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Yet Again

by Max Beerbohm

August, 2000  [Etext #2292]


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Yet Again

by Max Beerbohm




Till I gave myself the task of making a little selection from what I
had written since last I formed a book of essays, I had no notion that
I had put, as it were, my eggs into so many baskets--The Saturday
Review, The New Quarterly, The New Liberal Review, Vanity Fair, The
Daily Mail, Literature, The Traveller, The Pall Mall Magazine, The May
Book, The Souvenir Book of Charing Cross Hospital Bazaar, The Cornhill
Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Anglo-Saxon Review...Ouf! But the
sigh of relief that I heave at the end of the list is accompanied by a
smile of thanks to the various authorities for letting me use here
what they were so good as to require.

M. B.



CONTENTS

THE FIRE
SEEING PEOPLE OFF
A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
PORRO UNUM...
A CLUB IN RUINS
`273'
A STUDY IN DEJECTION
A PATHETIC IMPOSTURE
THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES
WHISTLER'S WRITING
ICHABOD
GENERAL ELECTIONS
A PARALLEL
A MORRIS FOR MAY-DAY
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS MANNER
THE NAMING OF STREETS
ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY
A HOME-COMING
`THE RAGGED REGIMENT'
THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC
DULCEDO JUDICIORUM


WORDS FOR PICTURES

`HARLEQUIN'
`THE GARDEN OF LOVE'
`ARIANE ET DIONYSE'
`PETER THE DOMINICAN'
`L' OISEAU BLEU'
`MACBETH AND THE WITCHES'
`CARLOTTA GRISI'
`HO-TEI'
`THE VISIT'



THE FIRE

If I were `seeing over' a house, and found in every room an iron cage
let into the wall, and were told by the caretaker that these cages
were for me to keep lions in, I think I should open my eyes rather
wide. Yet nothing seems to me more natural than a fire in the grate.

Doubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the
fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and
raging behind it; and I dare say I dimly wondered by what blessed
dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my
nursery. I do not think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the
fender. I knew by instinct that the creature within it was dangerous--
fiercer still than the cat which had once strayed into the room and
scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to wonder at
the creature's presence and learned to call it `the fire,' quite
lightly. There are so many queer things in the world that we have no
time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see
habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer
than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has
been dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a
fleeting moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came
within our ken. We are in the habit of saying that `first impressions
are best,' and that we must approach every question `with an open
mind'; but we shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our
infancy than we are now. `Make yourself even as a little child' we
often say, but recommending the process on moral rather than on
intellectual grounds, and inwardly preening ourselves all the while on
having `put away childish things,' as though clarity of vision were
not one of them.

I look around the room I am writing in--a pleasant room, and my own,
yet how irresponsive, how smug and lifeless! The pattern of the
wallpaper blamelessly repeats itself from wainscote to cornice; and
the pictures are immobile and changeless within their glazed frames--
faint, flat mimicries of life. The chairs and tables are just as their
carpenter fashioned them, and stand with stiff obedience just where
they have been posted. On one side of the room, encased in coverings
of cloth and leather, are myriads of words, which to some people, but
not to me, are a fair substitute for human company. All around me, in
fact, are the products of modern civilisation. But in the whole room
there are but three things living: myself, my dog, and the fire in my
grate. And of these lives the third is very much the most intensely
vivid. My dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but
you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face.
My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the
old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as
when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as
fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors, night
after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away the ancestors
of my dog. And my dog regards it with the old wonder and misgiving.
Even in his sleep he opens ever and again one eye to see that we are
in no danger. And the fire glowers and roars through its bars at him
with the scorn that a wild beast must needs have for a tame one. `You
are free,' it rages, `and yet you do not spring at that man's throat
and tear him limb from limb and make a meal of him! `and, gazing at
me, it licks its red lips; and I, laughing good-humouredly, rise and
give the monster a shovelful of its proper food, which it leaps at and
noisily devours.

