Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft — Spring (parts 10-16)

X.

Mentally and physically, I must be much older than my years.

At three- and-fifty a man ought not to be brooding constantly on his vanished youth.

These days of spring which I should be enjoying for their own sake, do but turn me to reminiscence, and my memories are of the springs that were lost.

Some day I will go to London and revisit all the places where I housed in the time of my greatest poverty.

I have not seen them for a quarter of a century or so.

Not long ago, had any one asked me how I felt about these memories, I should have said that there were certain street names, certain mental images of obscure London, which made me wretched as often as they came before me; but, in truth, it is a very long time since I was moved to any sort of bitterness by that retrospect of things hard and squalid.

Now, owning all the misery of it in comparison with what should have been, I find that part of life interesting and pleasant to look back upon--greatly more so than many subsequent times, when I lived amid decencies and had enough to eat.

Some day I will go to London, and spend a day or two amid the dear old horrors.

Some of the places, I know, have disappeared.

I see the winding way by which I went from Oxford Street, at the foot of Tottenham Court Road, to Leicester Square, and, somewhere in the labyrinth (I think of it as always foggy and gas-lit) was a shop which had pies and puddings in the window, puddings and pies kept hot by steam rising through perforated metal.

How many a time have I stood there, raging with hunger, unable to purchase even one pennyworth of food!

The shop and the street have long since vanished; does any man remember them so feelingly as I?

But I think most of my haunts are still in existence: to tread again those pavements, to look at those grimy doorways and purblind windows, would affect me strangely.

I see that alley hidden on the west side of Tottenham Court Road, where, after living in a back bedroom on the top floor, I had to exchange for the front cellar; there was a difference, if I remember rightly, of sixpence a week, and sixpence, in those days, was a very great consideration--why, it meant a couple of meals.

(I once _found_ sixpence in the street, and had an exultation which is vivid in me at this moment.

) The front cellar was stone-floored; its furniture was a table, a chair, a wash-stand, and a bed; the window, which of course had never been cleaned since it was put in, received light through a flat grating in the alley above.

Here I lived; here _I wrote_.

Yes, "literary work" was done at that filthy deal table, on which, by the bye, lay my Homer, my Shakespeare, and the few other books I then possessed.

At night, as I lay in bed, I used to hear the tramp, tramp of a _posse_ of policemen who passed along the alley on their way to relieve guard; their heavy feet sometimes sounded on the grating above my window.

I recall a tragi-comical incident of life at the British Museum.

Once, on going down into the lavatory to wash my hands, I became aware of a notice newly set up above the row of basins.

It ran somehow thus: "Readers are requested to bear in mind that these basins are to be used only for casual ablutions."

Oh, the significance of that inscription!

Had I not myself, more than once, been glad to use this soap and water more largely than the sense of the authorities contemplated?

And there were poor fellows working under the great dome whose need, in this respect, was greater than mine.

I laughed heartily at the notice, but it meant so much.

Some of my abodes I have utterly forgotten; for one reason or another, I was always moving--an easy matter when all my possessions lay in one small trunk.

Sometimes the people of the house were intolerable.

In those days I was not fastidious, and I seldom had any but the slightest intercourse with those who dwelt under the same roof, yet it happened now and then that I was driven away by human proximity which passed my endurance.

In other cases I had to flee from pestilential conditions.

How I escaped mortal illness in some of those places (miserably fed as I always was, and always over-working myself) is a great mystery.

The worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria--traceable, I imagine, to the existence of a dust-bin _under the staircase_.

When I spoke of the matter to my landlady, she was at first astonished, then wrathful, and my departure was expedited with many insults.

On the whole, however, I had nothing much to complain of except my poverty.

You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-sixpence a week--the most I ever could pay for a "furnished room with attendance" in those days of pretty stern apprenticeship.

And I was easily satisfied; I wanted only a little walled space in which I could seclude myself, free from external annoyance.

Certain comforts of civilized life I ceased even to regret; a stair-carpet I regarded as rather extravagant, and a carpet on the floor of my room was luxury undreamt of.

My sleep was sound; I have passed nights of dreamless repose on beds which it would now make my bones ache only to look at.

A door that locked, a fire in winter, a pipe of tobacco--these were things essential; and, granted these, I have been often richly contented in the squalidest garret.

One such lodging is often in my memory; it was at Islington, not far from the City Road; my window looked upon the Regent's Canal.

As often as I think of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever knew; for three successive days, at least, my lamp had to be kept burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few blurred lights in the street beyond the Canal, but for the most part nothing but a yellowish darkness, which caused the glass to reflect the firelight and my own face.

