Frank Boreham

[113]
I
THE POSTMAN

I must say a good word for the postman. He occupies so large a place in most of our lives that, as a matter of common courtesy, the least we can do is to recognize his value and importance. Others may not feel as I do, but I confess that I bless the postman every day of my life. Not that I am so fond of receiving letters, for I bless him with equal fervency whether he calls or whether he passes. I know that in this respect I am hopelessly illogical. If I am pleased to see the postmen pass the gate, I ought, if strictly logical, to be sorry to see him enter it. And, contrariwise, if the sight of the postman coming up the path affords me gratification, the spectacle of his passing my gate ought to fill me with disappointment. But I am not logical, never was, and never shall be. The best things in the world are hopelessly illogical—motherhood for example. A mother sits in the arm-chair by the fire, even as I write. She is chattering away to her baby. She knows perfectly well that the baby doesn’t understand a word she says. Knowing that she would, if she were logical, give up talking [114] to the child. But, just because she is so hopelessly illogical, she prattles away as though the baby could understand every word. It is a way mothers have, and we love them all the better for it. An illogical lady is a very lovable affair; but who ever fell in love with a syllogism? Robert Louis Stevenson is the most lovable of all our English writers, and the most illogical. Here is an entry from his diary, by way of illustration. ‘A little Irish girl,’ he writes, ‘is now reading my book aloud to her sister at my elbow. They chuckle, and I feel flattered; anon they yawn, and I am indifferent; such a wisely conceived thing is vanity.’ Just so. And why not? There is a higher wisdom than the wisdom of logic. If Stevenson had been logical, he would have felt elated by the chuckles and crushed by the yawns. But he knew better, and so do I. If the postman passes my door, I heave a sigh of relief that I have no letters to answer; it is almost as good as being granted a half-holiday. Am I therefore to be angry when the postman enters the gate, and accept his letters with a grunt? Not at all. In that case I throw my logic over the hedge for the edification of my next-door neighbour, and feel pleased that some of my friends are thinking of me. I greet the postman with a smile, and try to make him feel that he has rendered me an appreciable service, as indeed he has.[115]
I am writing on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anthony Trollope, and I fancy that it is the thought of Trollope and his extraordinary work that has set me scribbling about the postman. For Trollope was much more than a novelist. He was, in a sense, the prince of British postmen, and the forerunner of Rowland Hill and Henniker Heaton. To a far greater extent than we sometimes dream, we owe the efficiency of our modern postal service to Anthony Trollope. But before he died he became the victim of serious misgivings. He feared that we were losing the art of letter-writing. He produced a bundle of his mother’s love-letters. ‘In no novel of Richardson’s or Miss Burney’s,’ he declared, ‘is there a correspondence so sweet, so graceful, and so well expressed. What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction?’ And this lamentation was penned, mark you, years and years ago, before cheap telegrams and picture post cards had become the normal means of communication!

I suppose the real trouble is that we have allowed the amazing development of our commercial correspondence to corrupt the character of our private letter-writing. We indite all our letters in the phraseology of the business college. We write briefly, tersely, pointedly, and, most abominable [116] of all, by return of post. I should like to write a separate chapter in vigorous denunciation of the prompt reply. Private letters should never be hastily answered. If my friend replies instantly to my long, familiar letter, he gives me the painful impression that he wants to be rid of me, and is unwilling to have on his mind the thought of the letter he owes me. One of these days I shall start a new society to be called the ‘Wait a Week Society.’ Its members will be solemnly pledged to wait at least a week before replying to their private letters. There are strong and subtle reasons for taking such a vow. First of all, private letters should be easy, leisurely, chatty, and should only be written when one is in the mood, or when, for some reason, the person to whom it is addressed is specially in one’s thoughts. To this, it may be replied that one is never so much in the mood to write to a friend as when he has just received a letter from that friend. But the argument is fallacious. He is a very happy letter-writer indeed who can write me a long, free, chatty letter without saying anything that will rub me the wrong way or with which I shall disagree. During the first twenty-four hours after receiving his letter, those are the things that are most emphatically impressed upon my mind. If I reply within twenty-four hours, my letter to my friend will deal largely [117] with those disputatious and controversial points, and the inevitable result will be that the whole of my letter will grate upon him just as part of his letter has grated upon me. But if, as president of my own society, I wait a week before replying to his letter, I shall see things in their true perspective, and write him a long and breezy letter in which the things that vexed me find no place at all. I am often asked, What is the unpardonable sin? The only sin that I can never pardon is the sin of writing angry letters. I can forgive a man for speaking hastily; I have a temper myself. But to deliberately commit one’s spite to paper is to become guilty of an amazing atrocity and to degrade at the same time the postman’s high and solemn office.

I bless the postman because he can do for me, and do better than I could do, so many delicate things. I regard the postman as a faithful and indispensable assistant. It often falls to a minister’s lot to approach people, and especially young people, on the most delicate and important subjects. Upon their decisions much of their future happiness and usefulness will depend. I must therefore go about the business with the utmost care. But if I go to that young man and abruptly introduce the matter to him, I at once put him in a false position, and greatly imperil my chance of success. We are face to face; I have spoken to him, and he, in common [118] decency, must speak to me. It would be a thousand times better if, having opened my heart to him, I could withdraw before he uttered a single word. But as it is, I have forced him into a position in which he must say something. His judgement is not ripe, his mind is not made up, the whole subject is new to him, and yet my indiscretion has placed him in such a position that he is compelled to commit himself. He must say something without due consideration; I stand there, like a highway-robber, with my pistol pointed at his brow, and he must give me words. I may not want his words immediately; and he may wish he need not give his words immediately; but we are both the victims of a situation which I have foolishly precipitated. He speaks; and however he may guard his utterance, his final decision will inevitably be compromised by those hasty and immature sentences.

The evidence must be perfectly overwhelming that will lead a man to reverse a decision once made. And here am I, his would-be friend and helper, forcing him into a position from which he will find it very difficult to extricate himself. I meant to do him good, and I have done him incalculable harm. I meant to be his friend, and I have become his enemy. So true is it that evil is wrought from want of thought as well as want of heart.

Now see how much better the postman manages [119] the matter. I sit down at my desk and write exactly what I want to say. I am not under any necessity to complete a sentence until I can do so to my own perfect satisfaction. I can pause to consider the exact word that I wish to employ. And if, when it is written, my letter does not please me, I can tear it up without his being any the wiser, and write it all over again. I am not driven to impromptu utterance or careless phraseology. I am free of the inevitable effect upon my expression produced by the presence of another person. I am not embarrassed by the embarrassment that he feels on being approached on so vital a theme. I am cool, collected, leisurely, and free. And the advantages that come to me in inditing the letter are shared by him in receiving it. He is alone, and therefore entirely himself. He is not disconcerted by the presence of an interviewer. He owes nothing to etiquette or ceremony. He has the advantage of having the case stated to him as forcefully and as well as I am able to state it. He can read at ease and in silence without the awkward feeling that, in one moment, he must make some sort of reply. If he is vexed at my intrusion into his private affairs, he has time to recover from his displeasure and to reflect that I am moved entirely by a desire for his welfare. If he is flattered at my attention, he has time to fling aside such superficial considerations [120] and to face the issue on its merits. The matter sinks into his soul; becomes part of his normal life and thought; and, by the time we meet, he is prepared to talk it over without embarrassment, without personal feeling, and without undue reserve. In such matters—and they are among the most important matters with which a minister is called to deal—the postman is able to render me invaluable assistance.

There is something positively sacramental about the postman. For the letters that he carries have no value in themselves; they are simply paper and ink. They are precious only so far as they reveal the heart of the sender to the heart of the receiver. Here, for instance, is a letter for a young lady. She is at the door before the bell has ceased its ringing. She greets the postman with a smile, and blushes as she glances at the familiar handwriting. As soon as the postman has closed the gate after him, she hurries down to the summer-house, her favourite retreat, to read her letter. But she is not alone. Bruno, her big collie, goes bounding after his mistress. She reads the first pages of the letter, and allows the sheet to slip from her lap to the ground, whilst she proceeds to devour the following pages. And as the fluttering missive lies upon the floor of the summer-house, Bruno examines it. A dog’s eyes are sharper than a [121] girl’s eyes; yet how little the dog sees! He sees a piece of white paper covered with black marks—sees perhaps more in that respect than she does—yet he sees nothing, and less than nothing, for all that. For she sees, not the black marks on the white paper, but the very heart of one who worships her. She is gazing so intently into the soul of her lover that she does not notice whether the ‘t’s’ are crossed, or the ‘i’s’ dotted. To her the letter is a sacramental thing; its value lies not in itself, but in the revelation that it makes to her.

And it is because the postman spends his whole life among just such sacramental things that we welcome and honour him. We have an amiable way of transferring to the messenger the welcome that we accord to the message. Jessie Pope describes the joy of a mother on receiving a wire from her soldier-boy that he will soon be back again from the front.

‘Home at six-thirty to-day.’

Oh, what a tumult of joy!

Growing suspense flies away,

God bless that telegraph-boy!

God bless that telegraph-boy! Exactly. And that is why we honour the postman. The messenger always shares in the welcome given to the message How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of [122] him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace! We ministers often share in the postman’s benediction. We are welcomed and honoured and loved, not so much for our own sake as for the sake of the great, glad message that we bear. The heart leaps up to the message and blesses the messenger. God bless the telegraph-boy! God bless the postman!

Let it be distinctly understood that nothing that I shall now say is addressed to the crowd. To the crowd it would probably do more harm than good. It is intended only for a single individual; and he, I think, will understand. I am told that there is a unique secret by means of which a wireless message from the British Navy can be transmitted to the Admiralty Office without risk of interception. At the Admiralty a superlatively sensitive and superlatively secret instrument is most carefully attuned to the instrument of the battleship from which the message is expected. Then, when all is ready, every wireless operator in the Grand Fleet pulls out all the stops and bangs on all the keys of his instrument, and the inevitable result is the creation of a din that is almost deafening to all listeners at ordinary receivers. But through the crash and the tumult the specially delicate instrument at the Admiralty Office can distinctly hear its mate, and the priceless syllables penetrate the thunder of senseless sound without the slightest loss or leakage. I am about to attempt a similar experiment. I [124] have a message for a certain man. It is important that he, and he alone, should get it. It would do untold damage if it were heard at other receivers. Let him therefore take some pains to attune his instrument to mine.

