The Celt and Saxon, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, Complete

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Mrs. Lackstraw's confidences on the theme of the family she watched over
were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls
and pheasants at her farm. She dealt them out in exclamations, as much as
telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding the
unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry. The
confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors one after
another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as not every
Irishman would have been. A service of six months to the secretaryship
established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer species: not
much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman, and still
impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.

The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not
fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the
Mattock family. It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box
for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled
his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as
one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had won
their private esteem. They are not willingly suspicious: it agitates
their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery of
seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock: for in this
admiration of virtues that are so necessary to the stalwart growth of
man, they become just sensible of a minor deficiency; the tree, if we
jump out of it to examine its appearance, should not be all trunk. Six
months of ungrudging unremunerated service, showing devotion to the good
cause and perfect candour from first to last, was English, and a poetic
touch beyond: so that John Mattock, if he had finished the sentence
instead of lopping it with an interjection, would have said: 'These Irish
fellows, when they're genuine and first rate!--are pretty well the pick
of the land.' Perhaps his pause on the interjection expressed a doubt of
our getting them genuine. Mr. O'Donnell was a sort of exceptional
Irishman, not devoid of practical ability in a small way--he did his
duties of secretary fairly well; apparently sincere--he had refrained
from courting Jane; an odd creature enough, what with his mixture of
impulsiveness and discretion; likeable, pleasant to entertain and talk
to; not one of your lunatics concerning his country--he could listen to
an Englishman's opinion on that head, listen composedly to Rockney,
merely seeming to take notes; and Rockney was, as Captain Con termed him,
Press Dragoon about Ireland, a trying doctor for a child of the patient.

On the whole, John Mattock could shake his hand heartily when he was
leaving our shores. Patrick was released by Miss Grace Barrow's discovery
at last of a lady capable of filling his place: a circumstance that he
did not pretend to regret. He relinquished his post and stood aside with
the air of a disciplined soldier. This was at the expiration of seven
months and two weeks of service. Only after he had gone, upon her
receiving his first letter from the Continent, did Jane distinguish in
herself the warmth of friendliness she felt for him, and know that of all
around her she, reproaching every one who had hinted a doubt, had been
the most suspicious of his pure simplicity. It was the vice of her
condition to be suspicious of the honesty of men. She thought of her
looks as less attractive than they were; of her wealth she had reason to
think that the scent transformed our sad sex into dogs under various
disguises. Remembering her chill once on hearing Patrick in a green lane
where they botanised among spring flowers call himself her Irish cousin,
as if he had advanced a step and betrayed the hoof, she called him her
Irish cousin now in good earnest. Her nation was retrospectively
enthusiastic. The cordiality of her letter of reply to the wandering
Patrick astonished him on the part of so cool a young lady; and Captain
Con, when he heard Miss Mattock speak of Patrick to his wife, came to the
conclusion that the leery lad had gone a far way toward doing the trick
for himself, though Jane said his correspondence was full of the deeds of
his brother in India. She quite sparkled in speaking of this boy.

She and the captain had an interchange of sparklings over absent Patrick,
at a discovery made by Miss Colesworth, the lady replacing him, in a nook
of the amateur secretary's official desk, under heaps of pamphlets and
slips, French and English and Irish journals, not at all bearing upon the
business of the Laundry. It was a blotting-pad stuffed with Patrick's
jottings. Jane brought it to Con as to the proper keeper of the
reliquary. He persuaded her to join him in examining it, and together
they bent their heads, turning leaf by leaf, facing, laughing, pursuing
the search for more, sometimes freely shouting.

Her inspection of the contents had previously been shy; she had just
enough to tell her they were funny. Dozens of scraps, insides of torn
envelopes, invitation-cards, ends of bills received from home, whatever
was handy to him at the moment, had done service for the overflow of Mr.
Secretary's private notes and reflections; the blotting-paper as well;
though that was devoted chiefly to sketches of the human countenance, the
same being almost entirely of the fair. Jane fancied she spied herself
among the number. Con saw the likeness, but not considering it a
complimentary one, he whisked over the leaf. Grace Barrow was
unmistakeable. Her dimpled cushion features, and very intent eyes gazing
out of the knolls and dingles, were given without caricature. Miss
Colesworth appeared on the last page, a half-length holding a big key,
demure between curls. The key was explained by a cage on a stool, and a
bird flying out. She had unlocked the cage for Patrick.

'He never seemed anxious to be released while he was at work,' said Jane,
after she and the captain had spelt the symbolling in turns.

'And never thirsted to fly till he flew, I warrant him,' said Con.

A repeated sketch of some beauty confused them both; neither of them
could guess the proud owner of those lineaments. Con proclaimed it to be
merely one of the lad's recollections, perhaps a French face. He thought
he might have seen a face rather resembling it, but could not call to
mind whose face it was.

'I dare say it's just a youngster's dream on a stool at a desk, as poets
write sonnets in their youth to nobody, till they're pierced by somebody,
and then there's a difference in their handwriting,' he said, vexed with
Patrick for squandering his opportunity to leave a compliment to the
heiress behind him.

Jane flipped the leaves back to the lady with stormy hair.

'But you'll have the whole book, and hand it to him when he returns; it
'll come best from you,' said Con. 'The man on horseback, out of uniform,
's brother Philip, of course. And man and horse are done to the life.
Pray, take it, Miss Mattock. I should lose it to a certainty; I should; I
can't be trusted. You'll take it!'

