CHAPTER XVI

OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING

OF RICHARD ROCKNEY

Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,

our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The volcano we

couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an

armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of the

country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.

Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.

A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and

object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the

atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,

and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.

Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,

and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither

you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your

ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--Of

Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself in

short--the lower part of us. Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can

create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful

skies and the domestic English world spins with him. What he does not

like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what he

does like the consenting. If it is declared that argument will be

inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post. A hint of

his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.

Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency

from the example of our subject India. We may deem it native; perhaps of

its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own. Some have been so

venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting smiles

of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the

development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of the human bosom

are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed. Men,

for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort

of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we

behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something. One

thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the

utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the

colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any

suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no

attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.

Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger

across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will

have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to

the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as

horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the honours.

Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of

heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to

accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of

the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering

stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out

what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,

and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the

Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves,

manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other

Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful

as printed sheets. Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to mankind

from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles. Your

Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your

Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a

novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.

Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical

composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology, or

political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want war.

Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we

have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but

avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for

us, my worthy friends.

Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic

invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace is

a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the

pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's perusal

of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;

he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of

his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page fronting

him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously

confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such

thing as a present hour for man.

In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we have

him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the

spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken

him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit

of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions

project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the

phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his

globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and

justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on

the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of

both--the present of the good using of our powers. What can he show in

the Arts? What in Arms? His bards--O faithless! but they are men--his

bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility

of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They

question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,

our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his

trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God. They point

over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident

foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in

industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of

verse=-our supreme accomplishment.

Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his

pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is

down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,

lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports

from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all

great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining

apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what

poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in

times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the

generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at all costs,

he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock knighthood on

the heads of men of brains--even literary brains. They shall be knights,

an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a legislative, has not struck

him, for he has not yet imagined them a stable body. They require

petting, to persuade them to flourish and bring him esteem.

This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as

though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.

Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his

nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of

it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,

unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit

of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the

sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win

affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to

go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under a

discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful

speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is

in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim

its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is the

Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil the

charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch of

Bull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes, by

no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt to

be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a

vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy

grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle

conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours

auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,

ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And he is at

times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving, excessive,

very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch him, when to

be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to mention a

shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing of the

under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the advent

of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he does

mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he paid

the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish him. For men

with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund grotesque, with

his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of the pocket, his

fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is a shame and a

loathing. You attach small importance to images and symbols; yet if they

seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us, they are important.

The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the head, stamps the

character of our appearance and has a positive influence on our bearing.

Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded to act up to

them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword of division

between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one section. And the

Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their sensitiveness. They

serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields to which the world

has given glory. These execrate him as the full-grown Golden Calf of

heathenish worship. And they are so restive because they are so

patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts regarding

him. You have heard them. You tell us they are you: accurately, they

affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent outlines, tame bulk,

spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his imperviousness to whatsoever

does not confront the sensual eye of him with a cake or a fist, his

religious veneration of his habitual indulgences, his peculiar forms of

nightmare. They swear to his perfect personification of your moods, your

Saxon moods, which their inconsiderate spleen would have us take for

unmixedly Saxon. They are unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of

the foot on their necks, and they are of a blood demanding a

worshipworthy idea. And they dislike Bull's bellow of disrespect for

their religion, much bruited in the meadows during his periods of

Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget the sound: it hangs on the

afflicted drum of the ear when they are in another land, perhaps when the

old devotion to their priest has expired. For this, as well as for

material reasons, they hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles

of necessaries and relics, in the flight from home, and they instruct

their children to keep it burning. They transmit the sentiment of the

loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would be incapable of doing, even

with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed motherly Britannia the figure

sitting in the minds of men for our image--a palpitating figure, alive to

change, penetrable to thought, and not a stolid concrete of our

traditional old yeoman characteristic. Verily he lives for the present,

all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that there is no life for

him but of past and future: his delusion of the existence of a present

hour for man will not outlast the season of his eating and drinking

abundantly in security. He will perceive that it was no more than the

spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting forces; and penitently

will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids

wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him the bare machine for

those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment. He lives by reading

rearward and seeing vanward. He has no actual life save in power of

imagination. He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of all men.

Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has thrown too

extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his. The sight of a

broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with it is to

remove it from the field.

Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet

of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and

vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist

altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,

he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was

profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain. He had a

manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber

for proof of his knowing himself to be this person. He did not so much

write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic

sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her

man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic

assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of

the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard steel to

defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and the

monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special privileges

in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied her case,

was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to say

inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely, then

all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when distinguished

officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus of Rockney's

approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to bestow it. The

act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the objects

propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any man

adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his attachment.

If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed generally, they

travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they were precipitated,

the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at a more enlightened

passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others perchance might

equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the vigilant

circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge of the

right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others. Enough to

profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the newspaper

Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling a

puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for them

resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.

Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the

world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating

devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,

notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt of

sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened. One

secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of

Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the

bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our

streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the

island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads

in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:

how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked

on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly

ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the

consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon

shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:

the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand

upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication

of our not being the men we were.

But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,

instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his

meaning what he said. It was the personal throb. The fire of a mind was

translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the

rhetoric of primed scribes. He did away with the Biscay billow of the

leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction of sentences

that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and

gulped as equivalent to an idea. Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was

new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had

rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull. Though not alone in

working the change, he was the foremost. And he was not devoid of style.

Fervidness is the core of style. He was a tough opponent for his betters

in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.

An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present

us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics. It is

not imaginable among comparative pygmies. But Rockney's combat with his

fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the

Johnsonian in form. He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky

broadside of the enemy.

Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney

was the premier's pilot, or woe to him. Woe to the country as well, if

Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded. He was a man of

forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in the

voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to

command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance, a

more illumined prescience. Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul

course: this is the way for you! The refusal of the captain to go this

way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.

