Books: Pagan Papers

K >> Kenneth Grahame >> Pagan Papers

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Pagan Papers was first published in 1893 and the text is in the public
domain. This is a reprint of the first American edition of 1898. The
transcription was done by William McClain ,
2002.

A printed version of this book is available from Sattre Press,
http://pagan_papers.sattre-press.com/. It includes a glossary of
French and Latin phrases.

PAGAN PAPERS
by Kenneth Grahame

The Romance of the Road

Among the many places of magic visited by Pantagruel and his company
during the progress of their famous voyage, few surpass that island
whose roads did literally ``go'' to places -- ``ou les chemins
cheminent, comme animaulx'': and would-be travellers, having inquired
of the road as to its destination, and received satisfactory reply,
``se guindans'' (as the old book hath it -- hoisting themselves up on)
``au chemin opportun, sans aultrement se poiner ou fatiguer, se
trouvoyent au lieu destiné.''

The best example I know of an approach to this excellent sort of
vitality in roads is the Ridgeway of the North Berkshire Downs. Join
it at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames; at once it
strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid,
purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the Downs a
broad green ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the
neighbouring grass, yet distinct for all that. No villages nor
homesteads tempt it aside or modify its course for a yard; should you
lose the track where it is blent with the bordering turf or merged in
and obliterated by criss-cross paths, you have only to walk straight
on, taking heed of no alternative to right or left; and in a minute
'tis with you again -- arisen out of the earth as it were. Or, if
still not quite assured, lift you your eyes, and there it runs over
the brow of the fronting hill. Where a railway crosses it, it
disappears indeed -- hiding Alpheus-like, from the ignominy of rubble
and brick-work; but a little way on it takes up the running again with
the same quiet persistence. Out on that almost trackless expanse of
billowy Downs such a track is in some sort humanly companionable: it
really seems to lead you by the hand.

The ``Rudge'' is of course an exceptional instance; but indeed this
pleasant personality in roads is not entirely fanciful. It exists as a
characteristic of the old country road, evolved out of the primitive
prehistoric track, developing according to the needs of the land it
passes through and serves: with a language, accordingly, and a meaning
of its own. Its special services are often told clearly enough; but
much else too of the quiet story of the country-side: something of the
old tale whereof you learn so little from the printed page. Each is
instinct, perhaps, with a separate suggestion. Some are martial and
historic, and by your side the hurrying feet of the dead raise a
ghostly dust. The name of yon town -- with its Roman or Saxon suffix
to British root -- hints at much. Many a strong man, wanting his vates
sacer, passed silently to Hades for that suffix to obtain. The little
rise up yonder on the Downs that breaks their straight green line
against the sky showed another sight when the sea of battle surged and
beat on its trampled sides; and the Roman, sore beset, may have gazed
down this very road for relief, praying for night or the succouring
legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under
her sun-bonnet -- so may some girl-ancestress of hers have watched
with beating heart the Wessex levies hurry along to clash with the
heathen and break them on the down where the ash trees grew. And
yonder, where the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of
drooping boughs -- is that gleam of water or glitter of lurking
spears?

Some sing you pastorals, fluting low in the hot sun between dusty
hedges overlooked by contented cows; past farmsteads where man and
beast, living in frank fellowship, learn pleasant and serviceable
lessons each of the other; over the full-fed river, lipping the
meadow-sweet, and thence on either side through leagues of hay. Or
through bending corn they chant the mystical wonderful song of the
reaper when the harvest is white to the sickle. But most of them,
avoiding classification, keep each his several tender significance; as
with one I know, not so far from town, which woos you from the valley
by gentle ascent between nut-laden hedges, and ever by some touch of
keen fragrance in the air, by some mystery of added softness under
foot -- ever a promise of something to come, unguessed, delighting.
Till suddenly you are among the pines, their keen scent strikes you
through and through, their needles carpet the ground, and in their
swaying tops moans the unappeasable wind -- sad, ceaseless, as the cry
of a warped humanity. Some paces more, and the promise is fulfilled,
the hints and whisperings become fruition: the ground breaks steeply
away, and you look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads,
rolling woodland, and -- bounding all, blent with the horizon, a
greyness, a gleam -- the English Channel. A road of promises, of
hinted surprises, following each other with the inevitable sequence in
a melody.

