In One Lesson
by Henry Morley (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.2 #29 (12 Oct 1850).
Once on a sultry summer's day a traveller halted for rest in a thick wood, beside a mountain stream. Delighting in the grateful shade and lulled by the cool ripple of the water at his feet, he then considered himself happy among mortals. "Vain world," he said, "have I at last escaped you? Men, busy gnats, who would be eagles in your flight, have I your hum no longer in my ears? The gossip of the rivulet, the whisper of the wood, replace the cries of passion and the heart-grating jest. Here is water; were there bread-fruit on a single tree, here I would lie down and live; here I would live in peace, and toil no more."
A troubled sigh, more human than the sigh of wind among the foliage, disturbed the traveller. "Be thankful to your guardian angel," articulated the same voice, "be thankful to your God, young stranger, that in this forest you have not escaped the sound of a man speaking." The traveller yawned restlessly, and felt within himself by no means thankful.
The person who had interrupted his enjoyment was a hermit of the mountain, not yet old. He said, "Will you come with me?"
"Why, really"—answered the traveller.
"I have a sight to show that you will long remember."
"A sight!" said the young man; "but I assure you I have seen so many exhibitions and things of that sort—Venice, the Cosmorama, the Industrious Fleas, the Pope, the Eruption of Vesuvius, Tom Thumb, Simplon, Jenny Lind, that really"—
"What I will show you is a thing that you have not yet seen."
"O yes, some relic—some skull, or a saint's finger-nail; I assure you, my dear fellow, I have seen tons of relics."
"Still I will show you something that you have not seen in all your travelling."
"What is it then?"
"The World."
"The—what?" ejaculated the traveller, with a slow elevation of his eyebrows. "The world? Well, now, that is particularly cool. No, no; it won't do: you can't show me any up or down, in or out, corner or square acre of the world I have not already seen. From the Cider Cellars in London to High Mass in Saint Peter's at Rome I am equally at home. All over Europe I am as familiar with Welch rabbits as with Lachrymæ Christi. No, no. I know the world quite well enough already."
"You do not; come along with me."
"I'll tell you what," said the traveller, holding out his open hand; "I'll lay you a new hat that you can show me nothing new. Is it a bargain? Done then. So come along."
As they went up the mountain side the young man chattered idly.
"Why do you talk thus frivolously with me?" asked the hermit. "When you were speaking only to yourself, your words were earnest, though they were not true; why do you speak differently to a fellow-creature?"
"Fellow creature! ha! ha! What a way to talk to a gentleman!" exclaimed the traveller. "I see how it is, I'm in for a sermon." He stopped suddenly. "So, out with it at once—sudden death is my motto. I hate lingering agony. Where's your text?"
The hermit was silent. They continued to climb the steep.
"You talk of teaching me to know the world!" continued the traveller. "Why you don't know even the rudiments of education in it. We don't have our hearts given us to keep them in our pockets, and bring out on all occasions; they are packed up out of sight in a bony case, not to be come at easily. You, for example, look as dry and harmless as a dead leaf; and I might take you and talk to you as part and parcel of the woodland scenery, a log of it, I may say—a piece of lignum vitæ; or perhaps a male nymph; if I stopped here as I wished to do, I might talk my heart out to you, and we might be very sober upon brookwater: by the by, do you drink that, and does it give you goître?"
The hermit paused before an overhanging rock. A rude porch overgrown with passion-flowers sheltered the entrance to a cave, and under this there was a stone bench placed. The traveller sat down. "Now, hospitable friend," he said, "can you refresh a pilgrim with some hermit's fare? Produce your pumpkins."
"Presently. But this is not my home. First let us"—
"Oh! by all means; first let us see the curiosities. This, I suppose, is your museum."
The hermit with a grave look passed into the cave, and his companion followed. Within the cave there was a dim light and an earthy smell; across one part of it there hung a curtain beside which the hermit stood. "What you are now about to see" — he said.
