Faces in the Fire, and Other Fancies

Strawberries are delicious, as every one knows. 'It may be,' says Dr. Boteler, a quaint old English writer, 'it may be that God could make a better berry than a strawberry, but most certainly He never did.' Yes, strawberries are delicious; but I am not going to write about strawberries. Cream is also very nice, very nice indeed; but nothing shall induce me to write about cream. I have promised myself a chapter, neither on strawberries nor on cream, but on strawberries and cream. The distinction, as I shall endeavour to show, is a vitally important one.

Now the theme was suggested on this wise. I was walking through the city this afternoon, when I met a gentleman from whom, only this morning, I received an important letter. We shook hands, and were just plunging into the subject-matter of his letter when a tall policeman reminded us of the illegality of loitering on the pavement. Yet it was too hot to walk about.

'Come in here,' my companion suggested, pointing 25 to a café near by, 'and have a cup of afternoon tea.'

'No, thank you,' I replied, 'I had a cup not long ago.'

'Well, strawberries and cream, then?'

The temptation was too strong for me; he had touched a vulnerable point; and I succumbed. The afternoon was very oppressive; the restaurant looked invitingly cool; a quiet corner among the ferns seemed to beckon us; and the strawberries and cream, daintily served, soon completed our felicity.

Strawberries and cream! It is an odd conjunction when you come to think of it. The gardener goes off to his well-kept beds and brings back a big basket, lined with cabbage leaves, and filled to the brim with fine fresh strawberries. The maid slips off to the dairy and returns with a jug of rich and foamy cream. To what different realms they belong! The gardener lives, moves, and has his being in one world; the milkmaid spends her life in quite another. The cream belongs to the animal kingdom; the strawberries to the vegetable kingdom. But here, on these pretty little plates in the fern-grot are the gardener's world and the milkmaid's world beautifully blended. Here, on the table before us, are the animal and the vegetable kingdom perfectly supplementing and completing each other. It is 26 another phase of the wonder which suggested the nursery rhyme:

Flour of England, fruit of Spain,

Met together in a shower of rain.

Empires confront each other within the compass of a plum-pudding; continents salute each other in a tea-cup; the great subdivisions of the universe greet each other in a plate of strawberries and cream. What ententes, and rapprochements, and international conferences take place every day among the plates and dishes that adorn our tables!

It is a thousand pities that we have no authentic record of the discoverer of strawberries and cream. For ages the world enjoyed its strawberries, and for ages the world enjoyed its cream. But strawberries and cream was an unheard-of mixture. Then there dawned one of the great days of this planet's little story, a day that ought to have been carefully recorded and annually commemorated. History, as it is written, betrays a sad lack of perspective. It has no true sense of proportion. There came a fateful day on which some audacious dietetic adventurer took the cream that had been brought from his dairy, poured it on the strawberries that had been plucked from his garden, and discovered with delight that the whole was greater than the sum 27 of all its parts. Yet of that memorable day the historian takes no notice. With the amours of kings, the intrigues of courts, and the squabbles of statesmen he has filled countless pages; yet only in very rare instances have these things contributed to the sum of human happiness anything comparable to the pleasures afforded by strawberries and cream. We have never done justice to the intellectual prowess of the men who first tried some of the mixtures that are to us a matter of course. Salt and potatoes, for example. I heard the other day of a little girl who defined salt as 'that which makes potatoes very nasty if you have none of it with them.' It is not a bad definition. But, surely, something is due to the memory of the man who discovered that the insipidity might be removed, and the potato be made a staple article of diet, by the simple addition of a pinch of salt! Then, too, there are the men who found out that horseradish is the thing to eat with roast beef; that apple sauce lends an added charm to a joint of pork; that red currant jelly enhances the flavour of jugged hare; that mint sauce blends beautifully with lamb; that boiled mutton is all the better for caper sauce; and that butter is the natural corollary of bread. 'The man of superior intellect,' says Tennyson, in vindication of his weakness for boiled beef and new potatoes, 'knows what is good to eat.' And George Gissing 28 in a reference to these selfsame new potatoes, adds a corroborative word. 'Our cook,' he says, 'when dressing these new potatoes, puts into the saucepan a sprig of mint. This is genius. Not otherwise could the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately, emphasized. The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows only the young potato.' There have been thousands of statues erected to the memory of men who have done far less to promote the happiness of mankind than did any of these. Every great invention is preceded by thousands and thousands of fruitless attempts. Think of the nauseous conglomerations that must have been tried and tasted, not without a shudder, before these happy combinations were at length launched upon the world. Think of the jeers of derision that greeted the first announcement of these preposterous concoctions! Imagine the guffaws when a man told his companions that he had been eating red currant jelly with jugged hare! Imagine the nameless dietetic atrocities that that ingenious epicure must have perpetrated before he hit upon his ultimate triumph! I have not the initiative to attempt it. I lack the splendid daring of the pioneer. In a thousand years' time men will smack their lips over all kinds of mixtures of which I should shudder to hear. I am content to go on eating this by itself and that by itself, just as for 29 ages men were content to eat strawberries by themselves and cream by itself, never dreaming that this thing and that thing as much belong to each other as do strawberries and cream.

