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Boulder Place Directory 19
Page 08
Browning, on the other hand, kept his raptures and his processes severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea that there was something not quite respectable about professional literature, and that, like Gray, he wished to be considered a private gentleman who wrote for his amusement. When in later years he took a holiday, he went not for secret contemplation, but to recover from social fatigue. Browning is really one of the most mysterious figures in literature in this respect, because his inner life of poetry was so entirely apart from his outer life of dinnerparties and afternoon calls. Inside the sacred enclosure, the winds of heaven blow, the thunder rolls; he proclaims the supreme worth of human passion, he dives into the disgraceful secrets of the soul: and then he comes out of his study a courteous and very proper gentleman, looking like a retired diplomatist, and talking like an intelligent commercial traveller--a man whose one wish appeared to be as good-humouredly like everyone else as he conveniently could.
Furthermore, it will be remembered that the British and French Governments violently protested when the plans were made public that the Dutch Government intended to fortify the mouth of the Scheldt in 1906. But in 1912, when the Balkan crisis became acute, the British went one step further. When Col. Bridges, in a conversation with Gen. Jungbluth, the Chief of the Belgian General Staff, said that England was ready to strike, that 160,000 men were ready to be landed and that they would land them as soon as any European conflict should break out, Gen. Jungbluth protested that for such a step the permission of Belgium was necessary. The cool reply was that the English knew it, but thought that, as Belgium was not strong enough alone to protect herself, England would land troops anyway. Gen. Jungbluth answered that Belgium felt strong enough to protect herself, which is in keeping with her declaration to France, when she offered to protect Belgium by five army corps, as reported in the British "White Book." The position of England was therefore that, while in 1906 they had already concerted plans for a joint action, in 1912 England intended action in any case, should a European conflagration break out.
The men of the Caves supported life by hunting. But a very small part of their food supplies could have been drawn from the vegetable kingdom. When the climate was so severe that Alpine mosses grew at Schussenreid, acorns and like nuts would be about all they could procure from that source. The animals hunted by the Cave-men were principally reindeer, horses, bisons, and, occasionally mammoths and woolly rhinoceros. But they were not very choice in this matter, as they readily accepted as food any animal they could obtain by force or cunning. Wolves and foxes were not rejected, and in one cave large numbers of the bones of the common water rat were obtained. We know what animals were used as food, because we find their bones split for the purpose of procuring the marrow they contained. This was evidently to them a nutritious article of diet, since they were careful to open all the bones containing it, and bones so split are frequently the only means of detecting the former presence of man in some bone caves.
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