But we are now in another and stricter sense an island of chemins qui
cheminent: dominated, indeed, by them. By these the traveller,
veritably se guindans, may reach his destination ``sans se poiner ou
se fatiguer'' (with large qualifications); but sans very much else
whereof he were none the worse. The gain seems so obvious that you
forget to miss all that lay between the springing stride of the early
start and the pleasant weariness of the end approached, when the limbs
lag a little as the lights of your destination begin to glimmer
through the dusk. All that lay between! ``A Day's Ride a Life's
Romance'' was the excellent title of an unsuccessful book; and indeed
the journey should march with the day, beginning and ending with its
sun, to be the complete thing, the golden round, required of it. This
makes that mind and body fare together, hand in hand, sharing the
hope, the action, the fruition; finding equal sweetness in the languor
of aching limbs at eve and in the first god-like intoxication of
motion with braced muscle in the sun. For walk or ride take the mind
over greater distances than a throbbing whirl with stiffening joints
and cramped limbs through a dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover
vaster spaces with Lavengro, footing it with gipsies or driving his
tinker's cart across lonely commons, than with many a globe-trotter or
steam-yachtsman with diary or log? And even that dividing line --
strictly marked and rarely overstepped -- between the man who bicycles
and the man who walks, is less due to a prudent regard for personal
safety of the one part than to an essential difference in minds.

There is a certain supernal, a deific, state of mind which may indeed
be experienced in a minor degree, by any one, in the siesta part of a
Turkish bath. But this particular golden glow of the faculties is only
felt at its fulness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open
air. ``A man ought to be seen by the gods,'' says Marcus Aurelius,
``neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.'' Though this
does not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make of
humanity, yet the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight
in these unblest days of hurry. If ever seen at all, 'tis when after
many a mile in sun and wind -- maybe rain -- you reach at last, with
the folding star, your destined rustic inn. There, in its homely,
comfortable strangeness, after unnumbered chops with country ale, the
hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from
accustomed cares and worries -- you are set in a peculiar nook of
rest. Then old failures seem partial successes, then old loves come
back in their fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of
regret, then old jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing
of the gods above, nothing of men below -- not even their company.
To-morrow you shall begin life again: shall write your book, make your
fortune, do anything; meanwhile you sit, and the jolly world swings
round, and you seem to hear it circle to the music of the spheres.
What pipe was ever thus beatifying in effect? You are aching all over,
and enjoying it; and the scent of the limes drifts in through the
window. This is undoubtedly the best and greatest country in the
world; and none but good fellows abide in it.

Laud we the Gods,
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars.

The Romance of the Rail

In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of
the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no
longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier
times, three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked
out from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and
wot not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or
Madagascar, or if it were not North and South America. ``And there be
certaine flitting islands,'' says one, ``which have been oftentimes
seene, and when men approached near them they vanished.'' ``It may be
that the gulfs will wash us down,'' said Ulysses (thinking of what
Americans call the ``getting-off place''); ``it may be we shall touch
the Happy Isles.'' And so on, and so on; each with his special hope or
``wild surmise.'' There was always a chance of touching the Happy
Isles. And in that first fair world whose men and manners we knew
through story-books, before experience taught us far other, the Prince
mounts his horse one fine morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a
forest; and next morning, lo! a new country: and he rides by fields
and granges never visited before, through faces strange to him, to
where an unknown King steps down to welcome the mysterious stranger.
And he marries the Princess, and dwells content for many a year; till
one day he thinks ``I will look upon my father's face again, though
the leagues be long to my own land.'' And he rides all day, and sleeps
in a forest; and next morning he is made welcome at home, where his
name has become a dim memory. Which is all as it should be; for,
annihilate time and space as you may, a man's stride remains the true
standard of distance; an eternal and unalterable scale. The severe
horizon, too, repels the thoughts as you gaze to the infinite
considerations that lie about, within touch and hail; and the night
cometh, when no man can work.