Now this genius for mixing things is one of the hall-marks of our humanity. Strawberry leaves are part of the crest of a duchess; but strawberries and cream might be regarded as a suitable crest for the race. Man is an animal, but he is more than an animal; and he proves his superiority by mixing things. His poorer relatives of the brute creation never do it. They eat strawberries, and they are fond of cream; but it would never have occurred to any one of them to mix the strawberries with the cream. An animal, even the most intelligent and domesticated animal, will eat one thing and then he will eat another thing; but the idea of mixing the first thing with the second thing before eating either never enters into his comprehension.

The strawberries and cream represent, therefore, in a pleasant and attractive way, our human genius for mixing things. There is nothing surprising about it. Indeed, it is eminently fitting and characteristic. For we are ourselves such extraordinary medlies. Let any man think his way back across the ages, and mark the ingredients that have woven themselves into his make-up, and he will not be surprised at the extraordinary miscellany of passions 30 that he sometimes discovers within the recesses of his own soul. 'I remember,' Rudyard Kipling makes the Thames to say:

... I remember, like yesterday,

The earliest Cockney who came my way,

When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,

With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

He was death to feather and fin and fur,

He trapped my beavers at Westminster,

He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,

He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier;

He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,

Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,

While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin

The tall Phoenician ships stole in.

Men of the island caves mixed their blood with men of the great continental forests. It was an extraordinary agglomeration.

Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek

Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,

And the Romans came with a heavy hand,

And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,

And the Roman left and the Danes blew in-

And that's where your history books begin!

Is it any wonder that sometimes I feel, mingling with the emotions inspired by a recent communion service, 31 the savagery of some long-forgotten caveman ancestor? Civilization is so very young, and barbarism was so very old, that it is not surprising that I occasionally hark back involuntarily to the days to which my blood was most accustomed. I am an odd mixture considered from any point of view. 'There are very few human actions,' says Mark Rutherford, 'of which it can be said that this or that, taken by itself, produced them. With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed.' Of course not! It is my duty, that is to say, to take myself to pieces as little as possible. It does not really matter how much of my present temperament I got from the communion service, and how much I got from the caveman with the club in his hand. Here I am, a present entity, with the caveman, the tribesman, the Roman, and the Dane all mixed up together in me; and it is my business, instead of taking the complex mechanism to pieces, to make it, as a united and harmonious whole, do the work for which I have been sent into the world. I am not 32 to talk one moment of the strawberries on my plate, and then, in the next breath, to speak of the cream. It is not so much a matter of strawberries and cream as of strawberriesandcream.

There is, I fancy, a good deal in that. We are too fond of taking the cream from the strawberries, and the strawberries from the cream. I have on my plate here, not two things, but one thing; and that one thing is strawberriesandcream. One of the oldest and one of the silliest mistakes that men have made is their everlasting inclination to divide strawberries-and-cream into strawberries and cream. Think of the toothless chatter concerning the sexes. Have men or women done most for the world? Is the husband or is the wife most essential to the home? It will be quite time enough to attempt to answer such ridiculous questions when the waitresses at the restaurants begin to ask us whether we will have strawberries or cream! In the beginning, we are told, God created man in His own image, male and female created He them. It is not so much a matter of male and female: it is maleandfemale, just as it is strawberriesandcream. The thing takes other forms. Which do you prefer-summer or winter? As though we should appreciate summer if we never had a winter, or winter if we never had a summer! Is song or speech the most effective evangelistic agency? As though there would be 33 anything to sing about if the gospel had never been preached! Or anything worth preaching if the gospel had never set anybody singing! It is so very ridiculous to try to separate the strawberries from the cream. Miss Rosaline Masson, in commenting upon Wordsworth's beautiful sonnet on Westminster Bridge, says that it is the outcome of Dorothy Wordsworth's divine power of perception and her brother's divine power of expression. But who would dare to take the sonnet to pieces and say how much is Dorothy's, and how much is William's? It is Dorothy's and William's. It is strawberries and cream.

