Part 12

Yet if there is nothing on which vague people are clear, and if they are not difficult to influence as the majority, there is much on which they are positive as a matter of private conviction. In opposition to the exhortation to be able to give a reason for the faith that is in us, they can give no reason for anything they believe, or fancy they believe. They are sure of the result; but the logical method by which that result has been reached is beyond their power to remember or understand. To argue with them is to spend labour and strength in vain, like trying to make ropes out of sea-sand. Beaten off at every point, they settle down again into the old vapoury, I believe; and it is like fighting with ghosts to attempt to convince them of a better way. They look at you helplessly; assent loosely to your propositions; but when you come to the necessary deduction, they double back in a vague assertion that they do not agree with you--they cannot prove you wrong but they are sure that they are right; and you know then that the collapse is hopeless. If this meant tenacity, it would be so far respectable, even though the conviction were erroneous; but it is the mere unimpressible fluidity of vagueness, the impossibility of giving shape and coherence to a floating fog or a formless haze.

Vague as to the basis of their beliefs, they are vaguer still as to their facts. These indeed are like a ladder of which half the rungs are missing. They never remember a story and they cannot describe what they have seen. Of the first they are sure to lose the point and to entangle the thread; of the last they forget all the details and confound both sequence and position. As to dates, they are as if lost in a wood when you require definite centuries, years, months; but they are great in the chronological generosity of 'about,' which is to them what the Middle Ages and Classic Times are to uncertain historians. It is as much as they can do to remember their own birthday; but they are never sure of their children's; and generally mix up names and ages in a manner that exasperates the young people like a personal insult.

With the best intentions in the world they do infinite mischief. They detail what they think they have heard of their neighbours' sayings and doings; but as they never detail anything exactly, nor twice alike, by the time they have told the story to half a dozen friends they have given currency to half a dozen different chimeras which never existed save in their own woolly imaginations. No repute is safe with them, even though they may be personally good-natured and anxious not to do any one harm; for they are so vague that they are always setting afloat exaggerations which are substantially falsehoods; and if you tell them the most innocent fact of any one you would not injure for worlds--say your daughter or your dearest friend--they are sure to repeat it with additions and distortions, till they have made it into a Frankenstein which no one now can subdue.

Beside this mental haziness, which neither sees nor shapes a fact correctly, vague people are loose and unstable in their habits. They know nothing of punctuality at home nor abroad; and you are never sure that you will not stumble on them at meal-times at what time soever you may call. But worse than this, your own meal-times, or any other times, are never safe from them. They float into your house uncertainly, vaguely, without purpose, with nothing to say and nothing to do, and for no reason that you can discover. And when they come they stay; and you cannot for the life of you find out what they want, nor why they have come at all. They invade you at all times; in your busy hours; on your sacred days; and sit there in a chaotic kind of silence, or with vague talk which tires your brains to bring to a focus. But they are too foggy to understand anything like a delicate hint, and if you want to get rid of them, you must risk a quarrel and effectively shoulder them out. They will be no loss. They are so much driftweed in your life, and you can make no good of them for yourself nor others.

Even when they undertake to help you, they do you more harm than good by the hazy way in which they understand, and the inexactness with which they carry out, your wishes. They volunteer to get you by favour the thing you want and cannot find in the general way of business--say, something of a peculiar shade of olive-green--and they bring you in triumph a brilliant cobalt. They know the very animal you are looking for, they say, with a confidence that impresses you, and they send to your stable a grey horse to match your bay pony; and if you trust to their uncontrolled action in your affairs, you find yourself committed to responsibilities you cannot meet and whereby you are brought to the verge of destruction.

They do all this mischief, not for want of goodwill but for want of definiteness of perception; and are as sorry as you are when they make 'pie' and not a legible sheet. Their desire is good, but a vague desire to help is equal to no help at all; or even worse--it is a positive evil, and throws you wrong by just so much as it attempts to set you straight. They are as unsatisfactory if you try to help them. They are in evil case, and you are philanthropically anxious to assist them. You think that one vigorous push would lift the car of their fortunes out of the rut in which it has stuck; and you go to them with the benevolent design of lending your shoulder as the lever. You question them as to the central fact which they wish changed; for you know that in most cases misfortunes crystallize round one such evil centre, which, being removed, the rest would go well. But your vague friends can tell you nothing. They point out this little superficial inconvenience, that small remediable annoyance, as the utmost they can do in the way of definiteness; but when you want to get to the core, you find nothing but a cloudy complaint of general ill-will, or a universal run of untoward circumstances with which you cannot grapple. To cut off the hydra's heads was difficult enough; but could even Hercules have decapitated the Djinn who rose in a volume of smoke from the fisherman's jar?