To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
this second generation of steam. Pereunt et imputantur; they pass
away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed -- not fully nor
worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
immediate recognition as poetic material. ``For as it is dislocation
and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet,
who re-attaches things to Nature and the whole -- re-attaching even
artificial things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper
insight -- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts''; so
that he looks upon ``the factory village and the railway'' and ``sees
them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the
spider's geometrical web.'' The poet, however, seems hard to convince
hereof. Emerson will have it that ``Nature loves the gliding train of
cars''; ``instead of which'' the poet still goes about the country
singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and liberal.
Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its
kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron
with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart-flashing sun-rays, and
to make the whole a single expression of irresoluble force. And even
in a certain work by another and a very different painter -- though I
willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate romantic intention -- you
shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order
still lingering in the first transition period: the coach-shaped
railway carriages with luggage piled and corded on top, the red-coated
guard, the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces. To
those bred within sight of the sea, steamers will always partake in
somewhat of the ``beauty and mystery of the ships''; above all, if
their happy childhood have lain among the gleaming lochs and sinuous
firths of the Western Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, the
strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a piece of the busy,
mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand alone in owning
to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing whistle --
judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In the
days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles
from certain railway stations, veritable ``horns of Elf-land, faintly
blowing.'' Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a
phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the
journey bit by bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the
grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses
looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown
leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air
streamed in through the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter;
Endymion-like, ``my first touch of the earth went nigh to kill'': but
it was only to hurry northwards again on the wings of imagination,
from dust and heat to the dear mountain air. ``We are only the
children who might have been,'' murmured Lamb's dream babes to him;
and for the sake of those dream-journeys, the journeys that might have
been, I still hail with a certain affection the call of the engine in
the night: even as I love sometimes to turn the enchanted pages of the
railway a b c, and pass from one to the other name reminiscent or
suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian maybe, or savouring of Wessex,
or bearing me away to some sequestered reach of the quiet Thames.

Non Libri Sed Liberi

It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always
fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them -- all night
if you let him -- wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed
tears over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not
read them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books
without a remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers
start with the honest resolution that some day they will ``shut down
on'' this fatal practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter
into their charmed circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind
them. Then will they read out of nothing but first editions; every day
shall be a debauch in large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco
shall be familiar to their touch as buckram. Meanwhile, though, books
continue to flaunt their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun
the fray. In fine, one buys and continues to buy; and the promised
Sabbath never comes.

The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein
resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the
first sight of the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a
trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a
habit of melancholy in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed
with amorously for an hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior
passion aforesaid) takes its destined place on the shelf -- where it
stays. And this saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail
to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one
possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is
insufferably conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now
condemned to a fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby
though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine
youth and gloss by the price of any book. No man -- no human,
masculine, natural man -- ever sells a book. Men have been known in
moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary necessity, to
rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not, to
``wince and relent and refrain'' from what they should: these things,
howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of
us. But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural; and it is
noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity, contains no
distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately it is hardly known to
exist: the face of the public being set against it as a flint -- and
the trade giving such wretched prices.

In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the
reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment,
sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking
capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed,
books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life
that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. Non angli sed
Angeli was the comment of a missionary (old style) on the small human
duodecimos exposed for sale in the Roman market-place; and many a
buyer, when some fair-haired little chattel passed into his
possession, must have felt that here was something vendible no more.
So of these you may well affirm Non libri sed liberi; children now,
adopted into the circle, they shall be trafficked in never again.

There is one exception which has sadly to be made -- one class of men,
of whom I would fain, if possible, have avoided mention, who are
strangers to any such scruples. These be Executors -- a word to be
strongly accented on the penultimate; for, indeed, they are the common
headsmen of collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for
harmless books. Hoary, famous old collections, budding young
collections, fair virgin collections of a single author -- all go down
before the executor's remorseless axe. He careth not and he spareth
not. ``The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,'' and it
is chiefly by the hand of the executor that she doth love to scatter
it. May oblivion be his portion for ever!

