Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived 
longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep 
they claim they were still active; and among the treasures of 
memory that all men review for their amusement, these count in no 
second place the harvests of their dreams.  There is one of this 
kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual 
enough to be described.  He was from a child an ardent and 
uncomfortable dreamer.  When he had a touch of fever at night, and 
the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, 
now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away 
into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the 
poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and struggled 
hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning 
of sorrows.

But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the night-hag would 
have him by the throat, and pluck him strangling and screaming, 
from his sleep.  His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at 
times very strange, at times they were almost formless:  he would 
be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than a certain 
hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was 
awake, but feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at times, 
again, they took on every detail of circumstance, as when once he 
supposed he must swallow the populous world, and awoke screaming 
with the horror of the thought.  The two chief troubles of his very 
narrow existence - the practical and everyday trouble of school 
tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judgment - were 
often confounded together into one appalling nightmare.  He seemed 
to himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called 
on, poor little devil, to recite some form of words, on which his 
destiny depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell 
gaped for him; and he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with 
his knees to his chin.

These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that 
time of life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his 
power of dreams.  But presently, in the course of his growth, the 
cries and physical contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his 
visions were still for the most part miserable, but they were more 
constantly supported; and he would awake with no more extreme 
symptom than a flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the 
speechless midnight fear.  His dreams, too, as befitted a mind 
better stocked with particulars, became more circumstantial, and 
had more the air and continuity of life.  The look of the world 
beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a 
part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so that he 
would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and 
beautiful places as he lay in bed.  And, what is more significant, 
an odd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories 
laid in that period of English history, began to rule the features 
of his dreams; so that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat 
and was much engaged with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for 
bed and that for breakfast.  About the same time, he began to read 
in his dreams - tales, for the most part, and for the most part 
after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid 
and moving than any printed book, that he has ever since been 
malcontent with literature.

And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-
adventure which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to 
say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life - one of 
the day, one of the night - one that he had every reason to believe 
was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be 
false.  I should have said he studied, or was by way of studying, 
at Edinburgh College, which (it may be supposed) was how I came to 
know him.  Well, in his dream-life, he passed a long day in the 
surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing 
monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons.  In 
a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, 
turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall LAND, at 
the top of which he supposed himself to lodge.  All night long, in 
his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in 
endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a 
reflector.  All night long, he brushed by single persons passing 
downward - beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy 
labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women - but all 
drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing 
against him as they passed.  In the end, out of a northern window, 
he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the 
ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the 
streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to 
another day of monstrosities and operations.  Time went quicker in 
the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can guess) to 
one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom of 
these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken 
off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them.  I 
cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it 
was long enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long 
enough to send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a 
certain doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to 
the common lot of man.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort; 
indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank, 
now chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes 
appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no 
extraordinary kind.  I will just note one of these occasions, ere I 
pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting.  It seemed to 
him that he was in the first floor of a rough hill-farm.  The room 
showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a 
piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, 
there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside 
people, and set in miles of heather.  He looked down from the 
window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused.  
A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world.  There was no sign of 
the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly 
dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall of 
the house and seemed to be dozing.  Something about this dog 
disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for the 
beast looked right enough - indeed, he was so old and dull and 
dusty and broken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity; 
and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was 
no proper dog at all, but something hellish.  A great many dozing 
summer flies hummed about the yard; and presently the dog thrust 
forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his 
mouth like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the 
window, winked to him with one eye.  The dream went on, it matters 
not how it went; it was a good dream as dreams go; but there was 
nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish brown dog.  And the 
point of interest for me lies partly in that very fact:  that 
having found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should 
prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on 
indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors.  It would be 
different now; he knows his business better!