I always feel extremely sorry for the man who tries to move a vote of thanks at the close of a pleasant and successful function. Not for worlds could I be persuaded to attempt it. It is a most difficult and complicated business, and I should collapse utterly. It consists in taking the whole performance to pieces and allocating the praise. So much for the decorators; so much for the singers; so much for the elocutionists; so much for the speakers; so much for the chairman; so much for the pianist; so much for the secretary; and so on. To me it would be like furnishing a statistical table on leaving the restaurant showing how much of my enjoyment I owed to the strawberries and how much to the cream. Dissection is not in my 34 line. I only know that I thoroughly enjoyed the strawberriesandcream.

In selecting strawberries and cream as emblems of the mixed things of life, I fancy that my choice is a particularly happy one. That cream must be mixed with other foods goes without saying; and in Shakespeare's most notable reference to strawberries it is the same peculiarity that seems to have impressed him. He has a very pleasing allusion to the facility with which the strawberry mixes with other things. The passage occurs at the beginning of King Henry the Fifth. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely are discussing the new king. They are astonished at the change which has overtaken him since his accession. As a prince he was wild and dissolute, and broke his father's heart. But, as soon as he became king, he instantly sent for his boon-companions, told them that he intended by God's good grace to live an entirely new life, and begged them to follow his example. As the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it:

The breath no sooner left his father's body

But that his wildness, mortified in him,

Seemed to die, too. Yea, at that very moment.

Consideration like an angel came,

And whipped the offending Adam out of him.

Leaving his body as a paradise,

To envelop and contain celestial spirits.

35 To which the Bishop of Ely replies:

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,

And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,

Neighboured by fruit of baser quality.

It is a suggestive passage, considered from any point of view We live mixed lives in a mixed world, and we do not come upon the strawberries by themselves or all at once. We may find strawberries to-morrow where we can discover nothing but stinging-nettles to-day 'Madcap Harry' was not the only son whose life at first yielded nothing but nettles that stung and lacerated his father's soul, and yet afterwards produced strawberries that were the delight, not only of the Church, but of the world at large.

I was strolling one still evening along a lonely New Zealand shore, when I made a grim discovery that has often set me thinking. I had been walking along the wet and crinkled sands, the tide being out, and had amused myself with the shells and the seaweed that had been left lying about by the receding waters. There is always a peculiar charm about such a stroll. It holds such infinite possibilities. One seems to be exploiting the surprise-packet of the universe. Jane Barlow, in her Bogland Studies, makes one of her characters say:

What use is one's life widout chances? Ye've always a chance wid the tide;

For ye never can tell what 'twill take in its head to strew round on the shore;

Maybe driftwood, or grand bits of boards that come handy for splicing an oar,

Or a crab skytin' back o'er the shine o' the wet; sure, whatever ye've found,

It's a sort of diversion them whiles when ye've starvin' and strelin' around.

Absorbed in so delightful an occupation the passage of time escaped my attention, until suddenly 37 I noticed that twilight was rapidly falling, and I thought of my return. Before retracing my steps, however, I sat down for a moment's rest among the sand-dunes. The possibility of making a discovery among those arid mounds did not occur to me. But, as I sat absent-mindedly poking the soft sand with my stick, I suddenly struck something hard. I proceeded to dig it out, and found a couple of human skulls. They adorn the top shelf of my book-case before me at this moment. They always look down upon me as I write. I often catch myself leaning back in my chair, staring up at them, and trying to read their secret. Who were they, I wonder, these two bony companions of mine? Two Maoris finishing, among the lonely dunes, their last fierce fatal feud? Two travellers, hopelessly lost, who threw themselves down here to die? A couple of sailors, whose ship had struck the cruel reefs out yonder, and whose bodies were tossed up here by the pitiless waves? A pair of lovers trapped by the treacherous tide? I cannot tell. What a tantalizing mystery they seem to hold, as they grin down at me from this high shelf of mine! It is part of the ghostly sense of mystery that always haunts the sea and its tragedies. On the land, when disaster occurs, all the wreckage is left to tell its own tale; but on the ocean Fate instantly obliterates all her tracks. The magnificent vessel 38 lurches over, plunges with a roar into the deep, and the waves close over the frightful ruin. Compared with the silence of the sea, the Sphinx is voluble. The deep, dark, icy ocean-bed guards its secrets, and guards them well.

