Yeast: a Problem

‘Ay, sir, and, to do them justice, they had need, for the poor’s sake, to keep good friends with the squire.  How else are they to get a farthing for schools, or coal-subscriptions, or lying-in societies, or lending libraries, or penny clubs?  If they spoke their minds to the great ones, sir, how could they keep the parish together?’

‘You seem to see both sides of a question, certainly.  But what a miserable state of things, that the labouring man should require all these societies, and charities, and helps from the rich!—that an industrious freeman cannot live without alms!’

‘So I have thought this long time,’ quietly answered Tregarva.

‘But Miss Honoria,—she is not afraid to tell her father the truth?’

‘Suppose, sir, when Adam and Eve were in the garden, that all the devils had come up and played their fiends’ tricks before them,—do you think they’d have seen any shame in it?’

‘I really cannot tell,’ said Lancelot, smiling.

‘Then I can, sir.  They’d have seen no more harm in it than there was harm already in themselves; and that was none.  A man’s eyes can only see what they’ve learnt to see.’

Lancelot started: it was a favourite dictum of his in Carlyle’s works.

‘Where did you get that thought, my friend’

‘By seeing, sir.’

‘But what has that to do with Miss Honoria?’

‘She is an angel of holiness herself, sir; and, therefore, she goes on without blushing or suspecting, where our blood would boil again.  She sees people in want, and thinks it must be so, and pities them and relieves them.  But she don’t know want herself; and, therefore, she don’t know that it makes men beasts and devils.  She’s as pure as God’s light herself; and, therefore, she fancies every one is as spotless as she is.  And there’s another mistake in your charitable great people, sir.  When they see poor folk sick or hungry before their eyes, they pull out their purses fast enough, God bless them; for they wouldn’t like to be so themselves.  But the oppression that goes on all the year round, and the want that goes on all the year round, and the filth, and the lying, and the swearing, and the profligacy, that go on all the year round, and the sickening weight of debt, and the miserable grinding anxiety from rent-day to rent-day, and Saturday night to Saturday night, that crushes a man’s soul down, and drives every thought out of his head but how he is to fill his stomach and warm his back, and keep a house over his head, till he daren’t for his life take his thoughts one moment off the meat that perisheth—oh, sir, they never felt this; and, therefore, they never dream that there are thousands who pass them in their daily walks who feel this, and feel nothing else!’

This outburst was uttered with an earnestness and majesty which astonished Lancelot.  He forgot the subject in the speaker.

‘You are a very extraordinary gamekeeper!’ said he.

‘When the Lord shows a man a thing, he can’t well help seeing it,’ answered Tregarva, in his usual staid tone.

There was a pause.  The keeper looked at him with a glance, before which Lancelot’s eyes fell.

‘Hell is paved with hearsays, sir, and as all this talk of mine is hearsay, if you are in earnest, sir, go and see for yourself.  I know you have a kind heart, and they tell me that you are a great scholar, which would to God I was! so you ought not to condescend to take my word for anything which you can look into yourself;’ with which sound piece of common-sense Tregarva returned busily to his eel-lines.

‘Hand me the rod and can, and help me out along the buck-stage,’ said Lancelot; ‘I must have some more talk with you, my fine fellow.’

‘Amen,’ answered Tregarva, as he assisted our lame hero along a huge beam which stretched out into the pool; and having settled him there, returned mechanically to his work, humming a Wesleyan hymn-tune.