Now it is usual, and it is altogether good, to encourage people to entertain lofty ambitions, high ideals, and great expectations. It is a most necessary injunction, and I have not a word to say against it. It stirs the blood like a trumpet-blast. It rouses us like a challenge. But, however excellent the medicine may be, it cannot be expected to suit every ailment. No one drug is a panacea for all our human ills. And even the stimulating tonic to which I have referred does not at all meet the need of the man for whom I am now prescribing. John Sheergood is a friend of mine, and a really capital fellow. But I should not call him a happy man. His trouble is that his ambitions are too lofty, his expectations too great, and his ideals, in a sense, too high. He is crying for the moon, and breaking his heart because he can’t get it. I am profoundly sorry for this morbid friend of mine, and should dearly like to comfort him. His ideal is perfection, nothing less; and whenever he falls short of it he is in the depths of despair. If, as a student, he entered for a competition, he felt that he was in disgrace unless he secured the very first place. If he sat for [125] an examination, he counted every mark short of the coveted hundred per cent. as an indelible stain upon his character. He is in abject misery unless he can strike twelve at every hour of the day. I both admire him and pity him at the same time. His parents once told me that when he was a very small boy he contracted measles. The illness went hardly with him, and left him frail and debilitated. The doctor ordered a prolonged holiday by the seaside, with plenty of good food, plenty of fresh air, and, above all, plenty of bathing. He was only a little fellow, and when he approached the bathing-sheds for the first time his father accompanied him.

‘I don’t want to go in, dad,’ he cried appealingly; ‘it’s cold, and I’m cold, and I don’t like it!’

‘It will make you grow up into a big man, sonny!’ his father replied persuasively.

Now this touched Jack on a very tender spot, for, although his father was tall, and he himself cherished an inordinate admiration for tall men, he was himself almost ridiculously small. He had several times contrasted himself with other small boys of the same age, and had felt shockingly humiliated.

‘Will it really, dad; honour bright?’ he asked anxiously, carefully scrutinizing his father’s face.

‘It will indeed, sonny; that is why the doctor ordered it.’[126]
Poor little Jack submitted with a wry face to the process of disrobing, and, with a shiver, bravely approached the water. Summoning all his reserves of courage, he waded in until the water was up to his knees, to his waist, and at last to his neck. The excruciating part of the ordeal was by this time over; and, for the sake of the benefit so confidently promised him, he tolerated the caress of the waves for the next five minutes. Then he rushed out of the water. As soon as he was beyond the reach of the foam he stopped abruptly, surveyed himself carefully from top to toe, and straightway burst into tears. His mother, who was sitting knitting on the beach, at once ran to his assistance.

‘Why, whatever’s the matter, Jack? What are you crying for?’

‘Oh, mum, just look how wee I am! And dad said that if I went into the water it would make a big man of me!’

He has often since joined in the laugh, whenever the story of his childish adventure has been related in his hearing. But it is worth recording as being so eminently characteristic of him. He has never outgrown that boyish peculiarity. He is always setting his heart on instantaneous maturity. He seems to think that the world should have been built on a sort of Jack-and-the-beanstalk principle. He is continually sowing seeds overnight, and [127] feeling depressed if he cannot gather the fruit as soon as he wakes in the morning. Many of us have watched the Indian conjurer sow the seed of a mango-tree; throw a cloth over the pot; mutter mysterious charms and incantations; and then hit the cloth. And, behold, a full-grown mango-tree! He replaces the cloth, mutters further incantations, again removes the covering, and, lo, the mango-tree is in full flower! And when a third time he uncovers the plant, the mango-tree stands forth, every bough freighted with a heavy load of fruit! I have no idea as to how the trick is done. I only know that poor John Sheergood seems to be everlastingly lamenting the misfortune that ordained him to any existence other than that of an Indian conjurer. He is grievously disappointed, not because he was born with no silver spoon in his mouth, but because he was born with no magic wand in his hand. His mango-trees come to fruition very, very slowly. John believes in quick returns and lightning changes; and he is irritated and annoyed by the tardiness of that old-fashioned process called growth. It is good for a man to have lofty ideals; but I am sure that John Sheergood would be a happier man, and make us all more happy, if he would only break himself of his inveterate habit of crying for the moon.

In justice to John I am bound to say that, as [128] on the sands years ago, his principal disappointment is with himself. I have done my best to persuade him that a man should be infinitely patient with himself. Nothing is to be gained by getting out of temper with yourself. You may scold yourself and scourge yourself unmercifully; but I doubt if it does much good. A man must win his self-respect; and you can only learn to respect yourself by being very gentle and very considerate and very patient with yourself. A man’s self-culture is his first and principal charge; and he will never succeed unless he both loves himself and treats himself lovingly. A man should be as gentle with himself as a gardener is with his orchids; as a nurse is with her patient; as a mother is with her troublesome child. A gardener who lost all patience with his delicate plants; a nurse who treated her poor patient peevishly; or a mother who met ill-temper with ill-temper could only expect to fail. I have urged John Sheergood to treat himself with a softer hand, and to greet himself with a smile. I lent him Henry Drummond’s lovely essay on The Lilies, taking the precaution, before doing so, to underline the following sentences: ‘Growth must be spontaneous. A boy not only grows without trying, but he cannot grow if he tries. The man who struggles in agony to grow makes the church into a workshop when God meant it to be a beautiful [129] garden.’ There is a good deal in the chapter that will have a special interest for my poor self-castigated friend.

But, although his lash falls principally upon his own back, he is not the only sufferer. I shall never forget when, as a young fellow, he joined the church. His conversion was a very radiant experience, and, in the ecstasy of it all, he formed a brightly rose-tinted conception of what the fellowship of the church must be. The idea of being admitted to the society of numbers of people as happy as himself! They would be able to tell of experiences as glorious as his own; they would be sure to congratulate him on his inexpressible joy, and to help him in relation to the difficulties that beset his daily path. They would encourage him by their sympathy and stimulate him by their example. Their conversation would illumine for him the sacred page; their vivid testimonies to answered prayer would give him greater confidence in approaching the Throne of Grace; the very atmosphere that he expected to breathe would, he felt sure, inflame his own devotion to the highest and holiest things.

He has often since told me of his disillusionment. It happened to be a wet night when he was received into membership, and there were fewer members present than were usually there. As soon as the service was over they broke up into knots. He [130] overheard one group discussing a wedding; and heard a man with a strident voice say that it was a beastly night to be out without an umbrella. But nobody took any notice of John, and he left the building. To complete his discomfiture he mistook the step as he passed out of the church and stumbled awkwardly into the street. ‘The whole thing was an awful come-down,’ he told me afterwards, ‘the greatest surprise I had ever known. I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything.’ He got over it, of course; and learned by happy experience that the people who treated him so coyly on that memorable night are not half as bad as they seemed. Many of them are now among his dearest and most intimate friends; whilst even with the man who growled at the weather he has since spent some really delightful times. One of the oddest things in life is the dread that some people feel of appearing as good as they really are. And John has found out now that, in spite of the cold douche administered to him that night, there is in the church a glow of genuine enthusiasm and a wealth of spirituality that in those days he never suspected. But it did not reveal itself all at once. The best things never do. And because the church did not put on her beautiful garments as soon as he entered, John was mortified and confounded. He felt just as he felt that day on the sands when he [131] discovered with disgust that, under the spell of the sea, he had not immediately assumed gigantic proportions. As I say, he has got over it now, and smiles at it, just as he smiles when his adventure by the seaside is recounted.

He was a great favourite in the church, but his ingrained peculiarity betrayed itself with unfailing regularity in one particular direction. Oddly enough, in view of his own experience, he was a little severe with new members. I do not mean that he treated them coldly or distantly; nobody was more genial. But he expected too much of them. He was disappointed unless the convert of yesterday proved himself the full-blown saint of to-day. To satisfy him, they had to be raw recruits one day and hardened veterans the next. It was merely another phase of his Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. It was the magician and the mango-tree over again. In a way it was very fine to see how he grieved over the slightest lapse on the part of these new members. The smallest inconsistency in their behaviour filled him with remorse, and he was afflicted with the gravest suspicions as to our wisdom in welcoming such people into fellowship. He failed, it seemed to me, to distinguish between the raw material and the finished article. The Church evidently had some very raw material in her membership when the [132] Pauline Epistles were written; and it is a mercy for John that he was not born some centuries earlier.

John afterwards left us and entered the ministry. We were exceedingly sorry to lose him. A man more generally honoured, respected, and beloved I have seldom seen. The church was distinctly poorer after he left, although we were all glad that he had given himself to so great a work. But he carried his old characteristic up the pulpit steps with him. He has often told me the story of that first sermon and the way it was received. Such confidences between one minister and another are sacred, and I shall not betray this one. But I never hear John refer to that experience without thinking of Mark Rutherford. In his Autobiography, Mark Rutherford tells how, on settling at his first pastorate, he put all his soul into his first sermon. He was elated by the solemnity and grandeur of his calling, and spoke out of the very depths of his heart. ‘After the service was over,’ he says, ‘I went down into the vestry. Nobody came near me but the chapel-keeper, who said that it was raining, and immediately went away to put out the lights and shut up the building. I had no umbrella, and there was nothing for it but to walk home in the wet. When I got to my lodgings I found that my supper, consisting of bread and cheese, was on the table, but there was no fire. I was overwrought, and paced [133] about for hours in hysterics. All that I had been preaching seemed the merest vanity.’ And so on. John Sheergood’s experience was not unlike it. It was the sudden descent from the glowingly romantic ideal to the brutally prosaic reality. It nearly killed John just as it nearly killed Mark Rutherford. But he is getting over it. He is learning gradually, I think, that a minister can only get the best out of his people by being very patient with them, just as the people can only get the best out of their minister by being very patient with him. The world has evidently been built that way. Jack and the beanstalk is only a fairy-story and the mango-tree is a piece of Oriental trickery; there is no room for such prodigies in a world like this. Like the lilies, we begin in a very modest way, and grow very slowly; we must therefore exercise infinite patience with each other. I have fancied lately that some inkling of this has at length entered into the mind even of John Sheergood, and he has seemed a very much happier man in consequence.

There are few days in a girl’s life more critical than the day on which the sawdust streams from the mangled carcase of her dearest doll. It is a day of bitter disillusionment, a day in which a philosophy of some kind is painfully born. The doll came into the home amidst all the excitements of a birthday. It was instantly invested with every attribute of personality. The task of naming it was as solemn a function as the business of naming a baby. And when the choice had been made, and the name selected, that name was as unalterable as though it had been officially recorded at Somerset House. By that name it was greeted with delight every morning; by that name it was hushed to sleep every night; by that name it was introduced to other dolls, as well as to less important people; and by that name it was addressed a hundred times a day. The doll has suffered accidents and illnesses after the fashion of fleshier folk; but such misadventures, as is the way with humans, has only rendered her more dear. But now an accident has happened, surpassing in seriousness all previous misfortunes. [135] The thing has come to pieces! The girl has a shapeless rag in her hand; the floor is all powdered with sawdust; and her face is a spectacle for men and angels. I say again that this is an extremely critical day in a girl’s life, and upon the way in which she negotiates this passage in her history a good deal will eventually depend.