Sometimes, however, it is more easy to read the riddle. Here in Tasmania, within easy reach of this quiet study of mine, there is a battle-field that I love to visit. It extends for miles and miles, and the whole place is strewn with the wreckage that tells of the titanic conflict. I do not mean that the place is littered with dead men's bones. It was a far finer and a far fiercer fight than men could have waged, and it lasted longer than any war recorded in the annals of history. It is the battle-field on which the land fought the sea. It is a rocky and precipitous coast. Sometimes I like to walk along the top of the cliff, and look down upon the pile of massive boulders that lie tumbled in picturesque and bewildering confusion about the beach below. Or, at low tide, I like to make my way among those monstrous piles of broken rock that lie, higgledy-piggledy, all along the shore. What a fight it was, day and night, summer and winter, year in and year out, age after age! Occasionally the attack slackened down, and the rippling waters merely lapped softly against the rocks. But there was no real truce. The sea was only 39 gathering up its forces in secret for the majestic assault that was to come. Then the great breakers came rushing in, like regiments of cavalry in full career, and each huge wave hurled itself upon the crags with such fury that the spray dashed up sky high.

It was a titanic struggle, and the waters won. That is the extraordinary thing-the waters won. The water seems so soft, so yielding, so fluid, and the rocks seem so impregnable, so adamantine, so immutable. Yet the waters always win. The land makes no impression on the sea; but the sea grinds the land to powder. I know that the sea is often spoken of as the natural emblem of all that is fickle and changeful; but it is a pure illusion. There are, of course superficial variations of tone and tint and temper; but, as compared with the kaleidoscopic changes that overtake the land, the ocean is eternally and everywhere the same. It, and not the rocks, is the symbol of immutability. 'Look at the sea!' exclaims Max Pemberton, in Red Morn. 'How I love it! I like to think that those great rolling waves will go leaping by a thousand years from now. There is never any change about the sea. You never come back to it and say, "How it's changed!" or "Who's been building here?" or "Where's the old place I loved?" No; it is always the same. I suppose if one stood here 40 for a million years the sea would not be different. You're quite sure of it, and it never disappoints you.' The land, on the contrary, is for ever changing. Man is always working his transformations, and Nature is toiling to the same end.

'When the Romans came to England,' says Frank Buckland, the naturalist, 'Julius Caesar probably looked upon an outline of cliff very different from that which holds our gaze to-day. First there comes a sun-crack along the edge of the cliff; the rain-water gets into the crack; then comes the frost. The rain-water in freezing expands, and by degrees wedges off a great slice of chalk cliff; down this tumbles into the water; and Neptune sets his great waves to work to tidy up the mess.' No man can know the veriest rudiments of geology without recognizing that it is the land, and not the sea, that is constantly changing. We may visit some historic battle-field to-day, and, finding it a network of bustling streets and crowded alleys, may hopelessly fail to repeople the scene with the battalions that wheeled and charged, wavered and rallied, there in the brave days of old. But when, from the deck of a steamer, I surveyed the blue and tossing waters off Cape Trafalgar, I knew that I was gazing upon the scene just as it presented itself to the eye of Nelson on the day of his immortal victory and glorious death more than a century ago.

41Now, beneath this triumph of the ocean-the triumph that leaves the land in fragments whilst the sea itself sustains no injury-there lies a deeper significance than at first appears. Job saw it. No elusive secret, lurking in the universe around him, escaped his restless eye. 'The waters wear the stones!' he cried, and it was a shout of victory that rose from his heart when he said it. 'The waters wear the stones,' he exclaimed, 'and Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth.' It is the death-knell of the material. It is the triumph of the eternal. A little child looks upon the great granite cliffs, and it seems impossible that the lapping waves can ever pound them to pieces. But they do. And in the same way, Job says, man seems so impregnable, and the world so mighty, that it appears a thing incredible that God can finally prevail. But He shall. The quiet waters conquer the frowning cliffs at length. The walls of Jericho fall down. This is the victory that overcometh the world.

