In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth had an
emphatic success.  The creation is worthy of a place beside the
same artist's Othello and Hamlet.  It is the simplest and most
unsympathetic of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments
of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity.
Salvini sees nothing great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle,
and that courage which comes of strong and copious circulation.
The moral smallness of the man is insisted on from the first, in
the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan
embracing Banquo.  He may have some northern poetry of speech, but
he has not much logical understanding.  In his dealings with the
supernatural powers he is like a savage with his fetich, trusting
them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he is crossed,
casting his belief aside and calling 'fate into the list.'  For his
wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew
for her fiery spirit to command.  The nature of his feeling towards
her is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch.  He always
yields to the woman's fascination; and yet his caresses (and we
know how much meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly
hard and unloving.  Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might
take hold of any one who happened to be nearest to him at a moment
of excitement.  Love has fallen out of this marriage by the way,
and left a curious friendship.  Only once--at the very moment when
she is showing herself so little a woman and so much a high-
spirited man--only once is he very deeply stirred towards her; and
that finds expression in the strange and horrible transport of
admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini's lips--'Bring
forth men-children only!'

The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.
Macbeth's voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be
forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman's hands he seemed to
have blood in his utterance.  Never for a moment, even in the very
article of the murder, does he possess his own soul.  He is a man
on wires.  From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous
cowardice.  For, after all, it is not here, but in broad daylight,
with the exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at
every blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand, that
this man's physical bravery can keep him up; he is an unwieldy
ship, and needs plenty of way on before he will steer.

In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of
what he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the
'twenty trenched gashes' on Banquo's head.  Thus Macbeth makes
welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror
which are so soon to turn sour in him.  As he runs out to embrace
these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to realise to his mind's eye
the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he is dressing out the
phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination, playing the part
of justice, is to 'commend to his own lips the ingredients of his
poisoned chalice.'  With the recollection of Hamlet and his
father's spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which
that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,
it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the
two apparitions and the two men haunted.  But there are none to be
found.  Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit
and the 'twenty trenched gashes.'  He is afraid of he knows not
what.  He is abject, and again blustering.  In the end he so far
forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of what is before him,
that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.  When his wife tells
him he needs repose, there is something really childish in the way
he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression of
almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed.  And
what is the upshot of the visitation?  It is written in
Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of Salvini's
voice and expression:- 'O! siam nell' opra ancor fanciulli'-- 'We
are yet but young in deed.'  Circle below circle.  He is looking
with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell.  There may still
be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he
may move untroubled in this element of blood.

In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is
Salvini's finest moment throughout the play.  From the first he was
admirably made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as
ever he looked Othello.  From the first moment he steps upon the
stage you can see this character is a creation to the fullest
meaning of the phrase; for the man before you is a type you know
well already.  He arrives with Banquo on the heath, fair and red-
bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride and the sense of animal
wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a beast who has
eaten his fill.  But in the fifth act there is a change.  This is
still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is
still the same face which in the earlier acts could be
superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.  But
now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has
entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an
indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken
his features.  He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full
of horrors.  Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her
hand:  Macbeth makes no complaint--he has ceased to notice it now;
but the same smell is in his nostrils.  A contained fury and
disgust possesses him.  He taunts the messenger and the doctor as
people would taunt their mortal enemies.  And, indeed, as he knows
right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife.  About her
he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety;
and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can 'minister to a
mind diseased.'  When the news of her death is brought him, he is
staggered and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we
can call grief that he displays.  There had been two of them
against God and man; and now, when there is only one, it makes
perhaps less difference than he had expected.  And so her death is
not only an affliction, but one more disillusion; and he redoubles
in bitterness.  The speech that follows, given with tragic cynicism
in every word, is a dirge, not so much for her as for himself.
From that time forth there is nothing human left in him, only 'the
fiend of Scotland,' Macduff's 'hell-hound,' whom, with a stern
glee, we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf.  He is
inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of
wounds and slaughter.  Even after he meets Macduff his courage does
not fail; but when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all
virtue goes out of him; and though he speaks sounding words of
defiance, the last combat is little better than a suicide.

