The Crown of Wild Olive
long, though I did not mean that. Away with you, children. You have
thought enough for to-day.
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.
_Sentence_ out of letter from May (who is staying with Isabel just now
at Cassel), dated 15th June, 1877:--
"I am reading the Ethics with a nice Irish girl who is staying here, and
she's just as puzzled as I've always been about the fire-flies, and we
both want to know so much.--Please be a very nice old Lecturer, and tell
us, won't you?"
Well, May, you never were a vain girl; so could scarcely guess that I
meant them for the light, unpursued vanities, which yet blind us,
confused among the stars. One evening, as I came late into Siena, the
fire-flies were flying high on a stormy sirocco wind,--the stars
themselves no brighter, and all their host seeming, at moments, to fade
as the insects faded.
FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL.
On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in this
year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the
hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded
College of Dulwich.
In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for
some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,
little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by
blackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it:
growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a
primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in
autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there
are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning
dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the
hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and
deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-water
shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of
tadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered
themselves to my boyhood's pleased, and not inaccurate, observation.
There, my mother and I used to gather the first buds of the hawthorn;
and there, in after years, I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a
place wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any passage I
wanted to make better than usual in _Modern Painters_.
So, as aforesaid, on the first kindly day of this year, being thoughtful
more than usual of those old times, I went to look again at the place.
Often, both in those days, and since, I have put myself hard to it,
vainly, to find words wherewith to tell of beautiful things; but beauty
has been in the world since the world was made, and human language can
make a shift, somehow, to give account of it, whereas the peculiar
forces of devastation induced by modern city life have only entered the
world lately; and no existing terms of language known to me are enough
to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin, that varied
themselves along the course of Croxsted Lane. The fields on each side of
it are now mostly dug up for building, or cut through into gaunt corners
and nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and concurrencies of
three railroads. Half a dozen handfuls of new cottages, with Doric
doors, are dropped about here and there among the gashed ground: the
lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a deep-rutted, heavy-hillocked
cart-road, diverging gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of
waste; and bordered on each side by heaps of--Hades only knows
what!--mixed dust of every unclean thing that can crumble in drought,
and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes
and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery,
shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen
garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with
out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure,
indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering
foully here and there over all these,--remnants broadcast, of every
manner of newspaper, advertisement or big-lettered bill, festering and
flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and
mortal slime.
The lane ends now where its prettiest windings once began; being cut off
by a cross-road leading out of Dulwich to a minor railway station: and
on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy
of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised
carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good
attached gardens and offices--most of these tenements being larger--all
more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than
my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became
matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children
resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thus
brought up at the same distance from London, and in the same or better
circumstances of worldly fortune; but with only Croxsted Lane in its
present condition for their country walk. The trimly kept road before
their doors, such as one used to see in the fashionable suburbs of
Cheltenham or Leamington, presents nothing to their study but gravel,
and gas-lamp posts; the modern addition of a vermilion letter-pillar
contributing indeed to the splendour, but scarcely to the interest of
the scene; and a child of any sense or fancy would hastily contrive
escape from such a barren desert of politeness, and betake itself to
investigation, such as might be feasible, of the natural history of
Croxsted Lane.
But, for its sense or fancy, what food, or stimulus, can it find, in
that foul causeway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened
to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have
got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer
or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed from the
instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite
nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the
face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,
what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of
scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of
corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms
with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified
the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.
One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;
namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of
the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into
fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of imaginative
literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and the
conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere
of low vitality, have become the most valued material of modern
fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy.
The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be massed
under a few general heads.
I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the
population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,
as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and
infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The
resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in
a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly
developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the
description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.
In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,
of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his
two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He
marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and
provides for his favourite a separate and clandestine establishment with
her lover. On his deathbed, he sends for this favourite daughter, who
wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,
and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief
ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.
This story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and
spectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large
city. A village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his
daughters to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children
brought to him, if in the neighbourhood, by fear of village gossip, if
for no better cause.
II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of science
in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefullest
forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere
trampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to the
sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightful
in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them for
evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and of
their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokes
and crushes them into perdition, brings every law of healthy existence
into question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope into
doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and
self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the
intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all
sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its
impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric,
partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigour of
manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic Providence; showing how
everybody's fault is somebody else's, how infection has no law,
digestion no will, and profitable dirt no dishonour.
And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be called
the Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection with
the more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent tone
of clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; while
the inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laborious
scholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for its
practice.
III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great modern
city, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended to
be derived by men from the sight of nature, or the sense of art, is
forbidden for ever, leaves the craving of the heart for a sincere, yet
changeful, interest, to be fed from one source only. Under natural
conditions the degree of mental excitement necessary to bodily health is
provided by the course of the seasons, and the various skill and fortune
of agriculture. In the country every morning of the year brings with it
a new aspect of springing or fading nature; a new duty to be fulfilled
upon earth, and a new promise or warning in heaven. No day is without
its innocent hope, its special prudence, its kindly gift, and its
sublime danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, and every
effort of contending or remedial courage, the wholesome passions, pride,
and bodily power of the labourer are excited and exerted in happiest
unison. The companionship of domestic, the care of serviceable, animals,
soften and enlarge his life with lowly charities, and discipline him in
familiar wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the divine laws of
seed-time which cannot be recalled, harvest which cannot be hastened,