"THE LITTLE WIND FROM THE SEA' BY VIOLA WOODS He lived by the sea, and he was always writing a book. As he invariably left the windows open, the wind used to blow in and toss the manuscript away, so the book was never finished. It was the same with his countless cigarettes; he never smoked them more than halfway through, and his leavings would have been treasuretrove for any tramp. Though he drank wine extravagantly, he wasted it in the glass, and now that I come to remember his face, it seems as if God had never quite finished that. 'Life,' he used to say, 'is one continual feast.' He did not add, which he might have done, 'at somebody else's expense.' But the woman with the great loving heart of an angel and the sense of humor he did not altogether appreciate, added it for him, and that answered as well. After all, most of us have at some time or other to pay for our guests, and I do not think there were many hosts who grudged the dinner. When people start writing a book - poetry is the worst it is no rare experience for them to find their friends receding. Not so in this case; everybody was desperately expectant, and they used to drift in in the evening to hear the first chapters. They were so wonderful, those chapters, so satisfactory; as full of promise as a May morning. 'I sometimes feel I begin almost too well,' he complained, and across the face which God had neglected to finish flitted the ghost of a smile. The first book he wrote was called The Wootton Road. VOL. XI-NO. 567 'You see,' he put it to them, 'everyone who matters all the right people go on the Wootton Road, but one cannot go on the Wootton Road with a very small maid-servant, and a very large dog afraid of its own shadow. One has to go on the Wootton Road by one's self. There you will find them all, the people who matter the people who have not feared to touch capital: tinkers, vagabonds, gypsies, people who are here to-day, gone tomorrow, who leave behind them desolate patches on the moor where they lit their fire for an hour.' But when a thin streak of yellow lay like a golden sword across the horizon a little wind blew in from the sea and caught the pages, and no one ever saw the end of The Wootton Road. The next book he started was called The Evening Star. 'One does n't really want the sun or the moon,' he explained. 'Why should one drag one's self into the too cruel light of either? What one wants is the evening star; kind, benevolent, merciful—a continual twilight that does not give you sunstroke or send you crazy.' And again everybody listened, for this book reached its fourth chapter. But one day a little wind blew in across a troubled water and Evening Star was extinguished. The It was then that he began The Unfinished Symphony. It was a book about all the women whom he had told he loved as he had never loved a woman before, and what safer statement can a man make than this one, which has the added decoration of the 673 truth, for when has one man ever loved two women in the same way? 'Like Cynara's lover, I have been faithful in my fashion,' he declared. 'Love has got to die somewhere, and personally I prefer to see him die like a gladiator in the arena than to watch him fall asleep by the fire.' And his friends were more excited than ever, for the world has a mistaken idea that a man will write least about what he knows most. "This is going to be a book of short stories,' he told them. 'Nothing would have pleased me better than to have been able to make it a long one. Fate has willed it otherwise. Somehow, all these stories have to be short, but though they have to be short, they are going to be very, very beautiful. A Song of Songs.' 'No one has ever heard the Song of Songs more than once,' said the pale Russian, who knew all about music, 'and most of us never hear it at all.' 'I have never heard any other, and now I am going to make a book about it. And, above all, I want the funerals to be gorgeous. I am like the poor, I want to spend all my savings on the funeral. I cannot endure anything ugly, any death duties. There is a good deal to be said for burial at sea only I rather love to go back now and again and put a flower on a grave.' So The Unfinished Symphony was started. There was the pale Russian in the conspirator's coat whom he called 'Dearest' because she was dearest. She never burned her fingers with anything more than her own cigarette end. 'It was not so much that one noticed when he came, but it was so diabolical when he left,' she had said. It had been that way with her. It had hurt to part with what she knew she did not want to keep. the great loving heart of an angel, and more sense of humor than was comfortable. Her he called 'Darling,' because she was darling. But he had not liked it when she called the funeral "Getting the boot.' 'It's a last sunset,' he corrected, 'and sunsets are beautiful things,' which is undeniable. There was even the sweet, mild, virginal prospective wife and matron; the English maiden with the traditional mother complexion and punt on the river; but he could not for the life of him remember what he had called her, and that is unfortunate when one is writing a memoir. 'I shall call her Vale,' he decided. 'I think Vale is a satisfactory name for a woman.' There were a good many tears at that funeral. 