Part 17

Everything serves for a mask. A man's public character makes one which is as impenetrable in its disguise as any. The world takes one or two salient points and subordinates every other characteristic to these. It ignores all those subtle intricacies which modify thought and action at every turn, producing apparent inconsistency--but only apparent; and it boldly blocks out a mask of one or two dominant lines as the representative of a nature protean because complex. Any quality that makes itself seen from behind this mask which popular opinion has created out of a man's public character is voted as inconsistent, or, it may be, insincere; and the richer the nature the less it is understood. So it is with us all in our degree:--a thought which might lead us to gentler judgments on each other than it is the fashion to cultivate, knowing as we do that we each wear a mask which hides our real self from the world; and that if this real self is less beautiful than our admirers say, it is infinitely less hideous than our enemies would make it to appear.

_HEROES AT HOME._

We may say what we like about the worthlessness of the world and the solid charms of home, but the plain fact, stripped of oratorical disguise, is that we mostly give society the best we have and keep the worst of ourselves for our own. The hero at home is not half so fine a fellow as the hero in public, and cares far less for his audience. Indeed, when looked at under the domestic microscope, he is frequently found to be eminently un-heroic--something of the nature of a botch rather than nobility in undress and an ideal brought down to the line of sight; which would be the case if he and all things else were what they seem, and if heroism, like fine gold, was good all through. This is not saying that the hero in public is a cheat. He has only turned the best of his cloak outside, and hidden the seams and frays next his skin. We know that every man's cloak must have its seams and frays; and the vital question for each man's life is, Who ought to see most of them, strangers or friends? We fear it must be owned that, whoever ought, it is our friends who do get the worst of our wardrobe--the people we love, and for whom we would willingly die if necessary; whilst strangers, for whom we have no kind of affection, are treated to the freshest of the velvet and the brightest of the embroidery. The man, say, who is pre-eminently good company abroad, who keeps a dinner-table alive with his quick wit and keen repartee, and who has always on hand a store of unhackneyed anecdotes, the latest _on dits_, and the newest information not known to Reuter, but who hangs up his fiddle at his own fireside and in the bosom of his family is as silent as the vocal Memnon at midnight, is not necessarily a cheat. He is an actor without a part to play or a stage whereon to play it; a hero without a flag; a bit of brute matter without an energizing force.

The excitement of applause, the good wine and the pleasant dishes, the bright eyes of pretty women, the half-concealed jealousy of clever men, the sensation of shining--all these things, which are spurs to him abroad, are wanting at home; and he has not the originating faculty which enables him to dispense with these incentives. He is a first-class hero on his own ground; but it would be a tremendous downfall to his reputation were his admirers to see him as he is off parade, without the pomps and vanities to show him to advantage. He has just been the social hero of a dinner; 'so bright, so lively, so delightful,' says the hostess enthusiastically, with a side blow to her own proprietor, who perhaps is pleasant enough by the domestic hearth but only a dumb dog in public. The party has been 'made' by him, rescued from universal dullness by his efforts alone; and every woman admires him as he leaves in a polite blaze of glory, and only wishes he could be secured for her own little affair next week. So he takes his departure, a hero to the last, with a happy thought for every one and a bright word all round. The hall-door closes on him, and the hero sinks into the husband. He is as much transformed as soon as he steps inside his brougham as was ever Cinderella after twelve, with her state coach and footmen gone to pumpkin and green lizards. He likes his wife well enough, as wives and liking go; but she does not stir him up intellectually, and her applause is no whetstone for his wit. Put the veriest chit of a girl as bodkin between them and he will waken into life again, and become once more the conversational hero, because he is no longer wholly at home. His wife probably does not like it, and she laughs, as wives do, when she hears his praises from those who know him only at his best, letting off his fireworks for the applause of the crowd.

But then wives are proverbially unflattering in their estimates of their husbands' heroics; and the Truth that used to live at the bottom of a well has changed her name and abode in these later times, and has come to mean the partner of your joys, who gives you her candid opinion at home. Still, your good company abroad who sits like a mute Memnon at home is not pleasant, though not necessarily a sham. Certainly he is no hero all through, but he may be nothing worse than one of those unfortunates whose intellect lives on drams and does not take kindly to domestic pudding.

His wife does not approve of this hanging up of the fiddle by his own fireside; yet she does the same thing on her side, and is as little a heroine by the domestic hearth as he is a hero. What his talk is to him her beauty is to her; and for whom, let us ask, does she make herself loveliest? For her husband, or for a handful of fops and snobs each one of whom individually is more indifferent to her than the other? See her in society, a very Venus dressed by Worth and Bond Street, if not by the Graces. Follow her home, and see her as her maid sees her. The abundant _chevelure_, which is the admiration of the men and the envy of the women who believe in it, is taken off and hung up like her great-grandfather's wig, leaving her small round head covered by a wisp of ragged ends broken and burnt by dyes and restorers; her bloom of glycerine and powder is washed from her face, showing the faded skin and betraying lines beneath; the antimony is rubbed off her eyelids; the effects of belladonna leave her now contracting pupils; her perfectly moulded form is laid aside with her dress; and the fair queen of the _salon_--the heroine of gaslight loveliness--stands as a lay-figure with bare tracts of possibilities whereon the artist may work, but which tracts nature has forgotten or which she herself has worked on so unmercifully as to have worn out. How many a heartache would be healed if only the heroine, like the hero, could be followed to the sanctuary of the dressing-room, and if the adored could appear to the adorer as does the one to the maid the other to the valet!