It is the same in matters of health. Only medical men know to the full the difficulty of dealing with vague people when it is necessary that these should be precise. They can localize no pain, define no sensations. If the doctor thinks he has caught hold of one leading symptom, it fades away as he tries to examine it; and, probe as he may, he comes to nothing more definite than a pervading sense of discomfort, which he must resolve into its causes as he best can. So with their suspicions; and vague people are often strangely suspicious and distrustful. They tell you in a loose kind of way that such or such a man is a rogue, such or such a woman no better than she should be. You ask them for their data--they have none; you suggest that they are mistaken, or at least that they should hold themselves as mistaken until they can prove the contrary, and you offer your version of the reputations aspersed--your vague friends listen to you amiably, then go back on their charge and say, 'I am sure of it'--which ends the conversation. They rely on their impression as other people rely on known facts; and a foggy belief is to them what a mathematical demonstration is to the exact.

In business matters they are simply maddening. They never have the necessary papers; they do not answer letters; they confuse your questions and reply at random or not at all; and they forget all dates and details. When they go to their lawyer on business they leave certificates and drafts behind them locked up where no one can get at them; or if they send directions and the keys, they tell the servant to look for an oblong blue envelope in the right-hand drawer, when they ought to have said a square white parcel in the left. They give you vague commissions to execute; and you have to find your way in the fog to the best of your ability. They say they want something like something else you have never seen, and they cannot give an address more exact than 'somewhere in Oxford Street.' They think the man's name is Baker, or something like that. Perhaps it is Flower; but the suggestion of ideas ought to be intelligible to you, and is quite near enough for them. They ask you to meet them when they come up to London, but they do not give you either the station or the train. You have to make a guess as near as you can; and when you reproach them, they pay you the compliment of saying you are so clever, it was not necessary for them to explain.

If they have any friends out in Australia or India, they inquire of you, just returned, if you happened to meet them? When you ask, Where were they stationed?--they say they do not know; and when you suggest that Madras and Calcutta are not in the same Presidencies, that India is a large place and Australia not quite like an English county, they look helpless and bewildered, and drift away into the vague geography familiar to them, 'somewhere in India,' 'somewhere in Australia,' and 'I thought you might have met them.' For geography, like history, is one of the branches of the tree of knowledge they have never climbed, and the fruits thereof are as though they were not.

But apart from the personal discomforts to which vague people subject themselves, and the absurdities of which they are guilty, one cannot help speculating on the spiritual state of folks to whom nothing is precise, nothing definite, and no question of faith clearly thought out. To be sure they may be great in the realm of conviction; but so is the African savage when he hears the ghosts of his ancestors pass howling in the woods; so is the Assassin of the Mountain, when he sees heaven open as he throws himself on the spears of his enemies in an ecstacy of faith, to be realized by slaughter and suicide. Convictions based on imagination, unsupported by facts or proofs, are as worthless in a moral as in a logical point of view; but the vague have nothing better; and whether as politicians or as pietists, though they are warm partizans they are but feeble advocates, fond of flourishing about large generalities, but impossible to be pinned to any point and unable to defend any position. To those who must have something absolute and precise, however limited--one inch of firmly-laid foundation on which to build up the superstructure--it is a matter of more wonder than envy how the vague are content to live for ever in a haze which has no clearness of outline, no definiteness of detail, and how they can make themselves happy in a name--calling their fog faith, and therewith counting themselves blessed.

_ARCADIA._

Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible to adult life is to be found in the first weeks of the summer's holiday, when the hard-worked man of business leaves his office and all its anxieties behind him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a couple of months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh to him, it is like the renewal of his boyhood; and if he happens to have chosen a picturesque place, where the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders how it is that people who can stay here ever leave, or tire of the beauties that are so delightful to him. Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an occupant; he is told of that fairyland cottage, embowered in roses and jessamine, with a garden gay and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song; and he finds to his surprise that the owners of these choice corners of Arcadia are only anxious to escape from what he would, if he could, be only anxious to retain.

In his first days this restlessness, this discontent, is simply inconceivable. What more do they want than what they have? Why, that field lying there in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured cows which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening red, and backed by rock and tree and tumbling cascade, would be enough to make him happy. He could never weary of such a lovely bit of home scenery; and if to this he adds a view of the sea, or the crags and purple shadows of a mountain, he has wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London and the sulphur of the Metropolitan still cling about his throat, and the roar of the streets has not quite died out of his ears.

