We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good,
and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us
fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make
us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught
colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till
the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to
the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the
oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair
notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of
three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic
beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we
prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that
gives them their charms in our eyes. The "old blue" that we hang about
our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a
few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses
that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they
understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the
eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day
always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-
pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in
the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the
beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now
break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and
stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It
is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots.
Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to
verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of
art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even
my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by
the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug
up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and
will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will
pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth
of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of
the tail that is lost no doubt was.
We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar
with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their
loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china
dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will
have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and
say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as "those grand
old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those
china dogs."
The "sampler" that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as
"tapestry of the Victorian era," and be almost priceless. The blue-and-
white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked
and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use
them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the
"Presents from Ramsgate," and "Souvenirs of Margate," that may have
escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English
curios.
At this point Harris threw away the sculls, got up and left his seat, and
sat on his back, and stuck his legs in the air. Montmorency howled, and
turned a somersault, and the top hamper jumped up, and all the things
came out.
I was somewhat surprised, but I did not lose my temper. I said,
pleasantly enough:
"Hulloa! what's that for?"
"What's that for? Why - "
No, on second thoughts, I will not repeat what Harris said. I may have
been to blame, I admit it; but nothing excuses violence of language and
coarseness of expression, especially in a man who has been carefully
brought up, as I know Harris has been. I was thinking of other things,
and forgot, as any one might easily understand, that I was steering, and
the consequence was that we had got mixed up a good deal with the tow-
path. It was difficult to say, for the moment, which was us and which
was the Middlesex bank of the river; but we found out after a while, and
separated ourselves.
Harris, however, said he had done enough for a bit, and proposed that I
should take a turn; so, as we were in, I got out and took the tow-line,
and ran the boat on past Hampton Court. What a dear old wall that is
that runs along by the river there! I never pass it without feeling
better for the sight of it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old wall; what
a charming picture it would make, with the lichen creeping here, and the
moss growing there, a shy young vine peeping over the top at this spot,
to see what is going on upon the busy river, and the sober old ivy
clustering a little farther down! There are fifty shades and tints and
hues in every ten yards of that old wall. If I could only draw, and knew
how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch of that old wall, I'm sure.
I've often thought I should like to live at Hampton Court. It looks so
peaceful and so quiet, and it is such a dear old place to ramble round in
the early morning before many people are about.
But, there, I don't suppose I should really care for it when it came to
actual practice. It would be so ghastly dull and depressing in the
evening, when your lamp cast uncanny shadows on the panelled walls, and
the echo of distant feet rang through the cold stone corridors, and now
drew nearer, and now died away, and all was death-like silence, save the
beating of one's own heart.
We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life.
That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows
more and more deserted every year. In the sunlight - in the daytime,
when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides
and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth
has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome,
and we get frightened, like children in a silent house. Then we sit and
sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and
the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in
the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There
are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad.
Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a
million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.
Harris asked me if I'd ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said
he went in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a
map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish - hardly worth the
twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must
have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the
real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris
took in. He said:
"We'll just go in here, so that you can say you've been, but it's very
simple. It's absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first
turning to the right. We'll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go
and get some lunch."
They met some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had
been there for three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it.
Harris told them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going
in, and then should turn round and come out again. They said it was very
kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.
They picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they
went along, until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze. People
who had given up all hopes of ever getting either in or out, or of ever
seeing their home and friends again, plucked up courage at the sight of
Harris and his party, and joined the procession, blessing him. Harris
said he should judge there must have been twenty people, following him,
in all; and one woman with a baby, who had been there all the morning,
insisted on taking his arm, for fear of losing him.
Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his
cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze.
"Oh, one of the largest in Europe," said Harris.
"Yes, it must be," replied the cousin, "because we've walked a good two
miles already."
Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at
last, they passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris's
cousin swore he had noticed there seven minutes ago. Harris said: "Oh,
impossible!" but the woman with the baby said, "Not at all," as she
herself had taken it from the child, and thrown it down there, just
before she met Harris. She also added that she wished she never had met
Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was an impostor. That made
Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained his theory.
"The map may be all right enough," said one of the party, "if you know
whereabouts in it we are now."
Harris didn't know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to
go back to the entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part
of it there was not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability
of going back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they
turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite direction. About
ten minutes more passed, and then they found themselves in the centre.
Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what he had been
aiming at; but the crowd looked dangerous, and he decided to treat it as
an accident.
Anyhow, they had got something to start from then. They did know where
they were, and the map was once more consulted, and the thing seemed
simpler than ever, and off they started for the third time.
And three minutes later they were back in the centre again.
After that, they simply couldn't get anywhere else. Whatever way they
turned brought them back to the middle. It became so regular at length,
that some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take
a walk round, and come back to them. Harris drew out his map again,
after a while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told
him to go and curl his hair with it. Harris said that he couldn't help
feeling that, to a certain extent, he had become unpopular.
They all got crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper, and the man came
and climbed up the ladder outside, and shouted out directions to them.
But all their heads were, by this time, in such a confused whirl that
they were incapable of grasping anything, and so the man told them to
stop where they were, and he would come to them. They huddled together,
and waited; and he climbed down, and came in.
He was a young keeper, as luck would have it, and new to the business;
and when he got in, he couldn't find them, and he wandered about, trying
to get to them, and then HE got lost.
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