And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself “Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too ‘risky,’ the dialogue a little too strong, the ‘business’ a little too suggestive. I don’t say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I’ll begin a stricter life tomorrow.” Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!
“Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
‘Sorrow for sin God’s judgement stays!’
Against God’s Spirit he lies; quite stops
Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch’d fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall.”
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death—if calmly realised, and steadily faced—would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life—that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, “that last infirmity of noble minds”—but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man—and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology—that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for “Sport,” which no doubt has been in bygone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger. But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine “Sport”: I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some “man-eating” tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those “tender and delicate” beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love—“thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’—whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
“Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
I
Less Bread! More Taxes!
—and then all the people cheered again, and one man, who was more excited than the rest, flung his hat high into the air, and shouted (as well as I could make out) “Who roar for the Sub-Warden?” Everybody roared, but whether it was for the Sub-Warden, or not, did not clearly appear: some were shouting “Bread!” and some “Taxes!,” but no one seemed to know what it was they really wanted.
All this I saw from the open window of the Warden’s breakfast-saloon, looking across the shoulder of the Lord Chancellor, who had sprung to his feet the moment the shouting began, almost as if he had been expecting it, and had rushed to the window which commanded the best view of the marketplace.
“What can it all mean?” he kept repeating to himself, as, with his hands clasped behind him, and his gown floating in the air, he paced rapidly up and down the room. “I never heard such shouting before—and at this time of the morning, too! And with such unanimity! Doesn’t it strike you as very remarkable?”
I represented, modestly, that to my ears it appeared that they were shouting for different things, but the Chancellor would not listen to my suggestion for a moment. “They all shout the same words, I assure you!” he said: then, leaning well out of the window, he whispered to a man who was standing close underneath, “Keep ’em together, can’t you? The Warden will be here directly. Give ’em the signal for the march up!” All this was evidently not meant for my ears, but I could scarcely help hearing it, considering that my chin was almost on the Chancellor’s shoulder.
The “march up” was a very curious sight: a straggling procession of men, marching two and two, began from the other side of the marketplace, and advanced in an irregular zigzag fashion towards the Palace, wildly tacking from side to side, like a sailing vessel making
