official’ biographies do not tend either to aim for or achieve. Mackail’s biography is about ‘praising great men’ whereas Glasier and Leatham’s are about personal friendship and exploring and explaining Morris’s moral commitment – which was not divorced from, but may be seen at times in conflict with his artistic commitment. Both Leatham and Glasier try to resolve this conflict, exploring Morris from the perspective of their own experiences of him. As Glasier writes ‘Morris was a Socialist by reason of his whole intellectual and moral construction, and whatever circumstances eventually led him to realise and proclaim himself a Socialist – and there were doubtless many – his Socialism was none the less a necessary expression of his whole nature.’ It is a very interesting context in which to view Morris – for those happy to step beyond the wallpaper. Glasier’s volume has an introduction by Morris’s daughter May (after whom Leatham named one of his own daughters) and features a series of letters written between Morris and Glasier. Both books are available in paperback from www.unco.scot. Leatham Morris comes in at £3.99 (+ £2 p&p) Glasier Morris is £7.99 (+ £2.80 p&p) And there’s a special offer. Buy both books and Leatham’s own Socialism and Character and get free UK p&p. (A saving of £5.20) Just enter the coupon code MORRIS at checkout to get the special offer – available during March. The offer applies to UK purchases only. Make March the time you get to know William Morris – or get to know him all over again, differently.
Marx and Faith.
But the essential difference between Karl Marx and all prophets and the orthodox economists as well, is that he was a Social-Democrat first, and an economist only as a means of making an end of capitalism. The orthodox economists might deprecate the excessive share taken by capital; but they were not concerned with anything beyond the ‘moralisation’ less or more of a relationship which Marx held to be fundamentally immoral and which could be moralised only by extinction. Marx was so much of a moralist that, unlike the commercial economists, he believed the evil thing could be ended. The commercial economist, moreover, is usually a man of the study; but Marx was a man of action as well. Hunted out of Germany, hunted out of France, resident for a time in Brussels, but, returning to Germany and expelled once more, finally making London his home; dominating the strongest and inspiring some of the best men with whom he came into contact; leader and teacher of the International; watching events and in touch with revolutionists everywhere; opportunist man of affairs; London correspondent of the New York Tribune (at a guinea a week!); friend of trades unionists and of co-operators, Marx was an insurgent politician working for remote but inevitable ends. Despite the careful analyses in the first volume of the ‘Capital’ – analyses which the historical student will best appreciate as marvels of generalization – Marx, with all his deductiveness, was full of preconceived ideas passionately held and promulgated. He had faith that a system motived on reaping without sowing, to which Adam Smith made placid reference, must end. The expropriators would themselves be expropriated. He had faith that the progress made in the class stuggles of the past would result in the conquest of the means of life by the proletariate and the ending of classes and class struggles alike. The historical process which had seen the end of chattel slavery and of serfdom, why should it not witness the end of wage servitude, under which the proletarian must ‘beg a brother of the earth,’ to give him the means of living upon it? Marx a Politician. Unlike some of his doctrinaire followers today, he did not wait for the great change to work itself out, looking for ‘the inevitable to function inevitably.’ He believed that social order could not be secured without social organization by the individual units who desired and required it. His opportunism was shown by the way in which, in ‘Value, Price and Profit,’ he downed Weston for attacking trades unionism by maintaining that the policy of strikes was, what we know it to be, a see-saw of prices and wages, wages and prices, a chasing by the dog of its own tail. He may have realised that, even so, trades unionism could not, under capitalism, give up its powers to resist and to attack, just as today we cannot give up the idea of the right to strike even if strikes fail oftener than they succeed, and hit the striker and his dependents first and most heavily. The trade union can standardise conditions and preserve a minimum. In periods of expansion it may advance the standard, and resist retrogression in times of slump. Finally, and most hopeful of all, the trade union is a political force even more potent than the employers’ federation, since it controls more votes. Marx gave the revolt against exploitation a political turn. He said ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have a whole world to win and nothing to lose but your chains.’ He left no definite scheme whereby the expropriators were to be expropriated, and his early followers in all lands looked to barricades and a cataclysmic revolution. It may come to that as a result of the lack of class-consciousness and of political aptitude on the part of the proletariate. The present attempt to make the House of Lords supreme in Britain is the counterpart of Fascism in Italy and dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Turkey etc. If the gradual socialization of industry and commerce are to be frustrated by the janissaries of the established order, it is possible that there might be fighting in Britain. A few swashbucklers like Galloper Smith and Birkenhead might easily precipitate civil war. But it should not be, it need not be, and we hope it will not be. Russia had proved, what never was in doubt, that a change of government is one thing and a change of social structure is something very different and a much more prolonged process. Mrs Kingsley rejects Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s theory of gradualism, as based on the slow course of organic transformation. We need not, indeed, make love to gradualism. Quite the reverse. Let us, if anything, make love to speed. But even speed has its laws, and furious driving is apt to end in a smash. In the commandeering of socially-created wealth for public purposes, Britain, with its hundreds of millions of taxation extracted from the rich for education, water-supply, streets and roads, poor relief, unemployment and maternity benefit, art galleries and museums, public libraries, public health, street-lighting, traffic control, and research, is more communistic than Russia is after ten years of Maximalist government. So that gradualism has it as against ‘Mutations’ so far. Miracles. Mrs Kingsley, however, believes in miracles, as we have seen, and she would fain shift the onus probandi to those who question the occurrence of miracles. She says it is an ‘example of the loose and unscientific statements so often made by rationalists’ that ‘science on its own data cannot explain miracles, but it does not refute them.’ But the onus of proof rests with those who assert that miracles have happened. Science does not need to refute what it does not believe. The proofs of the universal reign of unbroken law form a categorical refutation of miracles. A miracle requires an abrogation of natural law, and Mrs Kingsley, who pins her faith in a general way to the transcendentalism of Emerson, would do well to recall Emerson’s dictum that ‘Nothing is that errs from law.’ Low Materialism. I seem to be emphasising my points of difference with Mrs Kingsley more than my points of agreement; but I hope all my denials have really an affirmative upshot. I should not write of her pamphlet if I did not find it, as I have said, arrestive and tending to make us review the grounds of our beliefs. As a Socialist and a public administrator I am at present busy with schemes of housing and of road-making byt direct labour because in a small community there is little else that one can do that is anything like so important. These schemes are all of the very essence of gradualism, and when a critic comes along and tells us in effect that all this is neither here nor there, and that the Social Revolution is to be carried by a Mutation, one is naturally pulled up sharp and nettled into meeting views that may very well be held by thousands besides this lady. Her pamphlet abounds in the signs of wide reading and she can state her extraordinary case very pointedly. The Two Materialisms. Philosophical materialism we accept. The vulgar materialism of ‘wealth, material comfort, and sensuous pleasure’ we reject. That is to say, philosophical materialists mostly reject it. And be it said, also, a great many spiritists, including most conventional Christians, are very much fonder of the fleshpots than are the philosophical materialists. No one could be less of a vulgar materialist than was Heinrich Karl Marx, born to middle-class comfort, but choosing the rugged service of the Social Revolution; grinding microscopic lenses and writing to the press for a living; not unfamiliar with the pawnbroker’s shop, and losing several of his children by death; consecrating his great powers to the service of an event in any case remote from his time – surely none was ever less of a materialist in the vulgar sense. He is but one in a noble company, living and dead, who have seen man’s life conditioned by circumstances over which man himself had potentially real control, with neither gods above nor devils below to prevent his being master of his fate collectively. The one condition was that he should learn the laws of social life, should realise and perform its civic duties, should above all things believe that the strong shall bear rule, and that the great mass of the exploited were in their numbers and the justice of their cause immensely the strongest and socially most important of all. Not Enough. Sir Thomas Harrison, the amiable old-time author of ‘Oceana’ believed that ‘The highest earthly felicity that people can ask or God can give is an equal and well-ordered commonwealth.’ But to Mrs Kingsley this does not seem enough. ‘No Communist’ she says, ‘can think that by merely getting enough food and clothes and better houses the workers are going to be happy and virtuous; look at the rich!’ But why ‘merely’? Could such a good change come without being accomplished by other good changes? The appeal does not hold. The rich do not work and can have none of the satisfactions discipline, and self-respect of the worker. Those who have no work have no leisure. Robert Burns was a good judge, and he saw the rich as those who ‘By evendown want o’ wark are curst.’ Patmore sang ‘Who pleasure follows pleasure slays.’ And Matthew Arnold saw the idle rich of decadent Rome sated and disgusted with the hell of a life in which there was nothing to enjoy because there was nothing to do. Look at the rich indeed! With their cars and their tennis racquets, their golf clubs and their jazz, their night clubs and revues and bawdy plays, their Blue Train and their attempts to fly from themselves and the boredom of their empty lives, they are indeed a warning rather than an example. Mrs Kingsley apparently seeks to make out that even lawful pleasure, comfort, and the highest mundane endeavour are not enough. She cites the longing of Morris’s wayfarers for the Earthly Paradise, the Acre of the Undying, and their ‘half-shame at having undertaken the quest and their regret that it has been all in vain.’ The poet’s excuse for their quest is that they ‘Had need of Life, to right the blindness and the wrong.’ But the blindness and the wrong are not to be righted by quitting the field. That was written before Morris had fully learned the great secret of the happy life, which is to be found in service and the immortality of fellowship as pictured by him in the ‘Dream of John Bull’ And the deeds that you do upon the earth, it is for fellowship sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you a part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane. The Craving for Unending. When he wrote of the old-time traditional quest of ‘a land where death is not’ he was still ‘the idle singer of an empty day,’ content that other people and not he should bear a hand with the slaying of the social monsters. The hatefulness of death as a mere deprivation of life and all its legitimate satisfactions was the most outstanding feature in Morris’s reflective life. The intensest pleasure made him in the last resort, ‘only the more mindful that the sweet days die.’ All this meant that he enjoyed life so much that death would be the greatest imaginable evil. Very evidently it did not mean that he had any hope of a reincarnation. Perhaps, also, Morris had an idea that he would not live long enough to be willing to take the final rest. He was but sixty-two when he was cut off in the full tide of his happy craftsmanship, with the latest of his great experiments, the Kelmscott Press, still in its infancy. In private he dwelt sometimes on the shortness of life and the possibility of lengthening it: but, unlike Shaw, whose thoughts tend the same way, he neither husbanded his great strength nor denied himself ‘pig,’ latakia, nor many cups of tea. Even so, he lasted longer than his father. We mostly do. Every generation extends the span of life by living less unhygenically. The remedy for the craving for unending life lies, not alone in the great extension of the life-span, but, above all, in the recognition of the quite plain fact that life is not to be reckoned in terms of the individual. The philosophy of Socialism leads in its ultimate interpretation to the frank recognition that man at his best is only a unit in the social scheme, a link in the endless chain of eternal life, not a complete being with a godlike claim to eternal life himself. In times of national stress this unitary character of man is recognised. Man, the lower animals, even ants, give their lives automatically, under stress of strong social feeling, for the good of the nation, herd, or colony. Humble people of socialised instincts risk their lives any day to save a fellow-creature. The poet Swinburne payed that he might be saved ‘from too much love of living’ and when we hear very ordinary people objecting strenuously to being ‘snuffed out’ as they indignantly say, and see them holding ‘circles’ and prying into the possibilities of a continued life for them on another plane, we cannot help regarding it as a greed of life which no achievement of theirs has ever justified in the past or is likely to justify in such a future as they picture. All that we learn from Spiritualists as to life on the astral plane shows it to be such a dull, stagnant, trivial affair that it would add a new terror to death if we believed that a life of that kind lay beyond. At one time I worked as a printer on The Two Worlds, the Spiritualist weekly, and saw a good deal of the Spiritualist fraternity at close quarters in that way and otherwise. Of their messages from the other world the general impression is of paltryness, the most outstanding memory being of repeated assurances to ‘take car of yourself’ and to ‘be sure you wear flannels next your skin.’ Carlyle somewhere tells of an old man who spoke to his (Carlyle’s) father in rapturous terms of the joys of heaven. And the old Scots mason retorted: ‘Who wants a stinking of clog like you in heaven? Don’t you think that seventy years of you is enough?’ It was brutal; but Carlyle manifestly tells the story with a chuckle as if he agreed with the rough justice of it. What we think about life on an alleged astral plane will not alter the fact whatever the fact may be; but in the absence of adequate proof it seems an overweening claim that the human mite, marvellous as he is, should seek to live for ever, or otherwise viewed, should, like the idiot Struldbrugs of Gulliver, have sentence of eternal life passed upon him. The good we do lives after us, and if that is sometimes very little, our claim to continued life on another plane is surely all the less, unless, indeed, we are to be taught there to be less self-centred, to have more of the spirit of comradeship and service. Already we have more pity than is needed for our own sorrows, more laughter than is warranted by our own joys, even when we know nothing of its cause, and we often worry over the troubles of others more than they do themselves. This altruism, which is by no means overdone, cannot but be greatly strengthened in the more socialised life of the future. ‘Sanctions.’ In a letter to me Mrs Kingsley says there are no moral sanctions today. She means, I take it, that the law and the commandments have lost their Divine authority and that no authoritative taboos have taken their place. But there are surely more taboos than ever, while law and public opinion are more strongly operative than ever. Morals are always ahead of theology. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not bear false witness – the public opinion behind these existed long before Moses formulated it as Divine law. All these taboos and many others have more force than ever they had; and they are reinforced by a thousand acquired instincts that are more potent than any old priestly taboo. In spite of a very much extended penal code, with vastly more efficient policing, the prison population is less and less. In spite of the coarsening effects of war, the increased decency of average social feeling is manifested in various ways. The war itself actually helped. Profiteering was never generally condemned till the word was coined for it, and till, with our backs to the wall it was felt to be the dirty game which it is, whether peace or war. The ‘slacker’ was one who wangled out of his duty as a citizen in time of national danger, but it stands in time of peace, also, for the two million men in Britain who were not ashamed to return themselves to the census-takers as ‘of no occupation.’ Homes for heroes, self-determination, direct labour, direct action, camouflage for that which needs to be disguised, C3 as a deplorable category – all are hopeful, illuminating verbal facets augmenting the vocabulary of a more socialised world. Mrs Kingsley, quoting Bertrand Russel says: ‘The whole solidity of matter has gone,’ En avent! That does but make it the more plastic and potent. The trouble with the grey matter up to now has been stodginess. That its solidity has gone is good news. It is still material despite its fluidity. By a natural dialectical tendency, I have dwelt upon the controversial aspects of Mrs Kingsley’s thesis, passing by much of which it is possible heartily to approve. The production of marvels – such as spirit-writing, ‘precipitation’ of letters from the ceiling, and ‘materialisations’ – has been so often shown to be mere trickery that it is depressing to think of fine minds being deflected from open forthright pursuit of the open forthright business of the world to such jugglery. There is no particular mystery about the things that really matter. |
ArticlesTo find past articles please use monthly archives. Archives
June 2018
Categories
|