Fire is the only one of the elements that inspires awe. We breathe
air, tread earth, bathe in water. Fire alone we approach with
deference. And it is the only one of the elements that is always
alert, always good to watch. We do not see the air we breathe--except
sometimes in London, and who shall say that the sight is pleasant? We
do not see the earth revolving; and the trees and other vegetables
that are put forth by it come up so slowly that there is no fun in
watching them. One is apt to lose patience with the good earth, and to
hanker after a sight of those multitudinous fires whereover it is,
after all, but a thin and comparatively recent crust. Water, when we
get it in the form of a river, is pleasant to watch for a minute or
so, after which period the regularity of its movement becomes as
tedious as stagnation. It is only a whole seaful of water that can
rival fire in variety and in loveliness. But even the spectacle of sea
at its very best--say in an Atlantic storm--is less thrilling than the
spectacle of one building ablaze. And for the rest, the sea has its
hours of dulness and monotony, even when it is not wholly calm.
Whereas in the grate even a quite little fire never ceases to be
amusing and inspiring until you let it out. As much fire as would
correspond with a handful of earth or a tumblerful of water is yet a
joy to the eyes, and a lively suggestion of grandeur. The other
elements, even as presented in huge samples, impress us as less august
than fire. Fire alone, according to the legend, was brought down from
Heaven: the rest were here from the dim outset. When we call a thing
earthy we impute cloddishness; by `watery' we imply insipidness;
`airy' is for something trivial. `Fiery' has always a noble
significance. It denotes such things as faith, courage, genius. Earth
lies heavy, and air is void, and water flows down; but flames aspire,
flying back towards the heaven they came from. They typify for us the
spirit of man, as apart from aught that is gross in him. They are the
symbol of purity, of triumph over corruption. Water, air, earth, can
all harbour corruption; but where flames are, or have been, there is
innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless, from our natural
love of destruction for destruction's sake. Fire is savage, and so,
even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is
but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To
destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still
`red in tooth and claw,' though she has begun to make fine flourishes
with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the mild dog on my hearth-rug
has been known to behave like a wolf to his own species. Scratch his
master and you will find the caveman. But the scratch must be a sharp
one: I am thickly veneered. Outwardly, I am as gentle as you, gentle
reader. And one reason for our delight in fire is that there is no
humbug about flames: they are frankly, primaevally savage. But this is
not, I am glad to say, the sole reason. We have a sense of good and
evil. I do not pretend that it carries us very far. It is but the
tooth-brush and nail-scissors that we flourish. Our innate instincts,
not this acquired sense, are what the world really hinges on. But this
acquired sense is an integral part of our minds. And we revere fire
because we have come to regard it as especially the foe of evil--as a
means for destroying weeds, not flowers; a destroyer of wicked cities,
not of good ones.

The idea of hell, as inculcated in the books given to me when I was a
child, never really frightened me at all. I conceived the possibility
of a hell in which were eternal flames to destroy every one who had
not been good. But a hell whose flames were eternally impotent to
destroy these people, a hell where evil was to go on writhing yet
thriving for ever and ever, seemed to me, even at that age, too
patently absurd to be appalling. Nor indeed do I think that to the
more credulous children in England can the idea of eternal burning
have ever been quite so forbidding as their nurses meant it to be.
Credulity is but a form of incaution. I, as I have said, never had any
wish to play with fire; but most English children are strongly
attracted, and are much less afraid of fire than of the dark. Eternal
darkness, with a biting east-wind, were to the English fancy a far
more fearful prospect than eternal flames. The notion of these flames
arose in Italy, where heat is no luxury, and shadows are lurked in,
and breezes prayed for. In England the sun, even at its strongest, is
a weak vessel. True, we grumble whenever its radiance is a trifle less
watery than usual. But that is precisely because we are a people whose
nature the sun has not mellowed--a dour people, like all northerners,
ever ready to make the worst of things. Inwardly, we love the sun, and
long for it to come nearer to us, and to come more often. And it is
partly because this craving is unsatisfied that we cower so fondly
over our open hearths. Our fires are makeshifts for sunshine. Autumn
after autumn, `we see the swallows gathering in the sky, and in the
osier-isle we hear their noise,' and our hearts sink. Happy, selfish
little birds, gathering so lightly to fly whither we cannot follow
you, will you not, this once, forgo the lands of your desire? `Shall
not the grief of the old time follow?' Do winter with us, this once!
We will strew all England, every morning, with bread-crumbs for you,
will you but stay and help us to play at summer! But the delicate
cruel rogues pay no heed to us, skimming sharplier than ever in
pursuit of gnats, as the hour draws near for their long flight over
gnatless seas.

Only one swallow have I ever known to relent. It had built its nest
under the eaves of a cottage that belonged to a friend of mine, a man
who loved birds. He had a power of making birds trust him. They would
come at his call, circling round him, perching on his shoulders,
eating from his hand. One of the swallows would come too, from his
nest under the eaves. As the summer wore on, he grew quite tame. And
when summer waned, and the other swallows flew away, this one
lingered, day after day, fluttering dubiously over the threshold of
the cottage. Presently, as the air grew chilly, he built a new nest
for himself, under the mantelpiece in my friend's study. And every
morning, so soon as the fire burned brightly, he would flutter down to
perch on the fender and bask in the light and warmth of the coals. But
after a few weeks he began to ail; possibly because the study was a
small one, and he could not get in it the exercise that he needed;
more probably because of the draughts. My friend's wife, who was very
clever with her needle, made for the swallow a little jacket of red
flannel, and sought to divert his mind by teaching him to perform a
few simple tricks. For a while he seemed to regain his spirits. But
presently he moped more than ever, crouching nearer than ever to the
fire, and, sidelong, blinking dim weak reproaches at his disappointed
master and mistress. One swallow, as the adage truly says, does not
make a summer. So this one's mistress hurriedly made for him a little
overcoat of sealskin, wearing which, in a muffled cage, he was
personally conducted by his master straight through to Sicily. There
he was nursed back to health, and liberated on a sunny plain. He never
returned to his English home; but the nest he built under the
mantelpiece is still preserved in case he should come at last.