'When shall I be happy again?' she had asked. 'When the May-trees flower once more,' he had answered. And as it was June, and she was very young, she sighed. And the autumn followed, and with it a little wind, and The Unfinished Symphony floated out with a few dry leaves. Then came the war. Drums were on the Wootton Road, and of course he went no one went sooner. He had often made life tortuous and whimsical, but over the national crisis he was perfectly virile, normal, uncomplicated, and he who had loved to sleep in an imperial bed with steps up to it, lay in the mud with the rest. 'It's all hideous, hideous, but somehow there is nowhere else where one could be.' He was extremely gallant; wearying and troublesome to his superiors beyond expression, and he received enormous mails. He got sundry decorations, but no promotion; and while others became majors, captains, and Then there was the woman with staff officials, a rainbow spread over the humble breast of a second-lieutenant. God, who had not finished his face, was very good to him, and just as life had given him no wounds, so battle miraculously spared him; for he was pitifully fearful of pain, intolerant of suffering, and once more he wrote through the blood and the noise and the fire he wrote. He started a book about the war. There was a chapter about the soldier poets who broke into song the starved mind blossoming in the arid and unfavorable places. There was a chapter called 'The Channel of Grace,' which told how the touch of brutal fact mysteriously woke rapture. There was a chapter called 'Afterwards.' But there was to be no afterwards. A stray bullet had him in the end. As kind, but hasty, hands laid him The Westminster Gazette out on the damp earth, his ears were full of sound, and a new music echoed through the undreamed mansions of his failing being. It was the Song of Songs at last. And the ultimate arms went round him; and his head, which had rested on so many hearts, rested on the deeper one of his eternal mother. 'It was not so much that one noticed when he came, but it was so diabolical when he left,' said the Russian. And in her eyes, which were like Northern Lakes, there was not a tear. High up on the green cliff the hasty cross stretched its arms towards the sunset, which is a beautiful thing, and the little wind from the sea blew on the only book that was ever finished. THE VICTORIAN VOLCANO MR. ASQUITH began his Romanes lecture in Oxford by noticing 'the curious fact that only queens had given their names to epochs in English literature. The explanation is simple. It is not that literature has flourished only under queens; for Milton wrote under two kings and the Commonwealth, and the years which produced Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Scott were not destitute of literature. But many kings with whom the country has been blest have had the same names; to speak of the Carolean Age is ambiguous, and to speak of the Third-Georgian Age cumbersome. Whereas, with queens, the distinction is precise and convenient, since Providence has hitherto bestowed upon us only one Elizabeth, one Anne, and one Victoria. Only one Victoria -and most people are inclined to add, ‘happily, only one.' Into such disfavor has the Great White Queen, with all her age, descended. Early, Middle, or Late, the Victorian Age meets with little mercy from our present critics and historians. Recently, it is true, milliners attempted, with tender solicitude, to revive the Early Victorian costume, crinolines and all, and, but for the war, we might have had whiskers back. But munition girls and women on the land do not adopt Early Victorian modes, and revivals of dress are as vain as revivals of Maypoles. Almost to everyone the very mention of the word 'Victorian' calls up the picture of a vanished age which none wishes to restore an age of self-satisfied complacency, of prosperity leaping and bounding like a kangaroo, and of a charity which began abroad. In that age, as we imagine it, virtue raged unchecked, the open secret of England's greatness was proclaimed in the language of Sinai, our poorer brethren were encouraged to pursue their toil in this vale of tears by hopes of celestial rewards, and the middle classes entered upon a more immediate millennium of domestic comfort, chastened by a pious tedium. The rustling maids serpentined into family prayers; the Sunday sermon was discussed above the Sunday joint; a Blanket Society. occupied the winter evenings; a Missionary Meeting supplied an annual gayety; with luggage strapped and tarpaulined on the roof of the railway coach, the family, clutching spades and buckets, started for the August sands; young ladies looked arch, and fainted; middle-aged gentlemen shed tears, even upon the floor of the House; towns spread with the rapid malignity of plagues, and economists called their desolation progress. There was a kind of literature and good literature too-which suited such surroundings, or could be made to suit. Macaulay was nearly always safe, sensible, robust; and even his Whiggery was always on the side of wealth. It was a relief to find in Tennyson an acknowledged poet, who could be put in the hands of young persons, and was received at Court. Maud was a little Byronic, certainly, and unpleasant relationships were suggested in the Idyls of the