The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who condoles so sweetly with your little troubles, and whose affectionate compassion soothes you like the trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a pleasant air, but who leaves her sick husband at home to get through the weary hours as he best may, who bullies her servants and scolds her children--she too, is a heroine of a class that does not look well when closely studied. The pretty young mother, making play with her pretty young children in the Park--a smiling picture of love and loveliness--when followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending the children up to the nursery and probably seeing them no more until Park hour to-morrow, when their beautiful little _têtes d'ange_ will enhance her own loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more beautiful because making the picture more complete; Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal philanthropy, refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but full of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken to mitigate at Borioboolagha; Croesus scattering showers of gold abroad, and applauded to the echo when his name, with the donation following, is read out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings at home; the eloquent upholder of human equality in public, snubbing in private all who are one degree below him in the social scale, and treating his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter on the motto _Noblesse oblige_, when the house-door is shut between him and the world, running honesty so fine that it is almost undistinguishable from roguery--all these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home, and make their heroism within the four walls literally a vanishing quantity.

People who live on the outside of the charmed circle of letters, but who believe that the men and women that compose it are of a different mould from the rest of mankind, and who long to be permitted to penetrate the rose-hedge and learn the facts of Armida's garden for themselves, sometimes learn them too clearly for their dreams to be ever possible again. They have a favourite author--a poet, say, or a novelist. If a poet, he is probably one whose songs are full of that delicious melancholy which makes them so divinely sad; an æsthetic poet; a blighted being; a creature walking in the moonlight among the graves and watering their flowers with his tears:--if a novelist, he is one whose sprightly fancy makes the dull world gay. A friend takes the worshipper to the shrine where the idol is to be found; in other words, they go to call on him at his own house. The melancholy poet 'hidden in the light of thought,' is a rubicund, rosy-gilled gentleman, brisk, middle-aged, comfortable, respectable, particular as to his wines, a connoisseur as to the merits of the _chef_, a _bon vivant_ of the Horatian order, and in his talk prone to personal gossip and feeble humour. The lively novelist, on the other hand, is a taciturn, morose kind of person, afflicted with perennial catarrh, ever ready with an unpleasant suggestion, given to start disagreeable topics of a grave, not to say depressing, nature, perhaps a rabid politician incapable of a give-and-take argument, or a pessimistic economist, taking gloomy views of the currency and despondent about our carrying trade.

As for the women, they never look the thing they are reputed to be, save in fashion, and sometimes in beauty. A woman who goes to public meetings and makes speeches on all kinds of subjects, tough as well as doubtful, presents herself in society with the look of an old maid and the address of a shy schoolgirl. A sour kind of essayist, who finds everything wrong and nothing in its place, has a face like the full moon and looks as if she fed on cream and butter. A novelist who sails very near the wind, and on whom the critics are severe by principle, is as quiet as a Quakeress in her conversation and as demure as a nun in her bearing; while a writer of religious tracts has her gowns from Paris and gives small suppers out of the proceeds. The public character and the private being of almost every person in the world differ widely from each other; and the hero of history who is also the hero to his valet has yet to be found.

Some people call this difference inconsistency, and some manysidedness; to some it argues unreality, to others it is but the necessary consequence of a complex human nature, and a sign that the mind needs the rest of alternation just as much as the body. We cannot be always in the same groove, never changing our attitude nor object. Is it inconsistency or supplement, contradiction or compensation? The sterner moralists, and those whose minds dwell on tares, say the former; those who look for wheat even on the stony ground and among thorns assert the latter. Anyhow, it is certain that those who desire ideals and who like to worship heroes would do well to content themselves with adoration at a long range. Distance lends enchantment, and ignorance is bliss in more cases than one. Heroism at home is something like the delicacy of Brobdingnag, or the grandiosity of Lilliput; and the undress of the domestic hearth is more favourable to personal comfort than to public glory. To keep our ideals intact we ought to keep them unknown. Our goddesses should not be seen eating beefsteaks and drinking stout; our poets are their best in print, and social small-talk does not come like truths divine mended from their tongue; our sages and philanthropists gain nothing, and may lose much, by being rashly followed to their firesides. Yet a man's good work and brave word are, in any case, part of his real self, though they may not be the whole; and even if he is not true metal all through, his gold, so far as it goes, counts for more than its alloy, and his public heroism overtops his private puerility.

_SEINE-FISHING._

Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England than the Cornish fishermen. Their business, at all times hazardous, is doubly so on a coast so dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is bought at the expense of security. Isolated rocks which are set up like teeth close round the jagged cliffs and far out from shore, cropping up at intervals anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks which are more perilous because more treacherous; strong currents which on the calmest day keep the sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a singularly tumultuous and changeable sea, where the ground-swell of the Atlantic sweeps on in long waves which break into a surf that would swamp any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow channel to the coves, a mere water-path as one may call it, beset by rocks which would break the boats to splinters if they were thrown against them--all these circumstances make the trade of the Cornish fishermen exceptionally dangerous; but they also make the men themselves exceptionally resolute and daring. They are true fighters with nature for food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set out to their work that they may never come back from it alive.

