Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft — Winter (parts 19-26)

XIX.

The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning.

With but half-formed purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the city, and came into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering awhile, heard the first notes of the organ, and so entered.

I believe it is more than thirty years since I was in an English church on Christmas Day.

The old time and the old faces lived again for me; I saw myself on the far side of the abyss of years--that self which is not myself at all, though I mark points of kindred between the beings of then and now.

He who in that other world sat to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at all--rapt in his own visions--or listened only as one in whose blood was heresy.

He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind, distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive.

More than that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from their dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the other.

"On earth peace, good-will to men"--already that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority.

Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech--and through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight his way!

To-day, I listen with no heretical promptings.

The music, whether of organ or of word, is more to me than ever; the literal meaning causes me no restiveness.

I felt only glad that I had yielded to the summons of the Christmas bells.

I sat among a congregation of shadows, not in the great cathedral, but in a little parish church far from here.

When I came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread on the moist earth; my dream expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey, and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow.

It is a piety to turn awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude?

I would not now, if I might, be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices, and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember.

When I was scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the fireside the Christmas stanzas of "In Memoriam."

To-night I have taken down the volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me once again--read as no other ever did, that voice which taught me to know poetry, the voice which never spoke to me but of good and noble things.

Would I have those accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at another time?

Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.

XX.

Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of hypocrisy?

The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the Round- heads; before that, nothing in the national character could have suggested it.

The England of Chaucer, the England of Shakespeare, assuredly was not hypocrite.

The change wrought by Puritanism introduced into the life of the people that new element which ever since, more or less notably, has suggested to the observer a habit of double-dealing in morality and religion.

The scorn of the Cavalier is easily understood;

it created a traditional Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured before the world as our arch-dissembler.

With the decline of genuine Puritanism came that peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue which is represented by Mr. Pecksniff--a being so utterly different from Tartufe, and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen themselves.

But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach has been persistently levelled at us.

It often sounds upon the lips of our emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in the offices of Continental newspapers.

And for the reason one has not far to look.

When Napoleon called us a "nation of shop-keepers," we were nothing of the kind; since his day we have become so, in the strictest sense of the word; and consider the spectacle of a flourishing tradesman, anything but scrupulous in his methods of business, who loses no opportunity of bidding all mankind to regard him as a religious and moral exemplar.

This is the actual show of things with us; this is the England seen by our bitterest censors.

There is an excuse for those who charge us with "hypocrisy."

But the word is ill-chosen, and indicates a misconception.

The characteristic of your true hypocrite is the assumption of a virtue which not only he has not, but which he is incapable of possessing, and in which he does not believe.

The hypocrite may have, most likely has, (for he is a man of brains,) a conscious rule of life, but it is never that of the person to whom his hypocrisy is directed.

Tartufe incarnates him once for all.

Tartufe is by conviction an atheist and a sensualist; he despises all who regard life from the contrasted point of view.

But among Englishmen such an attitude of mind has always been extremely rare;

to presume it in our typical money-maker who has edifying sentiments on his lips is to fall into a grotesque error of judgment.

No doubt that error is committed by the ordinary foreign journalist, a man who knows less than little of English civilization.

More enlightened critics, if they use the word at all, do so carelessly; when speaking with more precision, they call the English "pharisaic"--and come nearer the truth.

Our vice is self-righteousness.

We are essentially an Old Testament people; Christianity has never entered into our soul we see ourselves as the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration can attain unto humility.

In this there is nothing hypocritic.

The blatant upstart who builds a church, lays out his money in that way not merely to win social consideration; in his curious little soul he believes (so far as he can believe anything) that what he has done is pleasing to God and beneficial to mankind.

He may have lied and cheated for every sovereign he possesses; he may have polluted his life with uncleanness; he may have perpetrated many kinds of cruelty and baseness--but all these things has he done against his conscience, and, as soon as the opportunity comes, he will make atonement for them in the way suggested by such faith as he has, the way approved by public opinion.

His religion, strictly defined, is _an ineradicable belief in his own religiousness_.

As an Englishman, he holds as birthright the true Piety, the true Morals.

That he has "gone wrong" is, alas, undeniable, but never--even when leering most satirically--did he deny his creed.