Did I feel miserable?

Not a bit of it.

The enveloping gloom seemed to make my chimney-corner only the more cosy.

I had coals, oil, tobacco in sufficient quantity; I had a book to read; I had work which interested me; so I went forth only to get my meals at a City Road coffee- shop, and hastened back to the fireside.

Oh, my ambitions, my hopes!

How surprised and indignant I should have felt had I known of any one who pitied me!

Nature took revenge now and then.

In winter time I had fierce sore throats, sometimes accompanied by long and savage headaches.

Doctoring, of course, never occurred to me; I just locked my door, and, if I felt very bad indeed, went to bed--to lie there, without food or drink, till I was able to look after myself again.

I could never ask from a landlady anything which was not in our bond, and only once or twice did I receive spontaneous offer of help.

Oh, it is wonderful to think of all that youth can endure!

What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I remember thirty years ago!

XI.

Would I live it over again, that life of the garret and the cellar?

Not with the assurance of fifty years' contentment such as I now enjoy to follow upon it!

With man's infinitely pathetic power of resignation, one sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the worst of it, makes out a case for the resolute optimist.

Oh, but the waste of energy, of zeal, of youth!

In another mood, I could shed tears over that spectacle of rare vitality condemned to sordid strife.

The pity of it!

And--if our conscience mean anything at all--the bitter wrong!

Without seeking for Utopia, think what a man's youth might be.

I suppose not one in every thousand uses half the possibilities of natural joy and delightful effort which lie in those years between seventeen and seven- and-twenty.

All but all men have to look back upon beginnings of life deformed and discoloured by necessity, accident, wantonness.

If a young man avoid the grosser pitfalls, if he keep his eye fixed steadily on what is called the main chance, if, without flagrant selfishness, he prudently subdue every interest to his own (by "interest" understanding only material good), he is putting his youth to profit, he is an exemplar and a subject of pride.

I doubt whether, in our civilization, any other ideal is easy of pursuit by the youngster face to face with life.

It is the only course altogether safe.

Yet compare it with what might be, if men respected manhood, if human reason were at the service of human happiness.

Some few there are who can look back upon a boyhood of natural delights, followed by a decade or so of fine energies honourably put to use, blended therewith, perhaps, a memory of joy so exquisite that it tunes all life unto the end; they are almost as rare as poets.

The vast majority think not of their youth at all, or, glancing backward, are unconscious of lost opportunity, unaware of degradation suffered.

Only by contrast with this thick-witted multitude can I pride myself upon my youth of endurance and of combat.

I had a goal before me, and not the goal of the average man.

Even when pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my purposes, which were of the mind.

But contrast that starved lad in his slum lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and zealous youth, and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been the right remedy for such squalid ills.

XII.

As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged veterans."

Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands.

But so often have I removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of unfair usage.

More than one has been foully injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case--this but the extreme instance of the wrongs they have undergone.

Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find myself growing more careful--an illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by circumstance.

But I confess that, so long as a volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf.

To me that is unintelligible.

For one thing, I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize.

Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves.

The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.

For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.

My eyes being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word.

Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessaries of life.

Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need.

At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I _could_ not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine.

My Heyne's _Tibullus_ was grasped at such a moment.

It lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.

Sixpence was the price--sixpence!

At that time I used to eat my mid-day meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.

Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables.

But I did not dare to hope that the _Tibullus_ would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due to me.

I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me.

The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages.

In this _Tibullus_ I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct.

4, 1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?

There was no other inscription.

I like to imagine some poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.

How much _that_ was I could not easily say.

Gentle-hearted Tibullus!

--of whom there remains to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.

An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres, Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?

So with many another book on the thronged shelves.

To take them down is to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph.

In those days money represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the acquisition of books.

There were books of which I had passionate need, books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment.

I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf.

Now and then I have bought a volume of the raggedest and wretchedest aspect, dishonoured with foolish scribbling, torn, blotted--no matter, I liked better to read out of that than out of a copy that was not mine.

But I was guilty at times of mere self-indulgence; a book tempted me, a book which was not one of those for which I really craved, a luxury which prudence might bid me forego.

As, for instance, my _Jung-Stilling_.

It caught my eye in Holywell Street; the name was familiar to me in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, and curiosity grew as I glanced over the pages.

But that day I resisted; in truth, I could not afford the eighteen-pence, which means that just then I was poor indeed.

Twice again did I pass, each time assuring myself that _Jung-Stilling_ had found no purchaser.