No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats might be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer as little by shipwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in shore, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent about the Land's End. Or they may have been caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee shore; as so often happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points.

But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an insufficient quantity, is rather a miserable affair. The material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation, unification, whatever we like to call it--the law of the present day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own hand--the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's seine' and 'a rich man's seine,' almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or partnerships of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any share.

Fishermen's seines are not well regarded by the wealthy leaseholders of the cove and foreshore; and the leaseholder has very large legal rights and powers which it would be idle to blame him for exercising. The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right of landing is his; thus he can put on the screw when he wants to have things his own way, and can threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right to the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men will not go on his seine, but choose either a united one of their own or independent drift or trawl nets. Some, it is said, even object to the men fishing at all, at any rate during the seine season; some have raised the annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or four times its old rate; and some go through a round of surly suspicion and irritating supervision during the 'bulking' days, and higgle jealously over the small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So that, on the whole, the Cornish fisherman of the smaller coves has not much to boast of beside his courage and good heart, and a sturdy independence and honesty specially noticeable.

We know of no more animated scene than seine-fishing. From the first act to the last there is a quaint old-world flavour about it inexpressibly charming to people used to the prosaic life of modern cities. The 'huers' who stand on the hills watching for the first appearance of the 'school,' and who make known what they see either by signals or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound of which no one who has once heard it can ever forget; the smartness of the men dressing the seine-boats which carry the huge net with all its appurtenances; their quiet but eager watching for the school to come within practicable distance--that is, into sufficiently shoal water, and where the bottom is fairly level (else the fish all escape from under the net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing the school, and then the 'tucking' or lifting the fish from the sea to the boats--every stage is full of interest; but this last is the prettiest of all.

Imagine a moonlight night--low water at midnight--when the tucking begins. The boat cannot come up to the ordinary landing, which is only a roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent into the sea; so those who would share in the sport are fain to take the fisherman's path along the cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These rocks are never very safe. Even the men themselves, trained to them as they are from boyhood, sometimes slip on their slanting, broken, seaweed-covered surfaces, when, if they cannot swim and are not helped, all is over for them in this life; and for strangers they are difficult at the best of times. But on an obscurely lighted night, and after heavy rain, they are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the boat a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch the exact moment and make a spring before she drifts off again with the ebb. The row across the little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the shadows are deep and unfathomable; everywhere you see black rocks standing out from the steely sea, and little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken rocks. In the distance shine the magnificent Lizard Lights, and the red and white revolving light of the terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the horizon; the moon touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy sluggish rhythm of their flow. Only round the foot of the cliffs and about the rocks they break into spray that serves as high lights against the sombre grey and black of the landscape. You pull across to the opposite point, and then round into another smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and the seine net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fishing-boats set round on the outside of a circle of corks, within which is the master-boat, where all hands are assembled pulling at the net, to draw it closer. It is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart fellows are hauling on the lines with the sailors' cheery cry and the sailors' exuberant goodwill. Every now and then the master's voice cries out 'Break! break my sons!' when they shorten hold and go over to the other side of the boat, pulling themselves gradually aslant again, till the same order of 'Break! break!' shows that their purchase is too slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough, and then the fun begins.

All the boats engaged form a close circle round the inner line of corks, which is now a little sea of silver where the imprisoned pilchards beat and flutter, producing a sound for which we have no satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this little sea is silver; in torchlight it is of fire with varied colours flashing through the redder gleams; and in the dark it is a sea of phosphorescent light, each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed illuminated as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy. The men dip in baskets, or maunds, expressly made for this purpose, and ladle out the quivering fish by hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on the spot is pressed into the service, and even a boat manned by nothing more stalwart than one or two half-sick and half-frightened women receives its orders; and 'Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to the boat,' serves to keep one of the busiest of the tucking-boats in equilibrium.

The men, for all their hearty work, are like a party of schoolboys at play. Their humour may be rough, but it is never meant to be rude; their goodwill is sincere, for they have a share, however small, in the success of the catch; and the more they tuck, the more they will have for their wives and families to live on through the winter. It is their harvest-time; and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially are. There is no stint of volunteer labour either. Men who have been working hard all day on their own account go out at midnight to lend a hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the take is for a hard-fisted master who would count fins if he could, and who would refuse his men a head apiece if he thought his orders would be carried out, they are all honestly glad. They remember the time when a rich school was the wealth of the whole cove, and when a string of fresh pilchards would be given freely to any one coming to the cove at the time of bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.

Still, whatever of economic value there may be in this exploitation of labour, it has its mournful side in the loss of individual value which it includes. And no one can help feeling this who listens to the talk of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing the old days of personal independence and generous lordship with the present ones of wages and a wide-awake lesseeship, conscious of its legal rights and determined to act on them.