The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a
headlong unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and
powerful; and within these somewhat narrow limits there is so much
play and saliency that, so far as concerns Salvini himself, a third
great success seems indubitable.  Unfortunately, however, a great
actor cannot fill more than a very small fraction of the boards;
and though Banquo's ghost will probably be more seasonable in his
future apparitions, there are some more inherent difficulties in
the piece.  The company at large did not distinguish themselves.
Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff'd the
average ranter.  The lady who filled the principal female part has
done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal for
what she tried last week.  Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
scene is to make a memorable failure.  As it was given, it
succeeded in being wrong in art without being true to nature.

And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which
somewhat interfered with the success of the performance.  At the
end of the incantation scene the Italian translator has made
Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage.  This is a change of
questionable propriety from a psychological point of view; while in
point of view of effect it leaves the stage for some moments empty
of all business.  To remedy this, a bevy of green ballet-girls came
forth and pointed their toes about the prostrate king.  A dance of
High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would not be
more out of the key; though the gravity of a Scots audience was not
to be overcome, and they merely expressed their disapprobation by a
round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of Christmas fairies
would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit to gallery
with inextinguishable laughter.  It is, I am told, the Italian
tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the
observance.  With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a
stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of
those scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is
left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice
as well, and we should be better able to follow and enjoy an
admirable work of dramatic art.



CHAPTER III--BAGSTER'S 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'



I have here before me an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, bound
in green, without a date, and described as 'illustrated by nearly
three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.'  On the outside it
is lettered 'Bagster's Illustrated Edition,' and after the author's
apology, facing the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial
'Plan of the Road' is marked as 'drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder,'
and engraved by J. Basire.  No further information is anywhere
vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers had judged the work too
unimportant; and we are still left ignorant whether or not we owe
the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand that drew
the plan.  It seems, however, more than probable.  The literal
particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots
in the devil's garden, and carefully introduced the court-house in
the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the cuts; and
in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition of
the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air.  Whoever he
was, the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to
be the best illustrator of Bunyan.  They are not only good
illustrations, like so many others; but they are like so few, good
illustrations of Bunyan.  Their spirit, in defect and quality, is
still the same as his own.  The designer also has lain down and
dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as
Bunyan's; and text and pictures make but the two sides of the same
homespun yet impassioned story.  To do justice to the designs, it
will be necessary to say, for the hundredth time, a word or two
about the masterpiece which they adorn.

All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their
creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more
interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show
forth, falls more and more into neglect.  An architect may command
a wreath of vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as
each leaf came from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered
freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the building were
hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in
much the same situation as the writer of allegories.  The Faery
Queen was an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as
an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.  The case of Bunyan is
widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph,
although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust against
the wall.  Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with 'his fingers in
his ears, he ran on,' straight for his mark.  He tells us himself,
in the conclusion to the first part, that he did not fear to raise
a laugh; indeed, he feared nothing, and said anything; and he was
greatly served in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style,
which, like the talk of strong uneducated men, when it does not
impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity.  The mere
story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour.
He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of
moving mountains.  And we have to remark in him, not the parts
where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely
decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be
credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets
the end of their creation.  We can follow him step by step into the
trap which he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and
triumphant literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him
in an inconsistency.  The allegories of the Interpreter and of the
Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed,
like stage-plays, before the pilgrims.  The son of Mr. Great-grace
visibly 'tumbles hills about with his words.'  Adam the First has
his condemnation written visibly on his forehead, so that Faithful
reads it.  At the very instant the net closes round the pilgrims,
'the white robe falls from the black man's body.'  Despair 'getteth
him a grievous crab-tree cudgel'; it was in 'sunshiny weather' that
he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about the House
Beautiful, 'our country birds,' only sing their little pious verses
'at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.'
'I often,' says Piety, 'go out to hear them; we also ofttimes keep
them tame on our house.'  The post between Beulah and the Celestial
City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in country places.  Madam
Bubble, that 'tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion,
in very pleasant attire, but old,' 'gives you a smile at the end of
each sentence'--a real woman she; we all know her.  Christiana
dying 'gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring,' for no possible reason in the
allegory, merely because the touch was human and affecting.  Look
at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had
almost called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight in any
that 'he found to be a man of his hands'; his chivalrous point of
honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was down, a thing
fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with his
language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing:  'I thought I
should have lost my man'--'chicken-hearted'--'at last he came in,
and I will say that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly
to him.'  This is no Independent minister; this is a stout, honest,
big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long
moustaches as he speaks.  Last and most remarkable, 'My sword,'
says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-heart delighted,
'my sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, AND
MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN GET IT.'  And after this
boast, more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever dreamed of by the
rejected Ignorance, we are told that 'all the trumpets sounded for
him on the other side.'