For, to approach at last the point:  This honest fellow had long 
been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so 
had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, 
told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or 
the thwart reviewer:  tales where a thread might be dropped, or one 
adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion.  So 
that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as 
yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage 
like children who should have slipped into the house and found it 
empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a 
huge hall of faces.  But presently my dreamer began to turn his 
former amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account; by 
which I mean that he began to write and sell his tales.  Here was 
he, and here were the little people who did that part of his 
business, in quite new conditions.  The stories must now be trimmed 
and pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to 
an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the 
pleasure, in one word, had become a business; and that not only for 
the dreamer, but for the little people of his theatre.  These 
understood the change as well as he.  When he lay down to prepare 
himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and 
profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his 
little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile 
designs.  All other forms of dream deserted him but two:  he still 
occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at 
times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note 
that to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at 
intervals of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting 
new neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects of 
noon and dawn and sunset.  But all the rest of the family of 
visions is quite lost to him:  the common, mangled version of 
yesterday's affairs, the raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, 
rumoured to be the child of toasted cheese - these and their like 
are gone; and, for the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is 
simply occupied - he or his little people - in consciously making 
stories for the market.  This dreamer (like many other persons) has 
encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune.  When the bank 
begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, 
he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his 
readiest money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin 
to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, 
and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their 
lighted theatre.  No fear of his being frightened now; the flying 
heart and the frozen scalp are things by-gone; applause, growing 
applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own 
cleverness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant 
leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, that'll do!" upon 
his lips:  with such and similar emotions he sits at these 
nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, 
he scatters the performance in the midst.  Often enough the waking 
is a disappointment:  he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the 
thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone 
stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the 
awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities.  And yet how 
often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and 
given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better 
tales than he could fashion for himself.

Here is one, exactly as it came to him.  It seemed he was the son 
of a very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most 
damnable temper.  The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much 
abroad, on purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he 
returned to England, it was to find him married again to a young 
wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke.  
Because of this marriage (as the dreamer indistinctly understood) 
it was desirable for father and son to have a meeting; and yet both 
being proud and both angry, neither would condescend upon a visit.  
Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the sea; 
and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some intolerable 
insult, struck down the father dead.  No suspicion was aroused; the 
dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the 
broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with 
his father's widow, for whom no provision had been made.  These two 
lived very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down 
to table together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better 
friends; until it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying 
about dangerous matters, that she had conceived a notion of his 
guilt, that she watched him and tried him with questions.  He drew 
back from her company as men draw back from a precipice suddenly 
discovered; and yet so strong was the attraction that he would 
drift again and again into the old intimacy, and again and again be 
startled back by some suggestive question or some inexplicable 
meaning in her eye.  So they lived at cross purposes, a life full 
of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion; 
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil, 
followed her to the station, followed her in the train to the 
seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where 
the murder was done.  There she began to grope among the bents, he 
watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something 
in her hand - I cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly 
evidence against the dreamer - and as she held it up to look at it, 
perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she 
hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand-wreaths.  He had 
no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and there they stood 
face to face, she with that deadly matter openly in her hand - his 
very presence on the spot another link of proof.  It was plain she 
was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear - he could 
bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his destroyer; and he 
cut her short with trivial conversation.  Arm in arm, they returned 
together to the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey 
back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the 
evening in the drawing-room as in the past.  But suspense and fear 
drummed in the dreamer's bosom.  "She has not denounced me yet" - 
so his thoughts ran - "when will she denounce me?  Will it be to-
morrow?"  And it was not to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next; 
and their life settled back on the old terms, only that she seemed 
kinder than before, and that, as for him, the burthen of his 
suspense and wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he wasted 
away like a man with a disease.  Once, indeed, he broke all bounds 
of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her 
room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning 
evidence.  There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, 
in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent 
behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and 
then the door opened, and behold herself.  So, once more, they 
stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them; and once more 
she raised to him a face brimming with some communication; and once 
more he shied away from speech and cut her off.  But before he left 
the room, which he had turned upside down, he laid back his death-
warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face lighted up.  
The next thing he heard, she was explaining to her maid, with some 
ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things.  Flesh and blood 
could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next 
morning (though chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the 
mind) that he burst from his reserve.  They had been breakfasting 
together in one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished 
room of many windows; all the time of the meal she had tortured him 
with sly allusions; and no sooner were the servants gone, and these 
two protagonists alone together, than he leaped to his feet.  She 
too sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face, she heard him as 
he raved out his complaint:  Why did she torture him so? she knew 
all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not denounce him 
at once? what signified her whole behaviour? why did she torture 
him? and yet again, why did she torture him?  And when he had done, 
she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands:   "Do you not 
understand?" she cried.  "I love you!"