The young man interrupted him. "This really is too bad. I suppose you've got there thirty miles of Nile or Mississippi, rolled up in a few yards of paint and canvas. I might as well have stepped in out of Piccadilly. Spare the lecture. Draw the curtain. Well, what's here? A globe? Pooh, man, I learned the globes at school. Odd, though, certainly." And the young man approached the spectacle quite silently. It was a simple globe, revolving slowly, without visible support, suspended in the air, and all around it the air glittered with a strange, inexplicable mist. The mist spread rapidly throughout the cave, enveloping the hermit and the traveller; but through it the revolving globe appeared to shine with new distinctness. The traveller had some fear to conceal, for it appeared to him that on that little orb the land was land, the rocks were rocks, the seas were seas, although incomprehensibly minute. The glitter of the little seas attracted him, but as he gazed on any spot it grew. His eye was fixed with terror. Waves grew under it. He knew no more about the cavern, or the hermit, or the wondrous mist; there were but two things present to his mind, himself and the great panting ocean underneath a hot bright sun. A boat with spread sails floated by so close before him, that he drew back suddenly as if to stand out of its path. Sailors were in it, one was jesting with his wife; their child, a blue-eyed flaxen-headed little man of five years old, was playing at the stern, and dabbled with his rosy fingers in the water. Suddenly he lost his balance, there was a splash, a cry—another cry, the mother's—and the father leapt into the sea to save him. Our traveller strains forward with a beating heart, they struggle vainly; he will leap in to the rescue, but an unknown power binds him, as a nightmare, and he stands motionless, and can only turn his eyes away. When next he looks, there is no ocean, 'but the little globe revolving in its mist.
"How it glistens—glares at us. It is too much: drop the curtain, hermit!"
The hermit draws the curtain, and they are together in the cave again. "I have been eating wild grapes in the wood, and made myself a vision," said the traveller, "or were you playing tricks with ether vapour? Pooh, friend! I have breathed chloroform a dozen times; I am not to be cheated with mere druggery."
"Shall I explain?" asked the hermit.
"Certainly—confess."
"When I was a young man," said the hermit, "indolent and careless, I soon thought that I had seen the world. All its excitements were run through, and I felt wearied; I was what the French pronounce blasé, just as you are now."
"Just as I am. Yes, very good. A strong comparison."
"And so I said to myself, 'I will abjure the world. For all purposes of amusement it is a failure.'"
"For all purposes of amusement it is a failure!" echoed the traveller.
"I had read all the novels" (the traveller groaned), "seen all the exhibitions, knew what were the stock-themes in the newspapers, and I thirsted after something new."
"And thirsting vainly," said the traveller, "you shrivelled up into the dry thing I now behold."
"Pardon me," said the hermit, "I did not thirst vainly. I betook myself to antiquities, there found the novelty I required in studying black letter. I bought books of magic, and became"—
"Upon my word, I honour you," the traveller once more interrupted. "You fell back upon the forgotten wisdom of our ancestors. Wore a white waistcoat, did you not? You ground yourself in the Disraeli-Smyth-Manners mill, and came out a Young Englander."
"No; I grew a beard. I learned the secret of the Egyptian sorcerer!"
"What! the blot, of ink, the little boy, the sweeper, the cup of coffee, the sultan in his camp, and the anything and anybody you ask to see that is going on or existing in any part of the world, presented to your wondering eyes in the black magic of a blot of ink?"
"Precisely."
"For a full account of which see"—continued the lively visitor—"neither the cabala, nor any other mysterious volume of antiquity, but Lane's 'Modern Egyptians.'"
"But mine is not a shining blot of ink. It is as you have seen, a globe."
"Ah, we live in an age of improvements. Magic is done much better now than it was in the times of the Magi. I'd back Döbler against Trismegistus any day."
"Mine," continued the hermit, "is simply a mimic world. Whatever part you gaze upon will grow under your eyes, and you will see whatever may be taking place in that spot at that moment. The condition of possession was, that I must abide by my seclusion from the world; the spell would bind me to it."
"All the better. Well?"—
"Well, I came hither, put my globe where you have seen it, fixed my hermitage close by. Alas! alas!"
"O bother! Why alas?"
"I find I was mistaken, traveller. I study the globe and find I did not know the world, as I pretended. I see a thousand things in it that tempt me to rush out of my seclusion, and to join my labour to the labour of my fellows; and when I try to fly, the spell retains me. I see that there is, need of earnest speaking, hearty action, stirring love; speech, action, and love I have renounced; to me the world is made a hermit's toy, and I am miserable."