He pressed her so warmly to retain the bundle in her custody that she
carried it away.

Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which
struck her feelings and sympathies. Patrick's notes here and there
recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in between
herself and Grace Barrow. Who could help laughing at his ideas about
women! But if they were crude, they were shrewd--or so she thought them;
and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of them.
Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect the
papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of peculiar
personal import in his notes: he did not brood on himself.

Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.

'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market. It is a tussle for money
with them as with us, meaning power. They'd do it as little by oratory as
they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
comes of a sentiment. Power is built on work.'

To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us. Good-night to Cupid,
I fear. May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil to
have the loveliest women as of old. Retro S. M.'

The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral
earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.

CHAPTER XVI

OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING
OF RICHARD ROCKNEY

Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,
our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The volcano we
couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an
armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of the
country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.

A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and
object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,
and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.

Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your
ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--Of
Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself in
short--the lower part of us. Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can
create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful
skies and the domestic English world spins with him. What he does not
like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what he
does like the consenting. If it is declared that argument will be
inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post. A hint of
his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.
Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency
from the example of our subject India. We may deem it native; perhaps of
its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own. Some have been so
venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting smiles
of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the
development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of the human bosom
are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed. Men,
for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort
of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we
behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something. One
thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the
utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the
colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any
suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no
attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will
have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to
the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as
horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the honours.

Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of
the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering
stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out
what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,
and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the
Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves,
manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other
Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful
as printed sheets. Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to mankind
from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles. Your
Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your
Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a
novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.
Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical
composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology, or
political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want war.
Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we
have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but
avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for
us, my worthy friends.

Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace is
a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the
pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's perusal
of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page fronting
him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
thing as a present hour for man.

In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we have
him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his
globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of
both--the present of the good using of our powers. What can he show in
the Arts? What in Arms? His bards--O faithless! but they are men--his
bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They
question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God. They point
over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of
verse=-our supreme accomplishment.

Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in
times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the
generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at all costs,
he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock knighthood on
the heads of men of brains--even literary brains. They shall be knights,
an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a legislative, has not struck
him, for he has not yet imagined them a stable body. They require
petting, to persuade them to flourish and bring him esteem.

This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as
though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of
it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the
sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under a
discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is
in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is the
Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil the
charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch of
Bull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes, by
no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt to
be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a
vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle
conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours
auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,
ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And he is at
times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving, excessive,
very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch him, when to
be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to mention a
shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing of the
under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the advent
of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he does
mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he paid
the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish him. For men
with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund grotesque, with
his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of the pocket, his
fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is a shame and a
loathing. You attach small importance to images and symbols; yet if they
seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us, they are important.
The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the head, stamps the
character of our appearance and has a positive influence on our bearing.
Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded to act up to
them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword of division
between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one section. And the
Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their sensitiveness. They
serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields to which the world
has given glory. These execrate him as the full-grown Golden Calf of
heathenish worship. And they are so restive because they are so
patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts regarding
him. You have heard them. You tell us they are you: accurately, they
affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent outlines, tame bulk,
spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his imperviousness to whatsoever
does not confront the sensual eye of him with a cake or a fist, his
religious veneration of his habitual indulgences, his peculiar forms of
nightmare. They swear to his perfect personification of your moods, your
Saxon moods, which their inconsiderate spleen would have us take for
unmixedly Saxon. They are unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of
the foot on their necks, and they are of a blood demanding a
worshipworthy idea. And they dislike Bull's bellow of disrespect for
their religion, much bruited in the meadows during his periods of
Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget the sound: it hangs on the
afflicted drum of the ear when they are in another land, perhaps when the
old devotion to their priest has expired. For this, as well as for
material reasons, they hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
of necessaries and relics, in the flight from home, and they instruct
their children to keep it burning. They transmit the sentiment of the
loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would be incapable of doing, even
with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed motherly Britannia the figure
sitting in the minds of men for our image--a palpitating figure, alive to
change, penetrable to thought, and not a stolid concrete of our
traditional old yeoman characteristic. Verily he lives for the present,
all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that there is no life for
him but of past and future: his delusion of the existence of a present
hour for man will not outlast the season of his eating and drinking
abundantly in security. He will perceive that it was no more than the
spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting forces; and penitently
will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids
wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him the bare machine for
those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment. He lives by reading
rearward and seeing vanward. He has no actual life save in power of
imagination. He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of all men.
Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has thrown too
extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his. The sight of a
broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with it is to
remove it from the field.

Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist
altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was
profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain. He had a
manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber
for proof of his knowing himself to be this person. He did not so much
write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic
sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her
man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard steel to
defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and the
monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special privileges
in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied her case,
was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to say
inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely, then
all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when distinguished
officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus of Rockney's
approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to bestow it. The
act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the objects
propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any man
adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his attachment.
If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed generally, they
travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they were precipitated,
the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at a more enlightened
passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others perchance might
equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the vigilant
circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge of the
right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others. Enough to
profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the newspaper
Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling a
puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for them
resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.

Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt of
sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened. One
secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of
Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the
bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our
streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the
island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads
in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:
how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked
on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly
ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the
consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon
shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:
the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand
upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication
of our not being the men we were.

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