I do not quite know why I have made the feminine element so prominent in my introduction. Boys are just the same. They affect to deride a girl’s ridiculous weakness in cherishing so great a tenderness for a doll; but, for all their supercilious airs, they have illusions of their own. Dr. Samuel Johnson has told us how, as a boy, he consulted the oracle as to his future fortunes. If some issue were hanging in the balance—a game to be played, or an examination to be taken—he would endeavour to wrest from the unseen the secret that it held. He would note a particular stick or stone on the path before him; and then, with face turned skywards, he would walk towards it. If he trod on the object which he had chosen, he took it as a sign that he would win the game or pass the examination that was causing him such uneasiness. If, on the other hand, he stepped clean over it, he interpreted it as a sinister prediction of disaster. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes confesses to a similar weakness. ‘As for all manner of superstitious observances,’ [136] says the autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ‘I used to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them; but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experience. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issues to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember.’ And Dr. Holmes goes on to give us a good deal more in the same strain.

But, although they do not record it, there must have come to both Dr. Johnson and Dr. Holmes a day very similar to that on which the sawdust streamed from the mutilated doll. What about the day on which young Samuel Johnson, his scrofulous face and screwed-up eyes turned skywards, strode along the path towards the selected talisman, stepped plump upon it, and then lost the game that followed after all? And what about the day on which young Oliver Wendell Holmes, impatiently awaiting his father’s return from Boston, wondered if his parent would bring him the pocket-knife for which he had so long and loudly clamoured? But there, not fifty yards away, was a tree; and here, at his feet, was a stone. ‘If I hit it, he’ll bring it; if I miss it, he won’t!’ he cried; and, taking more [137] than usually careful aim, he threw the stone, and missed! But the pocket-knife was in his father’s handbag all the same! Boys or girls, men or women, it matters not; there come into our lives great and memorable days when we have to take farewell of our illusions. Our romances leave us. There comes a Christmas Day on which, to our uttermost bewilderment, we discover the secret history of Santa Claus. And very much will depend upon the way in which we face such sensational and eye-opening experiences.

We go through life leaving these shattered romances behind us. Our track is marked by the spatter of burst bubbles. What then? And in answer to that ‘What then?’ the obvious temptation is the temptation to cynicism. Since the doll has turned out to be a mere matter of sawdust and rags, since the talisman on the footpath told a lie, since the oracle of tree and stone deceived us, we make up our minds to fling to the scrap-heap such cherished beliefs as we still retain. We go in for a severe weeding out of everything that is imaginative, everything that is mystical, everything that is romantic. Life resolves itself into a dreary wilderness of matter-of-fact, an arid desert of common sense. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was wiser. Referring to his oracular stone-throwing and the rest of it, he says, ‘I won’t swear that I have not some tendency to these unwise practices even at [138] this present date. With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well that I would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them.’ It is a pity to sweep all our rainbow-tinted romances out of life simply because one of them has been reduced to the terms of rag and sawdust.

There stands before me as I write Sir John Millais’ great picture of ‘Bubbles.’ Both the picture and the experience that it portrays are wonderfully familiar. The curly head; the upturned face; the entire absorption of the little bubble-blower in the shining balls that he is hurling into space; the half-formed hope that this one, at least, may not sputter out and become an unbeautiful splash of soapsuds on the floor; the wistful half-expectancy that now, at last, he has created a lovely globe that shall float on and on, like a little fairy-world, for ever and for evermore. It is all in the picture, as every beholder has observed; and it is all in life. It is the first tragedy of infancy; it is the last tragedy of age. Bubbles; bubbles; bubbles; and yet what would the world be without bubbles? They burst, of course; but we are the happier for having blown them! Our dreams may never come true; but it’s lovely to dream! Illusions are part of life’s treasure-trove. When they go, they leave nothing behind them. When we lose them, we lose [139] everything. It is almost better to become criminal than to become cynical. To be criminal implies an evil hand; but to be cynical reveals a very evil heart. It is a thousand times better to be blowing bubbles that, though fragile, are very fair than to move sulkily about the world telling all the blowers of bubbles that their beautiful bubbles must burst. ‘I want to forget!’ cried the poor little ‘Lady of the Decoration.’ ‘I want to begin life again as a girl with a few illusions!’ Every fool knows that bubbles must burst. The man who feels it necessary to tell this to everybody proves, not that he possesses the gift of prophecy, but that he lacks the saving grace of common sense. The world would clearly be very much the poorer, and not one scrap the richer, if no bubbles were left in it. It is altogether wholesome to have a fair stock of illusions.

But at this point two serious questions press for answer. If illusions are so good, why do they fail us? Why are our bubbles permitted to burst? The question answers itself. If all the bubbles that had ever been blown were still floating about the world, there would be nothing so commonplace as bubbles. That is why the era of miracles ceased. It was a very romantic phase in the Church’s childhood, and it answers to the superstitious element in our own. But we may easily exaggerate its value. If the age of miracles had been indefinitely lengthened, [140] the effect would have been the same as if all the bubbles became everlasting. If all the bubbles that had ever been blown were with us still, who to-day would want to blow bubbles? And if miracles had once become commonplace, their charm and significance would have instantly vanished. ‘I am persuaded,’ Martin Luther sagely declares, ‘that if Moses had continued his working of miracles in Egypt for two or three years, the people would have been so accustomed thereunto, and would have so lightly esteemed them, that they would have thought no more of the miracles of Moses than we think of the sun or the moon.’ It would not be hard to prove that even the miracles of the New Testament tended to lose their effect. The amazement of the disciples at beholding what they took to be a ghost on the water is attributed to the fact that ‘they considered not the miracle of the loaves’ which had taken place a few hours earlier. A miracle was already so much a matter of course that the memory no longer treasured it as something phenomenal. No pains were taken to investigate its significance. It would have been a tragedy unspeakable if the miraculous element in the faith had become universally contemptible. As the eagle carefully builds the nest in which her eaglets are to see the light, and afterwards as carefully destroys it so that they may be forced to fly, so our illusions [141] are made for our enjoyment, and then dashed to pieces under our very eyes. Our childhood was enriched beyond calculation by the fine romances that gave it such bright colours; and, in exactly the same way, the childhood of the Church was glorified by the wonder-workings of a Hand Invisible.

And the other question is this: What shall we do when our illusions leave us? When the doll turns out to be sawdust and rag, when the youthful oracle speaks falsely, when the bubble bursts, what then? And again the answer is obvious. Why, to be sure, if one romance fails us, we must get a better, that is all! Any man who has not been soured by cynicism will confess that the romantic tints in the skein of life have deepened, rather than faded, as the years passed on. Surely, surely, the romance of youth was a lovelier thing than the romance of childhood! When a girl feels how silly it is to play with dolls, she begins to think of other things that will more appreciate her fondling. When a boy sees that it is senseless to throw stones at trees as a means of deciding his destiny, he takes to tossing precious stones and pretty trinkets in quite other directions, but with pretty much the same end in view. And so the romance of life—if life be well managed—increases with the years, until, by the time we become grandfathers and grandmothers, the world seems too wonderful for [142] us, and we stand and gaze bewildered at all its abounding surprises. Everything depends on filling up the gaps. As soon as the sawdust streams out of the doll, as soon as the futility of the oracle stands exposed, we must make haste to fill the vacant place with something better.

Long, long ago there were a few Jewish Christians who felt just as a girl feels when the component parts of her dearest doll suddenly fall asunder, just as Samuel Johnson felt when the talisman prophesied falsely, just as Oliver Wendell Holmes felt when he saw that he could trust his oracle no more. They felt—those Hebrew believers—that everything had gone from them. ‘To how great splendour,’ says Dr. Meyer, ‘had they been accustomed—marble courts, throngs of white-robed Levites, splendid vestments, the state and pomp of symbol, ceremonial and choral psalm! And to what a contrast were they reduced—a meeting in some hall, or school, with the poor, afflicted, and persecuted members of a despised and hated sect!’ But the writer of the epistle addressed to them makes it his—or her—principal aim to point out that it is all a mistake. Just as a girl’s richest romance follows upon the disillusionment of the terrible sawdust, so the wealthiest spiritual heritage of these Jewish Christians comes to them in place of the things that they were inclined to lament. ‘For,’ says the writer, [143] ‘ye have come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.’ And whoever finds himself the heir of so fabulous a wealth can well afford to smile at all his earlier disappointments.

I was at Wedge Bay. It was raining. Wondering what I should do, I remembered the great caves along the shore. For ages the waves had been at work scooping out for me a place of refuge for such a day as this. I put on my coat, slipped a novel in the pocket, and set off along the sands. I soon found a sheltered spot in which I was able to defy the weather, and to watch the waves or read my book just as the fancy took me. As a matter of fact, I had not much to read. The book was Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, and the bookmark was already near the end. I read therefore until, in the very climax of the tragic close, I suddenly came upon a text. Or perhaps it was less a text than a reference to a text, casually uttered in a moment of great excitement by one of the principal characters in the story. But it acted on my mind as the lever at the switch acts upon the oncoming railway train. In a flash, the novel and all its thrilling interest were left far behind, and I was [145] flying along an entirely new track. And here are the words that so adroitly changed the current of my thought:

‘“Oh, if there be judgement in heaven, thou hast well deserved it,” said Foster, “and wilt meet it! Thou hast destroyed her by means of her best affections—it is a seething of the kid in the mother’s milk.”’

Almost involuntarily I closed the book, slipped it back into my pocket, and sat looking out to sea lost in a brown but interesting study.