King. But Elaine, illustrated by Doré, made a suitable giftbook for the family doctor, and, if religious doubts intruded into the serious stanzas of In Memoriam, everything came right in the end, and the final description of the sister's wedding was correct, even to the whitefavor'd horses.' For historical romance and the sturdy qualities of gentlemanly Christianity, no one could beat Charles Kingsley, and his talk about the lower classes and halfeducated artisans might easily be skipped. Thackeray was a satiric rogue, it is true, but his heart really gushed with tenderness, and his heroines did everything that young ladies should. Dickens was irresistibly droll, and if he urged people to extend the bounty of good cheer to the deserving poor, there was no harm in that; for everyone wished to be kind, and it was a Christian privilege to distribute God's good gifts. If the typical Victorians required typical literature to wile away their comfortable leisure and stimulate their emotions up to the limits of propriety, they had enough to occupy them, and that of the very best. the in When we hear the Victorian Age and Victorian literature spoken of, such, we suppose, are the pictures at once formed in our minds. And yet how untrue they are, and how unworthy of our astonishing grandparents! From the reports complete reports of Mr. Asquith's lecture it appears that he dwelt upon the falsity of these superficial conceptions. At the very beginning, he noticed the almost paradoxical incongruity between what might be aptly termed the outward and the inward life of the Victorian Age'; and when, in a later passage, he observed that 'the note of revolt was not characteristic of that age,' we must conclude that he was thinking only of the outward life. Remembering Chartism, the struggles for tradeunions and the extension of the Franchise; remembering the dockstrikes and coal-strikes, or, in Ireland, the Fenians and the Plan of Campaign; we are not sure that, even within those limits, the observation would be true. Of the inward life it is entirely false. Revolt was the dominant and characteristic note of Victorian thought. To find parallels in revolution of thought one could only go to the age of the Renaissance or to the century of Athenian genius. There was hardly an established doctrine of belief, hardly a recognized principle of conduct, and hardly an accepted theory of speculation which the Victorians did not challenge, criticize, modify, or overthrow. There was something Titanic in the violence of their seditions more than Titanic, for they succeeded in their conflicts, and the powers against which they rebelled trembled and passed away. If ever a twilight obscured the accepted gods, it was in the Victorian Age. The surface of the country might appear undisturbed; the middle classes might pursue temporal and eternal rewards in uninterrupted tranquillity; landowners might extend their preserves, and colonists extend the Empire; royalty might organize international exhibitions, and the Crystal Palace stand as a symbol of perpetual peace; but the foundations of life itself were shaken, the heart of the world heaved with eruptive perturbation, and, beneath that placid surface, glowed the volcanic fires of thought. By the terms of the lectureship, Mr. Asquith thought himself limited to literature; religion and politics he regarded as rigorously excluded. But, happily, he did not rigorously exclude them, for it was exactly in the regions of religion and politics that the Victorian revolution was most vehement and produced the most lasting effects. As to religion, consider, on the one side, how vast a change was signified in the names of Newman, Keble, and Pusey; how deeply even the Anglican Church was stirred by this revolt; what bonds of commonplace were broken; what beauty was added to her traditions and services; what zeal and power of renunciation to her priesthood. On the purely scientific side, there is no need to recall the name of Darwin, for the methods of that genius of revolution have revolutionized every phase of knowledge-religious, historical, and natural alike and Huxley would now scarcely find an enemy awaiting his onslaught upon his trampled battlefields. But let us rather remember the simpler and more limited effect of historical and scholarly criticism applied by the Victorians to religious documents and accepted beliefs. Few of the present generation can realize how startling, how terrifying, the results of that criticism at first appeared. The revolution in thought seemed to shatter man's spiritual existence, and piteous lamentations arose from such as lingered lovingly in the ruined temples. All now are silent. Criticism. has been absorbed in faith. But read the Victorian Essays and Reviews, or Ecce Homo, or Literature and Dogma, and wonder why such moderate and religious books were once received with frightened screams of execration. Commercialism, Industrialism, Individualism, Competition, the gospel of laissez-faire- there is no denying it: all were Victorian, and all flourished and abounded. Who can even realize the suffering and degradation of the working classes' as factories multiplied, new pits were 'exploited,' and owners rose from stolid comfort to fastidious luxury? Yet how persistent was the protest of revolt, and how |