When, at public dinners and elsewhere, he tuned his voice to the note of edification, this man did not utter the lie of the hypocrite he _meant every word he said_.

Uttering high sentiments, he spoke, not as an individual, but as an Englishman, and most thoroughly did he believe that all who heard him owed in their hearts allegiance to the same faith.

He is, if you like, a Pharisee--but do not misunderstand; his Pharisaism has nothing personal.

That would be quite another kind of man; existing, to be sure, in England, but not as a national type.

No; he is a Pharisee in the minor degree with regard to those of his countrymen who differ from him in dogma; he is Pharisee absolute with regard to the foreigner.

And there he stands, representing an Empire.

The word hypocrisy is perhaps most of all applied to our behaviour in matters of sexual morality, and here with specially flagrant misuse.

Multitudes of Englishmen have thrown aside the national religious dogma, but very few indeed have abandoned the conviction that the rules of morality publicly upheld in England are the best known in the world.

Any one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of most other countries.

Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer.

The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world.

Despite all this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral superiority, and loses no chance of proclaiming it at the expense of other peoples.

To call him hypocrite, is simply not to know the man.

He may, for his own part, be gross-minded and lax of life; that has nothing to do with the matter; _he believes in virtue_.

Tell him that English morality is mere lip-service, and he will blaze with as honest anger as man ever felt.

He is a monument of self-righteousness, again not personal but national.

XXI.

I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present England?

Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during the last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to ascertain in what degree they have affected the national character, thus far.

One notes the obvious: decline of conventional religion, free discussion of the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favours every anarchic tendency.

Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy?

For the English to lose belief in themselves--not merely in their potential goodness, but in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good--would mean as hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history.

To doubt their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of course, the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and bred in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly deemed "best" among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth who are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in a very true sense, "honest, sober, and godly" lives.

Such folk, one knows, were never in a majority, but of old they had a power which made them veritable representatives of the English _ethos_.

If they thought highly of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they spoke, at times, as Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which carried with it no grave condemnation.

Hypocrisy was, of all forms of baseness, that which they most abhorred.

So is it still with their descendants.

Whether these continue to speak among us with authority, no man can certainly say.

If their power is lost, and those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer use the word amiss, we shall soon know it.

XXII.

It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism.

In the heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it.

Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for the civic freedom which is our highest national privilege.

An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of that which follows.

Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tudor.

Imagine (not to think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley, and the name of Milton unknown.

The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality.

Regret, if you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wishing that its piety had taken another form; later, there had to come the "exodus from Houndsditch," with how much conflict and misery!

Such, however, was the price of the soul's health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better meaning.

Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a relative term.

From the point of view of a conceivable civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse.

Of all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism, which, of course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves.

What we call Restoration morality--the morality, that is to say, of a king and court--might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from religious revolution.

The political services of Puritanism were inestimable; they will be more feelingly remembered when England has once more to face the danger of political tyranny.

I am thinking now of its effects upon social life.

To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed by the term English prudery, the accusation implied being part of the general charge of hypocrisy.

It is said by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation.

If by prude be meant a secretly vicious person who affects an excessive decorum, by all means let the prude disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness.

If, on the other hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life, cultivates, either by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of thought and speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then I say that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and I have no desire to see its prevalence diminish.

On the whole, it is the latter meaning which certain foreigners have in mind when they speak of English prudery--at all events, as exhibited by women; it being, not so much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of conceited foolishness.

An English woman who typifies the _begueule_ may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow's other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature.

Well, here is the point of difference.

Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism, as our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all the best things which Puritanism had to teach.

We who know English women by the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of language betokens, far more often than not, a corresponding delicacy of mind.

Landor saw it as a ridiculous trait that English people were so mealy-mouthed in speaking of their bodies; De Quincey, taking him to task for this remark, declared it a proof of blunted sensibility due to long residence in Italy; and, whether the particular explanation held good or not, as regards the question at issue, De Quincey was perfectly right.

It is very good to be mealy-mouthed with respect to everything that reminds us of the animal in man.

Verbal delicacy in itself will not prove an advanced civilization, but civilization, as it advances, assuredly tends that way.

XXIII.

