To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness as strength, is to court failure-the broad, healthy, human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it. If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further. Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held bad-heartedness was strength.
CHAPTER XV-THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL
We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are, of necessity, of a very vital character. We have shown only as yet the effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort. The position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic presentation. That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly, between good and evil-between right and wrong-between the secret consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere strength and force in certain other ways.
Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here-no technical skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches," as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand here meet and take each other"s hands, and will not be separated. This is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley-young men of great talent, failed-utterly failed-they thought they could make a hero out of a shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally-and failed.
The spirit of this is of the clever youth type-all too ready to forego the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth-whose tender mercies are often cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the Ebb-Tide with Huish the c.o.c.kney in it, after he was powerless to recall it; which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of The Master of Ballantrae "shame, and perhaps degrade, the beginning." He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late to remedy it-he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to put right errors in what was done.
Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:
"Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached him-the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the truth about life-was abundantly made good in his later writings. It is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry James:-"Do you know the story of the man who found a b.u.t.ton in his hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he. "Well," said the waiter, "what d"you expect? Expect to find a gold watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not?" Heavenly, by all means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he "smiling pa.s.sed the moral by." In his enjoyment of the waiter"s effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary b.u.t.ton. He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based upon just this audacious paralogism."
Many writers have done the same-and not a few critics have hinted at this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine, about the time of Stevenson"s death; and the whole is so good and clear that I must quote it-the writer was not thinking of the drama specially; only of prose fiction, and this but makes the pa.s.sage the more effective and apt to my point.
"In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in middle life "with only half his message delivered." Such a phrase may have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism. Still it set one questioning what was Stevenson"s message, or at least that part of it which we had time given us to hear.
"Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide. To a certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys" books, which yet held captive older people. Now, undoubtedly there was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys. It gratified their yearning for adventure. To too large a number of his readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson"s chief charm; though even of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so daintily.
"Most of Stevenson"s t.i.tles, too, like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae, tended to foster delusion in this direction. The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts, and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had their t.i.tles given more indication of their real scope and tendency.
"All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson"s true power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of "human nature" and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we have our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world. He has the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are pulling the same strings and playing on the same pa.s.sions which are at work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast crimes and the reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without them.
"And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson"s "message" (so far as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom-the creed that good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the sense that good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil. That is only the sowing of the martyr"s blood, which is, we know, the seed of the Church. We should not have marvelled in the least that a genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external "happy endings," which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against Providence. But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde. The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to Kidnapped shows David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.
"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson"s experience of real life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?
"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe "that all will come right in the end," when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it "come right" to-day.
"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, "It does not matter; nothing will ever come right!"
"Shakespeare has shown us-and never so n.o.bly as in his last great creation of The Tempest-that a man has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the enemy-that citadel of his own conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause there.
"We must remember that The Tempest was Shakespeare"s last work. The genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature against every a.s.sault is probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the pa.s.sions of its struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before those later years are reached!"
Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe"s saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe"s fine sayings as a motto for himself:
"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners; Here I"m a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." [7]
Stevenson"s own verdict on Deacon Brodie given to a New York Herald reporter on the author"s arrival in New York in September 1887, on the Ludgate Hill, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don"t think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. But we were both young men when we did that, and I think we had an idea that bad-heartedness was strength."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson"s eternal grat.i.tude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the Pall Mall Magazine about the Edinburgh Edition, etc. Men are mirrors in which they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious Pall Mall Magazine article than he did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking paltry revenges-writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty grievances-they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things.
R. L. Stevenson"s fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:-certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a G.o.d"s power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in Pippa Pa.s.ses:
"The year"s at the spring, And day"s at the morn; Morning"s at seven; The hillsides dew-pearled;
The lark"s on the wing; The snail"s on the thorn: G.o.d"s in His heaven, All"s right with the world.
"All service ranks the same with G.o.d, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as G.o.d wills Can work-G.o.d"s puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."
It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him.
CHAPTER XVI-STEVENSON"S GLOOM
The problem of Stevenson"s gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.
