at long last fired the mortal shot and stretched his victim motionless upon the mountain-side. Scotty's obstinately pursued purpose is attained: ... 'there on the snow lay the great grey-brown form, and at one end like twin-necked hydras coiling were the horns, the wonderful horns, the sculptured record of the splendid life... his fifteen years made visible in their rings. Scotty walked slowly over and gazed in sullen silence, not at the dear-won horns, but at the calm, yellow eyes, unclosed, and yet undimmed, by death. Stonecold was he. He did not understand himself. He did not know this was the sudden drop after the long slope up which he had been forcing himself for months. . . . He sat down twenty yards away with his back to the horns. He put a quid of tobacco in his mouth. But his mouth was dry; he spat it out again. He did not know what he himself felt. Words played but little part in his life and his lips uttered a torrent of horrid blasphemies, his one emotional outburst.' A long silence; then 'I'd give it back to him, ef I could.' So the murderer ejaculates his remorse as he averts his gaze from the majestic creature on whose head the blood-money has been set. And Scotty of the Gunder Ram, living out his long life, a sullen monomaniac of the hills, remains (by reversal of elder processes) a human being upon whom the personality of the beast he has slain has stamped its subtle influence: "Say, "66 Scotty... That there New Yorker told me to tell ye he'd "give"—"To Hell with yer New Yorker! I'll niver sell • “him—I'll niver part with him. I stayed by him till I done "him up, an' he'll stay by me till he gits even 6.66 Mr. Roberts, dwelling with equal insistence on what passes in the dusk regions, the inner consciousness-the mind, of the inarticulate, produces by sheer force of absorption in his subjects an illusion upon his readers, greater than Mr. SetonThompson effects, that their impressions of the scenes and characters he depicts (he is eminently a pictorialist) are direct impressions. So sharply are they imprinted upon the eye of the imagination that it is an effort to remember that they are obtained at second-hand from the author. Not only are his beasts presented dissociated from the modifications of custom and nature incident to human contact, but the observer has hidden himself and his personality almost as heedfully from the reader's view as from the view of the secretive tribes of twilight prowlers whose nurseries he explores and whose home-places he surreptitiously examines. To what degree of exactitude his divinations of the interior workings of brain and intelligence and memory attain, how far he has penetrated the barrier that, strive we never so eagerly, separates the speechendowed from the speechless, who shall say? 'Ich möchte die einzige Frage beantwortet haben ob mit der 'Idee des Instinkts. . . die Fähigkeit zu träumen vereinbar 'sei ? ' Kreisler states the proposition to Kater Murr's philosophic master. In reply Meister Abraham vindicates the claim of Murr and his fellows not only to the dream but to the ' delirium' of the somnambulist and to the reverie of the lover and poet. Similarly, to Buck the sled-dog, Mr. London accorded twilight visions of the youth of the breed; of hairy men squatted by fires of long-past centuries, naked, fire-scorched, with bent knees and back-slanted head. To Last Bull, the sullen solitary of the Zoological Park enclosure, Mr. Roberts with less assurance assigns a like gift of retrospective imagination: 'He would stand for an hour at a time motionless except for the switching of his long tail, and staring steadily westward as if he knew where the great past of his race had lain. . . . Beyond the city were mountains and waters he could not see, but beyond the waters and the mountains stretched the green, illimitable plainswhich perhaps (who knows?) in some faint vision inherited from the ancestors whose myriads had possessed them, his sombre eyes in some strange way could see. The head-keeper declared sympathetically that the great bull was homesick, pining for the wind-swept levels of the open country (God's country, Payne called it) which his imprisoned hoofs had never trodden.' Nor is Mr. Roberts content to limit the mental aptitudes of his heroes to imaginative dreaming. He ascribes to Red Fox a deliberate and intentional study of surrounding conditions, and a deliberate adaptation of himself, his tastes and habits to those conditions with an intelligent appreciation of facts observed, displaying the practical side of animal' mentality.' 'In a vague way Red Fox made up his mind to study the man-people very carefully, in order that he might make use of them without too great risk. He spent a great deal of his time watching and considering. He had no intention of drawing down on his head the vengeance of a being whose powers he had not yet learnt to define.' The homesickness of Kehonka, the wild goose with clipped wing, his heart near to bursting with his desire' as the voices of the flock pass him by; the statecraft of the great king-robber, the eagle who, untainted by the lust of killing,' allows the fishhawk a due share of his fishing spoils 'lest he should remove to freer waters,' these are some of the outward facts, and the inner interpretation thereof, revealed by much study and great love to the watcher of the woods.