There came a day when I was in funds.

I see myself hastening to Holywell Street (in those days my habitual pace was five miles an hour), I see the little grey old man with whom I transacted my business--what was his name?

--the bookseller who had been, I believe, a Catholic priest, and still had a certain priestly dignity about him.

He took the volume, opened it, mused for a moment, then, with a glance at me, said, as if thinking aloud: "Yes, I wish I had time to read it."

Sometimes I added the labour of a porter to my fasting endured for the sake of books.

At the little shop near Portland Road Station I came upon a first edition of Gibbon, the price an absurdity--I think it was a shilling a volume.

To possess those clean-paged quartos I would have sold my coat.

As it happened, I had not money enough with me, but sufficient at home.

I was living at Islington.

Having spoken with the bookseller, I walked home, took the cash, walked back again, and--carried the tomes from the west end of Euston Road to a street in Islington far beyond the _Angel_.

I did it in two journeys--this being the only time in my life when I thought of Gibbon in avoirdupois.

Twice--three times, reckoning the walk for the money--did I descend Euston Road and climb Pentonville on that occasion.

Of the season and the weather I have no recollection; my joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought.

Except, indeed, of the weight.

I had infinite energy, but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching--exultant!

The well-to-do person would hear this story with astonishment.

Why did I not get the bookseller to send me the volumes?

Or, if I could not wait, was there no omnibus along that London highway?

How could I make the well-to-do person understand that I did not feel able to afford, that day, one penny more than I had spent on the book?

No, no, such labour- saving expenditure did not come within my scope; whatever I enjoyed I earned it, literally, by the sweat of my brow.

In those days I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus.

I have walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together without ever a thought of saving my legs, or my time, by paying for waftage.

Being poor as poor can be, there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.

Years after, I sold my first edition of Gibbon for even less than it cost me; it went with a great many other fine books in folio and quarto, which I could not drag about with me in my constant removals; the man who bought them spoke of them as "tomb-stones."

Why has Gibbon no market value?

Often has my heart ached with regret for those quartos.

The joy of reading the Decline and Fall in that fine type!

The page was appropriate to the dignity of the subject; the mere sight of it tuned one's mind.

I suppose I could easily get another copy now; but it would not be to me what that other was, with its memory of dust and toil.

XIII.

There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station.

It had a peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind--chiefly theology and classics--and for the most part those old editions which are called worthless, which have no bibliopolic value, and have been supplanted for practical use by modern issues.

The bookseller was very much a gentleman, and this singular fact, together with the extremely low prices at which his volumes were marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he kept the shop for mere love of letters.

Things in my eyes inestimable I have purchased there for a few pence, and I don't think I ever gave more than a shilling for any volume.

As I once had the opportunity of perceiving, a young man fresh from class-rooms could only look with wondering contempt on the antiquated stuff which it rejoiced me to gather from that kindly stall, or from the richer shelves within.

My _Cicero's Letters_ for instance: podgy volumes in parchment, with all the notes of Graevius, Gronovius, and I know not how many other old scholars.

Pooh!

Hopelessly out of date.

But I could never feel that.

I have a deep affection for Graevius and Gronovius and the rest, and if I knew as much as they did, I should be well satisfied to rest under the young man's disdain.

The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example--were there no more--burns before one as a sacred fire, for ever unquenchable.

In what modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in the annotations of old scholars?

Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere school-book;

you feel so often that the man does not regard his author as literature, but simply as text.

Pedant for pedant, the old is better than the new.

XIV.

To-day's newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a spring horse- race.

The sight of it fills me with loathing.

It brings to my mind that placard I saw at a station in Surrey a year or two ago, advertising certain races in the neighbourhood.

Here is the poster, as I copied it into my note-book: "Engaged by the Executive to ensure order and comfort to the public attending this meeting:-- 14 detectives (racing), 15 detectives (Scotland Yard), 7 police inspectors, 9 police sergeants, 76 police, and a supernumerary contingent of specially selected men from the Army Reserve and the Corps of Commissionaires.

The above force will be employed solely for the purpose of maintaining order and excluding bad characters, etc. They will have the assistance also of a strong force of the Surrey Constabulary."

I remember, once, when I let fall a remark on the subject of horse-racing among friends chatting together, I was voted "morose."

Is it really morose to object to public gatherings which their own promoters declare to be dangerous for all decent folk?

Every one knows that horse-racing is carried on mainly for the delight and profit of fools, ruffians, and thieves.