And so here on this battle-field where the land and the sea fought for mastery, I find Job sitting, and he interprets for me the paean that the waves are singing. It is the laughter of their triumph. 'The waters wear away the stones.' That was the heartening message that gave to Spain one of her very greatest teachers. St. Isidore of Seville was 42 only a boy at the time. He found his lessons hard to learn. Study was a drudgery, and he was tempted to give up. The huge obstacles against which he, like the waves at the base of the cliff, was beating out his life seemed adamantine. So he ran away from school. But in the heat of the day he sat down to rest beside a little spring that trickled over a rock. He noticed that the water fell in drops, and only one drop at a time; yet those drops had worn away a large stone. It reminded him of the tasks he had forsaken, and he returned to his desk. Diligent application overcame his dullness, and made him one of the first scholars of his time. He never forgot the drops of water, dripping, dripping, dripping on the rock that they were conquering. 'Those drops of water,' says his biographer, 'gave to Spain a brilliant historian, and to the Church a famous doctor.'

It is always the gentle things of life that conquer us. 'The moving waters'-to quote Keats' beautiful phrase-

The moving waters at their priest-like task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores'

wear down the towering cliffs along the coast. It is Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the sun over again. The North Wind, with its violence and bluster, only makes the traveller button his 43 coat the tighter. It is the genial warmth of the sun that makes him take it off. It is always by gentleness that the adamantine world is mastered. That is one of life's most lovely secrets. We are not ruled as much as we think by parliaments and commandments and enactments. The proportion of our lives that is governed by such things is very small. But the proportion that is dominated by gentler and more winsome forces is very great. The voices that sway us with a regal authority are soft and tender voices, the voices of those whose genial goodness compels us to love them. The imperial tones to which we capitulate unconditionally are very rarely stern official tones. Who does not remember how, in The Rosary, the Hon. Jane Champion asks Garth Dalmain why he does not marry? And Garth tells her of old Margery, his childhood's friend and nurse, now his housekeeper and general mender and tender-old Margery, with her black satin apron, lawn kerchief, and lavender ribbons. 'No doubt, Miss Champion, it will seem absurd to you that I should sit here on the duchess's lawn and confess that I have been held back from proposing marriage to the women I most admired because of what would have been my old nurse's opinion of them.' Yet so it invariably is. Our servants are often our masters. Life's loftiest authorities never derive their sanctions 44 from rank, office, or station. The soul has enthronements and coronations of its own. A little child often leads it. A Carpenter becomes its king. Out of Nazareth comes the Conqueror of the World. The pure and cleansing waters wear down the giant crags at the last.

But with purity and gentleness must go patience. The lapping waters do not reduce the rocky strata at a blow. It is always by means of patience that the finest conquests are won. Who that has read Jack London's Call of the Wild will ever forget the great fight at the end of the book between Buck, the dog hero, and the huge bull-moose? 'Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed, the old bull; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees!' How was it done? 'There is a patience in the wild,' Jack London says, 'a patience dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself'; and it was by means of this patience that Buck brought down his stately antlered prey. 'Night and day, Buck never left him, never gave him a moment's rest, never permitted him to browse on the leaves of the trees or the shoots of the young birch or willow. Nor did he give the old bull one single opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender, trickling streams they crossed.' For four 45 days Buck hung pitilessly at the huge beast's heels, and at the end of the fourth day he pulled the bull-moose down. Buck looked so little, but he wore the monarch out. The waters seem so feeble, but they beat the rocks to powder. It is thus that the foolish things of this world always confound the wise; the weak things conquer the mighty; and the things that are not bring to naught the things that are.

True love is never utilitarian. I am well aware that, in novels and in plays, the fair heroine considerately falls in love with the brave man who, at a critical moment, saves her from a watery grave or from the lurid horrors of a burning building. It is very good of the lady in the novel. I admire the gratitude which prompts her romantic affection, and, nine times out of ten, my judgement cordially approves her taste. I know, too, that, in fiction, the sick or wounded hero invariably falls desperately in love with the devoted nurse whose patient and untiring attention ensures his recovery.