It was a drunken captain. Or how if a traitorous? We point out the danger

to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him guilty

either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named: one or the

other has him. Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived of a captain

having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.

Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in

fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts. Style

cast her aegis over him. He wore an armour in which he could walk, run

and leap-a natural style. The ardour of his temperament suffused the

directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made

his weakness and strength. Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness

was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the

weakness under the force of his blows. Thus there was nothing to teach

him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of

unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash

at walls.

How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question

himself! how constantly wrestle with himself! And if he be a writer

ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel

in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in

his charge! For on what is his forethought founded? Does he try the ring

of it with our changed conditions? Bus a man of forethought who has to be

one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever. His

apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of the

undeveloped dazzles his brain. He sees in time little else; his very

sincereness twists him awry. Such a man has the stuff of the born

journalist, and journalism is the food of the age. Ask him, however,

midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will answer

that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man. As to the

gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.

After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he

may less despise the age. He has to do it for his own sake. O gobbling

age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed, O

insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a stomach.

Furiously we disagree with you. We are in you to lead you or work you

pangs!

Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events. Rather no

journalism at all for him! He thought the office of the ordinary daily

preacher cowlike. His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;

he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of

business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard

on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of

things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism

of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to his voice when he

delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.

Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which incessant journalism

is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his prescience?

Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government not often. And,

dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators upon events,

manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals: advertisements do

not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a capricious moon.

Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably, you are in peril of collapsing:

show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal face, you are

steadily inflated. These reflections within us! Might not one almost say

that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far from the hustled

editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his voice instead of

diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper? A fund of gout was in

Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous

brain the strife had set in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety

of mind, though ideas remain closely consecutive and the utterance

resonant.

Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his

advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a

future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.

In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis

he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was

loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our monumental

image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot

constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the

gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary

record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them

by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of

them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely

in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,

consolatory to think of, though painful. The country has gone the wrong

road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that

we were prophetic.

Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,

Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets. Only Rockney fired to

chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus. The

revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to

belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us for

the disdainful fun of it. Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown with the

fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded valorous

people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a monstrous

defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his vision was of

the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead,

respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an

alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem, saw

the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to be

whipped out of him. Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the

prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any

Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt

anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is

to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his

malign contempt. Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic

England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war or

social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan

lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a

discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has

Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in

labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is

the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by

critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity

(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something

sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren point

his attention to. It is not seen, and though he can understand the perils

of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be ready

to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of a

connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his

heart. Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,

the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst to

give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:

meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted

that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw

to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until our

habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the

scum-surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being. A man of

forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the

people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,

even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at him,

goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and

Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to

temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the Celt,

in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than a

grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend. The material points in

a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here very

strong. Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish

Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable. You

may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your yoke-fellow

is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one for his

proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.

Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull. Believe in a future and

banish that gross obscuration of you. Decline to let that

old-yeoman-turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.

Speaking to the brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a

resolute sign from it to dismiss the brainless. Banish him your revels

and your debatings, prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to

his panics or his testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report

him at all, and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by

pothouse, privacy. The brain should lead, if there be a brain. Once free

of him, you will know that for half a century you have appeared bottom

upward to mankind. And you have wondered at the absence of love for you

under so astounding a presentation. Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can

dream of being, when his notions are in a similar state of inversion,

should be sheepish in hope for love.

He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in songful

gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and not to

England. You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable, allured

his imagination to the idea of England. Despite the passion for his

mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a hundred

years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he gladly

ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of

tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member of

strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the

legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican. The Cymry bear you no hatred;

their affection likewise is undefined. But there is reason to think that

America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of

Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and

where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their

children. Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of

ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and

forgets you. Be certain that the material grounds of division are not

all. To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your

presented shape. He cannot admire it. Gaelic Scots wind the same note of

repulsion.

And your poets are in a like predicament. Your poets are the most

persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism. They are in the

Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him his

hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are

condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint, the

picturesque. Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always

shrinkingly apart from him. They swell to a resemblance of their patron

if they stoop to woo his purse. He has, on hearing how that poets bring

praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare to

have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally them for their

shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain

from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre

of him. Ineffectual is that encouragement. Were he in the fire, melting

to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different. At his

pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song. He has perceived the

virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness to

make good use of them and inspire the poet. His own enrolled unrhythmical

bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his trumpeting best,

and offend not the Pierides.

This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be

excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,

to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it

running at full tide through the arteries. Preserve your worship, if the

object fills your optics. Better worship that than nothing, as it is

better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will

wreak circular mischief instead of illumining. You are requested simply

to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object

obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence. What

if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship,

it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but

worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of the

voraciously carnal. An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is conceivable

that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to wave as a

standard over their fraternal marching. Let Bull boo his drumliest at

such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have. He is the

obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the country,

the shots are aimed which seem so malignant. Him the gay manipulators

propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press, and across

the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion to batten

on. May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for it! But the

flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of those offices

which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh access of appetite

for the well-picked bone of his virtue. That ghastly apparition of the

fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of

the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his oils. To humour him,

and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep

underneath. While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or

the explosive powders are being secretly laid. He and his thousand

Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there will, the

wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before he

stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him. The theme is

chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives

it: that is, realistically; not with Bull's notion of the realism of the

butcher's shop and the pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted

raw and glaring in their streaks, but with the realism of the active

brain and heart conjoined. The reasons for the division of Celt and

Saxon, what they think and say of one another, often without knowing that

they are divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave

England, our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,

can afford to hear. Why not in a tale? It is he, your all for animal

pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example

teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you find

him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he

harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest

admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,

and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be

happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from

the pole-axe.

Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles

and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand. We have worn through a cloud

with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,

'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be

sunshine.