The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is 
their object; but I do not think that is much to the purpose.  
People generally say what they have been taught to say; that 
was the catchword they were given in youth to express the aims 
of their way of life; and men who are gaining great battles 
are not likely to take much trouble in reviewing their 
sentiments and the words in which they were told to express 
them.  Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds 
a quite different theory of life from the one on which he is 
patently acting.  And the fact is, fame may be a forethought 
and an afterthought, but it is too abstract an idea to move 
people greatly in moments of swift and momentous decision.  It 
is from something more immediate, some determination of blood 
to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is 
stormed or the bold word spoken.  I am sure a fellow shooting 
an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame 
as most commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall 
out how it will, is not one of those the muse delights to 
celebrate.  Indeed it is difficult to see why the fellow does 
a thing so nameless and yet so formidable to look at, unless 
on the theory that he likes it.  I suspect that is why; and I 
suspect it is at least ten per cent of why Lord Beaconsfield 
and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of 
Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why 
the Admirals courted war like a mistress.



CHAPTER VIII - SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN



THROUGH the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh 
has been in possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of 
paintings of singular merit and interest.  They were exposed 
in the apartments of the Scotch Academy; and filled those who 
are accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibition, with 
astonishment and a sense of incongruity.  Instead of the too 
common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances 
executed in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon 
him from the walls of room after room, a whole army of wise, 
grave, humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances, painted 
simply and strongly by a man of genuine instinct.  It was a 
complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy.  Lords and 
ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges, and heretical 
divines, a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; 
and the Scotchman of to-day walked about among the Scotchmen 
of two generations ago.  The moment was well chosen, neither 
too late nor too early.  The people who sat for these pictures 
are not yet ancestors, they are still relations.  They are not 
yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle 
distance within cry of our affections.  The little child who 
looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture, 
is now the veteran Sheriff EMERITIS of Perth.  And I hear a 
story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after 
an absence of sixty years: "I could see none of my old 
friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn Gallery, 
and found them all there."

It would be difficult to say whether the collection was 
more interesting on the score of unity or diversity.  Where 
the portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the 
same race, and all from the same brush, there could not fail 
to be many points of similarity.  And yet the similarity of 
the handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief those 
personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize.  He 
was a born painter of portraits.  He looked people shrewdly 
between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and 
had possessed himself of what was essential in their character 
before they had been many minutes in his studio.  What he was 
so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the 
moment of conception.  He had never any difficulty, he said, 
about either hands or faces.  About draperies or light or 
composition, he might see room for hesitation or afterthought.  
But a face or a hand was something plain and legible.  There 
were no two ways about it, any more than about the person's 
name.  And so each of his portraits are not only (in Doctor 
Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the catalogue) "a piece of 
history," but a piece of biography into the bargain.  It is 
devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally amusing, 
and carried its own credentials equally upon its face.  These 
portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete 
than many a volume of sententious memoirs.  You can see 
whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the 
historian from Raeburn's palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly 
and evasive periods.  And then the portraits are both signed 
and countersigned.  For you have, first, the authority of the 
artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and 
manners of men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of 
the subject, who sits looking out upon you with inimitable 
innocence, and apparently under the impression that he is in a 
room by himself.  For Raeburn could plunge at once through all 
the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and present 
the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most 
disengaged moments.  This is best seen in portraits where the 
sitter is represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow 
with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord 
Bannatyne hearing a cause.  Above all, from this point of 
view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable.  A 
strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of 
the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine 
nostril, sits with a drawing-board upon his knees.  He has 
just paused to render himself account of some difficulty, to 
disentangle some complication of line or compare neighbouring 
values.  And there, without any perceptible wrinkling, you 
have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and 
the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and 
signify an effort of the kind.  The whole pose, the whole 
expression, is absolutely direct and simple.  You are ready to 
take your oath to it that Colonel Lyon had no idea he was 
sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing in the world 
besides his own occupation of the moment.

Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, 
nearly the whole of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to 
contain some that were indifferent, whether as works of art or 
as portraits.  Certainly the standard was remarkably high, and 
was wonderfully maintained, but there were one or two pictures 
that might have been almost as well away - one or two that 
seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were 
not successful likenesses.  Neither of the portraits of Sir 
Walter Scott, for instance, were very agreeable to look upon.  
You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic and 
puffy.  And where is that peaked forehead which, according to 
all written accounts and many portraits, was the 
distinguishing characteristic of his face?  Again, in spite of 
his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot 
consider that Raeburn was very happy in hands.  Without doubt, 
he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to study it; 
but it was by no means always that he gave himself the 
trouble.  Looking round one of these rooms hung about with his 
portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces, 
as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a 
room full of living people.  But it was not so with the hands.  
The portraits differed from each other in face perhaps ten 
times as much as they differed by the hand; whereas with 
living people the two go pretty much together; and where one 
is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be 
commonplace.