II

‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk!’ The striking prohibition occurs three times—twice in the Book of Exodus, and once in the Book of Deuteronomy. I do not know on what principle we assess the relative value and importance of texts; but, surely, a great commandment, thrice emphatically reiterated, ought not to be treated as beneath our notice. I find that the interdict applies primarily to an ancient Eastern custom. All nations have their own idea as to the special delicacy of certain viands. We British people fancy lamb and sucking-pig, and feel no shame in destroying the tiny creatures as soon as they are born. The predilection of the Arab was for a new-born kid; [146] and when he wished to adorn his table with a particularly toothsome morsel, it was his habit to serve up the kid boiled in milk taken from the mother. It was against this favourite and familiar dish that the stern and repeated prohibition was launched. I do not know if there was any practical or utilitarian reason, based on hygienic or medical grounds, for the emphatic decree. Perhaps, or perhaps not. Some of the old commandments relating to animals seem to have been framed for no other purpose than to inculcate a certain gentleness and courtesy in our attitude towards these poorer relatives of ours. ‘Thou shalt not kill a cow and her calf on the same day’; ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn’; and so on. It is difficult to see any real reason why the ewe and her lamb, or the cow and her calf, should not go to the shambles together. But it was strictly forbidden. And similarly, ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.’ The finer feelings are certainly shocked at the thought of the cow and the calf going together to the slaughter, and at the idea of boiling the newly born and newly slain kid in the milk of its mother; and the most obvious moral seems to be that we are not to treat the creatures of the field and the forest in any way that grates and jars upon those finer instincts. As I sat watching the foam playing with the strands of seaweed, it seemed to me that, [147] if ever I am asked to preach in support of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I should have here a theme all ready to my hand. And I felt glad that I had read Kenilworth.

III

But the prohibition goes much farther than that. It enshrines a tremendous principle, a principle that is nowhere else so clearly stated. Sir Walter Scott evidently saw that; and no exposition could be clearer than his. The circumstances were, briefly, these. The Countess of Leicester was a prisoner. Just outside her room at the castle was a trapdoor. It was supported by iron bolts; but it was so arranged that even if the bolts were drawn, the trapdoor would still be held in its place by springs. Yet the weight of a mouse would cause it to yield and to precipitate its burden into the vault below. Varney and Foster decided to draw these bolts so that, if the Countess attempted to escape, the trap would destroy her. Later on, Foster heard the tread of a horse in the court-yard, and then a whistle similar to that which was the Earl’s usual signal. The next moment the Countess’s chamber opened, and instantly the trapdoor gave way. There was a rushing sound, a heavy fall, a faint groan, and all was over! At the same instant Varney called in at the window, ‘Is the [148] bird caught? Is the deed done?’ Deep down in the vault Foster could see a heap of white clothes, like a snowdrift. It flashed upon him that the noise that he had heard was not the Earl’s signal at all, but merely Varney’s imitation, designed to deceive the Countess and lure her to her doom. She had rushed out to welcome her husband, and had miserably perished. In his indignation, Foster turned upon Varney. ‘Oh, if there be judgement in heaven, thou hast deserved it,’ he said, ‘and wilt meet it! Thou hast destroyed her by means of her best affections. It is a seething of the kid in the mother’s milk!’

At that touchstone the inner meaning of the interdict stands revealed. The mother’s milk is Nature’s beautiful provision for the life and sustenance of the kid. Thou shalt not pervert that which was intended to be a ministry of life into an instrument of destruction. The wifely instinct that led the Countess to rush forth to welcome her lord was one of the loveliest things in her womanhood, and Varney used it as the agency by which he destroyed her. She was lured to her doom by means of her best affections. Charles Lamb points out, in his Tales from Shakespeare, that Iago compassed the death of the fair Desdemona in precisely the same way. ‘So mischievously did this artful villain lay his plots to turn the gentle qualities of this [149] innocent lady into her destruction and make a net for her out of her own goodness to entrap her!’ It is this that the prohibition forbids. Thou shalt not take the most sacred things in life and apply them to base and ignoble ends. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.

IV

The possibilities of application are simply infinite. There is nothing high and holy that cannot be converted into an engine of destruction. A girl is fond of music. The impulse is a lofty and admirable one. But it may easily be used to lure her away from the best things into a life of frivolity, voluptuousness, and sensation. A boy is fond of Nature. He loves to climb the mountain, row on the river, or scour the bush. Nothing could be better. But if it leads him to forsake the place of worship, to forget God, to fling to the winds the faith of his boyhood, and to settle down to a life of animalism and materialism, he has been destroyed by means of his best affections. Or take our love of society and of revelry. There are few things more enjoyable than to sit by the fireside, or on the beach, with a few really congenial companions, to talk, and tell stories, and recall old times; to laugh, to eat, and to drink together. Talking and [150] laughing and eating and drinking seem inseparable at such times. And yet out of that human, and therefore divine, impulse see the evils that arise! Look at our great national drink curse, with its tale of squalor and misery and shame! Did these men mean to be drunkards when first they entered the gaily lit bar-room? Nothing was farther from their minds. They were following a true instinct—the desire for companionship and congenial society. They have been lured to their doom, like Sir Walter Scott’s heroine, by means of their best affections.

V

And what about Love? Love is a lovely thing, or why should we be so fond of love-stories? The love of a man for a maid, and the love of a maid for a man, are surely among the very sweetest and most sacred things in life. No story is so fascinating as the story of a courtship. And that is good, altogether good. Every man who has won the affection of a true, sweet, beautiful girl feels that a new sanction has entered into life. He is conscious of a new stimulus towards purity and goodness. And every girl who has won the heart of a good, brave, great-hearted man feels that life has become a grander and a holier thing for her. As Shakespeare says:

Lord Lytton illustrates this magic force in his Last Days of Pompeii. He tells us that Glaucus, the Athenian, ‘had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal as, by her intellectual and refining spells, she reversed the fable of Circe, and converted the animals into men.’ Here, then, is something altogether good. It is clearly designed to minister new life to all who come beneath its spell. And yet the sordid fact remains that, through the degradation of this same high and holy impulse, thousands of young people make sad shipwreck.

VI

But of all things designed to minister life to the world, the Cross is the greatest and most awful. Its possibilities of regeneration are simply infinite; and in its case the danger is therefore all the greater. [152] ‘We preach Christ crucified,’ wrote Paul, ‘unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ It is the most urgent and insistent note of the New Testament that a man may convert into the instrument of his condemnation and destruction that awful sacrifice which was designed for his redemption. It is the sin of sins; the sin unpardonable; the sin so impressively forbidden by that ancient and thrice reiterated commandment whose significance Sir Walter Scott pointed out to me in the cave by the side of the sea.

Christmas Eve, 1973. Christmas-time once more! The season strangely stirs the memory, and the ghosts of Christmases long gone by haunt my solitary soul to-night. Somehow, a feeling creeps over me that this Christmas will be my last. Am I sorry? Yes, one cannot help feeling sorry, for life is very sweet. On the whole, I have been happy, and have, I think, done good. But oh, the loneliness! And every year has made it more unbearable. The friends of my girlhood have married, or gone away, or died, and each Christmas has made this desperate loneliness more hard to endure. Did God mean women to come into the world, to feel as I have felt, to long as I have longed, and then, after all, to die as I must die? None of the things for which women seem to be made have come to me. And now I have no husband to shelter me; no daughters to close my eyes; no tall sons to bear this poor body to its burial. I have pretended to satisfy myself by mothering other people’s children; but it was cruel comfort, and often only made my heart to ache the more. And now it is nearly over; [154] I have come to my very last Christmas. I have always loved to sit by the fire for a few minutes before lighting the lamp; and to-night as I do so something reminds me of the old days long gone by.

This little room, neat and cosy, but so quiet and so lonely, somehow brings back to my mind a dream that I had as a girl. Was it one dream, or was it several? Dear me, how the memory begins to piece it all together when once it gets a start! I wonder if I can trace it in my journal? I have always kept a journal—just for company. It runs into several big volumes now, and the handwriting has strangely altered with the years. I shall tear them all up and burn them to-morrow; it will be one way of spending my last Christmas! I have said things to this old journal of mine that a woman could not say to any soul alive. It has done me good just to tell these old books all about it. But my dream or dreams; when did they come? It must be sixty years ago, although, despite my loneliness, it really does not seem so long. But it can be no less, for it was in the days of the Great War. The war broke out in 1914—I was eighteen then!—but my dream came months afterwards when things were at their worst. It must have been in 1915. I remember that I had been watching the men in khaki. Everybody seemed to be going to the front. My brothers went; the tradesmen who [155] called for orders; the men who served us in the shops; everybody was enlisting. All our menfolk had become soldiers. And, thinking about all this, I dreamed. I wonder if I entered it in my journal? And, if so, I wonder if I can find it? Yes; here it is. Ah, I thought so. It was a series of dreams; night after night for a week, Sunday alone excepted. I don’t know why no dream came on Sunday. I will copy these six entries here, so that I can destroy the old volumes with their secrets without making an end of this. The dreams began on Monday.

* * * * *

Tuesday, October 5, 1915. I had such a strange dream last night. I thought I was at the front. Whether I was a nurse or not I have no idea; but you never know such things in dreams. Anyhow, I was there. I saw Fred and Charlie in the trenches as plainly as I have ever seen anything, and Tom the butcher-boy, and the young fellow who used to bring the groceries. And with them, and evidently on the best of terms with them, I saw a tall fellow with fair hair—such a gentlemanly fellow!—and after I had seen him I seemed to have no eyes for the others. If I looked to Fred, he only pointed to the boy with the fair hair. If I turned to Charlie, he nodded to the lad with the fair hair. Tom and the grocer’s assistant did the same. And then the [156] fellow with the fair hair looked up, and I saw his face—such a handsome face! He smiled—such a lovely smile!—and I felt myself blush. My confusion awoke me; and I knew it was a dream.

Wednesday, October 6, 1915. Would you believe it, you credulous old journal, I dreamed of my white-haired boy again last night! Isn’t it silly? He was home from the war, wounded, but well again. And we were being married; only think of it! I can see it all now as plainly as I can see the white page before me as I write. The commotion at home; the drive to the church; the church itself; the ceremony; how plain it all was! Fred was best man; my white-haired boy evidently had no brothers. Jessie, my own sweet little sister, was my bridesmaid, although she looked a good deal older. It seemed funny to see her with her hair up, and with long skirts. The church seemed full of soldiers. Everybody who had known him, served with him, camped with him, or fought with him, simply worshipped him. At weddings I have always looked at the bride, and taken very little notice of the bridegroom. But at our wedding everybody was looking at my white-haired boy—so tall, so handsome, so fine—like a knight out of one of the tales of chivalry. And I was glad that they were all looking at him. And I was so happy, oh, so [157] very, very happy! I was happy to think that everybody was so proud of my white-haired boy. And I was still more happy to think that my white-haired boy was mine, my very, very own. I was so happy that I cried, cried as though my heart would break for joy and pride and thankfulness. And my crying must have awakened me, for when I sat up and stared round my old bedroom in surprise there were tears in my eyes still. I wonder if I shall ever dream of my bridegroom again?