"A worse reason for misery I never heard," the traveller said, laughing. "As for your globe it's just a newspaper, a sort of illustrated journal. Well, now I understand the thing, we'll dip into it again, and this time take it easily. Let me sharpen the point of my cane. There, friend, there's an exhibiting rod. Point where you please, and let us both look at the same thing. You shall show me some of the things that grieve you. Heigho!" The traveller here yawned prodigiously; the hermit again drew aside the curtain. Presently he touched a point upon the globe, and not precisely finding what he meant to show, moved the cane slowly. As the pictures grew and faded, the traveller, with some impatience beat his foot upon the ground.
"Pooh," said he, "bog and waste. I have seen better dissolving views at the Polytechnic. Yes, now you stop, I see what you are at. Paddies and pigs, more than half naked children, a mud hut with a hole for a door and a hole for a window, and one room inside for the pig-sty, parlour, bedrooms, drawing-room, and kitchen. My dear fellow, that is Ireland, one of the most hackneyed and tiresome of all subjects. As an M.P., I have read blue-books for a new excitement; read Lord Devon's Commission, heard everlasting speeches, spoken myself, know facts and figures. Oh, it's too bad; indeed it is! I know, out of speeches in parliament, precisely what that hut contains. A kettle (that's to boil potatoes in), just a few plates, a heap of straw and a bench."
"You know that?" said the hermit.
"To be sure I do. Here are statistics for you, from Sir Robert Peel's speech on the Irish famine. In these mud cabins, or mud sheds, without a second room;—places unfit for human habitation, and which rather compromised the character of pigs, who happened to be joint tenants—there lived forty-seven per cent. of the inhabitants of Donegal, ditto of Leitrim and Roscommon; fifty per cent. of Sligo men, and fifty-two of Galway; fifty-five per cent. of Limerick folks, and fifty-six per cent. of Cork and Clare; sixty-two per cent. of the inhabitants of Mayo, and sixty-six per cent. of the inhabitants of Kerry."
"You know that?" said the hermit.
"To be sure I do. And glad enough the people are to have even these mud huts, and chance enough there is of an eviction even from them. Fifty thousand families were turned out of such homes in 1849, unable to pay rent."
"The little rent that it must be!"
"The little rent! You undertake to tell me of the world. Why, my good man, the people bid against each other recklessly to get a holding. If they get a bit of ground and plant potatoes, they can eat them. If they have no land, they can have no potatoes, and they cannot eat. Men are known to have bid six times more for a small bit of land than the amount that could be got from it by the most skilful management. See Mill's Political Economy. 0 pooh, why I am teaching you the world."
"They cannot pay this rent?"
"Pay it! They pay all their surplus, and they owe the rest, and are of course always liable to eviction. If a windfall comes, it pays arrears of rent. Nothing can better them, so they are reckless, and we laugh at them for their improvidence."
"Why do they bid so recklessly?"
"Six hungry mouths are offering against each other famine prices for a plateful of potatoes."
"But are they not hot-blooded reckless Celts, do you not think?"
"Ah, you mean satire, but I'll answer plainly. Facts, history, are all clear against the theory of an inherent perverseness in the Irish race. The Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1850, refers you, my dear fellow, to witnesses from all our colonies, examined before the Colonisation Committee. Mr. Pemberton and Mr. Brydone attest the success of Irishmen in Canada. Mr. Perley speaks for them in New Brunswick. In Nova Scotia they are vouched for by Mr. Uniacke; by Mr. Mintern in the United States; in Australia and Van Dieman's Land by Colonel Mitchell, Colonel McArthur, Mr. Verner, Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Besnard, Mr. Justice Therry, and the Rev. C.D. Lang. Count Strzelecki answers for them in the United States, Canada, and Australia;—they get to prosper and to grumble quite as readily as Anglo-Saxons."
"You know that?" the hermit said.
"What do you mean by asking whether I know that? I know it and say it. The fervid character of the Irish makes them as apt for hope as for despair; in their mud cabins they have never received Hope for guest; she never said a grace to the potatoes. The Irish character has not a small resemblance to the temperament of the ancient Greeks; and when her years of misery are over, Ireland may run a race of honour with the sister isle. Speeches and books cannot be read for nothing," said the traveller, perceiving that the hermit smiled.