When the sun's rays slant down upon your grate, then the fire blanches
and blenches, cowers, crumbles, and collapses. It cannot compete with
its archetype. It cannot suffice a sun-steeped swallow, or ripen a
plum, or parch the carpet. Yet, in its modest way, it is to your room
what the sun is to the world; and where, during the greater part of
the year, would you be without it? I do not wonder that the poor, when
they have to choose between fuel and food, choose fuel. Food nourishes
the body; but fuel, warming the body, warms the soul too. I do not
wonder that the hearth has been regarded from time immemorial as the
centre, and used as the symbol, of the home. I like the social
tradition that we must not poke a fire in a friend's drawing-room
unless our friendship dates back full seven years. It rests evidently,
this tradition, on the sentiment that a fire is a thing sacred to the
members of the household in which it burns. I dare say the fender has
a meaning, as well as a use, and is as the rail round an altar. In
`The New Utopia' these hearths will all have been rased, of course, as
demoralising relics of an age when people went in for privacy and were
not always thinking exclusively about the State. Such heat as may be
needed to prevent us from catching colds (whereby our vitality would
be lowered, and our usefulness to the State impaired) will be supplied
through hot-water pipes (white-enamelled), the supply being strictly
regulated from the municipal water-works. Or has Mr. Wells arranged
that the sun shall always be shining on us? I have mislaid my copy of
the book. Anyhow, fires and hearths will have to go. Let us make the
most of them while we may.

Personally, though I appreciate the radiance of a family fire, I give
preference to a fire that burns for myself alone. And dearest of all
to me is a fire that burns thus in the house of another. I find an
inalienable magic in my bedroom fire when I am staying with friends;
and it is at bedtime that the spell is strongest. `Good night,' says
my host, shaking my hand warmly on the threshold; you've everything
you want?' `Everything,' I assure him; `good night.' `Good night.'
`Good night,' and I close my door, close my eyes, heave a long sigh,
open my eyes, set down the candle, draw the armchair close to the fire
(my fire), sink down, and am at peace, with nothing to mar my
happiness except the feeling that it is too good to be true.

At such moments I never see in my fire any likeness to a wild beast.
It roars me as gently as a sucking dove, and is as kind and cordial as
my host and hostess and the other people in the house. And yet I do
not have to say anything to it, I do not have to make myself agreeable
to it. It lavishes its warmth on me, asking nothing in return. For
fifteen mortal hours or so, with few and brief intervals, I have been
making myself agreeable, saying the right thing, asking the apt
question, exhibiting the proper shade of mild or acute surprise,
smiling the appropriate smile or laughing just so long and just so
loud as the occasion seemed to demand. If I were naturally a brilliant
and copious talker, I suppose that to stay in another's house would be
no strain on me. I should be able to impose myself on my host and
hostess and their guests without any effort, and at the end of the day
retire quite unfatigued, pleasantly flushed with the effect of my own
magnetism. Alas, there is no question of my imposing myself. I can
repay hospitality only by strict attention to the humble, arduous
process of making myself agreeable. When I go up to dress for dinner,
I have always a strong impulse to go to bed and sleep off my fatigue;
and it is only by exerting all my will-power that I can array myself
for the final labours: to wit, making myself agreeable to some man or
woman for a minute or two before dinner, to two women during dinner,
to men after dinner, then again to women in the drawing-room, and then
once more to men in the smoking-room. It is a dog's life. But one has
to have suffered before one gets the full savour out of joy. And I do
not grumble at the price I have to pay for the sensation of basking,
at length, in solitude and the glow of my own fireside.

Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than content to
watch the noble and ever-changing pageant of the fire. The finest part
of this spectacle is surely when the flames sink, and gradually the
red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost
recesses of white heat. It is often thus that my fire welcomes me when
the long day's task is done. After I have gazed long into its depths,
I close my eyes to rest them, opening them again, with a start,
whenever a coal shifts its place, or some belated little tongue of
flame spurts forth with a hiss.... Vaguely I liken myself to the
watchman one sees by night in London, wherever a road is up, huddled
half-awake in his tiny cabin of wood, with a cresset of live coal
before him.... I have come down in the world, and am a night-watchman,
and I find the life as pleasant as I had always thought it must be,
except when I let the fire out, and awake shivering.... Shivering I
awake, in the twilight of dawn. Ashes, white and grey, some rusty
cinders, a crag or so of coal, are all that is left over from last
night's splendour. Grey is the lawn beneath my window, and little
ghosts of rabbits are nibbling and hobbling there. But anon the east
will be red, and, ere I wake, the sky will be blue, and the grass
quite green again, and my fire will have arisen from its ashes, a
cackling and comfortable phoenix.