In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision
and the same energy of belief.  The quality is equally and
indifferently displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the
tenderness of the pathos, the startling vigour and strangeness of
the incidents, the natural strain of the conversations, and the
humanity and charm of the characters.  Trivial talk over a meal,
the dying words of heroes, the delights of Beulah or the Celestial
City, Apollyon and my Lord Hate-good, Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-
Wiseman, all have been imagined with the same clearness, all
written of with equal gusto and precision, all created in the same
mixed element, of simplicity that is almost comical, and art that,
for its purpose, is faultless.

It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his
drawings.  He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil.  He, too, will
draw anything, from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the
courts of Heaven.  'A Lamb for Supper' is the name of one of his
designs, 'Their Glorious Entry' of another.  He has the same
disregard for the ridiculous, and enjoys somewhat of the same
privilege of style, so that we are pleased even when we laugh the
most.  He is literal to the verge of folly.  If dust is to be
raised from the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will 'fly
abundantly' in the picture.  If Faithful is to lie 'as dead' before
Moses, dead he shall lie with a warrant--dead and stiff like
granite; nay (and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism
of the author), it is with the identical stone tables of the law
that Moses fells the sinner.  Good and bad people, whom we at once
distinguish in the text by their names, Hopeful, Honest, and
Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as against By-ends, Sir Having
Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other, are in these drawings as
simply distinguished by their costume.  Good people, when not armed
cap-a-pie, wear a speckled tunic girt about the waist, and low
hats, apparently of straw.  Bad people swagger in tail-coats and
chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in
trousers, and for all the world like guests at a garden-party.
Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands before
Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.  But
above all examples of this artist's intrepidity, commend me to the
print entitled 'Christian Finds it Deep.'  'A great darkness and
horror,' says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the
comfortless deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the
sorrows and conflicts of his hero.  How to represent this worthily
the artist knew not; and yet he was determined to represent it
somehow.  This was how he did:  Hopeful is still shown to his neck
above the water of death; but Christian has bodily disappeared, and
a blot of solid blackness indicates his place.

As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for
the most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and
each having a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event
recorded, you will soon become aware of two things:  first, that
the man can draw, and, second, that he possesses the gift of an
imagination.  'Obstinate reviles,' says the legend; and you should
see Obstinate reviling.  'He warily retraces his steps'; and there
is Christian, posting through the plain, terror and speed in every
muscle.  'Mercy yearns to go' shows you a plain interior with
packing going forward, and, right in the middle, Mercy yearning to
go--every line of the girl's figure yearning.  In 'The Chamber
called Peace' we see a simple English room, bed with white
curtains, window valance and door, as may be found in many thousand
unpretentious houses; but far off, through the open window, we
behold the sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails
it with his hand:


'Where am I now! is this the love and care
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!
Thus to provide!  That I should be forgiven!
And dwell already the next door to heaven!'