"Pardon me," said the hermit, "I respect your earnestness. I only wonder that you, feeling thus and knowing so much, take no interest in home affairs."
"Familiarity, oh most innocent hermit, has bred—Heigho!" The traveller here yawned. "To think that I have come into the woods to talk about 'the Irish Difficulty.' Well, go on, Mr. Showman, I'll be lecturer, and let you see that I don't need your lessons. Pray forgive these yawns. Yea, there we have dissolving views again. Ah, now it grows. I see, I understand, Thady is working on a patch of waste land on the out-skirt of a farm. He is allowed that patch of waste land for his own for three years, Mr. Hermit, during which time he may eat what he can grow upon it. At the end of three years he will have turned it into tolerable land, and then it goes into the farm, and Thady starts fresh with another bit of moor. Delicious fruit of labour to the farmer, but I would as soon be Sisyphus as Thady—Silence, hermit, I will discharge now for your benefit a vast amount of knowledge:—
"Ireland's a fine country,' first flower of the earth,' and so on, has fine harbours, noble rivers, and a fertile land. Of this rich land nearly one-third is bog, moor, waste, totally uncultivated. The cultivated land has not increased in quantity, but dwindled. The land was held by few men, bound by the laws of land, encumbered, and almost unable to sell; hundreds of thousands of acres have gone out of cultivation. In one barony in the county of Cork, Sir Robert Peel told us in 1849, extending over eighty thousand acres, all the lands were thrown waste. A recent act facilitates the sale of encumbered property, and will in some degree check this evil. But of the waste land, while the Irish bid their famine prices for potatoes, there are a million and a half of acres reclaimable for spade or plough—(here, Hermit, I quote the report of Mr. Griffith to Lord Devon's Commission); two and a half millions reclaimable for pasture. Two and a half millions Mr. Griffith calls hopelessly waste, but there is no soil hopeless to a small proprietor. Here, Hermit, I quote John Stuart Mill. Were these wastes bought by Government and sold again, or sold at once by their possessors, in small freehold properties, to the poor Irish tenants, each would spend such energy upon his own domain as would soon turn the mass of waste into a little home Australia. Not only would thousands be fed and raised into comfort upon what is now mere useless ground, but a new thing would be seen,—a multitude of happy peasants in the sister island. I have been in Zurich, and have seen how men who own a bit of ground, love it and nourish it, plant every corner, water solicitously every single cabbage, rise with the sun, and even spend their holidays upon the cherished soil. When people come to love the land after that fashion, the land loves them, and makes them handsome presents."
"But," said the hermit, "has not this a tendency to root men to one spot—to stick them as firmly into a small patch of the earth as the vegetables they grow? does it not smother energy and check enterprise?"
"Every tree must have a root," replied the "fast" young traveller, "or it spreads no branches; so with man. Give him a status, and he educates his family to respect that standing and to support it. He sends his children out into the world to find similar standing places for themselves; he trains them to expect this, and not to live to snatch away some of his hard-earned acres, or to become his neighbouring rival. His branches are spread till they extend to other parts of the earth; where they, in turn, take root, and thus become centres of the same sound and beneficial expansion of population."
"Look here," said the hermit, moving the globe.
"Flanders, the Campine," said the traveller. "Yes, I know all about it. There we have a waste of sandhills. Look to the right and you perceive some spaces where the sandhills have been levelled and surrounded by a trench; broom is sown there; a few potatoes straggle up, and here and there some clover. Keep your eyes about you, Hermit, and you will wee some patches where the broom is cut; they cut it after three years' growth, and sell it then for faggots—by that time fallen broom leaves have enriched the sand a little, and the roots have given it consistency. Then, Hermit, the industrious proprietor will plough it up, or turn it with the spade, and buckwheat, or even rye, will grow without manure. And after this is reaped the ground will pay the price of some manuring; clover and potatoes flourish, and keep cows, and the cows yield more manure; regular cropping goes on from that time, and all the fertile plain which you see there to the left of you, O Hermit, has been made thus out of sandhills, by the solicitude of small proprietors. Them it remunerated, because they gave their own care and toil, their own leisure. It would have answered the purpose of no estate owner to pay men wages for the reclaiming of this land; but when it was acquired in patches by hard-handed men, then by such labour it was practicable, as Arthur Young has it, "to turn sand into gold." These men all thrive. They live, it is quite true, with close economy; but that is not because (unless in extraordinary years of famine) they are pinched by want, but because they have a motive for acquiring money; they have a hope of raising themselves higher in the scale of wealth, by adding other little acres to their patrimony. It is this labour, with keen interest in the work, and with a fair hope of such return as human nature prompts us all to look for, that makes men contented and industrious; this sense of property, that it is possible by hard work to acquire, that makes the peasant peaceable and gives him a conservative interest in the maintenance of law and order. It is because a labouring Irishman, in Ireland, can, by no labour, human or super-human, living in Ireland, raise himself in the social scale, that all his energy of character has been perverted, when at home, into an energy of recklessness."