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer 
awoke.  His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it 
soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were 
unmarketable elements; which is just the reason why you have it 
here so briefly told.  But his wonder has still kept growing; and I 
think the reader's will also, if he consider it ripely.  For now he 
sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive inventors 
and performers.  To the end they had kept their secret.  I will go 
bail for the dreamer (having excellent grounds for valuing his 
candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman - 
the hinge of the whole well-invented plot - until the instant of 
that highly dramatic declaration.  It was not his tale; it was the 
little people's!  And observe:  not only was the secret kept, the 
story was told with really guileful craftsmanship.  The conduct of 
both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and 
the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax.  I am 
awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it.  I am 
awake, and I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo - 
could not perhaps equal - that crafty artifice (as of some old, 
experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which 
the same situation is twice presented and the two actors twice 
brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in her 
hand, once in his - and these in their due order, the least 
dramatic first.  The more I think of it, the more I am moved to 
press upon the world my question:  Who are the Little People?  They 
are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in 
his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share 
plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to 
build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in 
progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one 
thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, 
like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where 
they aim.  Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less 
a person than myself; - as I might have told you from the 
beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism; 
- and as I am positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance 
but little farther with my story.  And for the Little People, what 
shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do 
one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human 
likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and 
fondly suppose I do it for myself.  That part which is done while I 
am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which 
is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, 
since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.  
Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience.  For myself - 
what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland 
unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with 
the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat 
and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his 
candidate at the general elections - I am sometimes tempted to 
suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of 
fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to 
the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my 
published fiction should be the single-handed product of some 
Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep 
locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a 
share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding.  I am an 
excellent adviser, something like Moliere's servant; I pull back 
and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and 
sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do 
the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when 
all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; 
so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so 
largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and 
what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there 
are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do 
this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been 
polite enough to read, the STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.  
I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a 
body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which 
must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking 
creature.  I had even written one, THE TRAVELLING COMPANION, which 
was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius 
and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that 
it was not a work of genius, and that JEKYLL had supplanted it.  
Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an 
elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person.  For 
two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and 
on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene 
afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took 
the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his 
pursuers.  All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I 
think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.  The 
meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in 
my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; 
indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have 
not a rudiment of what we call a conscience.  Mine, too, is the 
setting, mine the characters.  All that was given me was the matter 
of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change 
becoming involuntary.  Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have 
been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if 
I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the arena of the 
critics?  For the business of the powders, which so many have 
censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the 
Brownies'.  Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced 
at it, I may say a word:  the not very defensible story of OLALLA.  
Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's 
chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly 
scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk and detail as I have 
tried to write them; to this I added only the external scenery (for 
in my dream I never was beyond the court), the portrait, the 
characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and 
the last pages, such as, alas! they are.  And I may even say that 
in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose 
immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and 
from the hideous trick of atavism in the first.  Sometimes a 
parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; 
sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, 
and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a 
tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead 
of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem 
to perceive in the arabesque of time and space.

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat 
fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the 
picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no 
prejudice against the supernatural.  But the other day they gave me 
a surprise, entertaining me with a love-story, a little April 
comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the author of A 
CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE, for he could write it as it should be written, 
and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I cannot. - But who 
would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for 
Mr. Howells?



CHAPTER IX - BEGGARS



IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune when I was 
young to make the acquaintance of a certain beggar.  I call him 
beggar, though he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which 
were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg for him.  He was the wreck of an 
athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, 
with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on his face; 
but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the 
ready military salute.  Three ways led through this piece of 
country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must 
often have awaited me in vain.  But often enough, he caught me; 
often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he would 
spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at 
once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my 
farther course.  "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle 
inclining to rain.  I hope I see you well, sir.  Why, no, sir, I 
don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about 
my ordinary.  I am pleased to meet you on the road, sir.  I assure 
you I quite look forward to one of our little conversations."  He 
loved the sound of his own voice inordinately, and though (with 
something too off-hand to call servility) he would always hasten to 
agree with anything you said, yet he could never suffer you to say 
it to an end.  By what transition he slid to his favourite subject 
I have no memory; but we had never been long together on the way 
before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the English 
poets.  "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle atheistical 
in his opinions.  His Queen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical work.  
Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer.  With the works of 
Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet.  
Keats - John Keats, sir - he was a very fine poet."  With such 
references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own 
knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward uphill, his 
staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now 
swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private 
soldier; and all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and 
his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of his 
smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.