One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of 
Camperdown.  He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet 
slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his hand 
poised upon a chart by the finger tips.  The mouth is pursed, 
the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly 
arched.  The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and 
have the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea 
winds.  From the whole figure, attitude and countenance, there 
breathes something precise and decisive, something alert, 
wiry, and strong.  You can understand, from the look of him, 
that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and 
driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the 
fight at Camperdown.  He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet 
under Admiral de Winter.  "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a 
severe winter approaching; I have only to advise you to keep 
up a good fire."  Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine 
drollery must have supported him in the days of the mutiny at 
the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the 
VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active 
signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to 
intimidate the Dutch.

Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye, 
was the half-length of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord 
Justice-Clerk.  If I know gusto in painting when I see it, 
this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment.  The tart, rosy, 
humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face 
resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and perpetuated 
with something that looks like brotherly love.  A peculiarly 
subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and 
incredulous, like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with 
half a fancy it has been somewhat too long uncorked.  From 
under the pendulous eyelids of old age the eyes look out with 
a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle.  Hands, with no pretence 
to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach.  So 
sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait 
painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of 
sympathy on the part of the spectator.  And sympathy is a 
thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations, 
because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom.  It is 
probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for 
any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, 
than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation 
against his abstract vices.  He was the last judge on the 
Scotch bench to employ the pure Scotch idiom.  His opinions, 
thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, 
conversational style, were full of point and authority.  Out 
of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover 
of wine, and one who "shone peculiarly" at tavern meetings.  
He has left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and 
cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows.  
It was he who presided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in 
1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these occasions was 
scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day.  His summing up on Muir 
began thus - the reader must supply for himself "the growling, 
blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scotch accent: "Now this is 
the question for consideration - Is the panel guilty of 
sedition, or is he not?  Now, before this can be answered, two 
things must be attended to that require no proof: FIRST, that 
the British constitution is the best that ever was since the 
creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it 
better."  It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political 
trial?  A little later, he has occasion to refer to the 
relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French.  "I never 
liked the French all my days," said his lordship, "but now I 
hate them."  And yet a little further on: "A government in any 
country should be like a corporation; and in this country it 
is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to 
be represented.  As for the rabble who have nothing but 
personal property, what hold has the nation of them?  They may 
pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country 
in the twinkling of an eye."  After having made profession of 
sentiments so cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials 
were at an end, which was generally about midnight, Braxfield 
would walk home to his house in George Square with no better 
escort than an easy conscience.  I think I see him getting his 
cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a lantern in one 
hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk January 
night.  It might have been that very day that Skirving had 
defied him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for 
your lordship to menace me; for I have long learned to fear 
not the face of man;" and I can fancy, as Braxfield reflected 
on the number of what he called GRUMBLETONIANS in Edinburgh, 
and of how many of them must bear special malice against so 
upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that very 
moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile 
intent - I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he 
reflected that he also was not especially afraid of men's 
faces or men's fists, and had hitherto found no occasion to 
embody this insensibility in heroic words.  For if he was an 
inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid it is a fact that he 
was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid.  You may look 
into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will, 
but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter 
in.

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were 
even to name half of the portraits that were remarkable for 
their execution, or interesting by association.  There was one 
picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which you might palm 
off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the 
white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman 
who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, 
invented modern naval warfare.  There was that portrait of 
Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily 
through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of 
Athole.  There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose 
and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop 
out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking 
altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about 
fossils than young ladies; full-blown John Robieson, in 
hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, every inch of him, a fine 
old man of the world; Constable the publisher, upright beside 
a table, and bearing a corporation with commercial dignity; 
Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause 
since the world began; Lord Newton just awakened from 
clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President 
Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his 
wig, of some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery 
story-book, and yet all these fat features instinct with 
meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose 
combining somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature 
of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of 
intelligence and insight.  And all these portraits are so pat 
and telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, 
that, compared with the sort of living people one sees about 
the streets, they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy and 
obliterated sixpences.  Some disparaging thoughts upon our own 
generation could hardly fail to present themselves; but it is 
perhaps only the SACER VATES who is wanting; and we also, 
painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look in holiday 
immortality upon our children and grandchildren.