It is very good of the hero. Again I say, I admire his gratitude and almost invariably endorse his choice. But it must be distinctly understood that this sort of thing is strictly confined to novels and theatricals. In real life, men and women do not fall in love out of gratitude. As a matter of fact, I am much more likely to fall in love with somebody for whom I have done something than with somebody who has done something for me.

47I was talking the other day with a nurse in a children's hospital. It is a heartbreaking business, she told me. 'You get into the way of nursing them, and comforting them, and playing with them, and mothering them, until you feel that they belong to you. And then, just as you have come to love the little thing as though he were your own, out he goes. And he always goes out with his father or his mother, clapping his hands for very joy at the excitement of going home, and you are left with a big lump in your throat, and perhaps a tear in your eye, at the thought that you will never see him again!' Clearly, therefore, we do not fall in love as a matter of gratitude. The people who cling to us and depend upon us are much more likely to win our hearts than the people who have placed us under an obligation to them. If, instead of telling us that the heroine fell in love with the man who had saved her from drowning, the novelist had told us that the man who risked his life by plunging into the river fell in love with the white and upturned face as he laid it gently on the bank; or if, instead of telling us that the patient fell in love with the nurse, he had told us that the nurse fell in love with the patient upon whom she had lavished such beautiful devotion, he would have been much more true to nature and to real life. It is indisputable, of course, that, the rescuer having 48 fallen in love with the rescued, she may soon discover his secret, and, since love begets love, reciprocate his affection. It is equally true that, the nurse having conceived so tender a passion for her patient, he may soon read the meaning of the light in her eye and of the tone in her voice, and feel towards her as she first felt towards him. But that is quite another matter, and is beside our point at present. Just now, I am only concerned with challenging the novelist's unwarrantable assumption that we fall in love out of gratitude. We do nothing of the kind. Love, I repeat, is never utilitarian. We may fall hopelessly in love with a thing that is of very little use to us; and we may feel no sentimental attractions at all towards a thing that is almost indispensable. If any man dares to dispute these conclusions, I shall simply produce a roll of linoleum in support of my arguments, and he will be promptly crushed beneath the weight of argument that the linoleum will furnish.

The linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. It is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. If you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. Every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people's doors knows exactly what I mean. The very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. Such 49 sounds are of three kinds. There is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. And so I say that the linoleum-if there be one-rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. Perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. It is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.

But however that may be, the fact remains. Since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. Of everything else about the house you get very fond. I can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. Robert Louis Stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! And everybody knows how Dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. I fancy I should feel life to be less worth living if I were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity 50 seems to be mysteriously associated. But I cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. I feel perfectly certain that neither Stevenson nor Dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. Yet why? Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.

But we cannot in decency let the matter rest at that. There must be some reason for the failure of the linoleum to stir my affections. Why does it alone, among my household goods and chattels, kindle no warmth within my soul? The linoleum is both pretty and useful; what more can I want? Many things pretty, but not useful, have swept me off my feet. Many things useful, but not pretty, have captivated my heart. And more than once things neither pretty nor useful have completely enslaved me. Yet here is the linoleum, both pretty 51 and useful, and I feel for it no fondness whatsoever; I remain as cold as ice, and as hard as adamant. Why is it? To begin with, I fancy the pattern has something to do with it. I do not now refer to any particular pattern; but to all the linoleum patterns that were ever designed. Those endless squares and circles and diamonds and stars! Could anything be more repelling? Here, for instance, on the linoleum, I find a star. I know at once that if I look I shall see hundreds of similar stars. They will all be in perfectly straight lines, not one a quarter of an inch out of its place. They will all be mathematically equidistant; they will be of exactly the same size, of identically the same colour, and their angles will all point in precisely the same direction. If the stars in the firmament above us were arranged on the same principle, they would drive us mad. The beauty of it is that, there, one star differeth from another star in glory. But on the linoleum they do nothing of the sort.