Lancelot sat and tried to catch perch, but Tregarva’s words haunted him.  He lighted his cigar, and tried to think earnestly over the matter, but he had got into the wrong place for thinking.  All his thoughts, all his sympathies, were drowned in the rush and whirl of the water.  He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment of sight and sound.  Like many young men at his crisis of life, he had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had become her slave; and now a luscious scene, a singing bird, were enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful thoughts.  He tried to think, but the river would not let him.  It thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, and leapt madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and swept them away down its dancing waves, and let them go again only to sweep them down again and again, till his brain felt a delicious dizziness from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar.  And then below, how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans, hissing and twining snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge crystal bells, which boiled up from the bottom, and dived again beneath long threads of creamy foam, and swung round posts and roots, and rushed blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly banks, and shook the ever-restless bulrushes, till it was swept away and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, in one broad rippling sheet of molten silver, towards the distant sea.  Downwards it fleeted ever, and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream; and the great trout, with their yellow sides and peacock backs, lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows, and the may-flies flickered and rustled round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows’ bills snapped as they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift’s wings whirred like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun.  The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul, and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination, too deep for meditation, and

‘Beauty born of murmuring sound,
Did pass into his face.’

Blame him not.  There are more things in a man’s heart than ever get in through his thoughts.

On a sudden, a soft voice behind him startled him.

‘Can a poor cockney artist venture himself along this timber without falling in?’

Lancelot turned.

‘Come out to me, and if you stumble, the naiads will rise out of their depths, and “hold up their pearled wrists” to save their favourite.’

The artist walked timidly out along the beams, and sat down beside Lancelot, who shook him warmly by the hand.

‘Welcome, Claude Mellot, and all lovely enthusiasms and symbolisms!  Expound to me, now, the meaning of that water-lily leaf and its grand simple curve, as it lies sleeping there in the back eddy.’

‘Oh, I am too amused to philosophise.  The fair Argemone has just been treating me to her three hundred and sixty-fifth philippic against my unoffending beard.’

‘Why, what fault can she find with such a graceful and natural ornament?’

‘Just this, my dear fellow, that it is natural.  As it is, she considers me only “intelligent-looking.”  If the beard were away, my face, she says, would be “so refined!”  And, I suppose, if I was just a little more effeminate and pale, with a nice retreating under-jaw and a drooping lip, and a meek, peaking simper, like your starved Romish saints, I should be “so spiritual!”  And if, again, to complete the climax, I did but shave my head like a Chinese, I should be a model for St. Francis himself!’

‘But really, after all, why make yourself so singular by this said beard?’

‘I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be ashamed of the mark of manhood.  Oh, that one or two of your Protestant clergymen, who ought to be perfect ideal men, would have the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard, and testify that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and divinity of man as God made him!  Our forefathers were not ashamed of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep his moustache, while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as close as they can; and in proportion to a man’s piety he wears less hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the Popish priest who shaves his crown!’

‘What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns’ hair?’

‘I say, that extremes meet, and prudish Manichæism always ends in sheer indecency.  Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman’s hair is her glory, for it was given to her for a covering: as says your friend, Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later, and had a chance of working them out.’

‘How remarkably orthodox you are!’ said Lancelot, smiling.

‘How do you know that I am not?  You never heard me deny the old creed.  But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once?  My business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it wherever I find it.  Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the true.’

‘But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and so you, too, must search for the true.’

‘Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro.  They are worthy to occupy me a life; for they are eternal—or at least that which they express: and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon.  If I, who live by art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the fountain of art—of the

“Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate
With his own hues whate’er he shines upon.”’

‘As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!’ answered Lancelot.  ‘I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions.  When you look through the glitter of the words, your “spirit of beauty” simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.’

‘Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!’ said Claude, laughing.

‘I don’t care sixpence now for the ideal!  I want not beauty, but some beautiful thing—a woman perhaps,’ and he sighed.  ‘But at least a person—a living, loving person—all lovely itself, and giving loveliness to all things!  If I must have an ideal, let it be, for mercy’s sake, a realised one.’

Claude opened his sketch-book.

‘We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.  But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these degenerate days—the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.  Look at them!  Honoria the dark—symbolic of passionate depth; Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light!  Oh, that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in this piecemeal world!’

‘You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, from both beauties?’

‘I hope so, for my own sake.  There is no path left to immortality, or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.’

‘I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,’ said Lancelot.

‘Come here, gentlemen both!’ cried Argemone from the bridge.