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of 
the same order of merit.  No one, of course, could be 
insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. 
Campbell of Possil.  When things are as pretty as that, 
criticism is out of season.  But, on the whole, it is only 
with women of a certain age that he can be said to have 
succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded 
with men.  The younger women do not seem to be made of good 
flesh and blood.  They are not painted in rich and unctuous 
touches.  They are dry and diaphanous.  And although young 
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I 
would fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn 
would have us believe.  In all these pretty faces, you miss 
character, you miss fire, you miss that spice of the devil 
which is worth all the prettiness in the world; and what is 
worst of all, you miss sex.  His young ladies are not womanly 
to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are 
so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young 
ladies of the male novelist.

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and 
pretty sitters; or he had stupefied himself with 
sentimentalities; or else (and here is about the truth of it) 
Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an obstinate blindness 
in one direction, and know very little more about women after 
all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve.  This is 
all the more likely, because we are by no means so 
unintelligent in the matter of old women.  There are some 
capital old women, it seems to me, in books written by men.  
And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or 
the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in 
the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his 
men.  He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he 
was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from 
recognising what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down 
upon the canvas.  But where people cannot meet without some 
confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are 
occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very 
different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for 
intelligent study nor much result in the shape of genuine 
comprehension.  Even women, who understand men so well for 
practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the 
purposes of art.  Take even the very best of their male 
creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find 
he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he 
has a comb at the back of his head.  Of course, no woman will 
believe this, and many men will be so very polite as to humour 
their incredulity.



CHAPTER IX - CHILD'S PLAY



THE regret we have for our childhood is not wholly 
justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of public 
ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the change, we 
are not unconscious of the manifold advantages of our new 
state.  What we lose in generous impulse, we more than gain in 
the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to 
enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at 
soldiers.  Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no 
longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to 
listen to the wind.  We go to school no more; and if we have 
only exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by no means 
sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of 
chastisement.  And yet a great change has overtaken us; and 
although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our 
pleasure differently.  We need pickles nowadays to make 
Wednesday's cold mutton please our Friday's appetite; and I 
can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell 
myself a hunter's story, would have made it more palatable 
than the best of sauces.  To the grown person, cold mutton is 
cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever 
invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad 
fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton carries away before 
it such seductive figments.  But for the child it is still 
possible to weave an enchantment over eatables; and if he has 
but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be heavenly manna 
to him for a week.

If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and 
exercise, if he is not something positive in his tastes, it 
means he has a feeble body and should have some medicine; but 
children may be pure spirits, if they will, and take their 
enjoyment in a world of moon-shine.  Sensation does not count 
for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the 
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and 
touch and hear through a sort of golden mist.  Children, for 
instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great 
faculty for looking; they do not use their eyes for the 
pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own; and the 
things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful 
in themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I 
thought they might be turned to practical account in play.  
Nor is the sense of touch so clean and poignant in children as 
it is in a man.  If you will turn over your old memories, I 
think the sensations of this sort you remember will be 
somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, 
general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general 
sense of wellbeing in bed.  And here, of course, you will 
understand pleasurable sensations; for overmastering pain - 
the most deadly and tragical element in life, and the true 
commander of man's soul and body - alas! pain has its own way 
with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy 
garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than 
it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-
god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than 
philosophy, can protect us from this sting.  As for taste, 
when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which 
delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical 
asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth.  
Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many 
scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the 
woods.  But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means 
of pleasure; and there is all the world between gaping 
wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with which 
a man listens to articulate music.

At the same time, and step by step with this increase in 
the definition and intensity of what we feel which accompanies 
our growing age, another change takes place in the sphere of 
intellect, by which all things are transformed and seen 
through theories and associations as through coloured windows.  
We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and gossip, 
and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in 
which we walk and through which we look abroad.  We study shop 
windows with other eyes than in our childhood, never to 
wonder, not always to admire, but to make and modify our 
little incongruous theories about life.  It is no longer the 
uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but perhaps 
the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a countenance that 
has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an 
adventurous story written in its lines.  The pleasure of 
surprise is passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem 
mighty tame to encounter; and we walk the streets to make 
romances and to sociologise.  Nor must we deny that a good 
many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit or in 
the interest of a livelier digestion.  These, indeed, may look 
back with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest 
are in a better case; they know more than when they were 
children, they understand better, their desires and sympathies 
answer more nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their 
minds are brimming with interest as they go about the world.