Thursday, October 7, 1915. I did; I really did! I dreamed of him again! I saw the home in which we lived, a beautiful, beautiful home. I do not mean that it was big, but that it was sweet and comfortable, and everything so nice! I thought that he was walking with me on the lawn. He was older, a good bit older; I should think twice as old as when I first saw him in the trenches. But he was still the same, still tall, still fair, and oh, such a perfect gentleman! What care he took of me! How proud and devoted he seemed! And how he gloried in the children! For I thought we had children, five of them! The eldest and the youngest were boys, Arthur, so like his father as I saw him first, and the youngest, Harry, such a romp! The three girls, too, were the light of his eyes and the brightness of his life. What times we all had [158] together! I saw him once scampering across the fields with the children, whilst I sat among the cowslips knitting and awaiting the return of my merry madcaps. I saw him sitting with the rest of us around the fire in winter, whilst he told tales of the things that he did at the war. How the boys listened, almost worshipping! And again I saw him on the Sunday at the church. He sat next the aisle. I was so happy in being beside him, with the children on my right. What more, I wondered, could any woman want to fill her cup up to the brim? And, wondering, I awoke.

Friday, October 8, 1915. My dreams are getting to be like parts of a serial story. How real my white-haired boy seems to be! He has come into my life, and I cannot believe that he is only a dream-thing. I went for a walk yesterday with mother and Jessie, and they said I was silent and absent-minded. The truth was that I was thinking about him, yet how could I tell them? Nobody knows but my journal and myself. And last night—it seems scarcely possible—I saw him again! It was not quite so nice, for I thought we were very old. He was no longer tall and erect, but slightly bent, though stately still. And I leaned heavily upon his arm. And the children came, and brought their children—such a lot of them there seemed to [159] be. He grew as young as ever in playing with these troops of happy little people. And for them there was no fun like a game with grandpapa. And as I sat and watched them, I liked to think that all these boys and girls would have something of him about them, and would grow up to cherish his dear memory as their ideal of all that a Christian gentleman should be. And sometimes I thought of their children, and their children’s children, till I saw, floating before my fancy, hundreds and thousands of children yet to be; and I speculated idly as to how far his fine influence would carry down these coming generations. And once more I awoke.

Saturday, October 9, 1915. Oh, my journal, my journal! I dreamed of my white-haired boy again! How I wish I never had! If only I had always been able to think of him as I saw him on Wednesday night and Thursday! I was once more at the war. You know what funny things dreams are. In the trenches I again saw Fred and Charlie and Tom the butcher-boy, and the young fellow who used to bring the groceries. But this time they were all in action; when I saw them before they were resting. The air was heavy with battle-smoke; the great guns roared and reverberated; shells screamed and burst about me. It was like night, although I knew that it was daytime. As I stood [160] and watched—looking for somebody—four Red Cross men passed me. They were bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher was a mangled form. His face was hidden by his arm, half lying across his eyes. A strange impulse seized me. I sprang forward, raised his arm in the semi-darkness; there was a sudden flash caused by I know not what, and in the light of that fearful and revealing flash I recognized my white-haired boy! I trudged beside the stretcher to the hospital, knowing neither what I did nor what I said. And when we reached the hospital, my white-haired boy was dead! My white-haired boy, my white-haired boy, my white-haired boy was dead! Oh that I had never dreamed again!

Sunday, October 10, 1915. I dreamed once more, but not of my white-haired boy. I dreamed of myself; pity me that I had nothing better to dream of! I am only a girl; but in my dream I saw myself an old woman, old and lonely! Oh, so very, very lonely! I was sitting, I thought, in the dusk beside a bright and cheery fire in a neat and cosy little room. Neat and cosy, but oh, so lonely; and I felt sorry for myself, very sorry. For the self that I saw in my dream was a sad old self, a disappointed old self, a self that had fought bravely against being soured, but a self that had, after all, [161] only partly succeeded. It was not a nice dream; the nice dreams that I had earlier in the week will never come again. No, it was not a nice dream, and I awoke feeling uneasy and unhappy; and my head was aching.

* * * * *

Christmas Eve, 1973. And so, with a shaky, withered hand, I have copied into the last pages of my journal the entries that I made in the first of these old volumes. What did they mean, those dreams that came to me so long ago? Was there a white-haired boy at the war, a white-haired boy who, if there had been no war, or if just one cruel shell had failed to explode, would have been the glory of my life and the father of my children? But there was a war, and the fatal shell did burst, and my white-haired boy and I never met, never met. The five happy children—those two fine boys and the three lovely girls—will never now gladden these dim old eyes of mine. Those troops of grandchildren, and those hosts of unborn generations that I saw in my happy fancy, will never leave the land of dreams and alight on this old world. In the days of the war, I remember how people wept with the widows, and sorrowed with the mothers whose brave sons were stricken down. And, God knows, none of that sympathy was wasted. Oh, [162] it was heart-breaking to see the lusty women who would never see their husbands again; and the broken mothers who would never even have the poor consolation of visiting the graves of their fallen sons. And I was only a girl, a girl of nineteen. And nobody wept with me. I did not even weep for myself. Nobody knew about my white-haired boy. I did not know. But I know now. Yes, I know now. And God knows; I pillow my poor tired old head on that, God knows, God knows! And so this, then, is to be my last Christmas! Ah, well, so be it! And perhaps—who can tell?—perhaps, in a world where we women shall know neither wars, nor weddings, nor widowhood, I shall before next Christmas have found the face of my girlish dreams!

It is my great good fortune to dwell on the green and picturesque banks of a broad and noble river. ‘Rivers,’ says an old Spanish proverb which Izaak Walton quotes with a fine smack of approval, ‘rivers were made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.’ Let us beware lest we fall beneath the Spaniard’s lash. For myself, I can at least affirm that I never saunter beside these blue, fast-flowing waters without feeling that the lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places. It is wonderful how, after awhile, the winding river seems to weave itself into the very texture and fabric of one’s life. You stroll by it, bathe in it, row on it, fish in it, until every rock and every bank, every crag and every cliff, every twist and every bay, every deep and every shallow, takes its place among the intimacies and fond familiarities of life. It is one of the wonders of the world that this little island in the southern seas should pour into the Pacific so many fine majestic streams. And here, beside the lordliest of them all, I have made [164] my home. It is good to stand on these green banks, to survey the great expanse of gleaming waters, and to see the stately ships glide in and out. I often think of that early morning when John Forster found Carlyle standing beside the Thames at Chelsea, lost in an evident reverie of admiration. ‘I should as soon have thought of assaulting him as of addressing him,’ says Forster. To be sure! We do lots of things in this life of which we have no reason to be ashamed, things that are indeed altogether to our credit, yet in the performance of which we do not care to be discovered. It would be a sad old world, for example, if love-making went out of fashion; but no man cares to be caught in the act, for all that. Carlyle was caught making love to the Thames, as I have often made love to the Derwent, and he keenly resented the intrusion. ‘He abruptly turned away,’ adds the offender, ‘and moved across the roadway toward Cheyne Row, with that curious slow shuffle habitual with him, and I saw him no more.’

Why, my very Bible seems a new book as I ponder its pages by the banks of the Derwent. What a different story the Old Testament would have had to tell if Jerusalem had stood by the side of a river like this! The Jews never forgave the frowning Providence that denied to their fair city a river. They heard how Babylon stood proudly surveying [165] the shining waters of the Euphrates, how Nineveh was beautified by the lordly Tigris, how Thebes glittered in stately grandeur on the Nile, and how Rome sat in state beside the Tiber; and they were consumed with envy because no broad river protected them from their foes, and bore to their gates the wealthy merchandise of many lands. I never noticed until I dwelt by these blue waters how all the Psalms and prophecies are coloured by this phase of Judean life. The prophets were for ever dreaming of the river; the psalmists were for ever singing of the river. Nothing delighted the people like a vision, such as visited Ezekiel, of a broad river rushing out from Jerusalem. No greater or more glowing message ever reached the disconsolate and riverless people than when Isaiah proclaimed, ‘The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby!’ Jehovah, that is to say, shall impart to Jerusalem all the advantages of a river without any of its attendant dangers. Many a faithless river, by bearing the destroyer on its bosom to the city gates, had proved the undoing of the people after all. But no such fate shall overwhelm Jerusalem. And, hearing this, the riverless city was comforted.

It is recorded of the Right. Hon. John Burns [166] that, in the days when he was President of the Local Government Board, he found himself strolling on the Terrace of the House of Commons, surveying, with all the transports of a born Londoner, the shining waters of the Thames. His reverie was, however, rudely interrupted by a supercilious American who was inclined to regard with scornful contempt the object of Mr. Burns’ ecstatic admiration. ‘After all,’ the American demanded, ‘what is it but a ditch compared with the Missouri or the Mississippi?’ This was more than even a Cabinet Minister could be expected to stand. ‘The Missouri and the Mississippi!’ Mr. Burns exclaimed in a fine burst of patriotic indignation. ‘The Missouri and the Mississippi are water, sir, and nothing but water; but that,’ pointing to the Thames, ‘that, sir, is liquid history, liquid history!’ Yes, Mr. Burns is quite right. The Thames has a glory of its own among the world’s historic streams, although it is only a matter of degree. All rivers are liquid history. The records of the world’s great rivers constitute themselves, to all intents and purposes, the history of the race. To take a single illustration, it is obvious that the student who has mastered the history and hydrography of the Niger, the Congo, the Zambesi, the Orange, and the Nile has little more to learn about Africa. From the times of which Herodotus writes, when Cyrus lost his temper [167] with the Tigris, and turned it out of its channel for drowning one of his sacred white horses, rivers have loomed very largely in the annals of human history. Indeed, Professor Shailer Mathews, in The Making of To-morrow, says that there never was, until recent times, a nation that did not paddle or sail its way into history. Civilization, he says, got its first start on water. ‘In the early days rivers were thoroughfares, and they continued to be thoroughfares until the middle of last century. Even the United States was born on water. It was easier to get to New Orleans from Montreal by way of the Mississippi than overland.’ One has only to conjure up the wealthy historical traditions that cluster about the names of the Euphrates and the Nile, the Indus and the Volga, the Rhine and the Danube, the Tiber and the Thames, in order to convince himself that the records of the world’s great waterways are inextricably interwoven with the annals of the human race.