The woods are full of flowers and the rarer kind of insects, and he is never sated with the sea. There is the trout stream as clear as crystal, where he is sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the moors, where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot at, are handy; and there is no end to the picturesque bits just made for his sketch-book. Whatever his tastes may make him--naturalist, sailor, sportsman, artist--he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten or eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now that his playtime has come round again. At every turn he falls upon little scenes which give him an odd pleasure, as if they belonged to another life--things he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint books, long ago. Here go by two countrywomen, whose red and purple dresses are touched by the sun with startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside road; there clatters past on horseback a group of market-girls with flapping straw hats, and carrying their baskets on their arms as if they were a set of Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London man with frank curiosity as they canter on and smother him with dust. Now he passes through the midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where, standing under an ivied porch, a pretty young woman unconsciously makes a picture as she bends down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with sweets and cakes. The idyl here is so complete that the contemplation of pence given for the accommodation of the barn, or the calculation of shillings to be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist for the good things its small soul coveted, does not enter his mind.

The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent would be a kind of high treason to the poetic instinct; so the London man instinctively feels, glad to recognize the ideal he is mainly responsible for making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is fishing in the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows skim the ground or dart slanting above his head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young birds rustle in and out of the foliage; distant cattle low; cottage children laugh; everywhere he finds quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence of disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all who live here must feel the same delightful influences as those which he is feeling now, and be as innocent and virtuous as the place is beautiful and quiet.

But the charm does not last. Very few of us retain to the end of our holidays the same enthusiastic delight in our Arcadia that we had in the beginning. Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the illusion better; and with it the excitement; but a long spell in one place, however beautiful--unless indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes personally fond of the place and interested in the people--is almost sure to end in weariness. At first the modern pilgrim is savagely disinclined to society and his kind. All the signs and circumstances of the life he has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to watch the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers which put into his little harbour, and the excursionists who come by them he accounts as heathens and accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate generation and made only for evildoers. He has no reverence for the post, and his soul is not rejoiced at the sight of letters. Even his daily paper is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts as equal in importance with the picturesque bits he wishes to sketch, or the rare ferns and beetles to be found by long rambles and much diligence. By degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearns after the life he has left, and he begins to look for the signs thereof with interest, not to say pleasure. He watches the arrival of the boat, or he strolls up to the railway station and speculates on the new comers with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance, he hails him with enthusiastic cordiality; and in his extremity is reduced to fraternize with men 'not in his way.' He becomes peevish at the lateness of the mail, and he reads his _Times_ from beginning to end, taking in even the agony column and the advertisements. He finds his idyllic pictures to be pictures, and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better than their neighbours; and, as for the absence of human passions--they are merely dwarfed to the dimensions of the life, and are as relatively strong here as elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages quarrel among each other for trifles which he would have thought only children could have noticed; and they gossip to an extent of which he in his larger metropolitan life has no experience.

If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom of visitors, he is as much an object of curiosity and surmise as if he were a man of another hemisphere; and he may think himself fortunate if vague reports do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality, or his sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage at home, he is nobody here. He may be sure that, however great his name in art and literature, it will not be accounted to him for honour--it will only place him next to a well-conditioned mountebank; political fame, patent to all the world, rank which no one can mistake, and money which all may handle, alone going down in remote country places and carrying esteem along with them. If a wise man, he will forgive the uncharitable surmises and the contempt of which he is the object, knowing the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless vacuity from which they spring; but they are not the less unpleasant, and to understand a cause is not therefore to rejoice in the effect.

As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of circumstance gradually becoming unbearable. He misses the familiar conveniences and orderly arrangements of his London life. He has a raging tooth, and there is no dentist for miles round; he falls sick, or sprains his ankle, and the only doctor at hand is a half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman skilled in herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His letters go astray among the various hands to which they are entrusted; his paper is irregular; _Punch_ and his illustrated weeklies come a day late, with torn covers and greasy thumbmarks testifying to the love of pictorial art which encountered them by the way. He finds that he wants the excitement of professional life and the changeful action of current history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in a corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious; but he misses the centralized interest of metropolitan life, and catches himself hankering after the old intellectual fleshpots with the fervour of an exile, counting the days of his further stay.

And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony, and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others, which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in essentials here as in London--Arcadia being the poorer of the two, inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of classes.

By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his work invigorated in body, but quite sufficiently sated in mind to return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots. Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr. So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.

The peace to which we are all looking is not to be had in a Highland glen nor a Devonshire lane; and beautiful as are the retreats and show-places to which men of business rush for rest and refreshment--peaceful as they are to look at, and happy as it seems to us their inhabitants must be--it is all only a matter of the eye. They are Arcadias, if one likes to call them so; but while a man's powers remain to him they are halting-places only, not homes; and he who would make them his home before his legitimate time, would come to a weariness which should cause him to regret bitterly and often the collar which had once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of which he had so often growled.

_STRANGERS AT CHURCH._