All through the morning, the air was held in an ominous stillness.

Sitting over my books, I seemed to feel the silence; when I turned my look to the window, I saw nothing but the broad, grey sky, a featureless expanse, cold, melancholy.

Later, just as I was bestirring myself to go out for an afternoon walk, something white fell softly across my vision.

A few minutes more, and all was hidden with a descending veil of silent snow.

It is a disappointment.

Yesterday I half believed that the winter drew to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid azure shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of spring.

Idle by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to long for the days of light and warmth.

My fancy wandered, leading me far and wide in a dream of summer England.

.

.

.

This is the valley of the Blythe.

The stream ripples and glances over its brown bed warmed with sunbeams; by its bank the green flags wave and rustle, and, all about, the meadows shine in pure gold of buttercups.

The hawthorn hedges are a mass of gleaming blossom, which scents the breeze.

There above rises the heath, yellow-mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I walk for an hour or two, I shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of Suffolk, and look over the northern sea.

.

.

.

I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid broad pastures up to the rolling moor.

Up and up, till my feet brush through heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me.

Under a glowing sky of summer, this air of the uplands has still a life which spurs to movement, which makes the heart bound.

The dale is hidden; I see only the brown and purple wilderness, cutting against the blue with great round shoulders, and, far away to the west, an horizon of sombre heights.

.

.

.

I ramble through a village in Gloucestershire, a village which seems forsaken in this drowsy warmth of the afternoon.

The houses of grey stone are old and beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew how to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with flowers, and the air is delicately sweet.

At the village end, I come into a lane, which winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf and bracken and woods of noble beech.

Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting orchards, watered by sacred Avon.

Beyond, softly blue, the hills of Malvern.

On the branch hard by warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy solitude.

A rabbit jumps through the fern.

There sounds the laugh of a woodpecker from the copse in yonder hollow.

.

.

.

In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater.

The sky is still warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the dark mountain line.

Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel- grey between its dim colourless shores.

In the profound stillness, the trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary.

I

feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of the land I love seems to beat in the silent night gathering around me;

amid things eternal, I touch the familiar and the kindly earth.

Moving, I step softly, as though my footfall were an irreverence.

A turn in the road, and there is wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.

Then I see a light glimmering in the farmhouse window--a little ray against the blackness of the great hillside, below which the water sleeps.

.

.

.

A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse.

Far on every side stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and clustered trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills.

Slow, silent, the river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-green osier beds.

Yonder is the little town of St. Neots.

In all England no simpler bit of rural scenery; in all the world nothing of its kind more beautiful.

Cattle are lowing amid the rich meadows.

Here one may loiter and dream in utter restfulness, whilst the great white clouds mirror themselves in the water as they pass above.

.

.

.

I am walking upon the South Downs.

In the valleys, the sun lies hot, but here sings a breeze which freshens the forehead and fills the heart with gladness.

My foot upon the short, soft turf has an unwearied lightness;

I feel capable of walking on and on, even to that farthest horizon where the white cloud casts its floating shadow.

Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent, its ever-changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with luminous noontide mist.

Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the sheep-spotted downs, beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint.

Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see the low church-tower, and the little graveyard about it.

Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark is singing.

It descends; it drops to its nest, and I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England.

.

.

.

It is all but dark.

For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing by a glow of firelight reflected on to my desk; it seemed to me the sun of summer.

Snow is still falling.

I see its ghostly glimmer against the vanishing sky.

To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden, and perchance for several days.

But when it melts, when it melts, it will leave the snowdrop.

The crocus, too, is waiting, down there under the white mantle which warms the earth.

XXIV.

Time is money--says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people.

Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth--money is time.

I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study.

Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different the whole day would be!

Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune?

Money is time.

With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.

Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of purchase.

He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough.

What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time?

And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.

XXV.

The dark days are drawing to an end.

Soon it will be spring once more; I shall go out into the fields, and shake away these thoughts of discouragement and fear which have lately too much haunted my fireside.

For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much better employed, from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world.

The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything.

I know only one way in which I could have played a meritorious part as an active citizen--by becoming a schoolmaster in some little country town, and teaching half a dozen teachable boys to love study for its own sake.

That I could have done, I daresay.