We cannot, however, disguise from ourselves the fact that the affection that we feel for our rivers is not based solely, or even primarily, on utilitarian considerations. Nobody supposes that it is the navigable qualities of the Ganges that have led the Hindus to believe that to die on its banks, or to drink before death of its waters, is to secure to themselves everlasting felicity. Yet, when we attempt to [168] account in so many words for the fascination of the river, the task becomes intricate and difficult. Macaulay spent his thirty-eighth birthday on the banks of the Rhone, and transferred his impressions to his journal. ‘I was delighted,’ he says, ‘by my first sight of the blue, rushing, healthful-looking river. I thought, as I wandered along the quay, of the singular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on their banks; of the feeling of the Hindus about the Ganges, of the Hebrews about the Jordan, of the Egyptians about the Nile, of the Romans about the Tiber, and of the Germans about the Rhine. Is it that rivers have, in a greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the appearance of animation, and something resembling character? They are sometimes slow and dark-looking; sometimes fierce and impetuous; sometimes bright, dancing, and almost flippant.’ However that may be, the fact itself remains; and it is surprising that our literature does not more adequately reflect this marked peculiarity. Macaulay himself felt the lack, and dreamed of writing a great epic poem on the Thames. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘that no poet has thought of writing such a poem. Surely there is no finer subject of the sort than the whole course of the river from Oxford downwards.’ But a century has gone by and the poem has not been penned. Shakespeare [169] dwelt beside the Avon; Goethe loved to stroll among the willows on the banks of the Lahn; Coleridge was born, and spent the most impressionable years of his life in the beautiful valley of the Otter. And one of the tenderest idylls of our literary history is the picture of Wordsworth wandering hand in hand with Dorothy among the most delightful river scenery of which even England can boast. Yet, beyond a few sonnets and snippets, nothing came of it all. Neither the laughing little streams nor the more majestic and historic waterways have ever yet found their laureates.

But there are compensations. If the bards have been strangely and unaccountably irresponsive to the music of the waters, our great prose writers have caught its murmur and its meaning. Two particularly, John Bunyan and Rudyard Kipling, have given us the classics of the river. Bunyan’s river—the river that all the pilgrims had to cross—is too familiar to need more than the merest mention. And as for Mr. Kipling, he, like Bunyan, is a writer of both poetry and prose. As a poet he has failed to do justice to the river, as all the poets have failed. He has given us a snippet, as all the poets have done. He makes the Thames tells its own tale, and a wonderful tale it is.

But I forgave Kipling for not having repaired the omission of the older poets when I read Kim. Kim is the greatest story of a river that has ever been written. Who can forget the old lama and his long, long search for the River? Buddha, he thought, once took a bow and fired an arrow from its string, and, where that arrow fell, there sprang up a river ‘whose nature, by our Lord’s beneficence, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.’ And so, through Mr. Kipling’s four hundred vivid pages, there wanders the old lama, through city and rice-fields, over hills and across plains, asking, always asking, one everlasting question: ‘The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?’ All India, all the world seems to enter into that ceaseless cry. It is the deepest, oldest, latest cry of the universal heart: ‘The River; the River of the Arrow; the River [171] that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?’ And it is the Church’s unspeakable privilege to take the old lama’s hand and to point his sparkling eyes to the cleansing fountains.

It was half-past ten! I had no idea it was so late! Our little camp was pitched about four miles up Captain’s Gully, under the massive shelter of Bulman’s Ridge. It had been a perfect, cloudless day; all our excursions—fishing, shooting, botanizing, and the rest—had been crowned with delightful success; and after supper we sat round the great camp fire, talking. We talked, of course, of the only things ever discussed around camp fires—old times and old faces. I was struck with the number of sentences that began ‘I remember once——.’ Then, one by one, the others stole away to their tents—those little white tents that had looked like stray snowflakes in a wilderness of bush whenever we caught sight of them from the hills in the daytime, yet which seemed all the world to us at night. One by one, with a ‘Here’s off!’ or a ‘So long!’ the others had slipped quietly away, and the fire and I were at last left to ourselves. How still it all was! Now and then I heard the queer cry of a mopoke up the gully; and once there was the swish of a bough beneath the leap of a ’possum. [173] But, save for these, I could hear no sound but the subdued hissing and rumbling of the logs as they crumpled up in the fire before me. I remained for awhile, looking into the glowing embers; and there, in the dying fire, the faces of my companions all came back to me. And not theirs alone; for I saw, too, the old familiar faces of which we had been chatting, and a hundred others as well. It was then that I was startled by the ’possum in the branches overhead. I looked at my watch; it was half-past ten; and I too turned my back on the fire that had revealed so much. And I wondered, as I moved away to my tent, why, by the side of the fire, we always think of the Past, dream of the Past, talk of the Past. Why do our yesterdays all spring to new and glorious life when the flickering flames are lighting up our faces?

Our camp broke up a day or two later; and all such thoughts seemed to have died with the fire that gave them birth. But, oddly enough, they returned to me this morning. For, when I arose, I was conscious of a distinct snap of winter in the atmosphere; and when I entered the study I discovered that the divinity who presides over such matters had lit the first fire of another year. I saluted it with pleasure, not merely for the sake of the comfort it promised me, but for its own sake. I greeted it as one greets an old and trusted friend. On this side [174] of the world we scarcely know what winter means, and we are therefore in danger of underestimating the historic value of the fire. We can produce nothing in Australia worthy of comparison with those stern winters with which Northern and Western writers have made us so familiar. We are accustomed to a literature which pours in upon us from high Northern latitudes, and which describes, with a picturesque realism that evokes a sympathetic shiver, the glacial snowdrifts that, for weeks on end, lie deep along the hedgerows; the hapless bird that falls, frozen to death, from the leafless bough; the rabbit that perishes of slow starvation in its wretched burrow; and the fish that floats in stupor beneath the very ice that furnishes the skater’s paradise. But whilst, to us, snow and ice are things of imagination or of memory, I felt thankful this morning, as I knelt down like some old fire-worshipper and warmed my numb hands at the cheerful blaze, that this Tasmanian winter of ours has just enough sting in it to preserve in me a lively appreciation of this ancient and honourable institution.

For the fireside is sanctified by a great and glorious tradition. It enshrines all that is most mystical and most wonderful in our civilization. In his pictures of the forest, Jack London again and again emphasizes the magic effect of the fireside even on the creatures of the wild. When White Fang, the [175] wolf, saw the tongues of flame and clouds of smoke that arose from beneath the Indian’s hands, he was mystified. It seemed to him a sign of some divinity in man of which he knew nothing. It drew him as by some mesmeric influence. ‘He crawled several steps towards the flame. His nose touched it.’ And when he felt the pain it seemed as if an angry deity had smitten him.

In The Call of the Wild, Jack London returns to the same idea. Buck, the great dog, was a creature of the wild, and sometimes the yearning for the wild swept over him with almost irresistible authority. What was it that kept him from bounding off into the forest and shaking the dust of civilization from his paws for ever? It was because ‘faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof,’ had been developed within him. He had sprawled on the hearth before John Thornton’s fire; had looked up hungrily into John Thornton’s face; had learned to love his master more than life itself; and to the fireside of his master he was bound by invisible chains that he could not snap. ‘Deep in the forest,’ says Jack London, ‘a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call [176] sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.’ The fire; it is always the fire. The fire seems, even to the brutes, to be the emblem of the genius of our humanity.

For the triumph of humanity is the creation of home; and the soul of the home is the fireside. The luxurious summer evenings, with their wide range of out-of-door allurements, tend to discount the attractions of the home, and to depreciate the value of domestic intercourse. We return from business and rush out again for recreation. But winter furnishes a salutary corrective. When the day’s work is done, and the home is once reached, everything conspires to enhance its seductive charms. Outside, the dark and the cold, the bleak wind and the driving rain, threaten multiple discomforts to the gadabout who dares to venture forth; whilst within, the blazing fire, the cheerful hum of table talk, and the genial hospitalities of home make their most resistless appeal amidst the wintriest conditions. Was it not for this reason that the fire came to be regarded for centuries as the natural emblem of domestic felicity? In the days before matches were invented, when the lighting of a fire was a much more laborious business than it is to-day, the first fire in the home of a newly married pair was started [177] by the bearing of a burning brand from each of the homes from which bride and bridegroom came. It was intended as a kind of ritual. The communication of the flame from the old hearths which they had left to the new one which they had established was designed to symbolize the perpetuation of all that was worthiest and most sacred in the homes from which the young people had come. It was the transfer of the Past—that radiant and tender Past that saluted me from the glowing embers of my camp fire in the gully—to the roseate and unborn future.

But although it was in my solitude that the fire in Captain’s Gully spoke to me, the fire is no lover of loneliness. It is the very emblem of hospitality, and there are few graces more attractive. We boast that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and we do all that legislation can accomplish to make that castle impregnable and inviolate. We close the door, and draw the blinds, and we feel that we have effectually shut the whole world out. And yet when a friend looks in, we suddenly discover that our happiness consists, not in barring and bolting the heavy front door, but in flinging it wide open. We seat him in the best chair; we bring out the best dainties from the cupboard, the best books from the shelves, and the best stories from the treasure-house of memory. The fire crackles, cheeks [178] glow, and eyes sparkle as the genial conversation grows in interest and surprise. Nor is the pleasure by any means the monopoly of the host; the guest shares it to the full. What is more exhilarating or satisfying than an evening spent round a good fire with a few kindred spirits in whose company one is perfectly at home? You can speak or be silent, just as the mood takes you. You have not to labour to be entertaining if you feel that you have nothing to say; nor need you struggle to restrain yourself if you feel in the humour to talk. You have not to weigh every word as you instinctively do in the presence of less familiar or less trusted companions. You eat the fruit that is handed round, or decline it, just as the whim of the moment dictates, feeling under no obligation either way. You are entirely at your ease. Sometimes the one conversation holds the entire group, and the semi-circle listens, interested or amused, to the tale that one member of the cluster is telling. At other times the party automatically divides itself into knots; the gentlemen, it may be, breaking into politics or business, and the ladies comparing notes on more enticing themes. The fire blazes; the buzz of conversation rises and falls, sinks and swells. Occasionally the attention is so concentrated on the subdued voice of one speaker that scarcely a sound is audible outside the door; a moment later the [179] argument is so exciting, or the laughing so boisterous, that everybody seems to be shouting at the same time. The gramophone, and all such adventitious aids to the tolerable passage of a leaden evening, are never so much as thought of. Even the piano is left out in the cold. Every moment is crowded with the flush of unalloyed delight. And when the last guest has vanished, and the house seems silent and empty, it suddenly occurs to you that the great chief guest whom you have been entertaining, or who has been entertaining you, was the Past, the radiant and glorified Past. The phrase that we heard so often in Captain’s Gully, the ‘I remember once——,’ has been the key-note of the evening’s gossip.