Or perhaps the pattern is a floral one. It thinks to coax me into a feeling that I am in the garden among the roses, the rhododendrons, or the chrysanthemums. But it is a hopeless failure. Whoever saw roses, rhododendrons, or chrysanthemums, all of exactly the same size, of precisely the same colour, and hanging in rows at mathematically identical levels? The beauty of the garden is 52 that having looked at this rose, I am the more eager to see that one; having admired this chrysanthemum, I am the more curious to mark the variety presented by the next. No two are precisely the same. And because this infinite diversity is the essential charm both of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, I am shocked and repelled by the monotony of the pattern on the linoleum. In the old days it was customary to plaster the walls, even of sick-rooms, with papers of patterns equally pronounced, and many a poor patient was tortured almost to death by the glaring geometrical abominations. The doctor said that the sufferer was to be kept perfectly quiet; yet the pattern on the wall is allowed to scream at him and shout at him from night until morning, and from morning until night. He has counted those awful stars or roses, perpendicularly, horizontally, diagonally, from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, until the hideous monstrosities are reproduced in frightful duplicate upon the fevered tissues of his throbbing brain. He may close his eyes, but he sees them still. It was a form of torture worthy of an inquisitor-general. The pattern on the linoleum is happily not quite so bad. When we are ill we do not see it; and when we are well we may to some extent avoid it. Not altogether; for even if we do not look at it, we have an uncanny feeling 53 that it is there. Between the hearthrug and the table I catch sight of the bright flaunting head of a scarlet poppy, or of the tossing petals of a huge chrysanthemum, and my imagination instantly flashes to my mind the horrible impression of tantalizing rows of exactly similar blossoms running off with mathematical precision in every conceivable direction.

For some reason or other we instinctively recoil from these monotonous regularities. I once heard a friend observe that the average woman would rather marry a man whose life was painfully irregular than a man whose life was painfully regular. It may have been an over-statement of the case; but there is something in it. We fall in love with good people, and we fall in love with bad people; but with the man who is 'too proper,' and the woman who is 'too straight-laced,' we very, very rarely fall in love. It is the problem of Tennyson's 'Maud.' As a girl Maud was irregular-and lovable.

Maud, with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,

Maud, the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,

Maud, with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,

Maud, the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all.

54 But later on Maud was regular-and as unattractive as linoleum.

... Maud, she has neither savour nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage passed,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more.

Shall I be told that this is high doctrine, and hard to bear, this doctrine of the lovableness of irregularity? I think not. Towering above all our biographies, as snowclad heights tower above dusty little molehills, there stands the life-story of One who, alone among the sons of men, was altogether good. It is the most charming and the most varied life-story that has ever been written since this little world began. Its lovely deeds and graceful speech, its tender pathos and its awful tragedy, have won the hearts of men all over the world, and all down the ages. But find monotony there if you can! It is like a sky full of stars or a field of fairest flowers. The life that repels, as the linoleum repels, by the very severity of its regularity, has something wrong with it somewhere.

55If I have outraged the sensibilities of any well-meaning champion of a geometrical and mathematical and linoleum-like regularity, let me hasten to conciliate him! I know that even regularity-the regularity of the linoleum pattern-may have its advantages. Dr. George MacDonald, in Robert Falconer, says that 'there is a well-authenticated story of a notorious convict who was reformed by entering, in one of the colonies, a church where the matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone with his mother as a boy.' Bravo! It is pleasant, extremely pleasant, to find that even monotony has its compensations. Let me but get to know my 'too proper' and 'straight-laced' friends a little better, and I shall doubtless discover even there a few redeeming features.

But, for all that, the linoleum is cold; and we do not fall in love with cold things. A volcano is a much more dangerous affair than an iceberg; but it is much more easy to fall in love with the things that make you shudder than with the things that make you shiver. That was the trouble with Maud, she was so chilly and chilling; her 'cold and clear-cut face, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null!' And that is precisely the trouble with every system of religion, morality, or philosophy-save one-that has ever been presented to the minds of men. Plato and Aristotle and Marcus 56 Aurelius were splendid, simply splendid; but they were frigid, frigid as Maud, and their counsels of perfection could never have enchained my heart. Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed-the stars of the East-were wonderful, but oh, so cold! I turn from these icy regularities to the lovely life I have already mentioned. And, to use Whittier's expressive word, it is 'warm.'

Yes, warm, sweet, tender, even yet

A present help is He;

And faith has yet its Olivet,

And love its Galilee.

'Warm' ... 'love' ... here are words that touch my soul to tears. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' The monotony and frigidity of the linoleum have given way to the beauty and the brightness of flowery fields all bathed in summer sunshine.