A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the
damsels point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains:  'The
Prospect,' so the cut is ticketed--and I shall be surprised, if on
less than a square inch of paper you can show me one so wide and
fair.  Down a cross road on an English plain, a cathedral city
outlined on the horizon, a hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam
Wanton dancing with her fair enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in
hand, half pauses.  The cut is perfect as a symbol; the giddy
movement of the sorceress, the uncertain poise of the man struck to
the heart by a temptation, the contrast of that even plain of life
whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the wanton--the
artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely read Bunyan,
he had also thoughtfully lived.  The Delectable Mountains--I
continue skimming the first part--are not on the whole happily
rendered.  Once, and once only, the note is struck, when Christian
and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of
green shrubs--box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them,
domed or pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky.  A little
further, and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan's insight into
life, the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he has set down
the latter end of such a number of the would-be good; where his
allegory goes so deep that, to people looking seriously on life, it
cuts like satire.  The true significance of this invention lies, of
course, far out of the way of drawing; only one feature, the great
tedium of the land, the growing weariness in well-doing, may be
somewhat represented in a symbol.  The pilgrims are near the end:
'Two Miles Yet,' says the legend.  The road goes ploughing up and
down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms,
are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill;
they have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from
overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer
afternoon, beshadows them:  two miles! it might be hundreds.  In
dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags, in both parts,
miserably behind the text, but in the distant prospect of the
Celestial City more than regains his own.  You will remember when
Christian and Hopeful 'with desire fell sick.'  'Effect of the
Sunbeams' is the artist's title.  Against the sky, upon a cliffy
mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent
woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the
splendour--one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands
ecstatically lifted--yearn with passion after that immortal city.
Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of
death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the
zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against
that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts.
No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the
weakness of the artist.  Each pilgrim sings with a book in his
grasp--a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly
enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter.  And yet that is
not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.  Something in the
attitude of the manikins--faces they have none, they are too small
for that--something in the way they swing these monstrous volumes
to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some
subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut
that follows after--something, at least, speaks clearly of a
fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the
last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.  There is
that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a
difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle,
travelling to Tyburn in the cart.  Next come the Shining Ones,
wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the
blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates Christian.  In
two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the other shore; and
then, between two radiant angels, one of whom points upward, we see
them mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind them
on the inky river.  More angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and
if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others-
-a place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light--a
place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children.  And then this
symbolic draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein.  Three
cuts conclude the first part.  In the first the gates close, black
against the glory struggling from within.  The second shows us
Ignorance--alas! poor Arminian!--hailing, in a sad twilight, the
ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third we behold him, bound hand and
foot, and black already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried
high over the mountain-tops of the world by two angels of the anger
of the Lord.  'Carried to Another Place,' the artist enigmatically
names his plate--a terrible design.

Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his
pencil grows more daring and incisive.  He has many true inventions
in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares
realised.  It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and
some another; the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts
against the Wicket Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang
over Christian by the Mouth of Hell; the horned shade that comes
behind him whispering blasphemies; the daylight breaking through
that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and falling chill adown the
haunted tunnel; Christian's further progress along the causeway,
between the two black pools, where, at every yard or two, a gin, a
pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by--loathsome white devilkins
harbouring close under the bank to work the springes, Christian
himself pausing and pricking with his sword's point at the nearest
noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther
side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first
of Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull,
the frog-like limberness of limbs--crafty, slippery, lustful-
looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a
dim, infernal luminosity.  Horrid fellows are they, one and all;
horrid fellows and horrific scenes.  In another spirit that Good-
Conscience 'to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,' a
cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly
shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the
strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words.  It is no easy nor
pleasant thing to speak in one's lifetime with Good-Conscience; he
is an austere, unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and
the folds of his raiment are not merely claustral, but have
something of the horror of the pall.  Be not afraid, however; with
the hand of that appearance Mr. Honest will get safe across.

Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays
himself.  He loves to look at either side of a thing:  as, for
instance, when he shows us both sides of the wall--'Grace
Inextinguishable' on the one side, with the devil vainly pouring
buckets on the flame, and 'The Oil of Grace' on the other, where
the Holy Spirit, vessel in hand, still secretly supplies the fire.
He loves, also, to show us the same event twice over, and to repeat
his instantaneous photographs at the interval of but a moment.  So
we have, first, the whole troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant,
and Great-heart to the front, spear in hand and parleying; and
next, the same cross-roads, from a more distant view, the convoy
now scattered and looking safely and curiously on, and Valiant
handing over for inspection his 'right Jerusalem blade.'  It is
true that this designer has no great care after consistency:
Apollyon's spear is laid by, his quiver of darts will disappear,
whenever they might hinder the designer's freedom; and the fiend's
tail is blobbed or forked at his good pleasure.  But this is not
unsuitable to the illustration of the fervent Bunyan, breathing
hurry and momentary inspiration.  He, with his hot purpose, hunting
sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget the things that he has
written yesterday.  He shall first slay Heedless in the Valley of
the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his sleep, as if
nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted Ground.  And
again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of
the siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-
Truth, who did not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that
dangerous corner by Deadman's Lane.  And, with all inconsistencies
and freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts:  a
power of joining on one action or one humour to another; a power of
following out the moods, even of the dismal subterhuman fiends
engendered by the artist's fancy; a power of sustained continuous
realisation, step by step, in nature's order, that can tell a
story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and
figuratively, like the art of words.