According to my contention, this is a flight to which 
children cannot rise.  They are wheeled in perambulators or 
dragged about by nurses in a pleasing stupor.  A vague, faint, 
abiding, wonderment possesses them.  Here and there some 
specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart or a 
guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought and 
calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may 
see them, still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse 
as by a sort of destiny, but still staring at the bright 
object in their wake.  It may be some minutes before another 
such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world in which 
they dwell.  For other children, they almost invariably show 
some intelligent sympathy.  "There is a fine fellow making mud 
pies," they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some 
sense in mud pies."  But the doings of their elders, unless 
where they are speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves 
by the quality of being easily imitable, they let them go over 
their heads (as we say) without the least regard.  If it were 
not for this perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to 
fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the 
light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among 
whom they condescended to dwell in obedience like a 
philosopher at a barbarous court.  At times, indeed, they 
display an arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering.  
Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a young 
gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I 
had seen his bow and arrow.  He made no account of my groans, 
which he accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a 
piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a 
wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject.  
Those elders, who care so little for rational enjoyment, and 
are even the enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he had 
accepted without understanding and without complaint, as the 
rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take 
strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, 
fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or 
lying prone in bed.  This is exactly what a child cannot do, 
or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else.  He 
works all with lay figures and stage properties.  When his 
story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by 
way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, 
until he is out of breath.  When he comes to ride with the 
king's pardon, he must bestride a chair, which he will so 
hurry and belabour and on which he will so furiously demean 
himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with 
spurring, at least fiery red with haste.  If his romance 
involves an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person 
about the chest of drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, 
before his imagination is satisfied.  Lead soldiers, dolls, 
all toys, in short, are in the same category and answer the 
same end.  Nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the 
clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring 
incongruities.  The chair he has just been besieging as a 
castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is 
taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he 
is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a 
stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted 
pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener 
soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner.  He can make 
abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he 
puts his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an 
unsavoury lane.  And so it is, that although the ways of 
children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places 
daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie 
in the same element.  So may the telegraph wires intersect the 
line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and a 
bagman visit the same country, and yet move in different 
worlds.

People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the 
power of imagination in the young.  Indeed there may be two 
words to that.  It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy 
that the child exhibits.  It is the grown people who make the 
nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve 
the text.  One out of a dozen reasons why ROBINSON CRUSOE 
should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level 
in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts 
and had, in so many words, to PLAY at a great variety of 
professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there 
is nothing that delights a child so much.  Hammers and saws 
belong to a province of life that positively calls for 
imitation.  The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most 
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are 
successively simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and 
frosty morning," gives a good instance of the artistic taste 
in children.  And this need for overt action and lay figures 
testifies to a defect in the child's imagination which 
prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of 
his own heart.  He does not yet know enough of the world and 
men.  His experience is incomplete.  That stage-wardrobe and 
scene-room that we call the memory is so ill provided, that he 
can overtake few combinations and body out few stories, to his 
own content, without some external aid.  He is at the 
experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in 
certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near 
trying it as his means permit.  And so here is young heroism 
with a wooden sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation 
over a bit of jointed stick.  It may be laughable enough just 
now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts, that 
not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will 
make you weep and tremble.  For children think very much the 
same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and 
marriageable women.  No one is more romantic.  Fame and 
honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the 
business man's pleasure in method, all these and others they 
anticipate and rehearse in their play hours.  Upon us, who are 
further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of 
destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint 
for their own mimetic reproduction.  Two children playing at 
soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of 
the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating.  This is 
perhaps the greatest oddity of all.  "Art for art" is their 
motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as 
the raw material for play.  Not Theophile Gautier, not 
Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the 
reproduction more highly over the reality; and they will 
parody an execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of the young 
man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the world.

The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, 
in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is 
itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon 
philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood.  It is 
when we make castles in the air and personate the leading 
character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of 
our first years.  Only, there are several reasons why the 
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge.  Nowadays, when 
we admit this personal element into our divagations we are apt 
to stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind 
ourselves sharply of old wounds.  Our day-dreams can no longer 
lie all in the air like a story in the ARABIAN NIGHTS; they 
read to us rather like the history of a period in which we 
ourselves had taken part, where we come across many 
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly 
reprimanded.  And then the child, mind you, acts his parts.  
He does not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs, 
and sets the blood agog over all his body.  And so his play 
breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he gives 
it vent.  Alas! when we betake ourselves to our intellectual 
form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in 
bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no 
outlet.  Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, 
which desires the thing itself; and even to rehearse a 
triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although it is perhaps 
the most satisfactory piece of play still left within our 
reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to 
a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of 
triumphant after all.