His text and his sermon-which may be shortly summed in the following sentence-be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he ill.u.s.trated this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life. Suffering constantly, he still was always kindly. He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has said, this philosophy by every resource open to him. In practical life, all who knew him declared that he was brightness, nave fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a p.r.o.nounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom. Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in essence. Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge. Always behind Stevenson"s latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here, too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life backward. Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was before him where to choose. This fateful shadow pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for his own father"s despondency and gloom, which the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to him, to be ungrateful-"Has the man no grat.i.tude?" Two selves thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self-enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating character and inherited influence. When he reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings. Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service. Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort. He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company. At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the waters.
Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson-a gloom which well might have justified something of his father"s despondency. He struggles in vain to escape from it-it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do. In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process-all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts-is met, solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting. "The evening brings a "hame";" so should it be here-should it especially be in a dramatic work. If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then the last halo of the soul"s serene triumph. From this side, too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter sense of Stevenson"s work generally: it is, after all, distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite attained.
It was well pointed out in Hammerton, by an unanonymous author there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins, in Stevenson himself-in his real life-Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde. This writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie. R. L. Stevenson"s dramatic art and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie-it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as expressed in life.
In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of application. Stevenson, at the time he wrote The Foreigner at Home, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier knowledge and observation to England-and by doing so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early a.s.sociations and knowledge. He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it goes to form character-even national character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with him-the point is that, when he comes to this sort of comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed. It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing-and had I s.p.a.ce, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on it, with instances-in which case the Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than it has yet received. But meanwhile just take this little snippet-very characteristic and very suggestive in its own way-and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now said as ill.u.s.trating a certain side and a strange uncertain limitation in Stevenson:
"But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England foreign. The const.i.tution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a cla.s.s should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like a cold plunge." [8]
As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" [9] in the little dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for him.
CHAPTER XVII-PROOFS OF GROWTH
Once again I quote Goethe:
"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it follows no youth can be a master."
It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment-artistic and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses it. The Sedulous Ape sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new and alien series of a.s.sociations, where, for full effect, it should not be so. And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson"s first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and well read, rather than to the great ma.s.s, his "sedulous apehood" only the more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved. If the story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it? More than once in Catriona we must own we had this experience, directly warring against full possession by the story, and certain pa.s.sages about Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara Grant, of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever, indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere deus ex machina, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson"s own power of persiflage, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor la.s.s, for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit better fate than that.
But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at the very close. Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth to the last. To a true critic then, the problem is, having already attained so much-a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters, with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,-what would Stevenson have attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him? It has over and over again been said that, for long he shied presenting women altogether. This is not quite true: Thrawn Janet was an earlier effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real. Here also he was on the right road-the advance road. The s.e.x-question was coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in any broad and true picture. This element was effectively revived in Weir of Hermiston, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it does not go deeper than Denis Duval or Edwin Drood. We know what d.i.c.kens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson would have done. "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it. It shows the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the cross-roads-the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.
Yes; there was growth-undoubted growth. The questioning and severely moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism-the tendency to casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection-which had so coloured Stevenson"s art up to the date of The Master of Ballantrae, and made him a great essayist, was pa.s.sing in the satisfaction of a.s.sured insight into life itself. The art would gradually have been transformed also. The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur, pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.
CHAPTER XVIII-EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS
Stevenson"s earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical-to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted moralities-"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named them-that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his genealogy on both sides of the house. The strong Celtic strain is now amply attested by many researches. Such phantasies as The House of Eld, The Touchstone, The Poor Thing, and The Song of the Morrow, published along with some fables at the end of an edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Longman"s, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol-no phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient-blind to certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or the literature of phantasy, more properly.
This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tendencies in characters. The little early sketch written in June 1875, t.i.tled Good Content, well ill.u.s.trates this:
"Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek Content follows them on a snow-white a.s.s. Here, the broad sunlight falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage, pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign-poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompa.s.s them about; from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and walks with her slim hand upon my arm?
"Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a will o" the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand. And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on his white a.s.s, follows simpering Content.
"Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. Virtue is all a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache. Sore besmirched, on his jacka.s.s, follows Content."
The record, ent.i.tled Sunday Thoughts, which is dated some five days earlier is nave and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises to the fine climax in this respect at the close.
"A plague o" these Sundays! How the church bells ring up the sleeping past! I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves. t.i.ttering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent solitary voice of the preacher. To and fro I wander among the graves, and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air. Oh, the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage! Oh, to have wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree"s green heart!