One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon--six cuts,
weird and fiery, like the text.  The pilgrim is throughout a pale
and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.
There is no better devil of the conventional order than our
artist's Apollyon, with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his
changing and terrifying expression, his infernal energy to slay.
In cut the first you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but
already formidable in suggestion.  Cut the second, 'The Fiend in
Discourse,' represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking
his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his tail writhing
in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while Christian stands
back a little, timidly defensive.  The third illustrates these
magnificent words:  'Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole
breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter:
prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou
shalt go no farther:  here will I spill thy soul!  And with that he
threw a flaming dart at his breast.'  In the cut he throws a dart
with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth,
spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path,
as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal
den.  The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames,
such red-hot nether energy.  And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he
has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and
roaring as he leaps.  The fifth shows the climacteric of the
battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and
dealt that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him,
but 'giving back, as one that had received his mortal wound.'  The
raised head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword,
the one wing relaxed in agony, all realise vividly these words of
the text.  In the sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the
pilgrim is seen kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden scene
of contest and among the shivers of the darts; while just at the
margin the hinder quarters and the tail of Apollyon are whisking
off, indignant and discounted.

In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the
text, and that point is one rather of the difference of arts than
the difference of artists.  Throughout his best and worst, in his
highest and most divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of
his sectarianism, the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and
ennobles, convinces, accuses the reader.  Through no art beside the
art of words can the kindness of a man's affections be expressed.
In the cuts you shall find faithfully parodied the quaintness and
the power, the triviality and the surprising freshness of the
author's fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in ready
symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible
before the eyes:  but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to
be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the
prints examined.

Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in
any other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which
have, to one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from
childhood up, and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart
lungeing at Giant Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian,
and every turn and town along the road to the Celestial City, and
that bright place itself, seen as to a stave of music, shining afar
off upon the hill-top, the candle of the world.




SKETCHES




THE SATIRIST



My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight.  He
was by habit and repute a satirist.  If he did occasionally condemn
anything or anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had
hitherto escaped, it was simply because he condemned everything and
everybody.  While I was with him he disposed of St. Paul with an
epigram, shook my reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis,
and fell foul of the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two
out of the ten commandments.  Nothing escaped his blighting
censure.  At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or lowered my
estimation of a friend.  I saw everything with new eyes, and could
only marvel at my former blindness.  How was it possible that I had
not before observed A's false hair, B's selfishness, or C's boorish
manners?  I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a
couple of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed
to bear openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast.  I
half expected that these miserable beings, like the people of
Lystra, would recognise their betters and force us to the altar; in
which case, warned by the late of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know
that my modesty would have prevailed upon me to decline.  But there
was no need for such churlish virtue.  More blinded than the
Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in our gait; and as our
temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing than healing
their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in scorn.

I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from
interest, but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the
case.  To understand it, let us take a simile.  Suppose yourself
walking down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the
crowd out of a flask of vitriol.  You would be much diverted with
the grimaces and contortions of his victims; and at the same time
you would fear to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing
that, when once among the crowd, you would run a good chance
yourself of baptism with his biting liquor.  Now my companion's
vitriol was inexhaustible.

It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was
being anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me
fall to criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into
his neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to
go farther and discover what is really true.  He is content to find
that things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it
that they do not exist at all.  He sees our virtues are not what
they pretend they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us
the possession of virtue altogether.  He has learnt the first
lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not even suspected
that there is another equally true, to wit, that no man is wholly
bad.  Like the inmate of a coloured star, he has eyes for one
colour alone.  He has a keen scent after evil, but his nostrils are
plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils before
going about the streets of the plague-struck city.