Of a truth, the foes of the book-lover are not few. One of the most
insidious, because he cometh at first in friendly, helpful guise, is
the bookbinder. Not in that he bindeth books -- for the fair binding
is the final crown and flower of painful achievement -- but because he
bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and
the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart
grows sick with hope deferred. Each morn the maiden binds her hair,
each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage-porch, each autumn the
harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds lake and
stream, and still the bookbinder he bindeth not. Then a secret voice
whispereth: ``Arise, be a man, and slay him! Take him grossly, full of
bread, with all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May; At gaming,
swearing, or about some act That hath no relish of salvation in it!''
But when the deed is done, and the floor strewn with fragments of
binder -- still the books remain unbound. You have made all that
horrid mess for nothing, and the weary path has to be trodden over
again. As a general rule, the man in the habit of murdering
bookbinders, though he performs a distinct service to society, only
wastes his own time and takes no personal advantage.

And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in
leathern surcoats bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet
weathered the Cape and sailed into halcyon seas. For these books --
well, you kept them many weeks before binding them, that the
oleaginous printer's-ink might fully dry before the necessary
hammering; you forbore to open the pages, that the autocratic binder
might refold the sheets if he pleased; and now that all is over --
consummatum est -- still you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a
quiet mind. For these purple emperors are not to be read in bed, nor
during meals, nor on the grass with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief
periods are all the whirling times allow you for solid serious
reading. Still, after all, you have them; you can at least pulverise
your friends with the sight; and what have they to show against them?
Probably some miserable score or so of half-bindings, such as lead you
scornfully to quote the hackneyed couplet concerning the poor Indian
whose untutored mind clothes him before but leaves him bare behind.
Let us thank the gods that such things are: that to some of us they
give not poverty nor riches but a few good books in whole bindings.
Dowered with these and (if it be vouchsafed) a cup of Burgundy that is
sound even if it be not old, we can leave to others the foaming grape
of Eastern France that was vintaged in '74, and with it the whole
range of shilling shockers, -- the Barmecidal feast of the purposeful
novelist -- yea, even the countless series that tell of Eminent Women
and Successful Men.

Loafing

When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn
has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows
who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and
stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest,
realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence
has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures
than the other -- that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart
supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes
straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been
spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others,
the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the
Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it: they
are very necessary to him. For ``Suave mari magno'' is the motto of
your true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the
struggles and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making
holiday that he is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and
maintain his self-satisfaction at boiling-point. And so is he never
very far away from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof,
but hovers more or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star
amidst whirling constellations, he may watch the mad world ``glance,
and nod, and hurry by.''

There are many such centres of contemplation along the West Coast of
Scotland. Few places are better loafing-ground than a pier, with its
tranquil ``lucid interval'' between steamers, the ever recurrent throb
of paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles,
splash of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry
and scurry of the human morrice. Here, tanquam in speculo, the Loafer
as he lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in
the great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting,
departing woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference --
he may experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a
dream; as if, indeed, he were Heine's god in dream on a mountain-side.
Let the drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his
dream, will vanish into the nothing whence they came. And these
emotions may be renewed each morning; if a fair one sail to-day, be
sure that one as fair will land to-morrow. The supply is
inexhaustible.

But in the South perhaps the happiest loafing-ground is the gift of
Father Thames; for there again the contrast of violent action, with
its blisters, perspiration, and the like, throws into fine relief the
bliss of ``quietism.'' I know one little village in the upper reaches
where loafing may be pushed to high perfection. Here the early hours
of the morning are vexed by the voices of boaters making their way
down the little street to the river. The most of them go staggering
under hampers, bundles of waterproofs, and so forth. Their voices are
clamant of feats to be accomplished: they will row, they will punt,
they will paddle, till they weary out the sun. All this the Loafer
hears through the open door of his cottage, where in his shirt-sleeves
he is dallying with his bacon, as a gentleman should. He is the only
one who has had a comfortable breakfast -- and he knows it. Later he
will issue forth and stroll down in their track to the bridge. The
last of these Argonauts is pulling lustily forth; the river is dotted
with evanishing blazers. Upon all these lunatics a pitiless Phoebus
shines triumphant. The Loafer sees the last of them off the stage,
turns his back on it, and seeks the shady side of the street.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5