Part 15 (1/2)

A just chastis.e.m.e.nt may benefit a man, though it seldom does, but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

In these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders: people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally are content to settle it by b.u.t.toning up their pockets, and pa.s.sing by, on the other side.

In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over-filled, where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien tyrant as it is here.

You cannot cage a field bird when it is old; it dies for want of flight, of air, of change, of freedom. No use will be the stored grain of your cages; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.

”What is England?”

”It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think; and they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now and then. They carry red Bibles, and they go about with their mouths open to catch flies, and they run into all the little old dusty places; you must have seen them.”

”And why do we want to have anything to do with them?”

”They will come in s.h.i.+ps and fire at us, if we are not bigger and stronger than they. We must build iron houses that float, and go on the sea and meet them.”

_PUCK._

”Animalism,” forsooth!--a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we have genuine appet.i.tes, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall ”animalism”

be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? ”Animalism!”

You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols, and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at your dinner betwixt soup and the ”cha.s.se;” and cannot spend a summer afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your pa.s.sions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle, first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck out greed, and selfishness, and wors.h.i.+p of station or gold, as ”love,”

and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer them as worthy of their wors.h.i.+p, fling it from them with a curse, finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.

”Animalism,” forsooth! G.o.d knows it would be well for you, here and hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of your egregious vanity!

I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind, or kept some hours waiting for dinner.

In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In an old north-country dame, who lives on five s.h.i.+llings a week, in a cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle cla.s.ses, with their incessant flutter, and bl.u.s.ter, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces, and their nervous deference to opinion;--it is your middle cla.s.ses that have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode of the day a union of boorishness and servility, of effervescence and of apathy--a court suit, as it were, worn with muddy boots and a hempen s.h.i.+rt.

I think Fanfreluche spoke with reason. Coincidence is a G.o.d that greatly influences mortal affairs. He is not a cross-tempered deity either, always; and when you beat your poor fetish for what seems to you an untoward accident, you may do wrong; he may have benefited you far more than you wot.

Now I believe that when a woman's own fair skin is called rouge, and her own old lace is called imitation, she must in some way or other have roused sharply the conscience or the envy of her sisters who sit in judgment.

I canna go to church. Look'ee,--they's allus a readin' o' cusses, and d.a.m.nin', and h.e.l.l fire, and the like; and I canna stomach it. What for shall they go and say as all the poor old wimmin i' tha parish is gone to the deil 'cause they picks up a stick or tew i' hedge, or likes to mumble a charm or tew o'er their churnin'? Them old wimmin be rare an'