In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in 
all.  "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he 
cannot so much as take a walk except in character.  I could 
not learn my alphabet without some suitable MISE-EN-SCENE, and 
had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down 
to my book.  Will you kindly question your memory, and find 
out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and 
soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with 
some invention?  I remember, as though it were yesterday, the 
expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came 
with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was 
none to see.  Children are even content to forego what we call 
the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance.  When 
they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter 
senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because 
they are making believe to speak French.  I have said already 
how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be 
gulled and led by the nose with the fag end of an old song.  
And it goes deeper than this: when children are together even 
a meal is felt as an interruption in the business of life; and 
they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves 
some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render 
entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking.  
What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern 
upon tea-cups! - from which there followed a code of rules and 
a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take 
rank as a game.  When my cousin and I took our porridge of a 
morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal.  
He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country 
continually buried under snow.  I took mine with milk, and 
explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation.  
You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an 
island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with 
snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in 
cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was 
always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last 
corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew 
smaller every moment; and how in fine, the food was of 
altogether secondary importance, and might even have been 
nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.  But 
perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were 
in the case of calves' feet jelly.  It was hardly possible not 
to believe - and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did 
all I could to favour the illusion - that some part of it was 
hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the 
secret tabernacle of the golden rock.  There, might some 
miniature RED BEARD await his hour; there, might one find the 
treasures of the FORTY THIEVES, and bewildered Cassim beating 
about the walls.  And so I quarried on slowly, with bated 
breath, savouring the interest.  Believe me, I had little 
palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste 
when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because 
the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.

Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-
minded children.  It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-
eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, 
and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend 
themselves to almost any sort of fable.  And thus cricket, 
which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing 
and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving.  It 
is a game, if you like, but not a game of play.  You cannot 
tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls 
forth can be justified on no rational theory.  Even football, 
although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow 
of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young 
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little 
boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, 
and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with 
an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a 
sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian 
nations.

To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted 
about the bringing up of children.  Surely they dwell in a 
mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their 
parents.  What can they think of them? what can they make of 
these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their 
games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown 
designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the 
tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again 
reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the 
prerogatives of age?  Off goes the child, corporally smarting, 
but morally rebellious.  Were there ever such unthinkable 
deities as parents?  I would give a great deal to know what, 
in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling.  
A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at 
best very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of 
terror for the untried residue of mankind go to make up the 
attraction that he feels.  No wonder, poor little heart, with 
such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the 
hand he knows!  The dread irrationality of the whole affair, 
as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to 
forget.  "O, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can 
we not all be happy and devote ourselves to play?"  And when 
children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much 
the same purpose.

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these 
considerations; that whatever we are to expect at the hands of 
children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about 
matters of fact.  They walk in a vain show, and among mists 
and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned 
about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; 
and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach 
them what we mean by abstract truthfulness.  When a bad writer 
is inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of 
years, we charge him with incompetence and not with 
dishonesty.  And why not extend the same allowance to 
imperfect speakers?  Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about 
poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we 
excuse them heartily from blame.  But show us a miserable, 
unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession it is to take 
a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly 
stiletto, and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream 
and the rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be 
as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing 
evidence.  Upon my heart, I think it less than decent.  You do 
not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to 
weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he 
cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a 
gingerbread dragoon.

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very 
inquiring as to the precise truth of stories.  But indeed this 
is a very different matter, and one bound up with the subject 
of play, and the precise amount of playfulness, or 
playability, to be looked for in the world.  Many such burning 
questions must arise in the course of nursery education.  
Among the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the 
pretty soldier and the terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is 
not, the child to expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran?  Is he, or 
is he not, to look out for magicians, kindly and potent?  May 
he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast away upon a 
desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that 
he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a 
cruise in his own toy schooner?  Surely all these are 
practical questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a 
view to play.  Precision upon such a point, the child can 
understand.  But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour, 
as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and 
such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone 
by a forbidden path, - why, he can see no moment in the 
inquiry, and it is ten to one, he has already half forgotten 
and half bemused himself with subsequent imaginings.