"But," said the hermit, "how can you convert these wretched men into proprietors upon waste land? They cannot buy land; would you have it given to them?"
"No," said the traveller, "not given certainly. It is not one thing only that Ireland wants; it is not one provision that will remedy all her complaints. She wants a course of treatment, which has been most properly commenced. The Encumbered Estates Courts are now taking out of the hands of practically insolvent landlords numerous estates which, being sold for the benefit of creditors, come into the hands of men able to work them properly. This checks one symptom of disease; for hitherto, instead of wastes becoming cultivated, we have had cultivated land becoming waste. Lands properly attended to, give work and wages. Now, if the wastes were, we will say, purchased by Government, their marketable value being small, they would be saleable in parcels of a few acres in extent, at prices which a labourer might compass by a few years' industry. Facilities could easily be given; but the great thing would be an inducement to labour and to save, a possibility of rising in society above the lowest step. The ground acquired would engage much of the leisure of contented men; and for the rest, in point of character, despite the common error of prejudice, in equal circumstances of encouragement, I would back any Irishman against a Fleming."
"Are these your private notions?" asked the hermit.
"No: what I think about the Irish character, I think in common with all men who have paid unprejudiced attention to the subject. What I say of waste lands is political economy, for the grinding of which I always use a Mill much and deservedly esteemed in England."
"And so you get your Irish panacea?"
"So I get no panacea, Mr. Hermit—there is no single panacea for a social evil. Bodies politic are complex things; but so I get a good prescription, which may advantageously be worked into the treatment of a case which certainly is not incurable. Now you may just let down your curtain, friend. I told you there was nothing to be taught me of the "world. As for your globe, as I before said, it is just an Illustrated Newspaper. I'm sick of news. As for your magic, pooh! What magic of the past would not be clumsy, if put next door to the common-places of to-day. Well, it's no fault of yours. And so this toy of yours has made you miserable."
"Yes, Traveller, this vivid picture of the world has made me fret against the spell which keeps me bound to know and never use my knowledge. What reality of heaven can there be for me, to whom this earth, and all the men and women loving, suffering, and labouring upon it, are but a hermit's toy? Yet you profess to know the world, and fly it!"
"Certainly, my friend. For you must understand that habit, chance of education, temper, and a thousand accidents of life, all fly to a man's eyes, and there is no such thing as the possibility of five men seeing everything alike. One sees a ball, and says it's round; two says it's square; three considers it a pyramid; four says it's like a marlinspike; and five says there is nothing to be seen at all. They are not perverse. There are not many perverse people now-a-days, but we do see things so very differently, that I consider eyes to be of no use in the world at all."
"But other senses"—
"Well, it 's extremely hard for a man to feel a thing and own that it feels round, when he sees positively that it's square. He goes by rule of square, and then we call it prejudice; a pardonable matter after all."
"But prejudices yield?"
"Not very often in adults, they yield in the next generation. Slow work, Hermit."
"Slow, but sure. You who were impatient to leap into the water for a phantom child, refuse to fight the tide of difficulty, even to help a nation in distress."
"There are plenty of men at work, my friend, trying their strength against the waves. Now let me try my appetite. 'Tis easier to see the world than find one's dinner in it."
So the stranger ate a dinner in the hermit's cell, and, the same evening, resumed his travels. Had he grown weary of the woods?—We met him, ten days afterwards, in London.