Why does he do this?  It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge
of good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and
grow fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house.  This was my
first thought; but my second was not like unto it, and I saw that
our satirist was wise, wise in his generation, like the unjust
steward.  He does not want light, because the darkness is more
pleasant.  He does not wish to see the good, because he is happier
without it.  I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a
state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed
when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their lips;
and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual state.  He has
the forbidden fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself
a god as often and as long as he likes.  He has raised himself upon
a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of
ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor
Priest, content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more
easily attained.  Yes, certes, much more easily attained.  He has
not risen by climbing himself, but by pushing others down.  He has
grown great in his own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and
risking the fate of AEsop's frog, but simply by the habitual use of
a diminishing glass on everybody else.  And I think altogether that
his is a better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most others.

After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
spirit suspiciously like his own.  All through, I have been
comparing myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the
best of the comparison.  Well, well, contagion is as often mental
as physical; and I do not think my readers, who have all been under
his lash, will blame me very much for giving the headsman a
mouthful of his own sawdust.



NUITS BLANCHES



If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night,
it should be I.  I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that
woke from his few hours' slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on
his brow, to lie awake and listen and long for the first signs of
life among the silent streets.  These nights of pain and weariness
are graven on my mind; and so when the same thing happened to me
again, everything that I heard or saw was rather a recollection
than a discovery.

Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet.  But nothing
came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that
was made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the
extinguished fire.  It was a calm; or I know that I should have
heard in the roar and clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it
for so many years, the wild career of a horseman, always scouring
up from the distance and passing swiftly below the window; yet
always returning again from the place whence first he came, as
though, baffled by some higher power, he had retraced his steps to
gain impetus for another and another attempt.

As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling
of a carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed
within a few streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it
had arisen.  This, too, was as a reminiscence.

I rose and lifted a corner of the blind.  Over the black belt of
the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there
a lighted window.  How often before had my nurse lifted me out of
bed and pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if,
there also, there were children that could not sleep, and if these
lighted oblongs were signs of those that waited like us for the
morning.

I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well
of the staircase.  For what cause I know not, just as it used to be
in the old days that the feverish child might be the better served,
a peep of gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me.  But where
I was, all was darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous
ticking of the clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.

The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction
on the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for
which, all night through, I waited and longed of old.  It was my
custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, 'When will
the carts come in?' and repeat it again and again until at last
those sounds arose in the street that I have heard once more this
morning.  The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for
early carts.  I know not, and I never have known, what they carry,
whence they come, or whither they go.  But I know that, long ere
dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously past, with
the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the same clink of
horses' feet.  It was not for nothing that they made the burthen of
my wishes all night through.  They are really the first throbbings
of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear
them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a
hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude.  They
have the freshness of the daylight life about them.  You can hear
the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their
horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy,
harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness.  There
is now an end of mystery and fear.  Like the knocking at the door
in Macbeth, {8} or the cry of the watchman in the Tour de Nesle,
they show that the horrible caesura is over and the nightmares have
fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men
is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.

In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the
officious knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older
than I had dreamed myself all night.



THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES



It is all very well to talk of death as 'a pleasant potion of
immortality', but the most of us, I suspect, are of 'queasy
stomachs,' and find it none of the sweetest. {9a}  The graveyard
may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very
ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however fair may be the
life to which it leads.  And though Enoch and Elias went into the
temple through a gate which certainly may be called Beautiful, the
rest of us have to find our way to it through Ezekiel's low-bowed
door and the vault full of creeping things and all manner of
abominable beasts.  Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind
to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an
alleviation.  If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
It was in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning
found me lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars',
thoroughly sick of the town, the country, and myself.

Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a
spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves.  Their very
aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking
to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some 'talk fit for a
charnel,' {9b} something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious
logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has come down to us as
the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the very prince of
gravediggers.  Scots people in general are so much wrapped up in
their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such
conversation:  the talk of fish-mongers running usually on
stockfish and haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat
stories and speeches that positively smell of the graveyard.  But
on this occasion I was doomed to disappointment.  My two friends
were far into the region of generalities.  Their profession was
forgotten in their electorship.  Politics had engulfed the narrower
economy of grave-digging.  'Na, na,' said the one, 'ye're a'
wrang.'  'The English and Irish Churches,' answered the other, in a
tone as if he had made the remark before, and it had been called in
question--'The English and Irish Churches have IMPOVERISHED the
country.'

'Such are the results of education,' thought I as I passed beside
them and came fairly among the tombs.  Here, at least, there were
no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning's leader, to
distract or offend me.  The old shabby church showed, as usual, its
quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable,
still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago.  A chill dank
mist lay over all.  The Old Greyfriars' churchyard was in
perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the
associations with no fear of vulgar interruption.  On this stone
the Covenant was signed.  In that vault, as the story goes, John
Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil.  From that window Burke
the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps
o' nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made
grave.  Certainly he would have a selection here.  The very walks
have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole
ground is uneven, because (as I was once quaintly told) 'when the
wood rots it stands to reason the soil should fall in,' which, from
the law of gravitation, is certainly beyond denial.  But it is
round the boundary that there are the finest tombs.  The whole
irregular space is, as it were, fringed with quaint old monuments,
rich in death's-heads and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich
in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes--rich in them to such an extent
that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled end-
long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts
of odd corners among the sculpture.  These tombs raise their backs
against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses, and every here and
there a clothes-pole projects between two monuments its fluttering
trophy of white and yellow and red.  With a grim irony they recall
the banners in the Invalides, banners as appropriate perhaps over
the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these others above the
dust of armies.  Why they put things out to dry on that particular
morning it was hard to imagine.  The grass was grey with drops of
rain, the headstones black with moisture.  Yet, in despite of
weather and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and
beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms
where whole families were born and fed, and slept and died.  At one
a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from
another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman.  Every here and
there was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of
crockery inside upon the window-seat.  But you do not grasp the
full connection between these houses of the dead and the living,
the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses,
till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface of
the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its
wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall
monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back.  It startles
you to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the
tomb.

A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of
bones that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first
disappointment had taught me to expect little from Greyfriars'
sextons, and I passed him by in silence.  A slater on the slope of
a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.  A lean black cat, looking
as if it had battened on strange meats, slipped past me.  A little
boy at a window put his finger to his nose in so offensive a manner
that I was put upon my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old
epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the shadow of vaults.

Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and
the other younger, with a child in her arms.  Both had faces eaten
with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage
of degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for
dress is lost.  As they came down they neared a grave, where some
pious friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put
a bell glass over it, as is the custom.  The effect of that ring of
dull yellow among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more
pleasant than it is in modern cemeteries, where every second mound
can boast a similar coronal; and here, where it was the exception
and not the rule, I could even fancy the drops of moisture that
dimmed the covering were the tears of those who laid it where it
was.  As the two women came up to it, one of them kneeled down on
the wet grass and looked long and silently through the clouded
shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating to and
fro to lull the muling baby.  I was struck a great way off with
something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and
haggard women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to
hear what they were saying.  Surely on them the spirit of death and
decay had descended; I had no education to dread here:  should I
not have a chance of seeing nature?  Alas! a pawnbroker could not
have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what the
kneeling woman said to the woman upright--this and nothing more:
'Eh, what extravagance!'

O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed--wonderful, but
wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity.  Thy men are more
like numerals than men.  They must bear their idiosyncrasies or
their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the
scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.  Thy precepts of economy have
pierced into the lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum
in vice, a respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of
Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia.  For lo!
thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon
new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the
improvidence of love.

Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the
gates again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone
of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of
these green mounds and blackened headstones.



NURSES



I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
death.  It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking
forth upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow
blankets, and with long lines of underclothing fluttering between
the battered posts.  There were any number of cheap prints, and a
drawing by one of 'her children,' and there were flowers in the
window, and a sickly canary withered into consumption in an
ornamental cage.  The bed, with its checked coverlid, was in a
closet.  A great Bible lay on the table; and her drawers were full
of 'scones,' which it was her pleasure to give to young visitors
such as I was then.