It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, 
where they figure so prettily - pretty like flowers and 
innocent like dogs.  They will come out of their gardens soon 
enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box.  
Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent!  Let them doze 
among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a 
rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?



CHAPTER X - WALKING TOURS



IT must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some 
would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing 
the country.  There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as 
good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, 
than from a railway train.  But landscape on a walking tour is 
quite accessory.  He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not 
voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly 
humours - of the hope and spirit with which the march begins 
at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the 
evening's rest.  He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack 
on, or takes it off, with more delight.  The excitement of the 
departure puts him in key for that of the arrival.  Whatever 
he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be further 
rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure 
in an endless chain.  It is this that so few can understand; 
they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an 
hour; they do not play off the one against the other, prepare 
all day for the evening, and all evening for the next day.  
And, above all, it is here that your overwalker fails of 
comprehension.  His heart rises against those who drink their 
curacoa in liqueur glasses, when he himself can swill it in a 
brown john.  He will not believe that the flavour is more 
delicate in the smaller dose.  He will not believe that to 
walk this unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy and 
brutalise himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort 
of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in 
his spirit.  Not for him the mild luminous evening of the 
temperate walker!  He has nothing left of man but a physical 
need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if 
he be a smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted.  It is 
the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is 
needed to obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; 
he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes further and 
fares worse.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be 
gone upon alone.  If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it 
is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is 
something else and more in the nature of a picnic.  A walking 
tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the 
essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and 
follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because 
you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a 
champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.  And then you 
must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take 
colour from what you see.  You should be as a pipe for any 
wind to play upon.  "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of 
walking and talking at the same time.  When I am in the 
country I wish to vegetate like the country," - which is the 
gist of all that can be said upon the matter.  There should be 
no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative 
silence of the morning.  And so long as a man is reasoning he 
cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes 
of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of 
dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that 
passes comprehension.

During the first day or so of any tour there are moments 
of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly 
towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it 
bodily over the hedge and, like Christian on a similar 
occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing."  And yet it 
soon acquires a property of easiness.  It becomes magnetic; 
the spirit of the journey enters into it.  And no sooner have 
you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of 
sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a 
shake, and fall at once into your stride.  And surely, of all 
possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the 
best.  Of course, if he WILL keep thinking of his anxieties, 
if he WILL open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-
arm with the hag - why, wherever he is, and whether he walk 
fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy.  And 
so much the more shame to himself!  There are perhaps thirty 
men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large 
wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.  It 
would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one 
after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the 
first few miles upon the road.  This one, who walks fast, with 
a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind; 
he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the 
landscape to words.  This one peers about, as he goes, among 
the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies; 
he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough 
upon the complacent kine.  And here comes another, talking, 
laughing, and gesticulating to himself.  His face changes from 
time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger 
clouds his forehead.  He is composing articles, delivering 
orations, and conducting the most impassioned interviews, by 
the way.  A little farther on, and it is as like as not he 
will begin to sing.  And well for him, supposing him to be no 
great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid 
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know 
which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer 
the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of 
your clown.  A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to 
the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no 
wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by.  I knew 
one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, 
although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as 
he went like a child.  And you would be astonished if I were 
to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed 
to me that, when on walking tours, they sang - and sang very 
ill - and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the 
inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from round a 
corner.  And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is 
Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay ON GOING A JOURNEY, 
which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who 
have not read it:-

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and 
the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and 
a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking!  It is 
hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.  I 
laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."

Bravo!  After that adventure of my friend with the 
policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish 
that in the first person?  But we have no bravery nowadays, 
and, even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish 
as our neighbours.  It was not so with Hazlitt.  And notice 
how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the 
theory of walking tours.  He is none of your athletic men in 
purple stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three 
hours' march is his ideal.  And then he must have a winding 
road, the epicure!

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, 
one thing in the great master's practice that seems to me not 
wholly wise.  I do not approve of that leaping and running.  
Both of these hurry the respiration; they both shake up the 
brain out of its glorious open-air confusion; and they both 
break the pace.  Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the 
body, and it distracts and irritates the mind.  Whereas, when 
once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no 
conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents 
you from thinking earnestly of anything else.  Like knitting, 
like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and 
sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind.  We can think 
of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child thinks, or 
as we think in a morning dose; we can make puns or puzzle out 
acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and 
rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to 
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the 
trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the 
mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at 
home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his 
own private thought!