He would often go the whole way home with me:  often to borrow a 
book, and that book always a poet.  Off he would march, to continue 
his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of 
his ragged coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a 
while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the worse 
for its travels into beggardom.  And in this way, doubtless, his 
knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism took a wider range.  
But my library was not the first he had drawn upon:  at our first 
encounter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical 
Queen Mab, and "Keats - John Keats, sir."  And I have often 
wondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I often 
wondered how he fell to be a beggar.  He had served through the 
Mutiny - of which (like so many people) he could tell practically 
nothing beyond the names of places, and that it was "difficult 
work, sir," and very hot, or that so-and-so was "a very fine 
commander, sir."  He was far too smart a man to have remained a 
private; in the nature of things, he must have won his stripes.  
And yet here he was without a pension.  When I touched on this 
problem, he would content himself with diffidently offering me 
advice.  "A man should be very careful when he is young, sir.  If 
you'll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentleman like 
yourself, sir, should be very careful.  I was perhaps a trifle 
inclined to atheistical opinions myself."  For (perhaps with a 
deeper wisdom than we are inclined in these days to admit) he 
plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer and skittles.

Keats - John Keats, sir - and Shelley were his favourite bards.  I 
cannot remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste 
to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author.  
What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, 
the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense 
of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet:  
the romance of language.  His honest head was very nearly empty, 
his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite 
authors, he can almost never have understood what he was reading.  
Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I tried in 
vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for 
nothing but romantic language that he could not understand.  The 
case may be commoner than we suppose.  I am reminded of a lad who 
was laid in the next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital 
and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his 
last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare.  My friend pricked up his 
ears; fell at once in talk with his new neighbour, and was ready, 
when the book arrived, to make a singular discovery.  For this 
lover of great literature understood not one sentence out of 
twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he understood the 
least - the inimitable, mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in 
HAMLET.  It was a bright day in hospital when my friend expounded 
the sense of this beloved jargon:  a task for which I am willing to 
believe my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it as an 
easy one.  I know indeed a point or two, on which I would gladly 
question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit 
the glimpses of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to the 
spacious days of Elizabeth.  But in the second case, I should most 
likely pretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in 
the pit at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite 
part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out - as I seem to 
hear him - with a ponderous gusto-

"Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd."

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party I and what 
a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost received the honours of 
the evening!

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is 
long since dead; and now lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and 
quite forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. - But not for me, you 
brave heart, have you been buried!  For me, you are still afoot, 
tasting the sun and air, and striding southward.  By the groves of 
Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters' Tryst, 
and where the curlews and plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see 
and hear you, stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully 
discoursing of uncomprehended poets.


II


The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his 
counterpart.  This was a little, lean, and fiery man, with the eyes 
of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped 
with his wife and children and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn 
of Kinnaird.  To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and 
daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued 
pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two stones, 
and smoked, and plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown 
water.  His children were mere whelps, they fought and bit among 
the fern like vermin.  His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather 
brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her 
lord while I was present.  The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a 
sty for pigs.  But the grinder himself had the fine self-
sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he 
did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the day 
before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am 
proud to remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint.  
Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; scarce flying higher 
than the story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly 
seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts, 
whether of poetry or music, adequately embodied in that somewhat 
obvious ditty,

"Will ye gang, lassie, gang
To the braes o' Balquidder."