For the fact is that the fireside, whether in Captain’s Gully in summer-time or at home in dead of winter, is a sort of magic observatory, a kind of camera-obscura. Outside, the world is wrapped in impenetrable darkness. But the kindly glow of the fire stimulates the memory, spurs the imagination, and brings back all our lost loves and all our veiled landscapes in a beautified and idealized form. The lonely man sees faces in the fire; but there are other things as well. The springs and summers that haunt our fancy as we talk of them beside a roaring fire are the blithest and gayest seasons that the world has ever known. Never was sky so blue, [180] or earth so fair, or sun so bright, or air so sweet as the sky and the earth, the sun and the air, that we contemplate from our coign of vantage by the side of the fire. The fragrance of the hawthorn in the hedgerow; the humming of the bees along the bank; the carolling of birds in the tree-tops; the bleating of the lambs across the meadows,—these never appear so alluring as when we view them from the wonderful observatory at the fireside. Dean Hole tells with what sadness he used to pluck the last roses of summer. And then, he says, ‘the chill evenings come, curtains are drawn, and bright fires glow. Then who is so happy as the rose-grower with the new catalogues before him?’ He sits by his fire and talks lovingly of the roses that he grew in the summer that has vanished, and his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he thinks of the still fairer blossoms of the summer that will soon be here. And so two summer-times sit by his hearth at mid-winter, and he revels in the company of each of them.

It is ever so. The crackling of the logs wakes up the slumbering Past, and it all comes back to us. As soon as a man gets his feet on the fender he instinctively thinks of old times and old companions. The flames have destroyed much; but they also revive much. They bring back to us our yesterdays; they bring back, indeed, the lordly yesterdays of [181] the remotest, stateliest antiquity. Surely that was the idea in Macaulay’s mind when he wrote ‘Horatius’:

Now, when I come to think of it, is it any wonder that the days of auld lang syne, and the old familiar [182] faces, should all come back in the flames? For the scientists tell me that this study-fire of mine is simply the radiance of far-back ages suddenly released for my present comfort. Long before a single black-fellow prowled about these vast Australian solitudes, the sun bathed this huge continent in apparently superfluous brightness. But the sun knew what it was doing. The coalbeds gathered up and stored that sunshine through centuries of centuries. The black men came; and the white men came; and here at last am I! I need that sunshine of ages long gone by. The miner digs for it; brings it to the surface; sends it to my study; and, lo, I am this very morning warming my numb fingers at its genial glow!

And so the match with which I light a fire, either in the camp away up in the bush, or in this quiet study at home, is nothing less than the wand of a magician! At the barred and bolted doors of the irrecoverable Past I tap with that small wand and cry, ‘Open, Sesame!’ And, lo, a miracle is straightway wrought! The doors that have been closed for years, perhaps for ages, swing suddenly open, and the sunshine comes streaming out! That match liberates the imprisoned brightness. The scientists say so, and I can easily believe it. For this is the essential glory of the fireside. All the sunniest memories rush to mind as we cluster round [183] the hearth. All the sunniest experiences of the dead and buried years spring to vigorous life once more. All the sunniest faces—the dear, familiar faces of the long ago—smile at us again from out the glowing embers. And perhaps—who shall say?—perhaps some thought like this haunted the minds of a prophet of the Old Testament and an apostle of the New when, greatly daring, they declared that ‘our God is a consuming fire!’ Did they mean that, when we see Him as He is, all the holiest and sweetest and most precious treasure of the Past will be more our own? Did they mean that in Him the sunshine of all the ages will again salute us?

I am writing on the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dante. The poet was born in 1265; I am writing in 1915. Six hundred and fifty years represent a tremendous slice of history; and these six hundred and fifty years span a chasm between two specially notable crises in the annals of this little world. Dante was born in a year of battle and of tumult, of fierce dissension and of bitter strife. It was a year that decided the destinies of empires and changed the face of Europe. Such a year, too, is this in which I write, and, writing, look down the long, long avenue of the centuries that intervene. This morning, however, I am not concerned with the story of revolution and of conflict, of political convulsions and of nations at war. Such a study would have fascinations of its own; but I deliberately leave it that I may contemplate the secret history of a great, a noble, and a tender soul. Edward FitzGerald tells us that he and Tennyson were one day looking in a shop window in Regent Street. They saw a long row of busts, among which were those of Goethe and Dante. [185] The poet and his friend studied them closely and in silence. At last FitzGerald spoke. ‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘which is present in Dante’s face and absent from Goethe’s?’ The poet answered, ‘The divine!’ Now how did that divine element come into Dante’s life? He has himself told us. Has the spiritual autobiography of Dante, as revealed to us in the introductory lines of his Inferno, ever taken that place among our devotional classics to which it is justly entitled? Surely the pathos, the insight, and the exquisite simplicity of that first page are worthy of comparison with the choicest treasures of Bunyan or of Wesley, of Brainerd or of Fox. Let us glance at it.

I

I have heard many evangelists preach on such texts as: ‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.’ It was necessary, of course, that they should explain to their audiences what they meant by this lost condition. Wisely enough, they have usually had recourse to illustration. The child lost in a London crowd; the ship lost on a trackless sea; the sheep lost among the lonely hills; the traveller lost in the endless bush,—all these have been exploited again and again. From literature, one of the best illustrations is the moving story of Enoch Arden. When poor Enoch returns [186] from his long sojourn on the desolate island, he finds that his wife, giving him up for dead, has married Philip, and that his children worship their new father. It is the garrulous old woman at the inn who tells him, never dreaming that she is speaking to Enoch. Says she:

But none of these illustrations are as good as Dante’s. He opens by describing the emotions with which, at the age of thirty-five, his soul awoke. He was lost!

Neither Bunyan’s pilgrim in his City of Destruction, nor his City of Mansoul beleaguered by fierce foes, is quite so human or quite so convincing as this weird scene in the forest. The gloom, the loneliness, the silence, and the absence of all hints as to a [187] way out of his misery; these make up a scene that combines all the elements of adventure with all the elements of reality. Dante was lost, and knew it.

II

The poet cannot tell us by what processes he became entangled in this jungle. ‘How first I entered it I scarce can say.’ But it does not very much matter. The way by which he escaped is the thing that concerns us; and to this theme he bravely addresses himself. In his description of his earliest sensations in the dark forest, several things are significant. He clearly regarded it as a very great gain, for example, to have discovered that he was lost. ‘I found me,’ he says, ‘I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.’ Those three words, ‘I found me,’ remind us of nothing so much as the record of the prodigal, ‘And he came to himself.’ I am pleased to notice that it is of the incomparable story of the prodigal that Dante’s opening confession reminds most of his expositors. Thus, Mr. A.G. Ferress Howell, in his valuable little monograph on Dante, observes that this finding of himself ‘shows that he has got to the point reached by the prodigal son when he said, “I will arise and go to my father.” He found, that is to say, that he had altogether missed the true object of life. The [188] wild and trackless wood,’ Mr. Howell goes on to observe, ‘represents the world as it was in 1300. Why was it wild and trackless? Because the guides appointed to lead men to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of Philosophy, and to eternal felicity in accordance with the teachings of Revelation—the Emperor and the Pope—were both of them false to their trust.’ So here was poor Dante, only knowing that he was hopelessly lost; and unable to discover among the undergrowth about him any suggestion of a way to safety.

III

Suddenly the Vision Beautiful breaks upon him. He stumbles blindly through the forest until he arrives at the base of a sunlit mountain:

The hill is, of course, the life he fain would live—steep and difficult, but free from the mists of the valley and the entanglements of the wood. And is it not illumined by the Sun of Righteousness—‘Who leads all wanderers safe through every [189] way’? He stepped out from the valley and cheerfully commenced the ascent. And then his troubles began. One after the other, wild beasts barred his way and dared him to persist. His path was beset with the most terrible difficulties. Now here, if anywhere, the poet betrays that spiritual insight, that flash of genuine mysticism, that entitles him to rank with the great masters. For whilst he wandered in the murky wood no ravenous beasts assailed him. There, life, however unsatisfying, was at least free from conflict. But as soon as he essayed to climb the sunlit hill his way was challenged. It is a very ancient problem. The psalmist marvelled that, whilst the wicked around him enjoyed a most profound and unruffled tranquillity, his life was so full of perplexity and trouble. John Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he, in his pilgrim progress, be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? I have often thought of the problem when out shooting. The dog invariably ignores the dead birds and devotes all his energy to the fluttering things that are struggling to escape. In the stress of the experience itself, however, such comfortable thoughts do not occur to us, and it seems passing strange that, whilst our days in the wood were undisturbed by hungry eyes or gleaming [190] fangs, our attempt to climb the sunlit hill should bring about us a host of unexpected enemies. Many a young and eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey awaiting him.

IV

And such beasts! Trouble seemed to succeed trouble; difficulty followed on the heels of difficulty; peril came hard upon peril.

He had scarcely recovered from the shock, and driven this peril from his path, when

[191] The panther, the lion, and the wolf; that is very suggestive, and we must look into this striking symbolism a little more closely.

V

The three fierce creatures that challenged Dante’s ascent of the sunlit hill represent evils of various kinds and characters. If a man cannot be deterred by one form of temptation, another will speedily present itself. It is, as the old prophet said, ‘as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.’ If one form of evil is unsuccessful, another instantly replaces it. If the panther is driven off, the lion appears; and if the lion is vanquished, the lean wolf takes its place. But there is more than this hidden in the poet’s parable. Did Dante intend to set forth no subtle secret by placing the three beasts in that order? Most of his expositors agree that he meant the panther to represent Lust, the lion to represent Pride, and the wolf to represent Avarice. Lust is the besetting temptation of youth, and therefore the panther comes first. Pride is the sin to which we succumb most easily in the full vigour of life. We have won our spurs, made a way for ourselves in the world, and the glamour of our triumph is too much for us. And Avarice comes, not exactly [192] in age, but just after the zenith has been passed. The beasts were not equidistant. The lion came some time after the panther had vanished; but the wolf crept at the lion’s heels. What a world of meaning is crowded into that masterly piece of imagery! Assuming that this interpretation be sound, two other suggestions immediately confront us; and we must lend an ear to each of them in turn.

VI

The three creatures differed in character. The panther was beautiful; the lion was terrible; the wolf was horrible. Although the poet knew full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther’s spring, he was compelled to admire the creature’s exquisite beauty. ‘The hour,’ he says,

The lion, on the other hand, is the symbol of majesty and terror. But the lean she-wolf was positively [193] horrible. Her hungry eyes, her gleaming fangs, her panting sides, filled the beholder with loathing. ‘Her leanness seemed full of all wants.’ The poet says that the very sight of her o’erwhelmed and appalled him. Dante himself confessed that, of the three, he regarded the last as by far the worst of these three brutal foes. Now I fancy that, in the temptations that respectively assail youth, maturity, and decline, I have noticed these same characteristics. As a rule, the sins of youth are beautiful sins. The appeals to youthful vice are invariably defended on aesthetic grounds. The boundary-line that divides high art from indecency is a very difficult one to define. And it is so difficult to define because the blandishments to which youth succumbs are for the most part the blandishments of beauty. Like the panther, vice is cruel and pitiless; yet the glamour of it is so fair that it ‘blends with the matin dawn and the sweet season.’ The sins that bring down the strong man, on the other hand, are not so much beautiful as terrible. The man in his prime goes down before those terrific onslaughts that the forces of evil know so well how to organize and muster. They are not lovely; they are leonine. And is it not true that the temptations that work havoc in later life are as a rule unalluring, hideous, and difficult to understand? The world is thunderstruck. It seems so incomprehensible that, after having [194] survived his struggle with the beauteous panther and the terrible lion, a man of such mettle should yield to a lean and ugly wolf!