* While to Last Bull's powers of imagination and Red Fox's talent for applied observation, Mr. Long adds an example of the moral capacity of self-sacrifice for that abstract idea called 'race-love.' In his Little Brother to the Bear' he testifies to a heroism' which brings a thrill of admiration for Moowesuk,' the gallant little champion who always comes in the face of death and danger to the cry of distress from one of his own kind.' Throughout these narratives, with their attempt not to humanise but to individualise the animal, the attitude adopted towards the insoluble problems approached is the same. It is no doubt the unusual things,' as Mr. Long allows, the exceptional rather than the normal animal individualities that are presented, but even while it is the spell of the wild that draws men's spirit towards the vast dumb-show mystery of the beast creation, while the emotional element of sympathy is ever present, the approach is made in the spirit of the truth-seeker. And for us who read, as for those who write, the spell of nature and the spirit of truth compass ends well worth attaining. In the fretted, crowded, hurry of life, with its intellectual stress and nervous tension, the Animal Story of to-day comes as an open door upon a wide horizon. In Mr. Roberts' eloquent words: 'it is a potent emancipator. It frees us for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities and from the mean tenement of self, of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to return to nature without requiring that we at the same time return to barbarism. It leads us back to the old kinship of earth without asking us to relinquish by way of toll any part of the wisdom of the ages, any fine essential of the "large result of time." The clear, candid life to which it initiates us, far behind though it lies in the long upward march of being, holds for us this quality. It has ever the more significance, it has ever the richer gift of refreshment and renewal, the more humane the heart, the more spiritual the understanding which we bring to the intimacy of it.'t * See also The Grey Master, The Monarch of Park Barren, &c. † Preface to The Kindred of the Wild.' ART. V. THE COCKNEY RAPHAEL.' 1. Benjamin Robert Haydon his Correspondence and Table Talk. With Memoir by F. W. HAYDON. 1876. 2. Life of B. R. Haydon from his Autobiography and Journals. Compiled by TOM TAYLOR. 1853. 3. Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie. 1860. 4. Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. 1869. 5. Life and Writings of H. Fuseli. 1881. 6. Memorials of Coleorton. 1803-34. Edited by W. KNIGHT. 1887. 7. Friendships of Mary Mitford. Edited by A. G. K. L'ESTRANGE. 1882. 8. Letters and Journals of Sir Walter Scott. 9. Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. LUCAS. 1905. 1890 and 1894. London: Methuen. 10. Haydon's Lectures on Painting and Design. 1844-6. WE E live in the age of modesty and indifference, when unblushing self-confidence is very generally deprecated, enthusiasm has long ceased to be fashionable, and patriotism is said to be in a decadent condition. Even our poets, with one or two notable exceptions, deem it necessary to assume a diffidence they do not feel, which Byron would have ridiculed and Wordsworth scorned. It is not therefore easy for us to form an impartial opinion of a man like Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter, whose vanity was only equalled by his self-confidence, whom even that kindly critic Sir Walter Scott euphemistically described as being somewhat too enthusiastic,' and who remained to the very end of his life a flaming patriot. It is said that he even loved a London fog, that sublime canopy that shrouds the City of the World,' and when a friend likened it to the smoke of the Israelites making bricks in Egypt, It is grander,' he exclaimed, for it is the smoke of a 'people who would have made the Egyptians make bricks 'for them!' But though he proudly boasted of being a man who gloried in his native land, who would rather die on a dunghill in it than be possessed of affluence in any other, his patriotism was not of that despairing pessimistic kind to which we are nowadays accustomed. What!' he cried indignantly when some one uttered a commonplace on the defensive advantages of insularity, The Channel a lucky thing for England? 'I can tell you it is a lucky thing for the Continent!' And he would never have identified himself with the 'Old Tory' of his picture, whom he represented as a typical John Bull, breakfasting in comfort and security, surrounded by every possible luxury, and loudly proclaiming the ruin of his country. When in early life Haydon selected as his motto a line from Tasso Ali al cuor' (Wings at the heart ')-he made a singularly happy choice, for in those three words the whole character of the man is admirably summed up. No one can peruse the autobiographical account of that ceaseless struggle with Fate which he waged so dauntlessly and with such indomitable courage during the last forty years of his life without being struck by the unabated optimism which he displayed in the face of continual disappointment. He resembled, as he himself declared, a man with air-balloons under his armpits and ether in his soul. Miss Mitford rightly said of him that he was 'all air and fire'; nothing seemed able to stifle his ambition or damp his ardour. On those buoyant wings of his imagination he soared to sublime heights, whence the adverse winds of Circumstance buffeted him back to earth with monotonous and depressing regularity. But in spite of repeated failure he never despaired; beneath the bludgeonings of Chance his head 'was bloody but unbowed.' After each fresh reverse his mind sprang to a new hope, and it was this elasticity,' as he calls it, that supported him through periods of tribulation which would have earlier crushed the spirit of a less sanguine man. Like Robert Browning, he was ever a fighter, One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Sleep to wake.' Haydon's trust in Providence was pathetic in its intensity, and survived the rudest shocks. He was a deeply religious man; never rose or retired without prayer, and occasionally during the day would invoke a divine blessing upon his work. But his belief in God's protection did not make him a fatalist or an idler. My enthusiasm was intense,' he writes in the year 1815. 'I held intercourse only with my art and my great 'Creator. I shunned society. I looked on myself as called to 'produce a great reform, and I devoted myself to it with the passionate self-seclusion of an ascetic.' If genius consists of an infinite capacity for taking pains, then Haydon possessed real genius. His industry was amazing. |