- which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and 
to him, in view of his experience, must have found a special 
directness of address.  But if he had no fine sense of poetry in 
letters, he felt with a deep joy the poetry of life.  You should 
have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched beside 
the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest 
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking 
birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in 
cities; and with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once 
more pitched his camp in the living out-of-doors.  But we were a 
pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a 
consistent first-class passenger in life, he would scarce have laid 
himself so open; - to you, he might have been content to tell his 
story of a ghost - that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived 
- whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and 
that would have been enough, for that would have shown you the 
mettle of the man.  Here was a piece of experience solidly and 
livingly built up in words, here was a story created, TERES ATQUE 
ROTUNDUS.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literary bards!  
He had visited stranger spots than any seaside cave; encountered 
men more terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in 
that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War; played his part 
with the field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared 
in that enduring, savage anger and contempt of death and decency 
that, for long months together, bedevil'd and inspired the army; 
was hurled to and fro in the battle-smoke of the assault; was 
there, perhaps, where Nicholson fell; was there when the attacking 
column, with hell upon every side, found the soldier's enemy - 
strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the 
scale, and the fate of the flag of England staggered.  And of all 
this he had no more to say than "hot work, sir," or "the army 
suffered a great deal, sir," or "I believe General Wilson, sir, was 
not very highly thought of in the papers."  His life was naught to 
him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank:  in words his 
pleasure lay - melodious, agitated words - printed words, about 
that which he had never seen and was connatally incapable of 
comprehending.  We have here two temperaments face to face; both 
untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in the egg; both 
boldly charactered:  - that of the artist, the lover and artificer 
of words; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover and forger of 
experience.  If the one had a daughter and the other had a son, and 
these married, might not some illustrious writer count descent from 
the beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder?


III


Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.  
The burglar sells at the same time his own skill and courage and my 
silver plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew 
receiver.  The bandit sells the traveller an article of prime 
necessity:  that traveller's life.  And as for the old soldier, who 
stands for central mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt 
in a specially; for he was the only beggar in the world who ever 
gave me pleasure for my money.  He had learned a school of manners 
in the barracks and had the sense to cling to it, accosting 
strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking patrons with a merely 
regimental difference, sparing you at once the tragedy of his 
position and the embarrassment of yours.  There was not one hint 
about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting 
gratitude, the rant and cant, the "God bless you, Kind, Kind 
gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by 
disproportionate vehemence, which is so notably false, which would 
be so unbearable if it were true.  I am sometimes tempted to 
suppose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the old 
days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and mourners 
keened beside the death-bed; to think that we cannot now accept 
these strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just note of 
life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions.  
They wound us, I am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of 
keening (as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow like a 
buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a 
shudder of disgust.  But the fact disproves these amateur opinions.  
The beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man.  He knows 
what he is about when he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a 
babe, and poisons life with POOR MARY ANN or LONG, LONG AGO; he 
knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens 
the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know what they 
are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of cities, 
ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.  This 
trade can scarce be called an imposition; it has been so blown upon 
with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly.  We pay them 
as we pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of 
our drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain.  
We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and 
hurry on.  And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience 
like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations 
can be purchased for a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars?  And the 
answer is, Not one.  My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his 
ragged boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots 
were given him again and again, and always gladly accepted; and the 
next day, there he was on the road as usual, with toes exposed.  
His boots were his method; they were the man's trade; without his 
boots he would have starved; he did not live by charity, but by 
appealing to a gross taste in the public, which loves the limelight 
on the actor's face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots.  There 
is a true poverty, which no one sees:  a false and merely mimetic 
poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above all 
drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation.  The true poverty does not 
go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put 
a penny in its hand.  The self-respecting poor beg from each other; 
never from the rich.  To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to 
hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man 
might suppose that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it 
goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise.  In 
the houses of the working class, all day long there will be a foot 
upon the stair; all day long there will be a knocking at the doors; 
beggars come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with intermission, 
from morning till night; and meanwhile, in the same city and but a 
few streets off, the castles of the rich stand unsummoned.  Get the 
tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was always the poor who 
helped him; get the truth from any workman who has met misfortunes, 
it was always next door that he would go for help, or only with 
such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of 
the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he trails 
his passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even to 
the attics with his nasal song.  Here is a remarkable state of 
things in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be 
asked to give.