VII

The other thing is this: there is a distinction in method, a difference in approach, distinguishing these three beasts. The panther crouches, springs suddenly upon its unsuspecting prey, and relies on the advantage of surprise. Such are the sins of youth. ‘Alas,’ as George Macdonald so tersely says,

The lion meets you in the open, and relies upon his strength. The wolf simply persists. He follows your trail day after day. You see his wicked eyes, like fireflies, stabbing the darkness of the night. He relies not upon surprise or strength, but on wearing you down at the last. Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth—having beaten off the panther—beware of the lion and the wolf. And, still more imperatively, let him that thinketh he standeth—having vanquished both the panther and the lion—take heed lest he fall at last to the grim [195] and frightful persistence of the lean she-wolf. It is just six hundred and fifty years to-day since Dante was born; but, as my pen has been whispering these things to me, the centuries have fallen away like a curtain that is drawn. I have saluted across the ages a man of like passions with myself, and his brave spirit has called upon mine to climb the sunlit hill in spite of everything.

Not so very long ago, and not so very far from this Tasmanian home of mine, I beheld a spectacle that took me completely by surprise, and even now baffles my best endeavours to describe it. I was on board a fine steamship four days out from Hobart. In the early afternoon, as I was rising from a brief siesta, I was startled by a voice exclaiming excitedly, ‘Oh, do come and see such a splendid iceberg!’ I confess that at first I entertained the notion with a liberal allowance of caution. I was afflicted with very grave suspicions. At sea, folk are apt to forget the calendar, and every day in the year has an awkward way of getting itself mistaken for the first of April. But the manifest earnestness of my informant bore down before it all base doubts, and I was sufficiently convinced to hurry up to the promenade deck. I looked eagerly far out to port, and then to starboard, but nothing was to be seen! It was the old story of ‘water, water everywhere!’ My suspicions returned in an aggravated form. Indignantly I sought out my informant, and peremptorily demanded production of the promised iceberg. [197] ‘It’s dead ahead,’ he replied calmly, ‘and can therefore only be seen as yet from the bows.’ To the bows I accordingly hastened, and there I found a crowd, comprising both passengers and crew, already congregated.

And surely enough, I then and there beheld the most magnificent and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon upon which these eyes ever rested. Right ahead of the ship there loomed up on the far horizon what appeared, under an overcast, leaden sky, to be a fair-sized island, with a high and rocky coast. In the distance stood a tall, rugged peak, as of a mountain towering up like a monarch coldly proud of his desolate island realm. The whole stood out strikingly gloomy and forbidding against the distant eastern skyline. But, hey, presto! even as we watched it, in less time than it takes to tell, a wonderful transformation scene was enacted before our eyes. Suddenly, from over the stern, the sun shone out, flinging all its radiant splendours on the colossal object of our undivided attention.

In the twinkling of an eye, as if by magic, that which but a second ago might have passed for a barren rocky island was transformed into a brilliant mass of dazzling whiteness. Everything seemed to have been transfigured. A fairyland of pearly palaces, flashing with diamonds and emeralds, could not have eclipsed its glories now! [198] There it still stood, indescribably terrible and grand, right in our track, as though daring us to approach any nearer to its gleaming purities. And as the sunlight refracted about it, all the colours of the rainbow seemed to play around its brow. Moreover, the genial warmth produced another wonder. For, under its benign influence, the glittering peaks gave off columns of vapour. They seemed to smoke like volcanoes.

The wonder grew upon us as we watched. And yet, straight on, our good ship held her way, her course unaltered and her speed unabated, as if, fascinated by the majestic beauty before her, she were eager to dash herself to pieces at the feet of such pure and awful loveliness. Ever greater and ever more splendid it appeared as the distance lessened between us and it, until we really seemed to be approaching an almost perilous proximity. Then, of a sudden, the ship swerved to the north-ward, and we ran by within a few hundred yards of the icy monster. Who could help recalling the adventure of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’?

Or Tennyson’s lovely simile, wherein he says that we ourselves are like

Then once again the fickle sun veiled his face, and that which had appeared at first as a rocky island in mid-ocean, and afterwards as a flashing palace of crystals, now assumed a dulled whiteness as of one huge mass of purest chalk.

The heavy southern seas were dashing angrily against it, seeming jealously to resent its escape from their own frozen dominions. And the great clouds of spray which, as a consequence, were hurled into mid-air gave an added grandeur to a spectacle that seemed to need no supplementary charms. For miles around, the sea was strewn with enormous [200] masses of floating ice, some as large as an ordinary two-story house, and all of the most fantastic shapes, which had apparently swarmed off from the main berg. One long row of these, stretching out from the monster right across the ship’s course, looked for a moment not unlike a great ice-reef connected with the berg, and caused no little anxiety until the line of apparent peril had been safely negotiated. When we were clean abreast, a gun was fired from the bridge of the steamer, in order, I understand, to ascertain from the rapidity and volume of the echo the approximate distance, and, by deduction, the size of our polar acquaintance. Nor were there wanting those who were sanguine enough to expect that the atmospheric vibration set in operation by the explosion might finish the work of dislocation which any cracks or fissures had already begun, and bring down at least some tottering peaks or pinnacles. Sir John Franklin, in one of his northern voyages, saw this feat accomplished. But, if any of my companions expected to witness a similar phenomenon, they had reckoned without their host. The unaffected dignity of the sullen monster mocked our puny effort to bring about his downfall. Hercules scorned the ridiculous weapons of the pigmies! The dull booming of the gun started a thousand weird echoes on the desolate ice. They snarled out their remonstrance at our [201] intrusion upon their wonted solitude, and then again lapsed sulkily into silence. The temperature dropped instantly, and I recalled a famous saying of Dr. Thomas Guthrie’s, whose life I had just been reading. In one of his speeches, before the Synod of Angus and Mearns, he said, ‘I know of churches that would be all the better of some little heat. An iceberg of a minister has been floated in among them, and they have cooled down to something below zero.’ ‘An iceberg of a minister!’ I think of the nipping air on board when our ship was in the midst of the ice; and the memory of it makes me shiver! ‘An iceberg of a minister!’ God, in His great mercy, save me from being such a minister as that!

The long-sustained excitement to which these events had given rise had scarcely begun to subside when the cry arose, ‘An iceberg on the starboard bow!’ This, in its turn, was speedily succeeded by ‘Another!’ Then, ‘An iceberg on the port bow!’ And yet once more ‘Another!’ till we were literally surrounded by icebergs. At tea-time we could peep through the saloon portholes at no fewer than five of these polar giants. Although most of them were larger than our first acquaintance—at least one of them being about three miles in length—none of these later appearances succeeded in arousing the same degree of enthusiasm as that with which we hailed the advent of the first. For [202] one thing, the charm of novelty had, of course, begun to wear off. And, for another, they were of a less romantic shape, most of them being perfectly flat, as though some great polar plain were being broken up and we were being favoured with the superfluous territory in casual instalments. And, by the way, speaking of the shape of icebergs, I am told that the icebergs of the two hemispheres are quite different in shape, the Arctic bergs being irregular in outline, with lofty pinnacles and glittering domes, while the Antarctic bergs are, generally speaking, flat-topped, and of less fantastic form. The delicate traceries of the far North do not reflect themselves in the sturdier and more matter-of-fact monsters of the South. The appearance of icebergs in such numbers, of such dimensions, in these latitudes, and at this time of the year, constitutes, I am credibly informed, a very unusual if not, indeed, a quite unique experience. The theory was freely advanced that some volcanic disturbance had visited the polar regions and had dislodged these massive fragments. However that may be, we were not at all sorry that it had fallen to our happy lot to behold a spectacle of such sublimity. And when we reflected that less than one-tenth of each mass was visible above the water-line, we were able to form a more adequate appreciation of the stupendous proportions of our gigantic neighbours. [203] Reflecting upon this aspect of the matter, I remembered to have heard, in my college days, a popular London preacher make excellent use of this phenomenon. ‘When,’ he said impressively, ‘when you are tempted to judge sin from its superficial appearance, and to judge it leniently, remember that sins are like icebergs—the greater part of them is out of sight!’

A certain amount of anxiety was felt, I confess, by most of us as night cast her sable mantle over sea and ice. To admire an iceberg in broad daylight is one thing; to be racing on amidst a crowd of them by night is quite another. Ice, however, casts around it a weird, warning light of its own, which makes its presence perceptible even in the darkest night. So all night long the good ship sped bravely on her ocean track, and all night long the captain himself kept cold and sleepless vigil on the bridge. When morning broke, three fresh icebergs were to be seen away over the stern. But we had now shaped a more northerly course; and we therefore waved adieu to these magnificent monsters which we were so delighted to have seen, and scarcely less pleased to have left. They will doubtless have melted from existence long before they will have melted from our memories.

Yes, they will have melted! And that reminds me of another famous saying of the great Dr Thomas [204] Guthrie, a saying which is peculiarly to the point just now. ‘The existence,’ he said, ‘of the Mohammedan power in Turkey is just a question of time. Its foundations are year by year wearing away, like that of an iceberg which has floated into warm seas, and, as happens with that creation of a cold climate, it will by-and-by become top-heavy, the centre of gravity being changed, and it will topple over! What a commotion then!’ Ah! what a commotion, to be sure!

They will have melted! Silly things! They grew weary of that realm of white and stainless purity to which they once belonged; they broke away from their old connexions and set out upon their long, long drift. They drifted on and on towards the milder north; on and on towards warmer seas; on and on towards the balmy breath and ceaseless sunshine of the tropics. And, in return, the sunshine destroyed them. Yes, the sunshine destroyed them. I have seen something very much like it in the Church and in the world. ‘Therefore,’ says a great writer, who had himself felt the fatal lure of too-much-sunshine, ‘therefore let us take the more steadfast hold of the things which we have heard, lest at any time we drift away from them.’ It is a tragedy of no small magnitude when, like the iceberg, a man is lured by sparkling summer seas to his own undoing.