Yet, no; for I must have had as a young man the same mind that I have in age, devoid of idle ambitions, undisturbed by unattainable ideals.

Living as I do now, I deserve better of my country than at any time in my working life; better, I suspect, than most of those who are praised for busy patriotism.

Not that I regard my life as an example for any one else; all I say is, that it is good for me, and in so far an advantage to the world.

To live in quiet content is surely a piece of good citizenship.

If you can do more, do it, and God-speed!

I know myself for an exception.

And I ever find it a good antidote to gloomy thoughts to bring before my imagination the lives of men, utterly unlike me in their minds and circumstances, who give themselves with glad and hopeful energy to the plain duties that lie before them.

However one's heart may fail in thinking of the folly and baseness which make so great a part of to-day's world, remember how many bright souls are living courageously, seeing the good wherever it may be discovered, undismayed by portents, doing what they have to do with all their strength.

In every land there are such, no few of them, a great brotherhood, without distinction of race or faith; for they, indeed, constitute the race of man, rightly designated, and their faith is one, the cult of reason and of justice.

Whether the future is to them or to the talking anthropoid, no one can say.

But they live and labour, guarding the fire of sacred hope.

In my own country, dare I think that they are fewer than of old?

Some I have known; they give me assurance of the many, near and far.

Hearts of noble strain, intrepid, generous; the clear head, the keen eye; a spirit equal alike to good fortune and to ill.

I see the true-born son of England, his vigour and his virtues yet unimpaired.

In his blood is the instinct of honour, the scorn of meanness; he cannot suffer his word to be doubted, and his hand will give away all he has rather than profit by a plebeian parsimony.

He is frugal only of needless speech.

A friend staunch to the death; tender with a grave sweetness to those who claim his love; passionate, beneath stoic seeming, for the causes he holds sacred.

A hater of confusion and of idle noise, his place is not where the mob presses; he makes no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful promise of what he will do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel of wisdom overborne, he will hold apart, content with plain work that lies nearest to his hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in destruction.

He was ever hopeful, and deems it a crime to despair of his country.

"Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit."

Fallen on whatever evil days and evil tongues, he remembers that Englishman of old, who, under every menace, bore right onwards; and like him, if so it must be, can make it his duty and his service to stand and wait.

XXVI.

Impatient for the light of spring, I have slept lately with my blind drawn up, so that at waking, I have the sky in view.

This morning, I awoke just before sunrise.

The air was still; a faint flush of rose to westward told me that the east made fair promise.

I could see no cloud, and there before me, dropping to the horizon, glistened the horned moon.

The promise held good.

After breakfast, I could not sit down by the fireside; indeed, a fire was scarce necessary; the sun drew me forth, and I walked all the morning about the moist lanes, delighting myself with the scent of earth.

On my way home, I saw the first celandine.

So, once more, the year has come full circle.

And how quickly; alas, how quickly!

Can it be a whole twelvemonth since the last spring?

Because I am so content with life, must life slip away, as though it grudged me my happiness?

Time was when a year drew its slow length of toil and anxiety and ever frustrate waiting.

Further away, the year of childhood seemed endless.

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly.

When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience; the week gone by is already far in retrospect of things learnt, and that to come, especially if it foretell some joy, lingers in remoteness.

Past mid-life, one learns little and expects little.

To-day is like unto yesterday, and to that which shall be the morrow.

Only torment of mind or body serves to delay the indistinguishable hours.

Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to a moment.

I could wish for many another year; yet, if I knew that not one more awaited me, I should not grumble.

When I was ill at ease in the world, it would have been hard to die; I had lived to no purpose, that I could discover; the end would have seemed abrupt and meaningless.

Now, my life is rounded; it began with the natural irreflective happiness of childhood, it will close in the reasoned tranquillity of the mature mind.

How many a time, after long labour on some piece of writing, brought at length to its conclusion, have I laid down the pen with a sigh of thankfulness; the work was full of faults, but I had wrought sincerely, had done what time and circumstance and my own nature permitted.

Even so may it be with me in my last hour.

May I look back on life as a long task duly completed--a piece of biography; faulty enough, but good as I could make it--and, with no thought but one of contentment, welcome the repose to follow when I have breathed the word "Finis."

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