IV


There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who 
was taxed with ingratitude:  "IL FAUT SAVOIR GARDER L'INDEPENDANCE 
DU COEUR," cried he.  I own I feel with him.  Gratitude without 
familarity, gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a 
friendship, is a thing so near to hatred that I do not care to 
split the difference.  Until I find a man who is pleased to receive 
obligations, I shall continue to question the tact of those who are 
eager to confer them.  What an art it is, to give, even to our 
nearest friends! and what a test of manners, to receive!  How, upon 
either side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for each 
other; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, how falsely 
cheerful, the receiver!  And yet an act of such difficulty and 
distress between near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a 
total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions.  
The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an 
obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with!  But let us 
not be deceived:  unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger 
jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary:  gratitude and 
charity.  In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is 
not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is 
resented.  We are all too proud to take a naked gift:  we must seem 
to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our 
society.  Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is 
that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, 
and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:  that he 
has the money and lacks the love which should make his money 
acceptable.  Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the 
rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure:  
and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a 
recipient.  His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor 
are not his friends, they will not take.  To whom is he to give?  
Where to find - note this phase - the Deserving Poor?  Charity is 
(what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded, 
with secretaries paid or unpaid:  the hunt of the Deserving Poor 
goes merrily forward.  I think it will take more than a merely 
human secretary to disinter that character.  What! a class that is 
to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to 
receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the 
same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate 
part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of 
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:  - 
and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a 
needle's eye!  O, let him stick, by all means:  and let his polity 
tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of 
which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be 
abolished even from the history of man!  For a fool of this 
monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation:  and the fool 
who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the 
fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!


V


And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may 
take.  He may subscribe to pay the taxes.  There were the true 
charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, 
helping all.  There were a destination for loveless gifts; there 
were the way to reach the pocket of the deserving poor, and yet 
save the time of secretaries!  But, alas! there is no colour of 
romance in such a course; and people nowhere demand the picturesque 
so much as in their virtues.



CHAPTER X - LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE 
CAREER OF ART



WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of 
some practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) 
of some gravity to the world:  Should you or should you not become 
an artist?  It is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; 
all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the 
materials of that decision; and I will begin, as I shall probably 
conclude also, by assuring you that all depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.  
Youth is wholly experimental.  The essence and charm of that 
unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as 
ignorance of life.  These two unknowns the young man brings 
together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a 
bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but 
never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never 
with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment.  If he be a 
youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest of 
this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion to 
the pleasure he receives.  It is not beauty that he loves, nor 
pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his 
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the 
variety of human fate.  To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity 
is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of 
experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall 
in later days; or if there be any exception - and here destiny 
steps in - it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of the 
primary activity of the senses, he calls up before memory the image 
of transacted pains and pleasures.  Thus it is that such an one 
shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines insensibly 
toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and 
recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of 
all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing, 
it will pass gently away in the course of years.  Emphatically, it 
is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and 
when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so 
properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably 
some similar passage in his own experience.  For the temptation is 
perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare.  But again we 
have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are 
bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ARS ARTIUM and 
common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, 
and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet:  
all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge.  
And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to 
speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in 
literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may 
be found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, 
and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the 
necessary tools.  Lastly we come to those vocations which are at 
once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of 
pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse 
to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are 
born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the 
turning-lathe.  These are predestined; if a man love the labour of 
any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods 
have called him.  He may have the general vocation too:  he may 
have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the 
mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this 
inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps 
above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling 
enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and 
to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any 
expense of time and industry.  The book, the statue, the sonata, 
must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the 
unflagging spirit of children at their play.  IS IT WORTH DOING? - 
when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that 
question, it is implicitly answered in the negative.  It does not 
occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room 
sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour 
of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the 
bosom of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no 
room for hesitation:  follow your bent.  And observe (lest I should 
too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn 
so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly.  Habit and 
practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less 
disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small 
taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an 
exclusive passion.  Enough, just now, if you can look back over a 
fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than 
held its own among the thronging interests of youth.  Time will do 
the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be 
engrossed in that beloved occupation.