That intelligent men allow themselves to take part in the affair, and defend their conduct by declaring that their presence "maintains the character of a sport essentially noble," merely shows that intelligence can easily enough divest itself of sense and decency.

XV.

Midway in my long walk yesterday, I lunched at a wayside inn.

On the table lay a copy of a popular magazine.

Glancing over this miscellany, I found an article, by a woman, on "Lion Hunting," and in this article I came upon a passage which seemed worth copying.

"As I woke my husband, the lion--which was then about forty yards off--charged straight towards us, and with my .

303 I hit him full in the chest, as we afterwards discovered, tearing his windpipe to pieces and breaking his spine.

He charged a second time, and the next shot hit him through the shoulder, tearing his heart to ribbons."

It would interest me to look upon this heroine of gun and pen.

She is presumably quite a young woman; probably, when at home, a graceful figure in drawing-rooms.

I should like to hear her talk, to exchange thoughts with her.

She would give one a very good idea of the matron of old Rome who had her seat in the amphitheatre.

Many of those ladies, in private life, must have been bright and gracious, high-bred and full of agreeable sentiment; they talked of art and of letters; they could drop a tear over Lesbia's sparrow; at the same time, they were connoisseurs in torn windpipes, shattered spines and viscera rent open.

It is not likely that many of them would have cared to turn their own hands to butchery, and, for the matter of that, I must suppose that our Lion Huntress of the popular magazine is rather an exceptional dame; but no doubt she and the Roman ladies would get on very well together, finding only a few superficial differences.

The fact that her gory reminiscences are welcomed by an editor with the popular taste in view is perhaps more significant than appears either to editor or public.

Were this lady to write a novel (the chances are she will) it would have the true note of modern vigour.

Of course her style has been formed by her favourite reading; more than probably, her ways of thinking and feeling owe much to the same source.

If not so already, this will soon, I daresay, be the typical Englishwoman.

Certainly, there is "no nonsense about her."

Such women should breed a remarkable race.

I left the inn in rather a turbid humour.

Moving homeward by a new way, I presently found myself on the side of a little valley, in which lay a farm and an orchard.

The apple trees were in full bloom, and, as I stood gazing, the sun, which had all that day been niggard of its beams, burst forth gloriously.

For what I then saw, I have no words; I can but dream of the still loveliness of that blossomed valley.

Near me, a bee was humming; not far away, a cuckoo called; from the pasture of the farm below came a bleating of lambs.

XVI.

I am no friend of the people.

As a force, by which the tenor of the time is conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as a visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to abhorrence.

For the greater part of my life, the people signified to me the London crowd, and no phrase of temperate meaning would utter my thoughts of them under that aspect.

The people as country-folk are little known to me;

such glimpses as I have had of them do not invite to nearer acquaintance.

Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly.

Right or wrong, this is my temper.

But he who should argue from it that I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my own would go far astray.

Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast distinction between the individual and the class.

Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition for good; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which contagion prompts him.

It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had made so little progress.

Now, looking at men in the multitude, I marvel that they have advanced so far.

Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person by his intellectual power and attainment.

I could see no good where there was no logic, no charm where there was no learning.

Now I think that one has to distinguish between two forms of intelligence, that of the brain, and that of the heart, and I have come to regard the second as by far the more important.

I guard myself against saying that intelligence does not matter; the fool is ever as noxious as he is wearisome.

But assuredly the best people I have known were saved from folly not by the intellect but by the heart.

They come before me, and I see them greatly ignorant, strongly prejudiced, capable of the absurdest mis-reasoning; yet their faces shine with the supreme virtues, kindness, sweetness, modesty, generosity.

Possessing these qualities, they at the same time understand how to use them; they have the intelligence of the heart.

This poor woman who labours for me in my house is even such a one.

From the first I thought her an unusually good servant; after three years of acquaintance, I find her one of the few women I have known who merit the term of excellent.

She can read and write--that is all.

More instruction would, I am sure, have harmed her, for it would have confused her natural motives, without supplying any clear ray of mental guidance.

She is fulfilling the offices for which she was born, and that with a grace of contentment, a joy of conscientiousness, which puts her high among civilized beings.

Her delight is in order and in peace; what greater praise can be given to any of the children of men?

The other day she told me a story of the days gone by.

Her mother, at the age of twelve, went into domestic service; but on what conditions, think you?

The girl's father, an honest labouring man, _paid_ the person whose house she entered one shilling a week for her instruction in the duties she wished to undertake.

What a grinning stare would come to the face of any labourer nowadays, who should be asked to do the like!

I no longer wonder that my housekeeper so little resembles the average of her kind.