SEEING PEOPLE OFF

I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most
difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.

To see a friend off from Waterloo to Vauxhall were easy enough. But we
are never called on to perform that small feat. It is only when a
friend is going on a longish journey, and will be absent for a longish
time, that we turn up at the railway station. The dearer the friend,
and the longer the journey, and the longer the likely absence, the
earlier do we turn up, and the more lamentably do we fail. Our failure
is in exact ratio to the seriousness of the occasion, and to the depth
of our feeling.

In a room, or even on a door-step, we can make the farewell quite
worthily. We can express in our faces the genuine sorrow we feel. Nor
do words fail us. There is no awkwardness, no restraint, on either
side. The thread of our intimacy has not been snapped. The leave-
taking is an ideal one. Why not, then, leave the leave-taking at that?
Always, departing friends implore us not to bother to come to the
railway station next morning. Always, we are deaf to these entreaties,
knowing them to be not quite sincere. The departing friends would
think it very odd of us if we took them at their word. Besides, they
really do want to see us again. And that wish is heartily
reciprocated. We duly turn up. And then, oh then, what a gulf yawns!
We stretch our arms vainly across it. We have utterly lost touch. We
have nothing at all to say. We gaze at each other as dumb animals gaze
at human beings. We `make conversation'--and such conversation! We
know that these are the friends from whom we parted overnight. They
know that we have not altered. Yet, on the surface, everything is
different; and the tension is such that we only long for the guard to
blow his whistle and put an end to the farce.

On a cold grey morning of last week I duly turned up at Euston, to see
off an old friend who was starting for America.

Overnight, we had given him a farewell dinner, in which sadness was
well mingled with festivity. Years probably would elapse before his
return. Some of us might never see him again. Not ignoring the shadow
of the future, we gaily celebrated the past. We were as thankful to
have known our guest as we were grieved to lose him; and both these
emotions were made evident. It was a perfect farewell.

And now, here we were, stiff and self-conscious on the platform; and,
framed in the window of the railway-carriage, was the face of our
friend; but it was as the face of a stranger--a stranger anxious to
please, an appealing stranger, an awkward stranger. `Have you got
everything?' asked one of us, breaking a silence. `Yes, everything,'
said our friend, with a pleasant nod. `Everything,' he repeated, with
the emphasis of an empty brain. `You'll be able to lunch on the
train,' said I, though this prophecy had already been made more than
once. `Oh yes,' he said with conviction. He added that the train went
straight through to Liverpool. This fact seemed to strike us as rather
odd. We exchanged glances. `Doesn't it stop at Crewe?' asked one of
us. `No,' said our friend, briefly. He seemed almost disagreeable.
There was a long pause. One of us, with a nod and a forced smile at
the traveller, said `Well!' The nod, the smile, and the unmeaning
monosyllable, were returned conscientiously. Another pause was broken
by one of us with a fit of coughing. It was an obviously assumed fit,
but it served to pass the time. The bustle of the platform was
unabated. There was no sign of the train's departure. Release--ours,
and our friend's--was not yet.

My wandering eye alighted on a rather portly middle-aged man who was
talking earnestly from the platform to a young lady at the next window
but one to ours. His fine profile was vaguely familiar to me. The
young lady was evidently American, and he was evidently English;
otherwise I should have guessed from his impressive air that he was
her father. I wished I could hear what he was saying. I was sure he
was giving the very best advice; and the strong tenderness of his gaze
was really beautiful. He seemed magnetic, as he poured out his final
injunctions. I could feel something of his magnetism even where I
stood. And the magnetism, like the profile, was vaguely familiar to
me. Where had I experienced it?

In a flash I remembered. The man was Hubert le Ros. But how changed
since last I saw him! That was seven or eight years ago, in the
Strand. He was then (as usual) out of an engagement, and borrowed
half-a-crown. It seemed a privilege to lend anything to him. He was
always magnetic. And why his magnetism had never made him successful
on the London stage was always a mystery to me. He was an excellent
actor, and a man of sober habit. But, like many others of his kind,
Hubert le Ros (I do not, of course, give the actual name by which he
was known) drifted seedily away into the provinces; and I, like every
one else, ceased to remember him.

It was strange to see him, after all these years, here on the platform
of Euston, looking so prosperous and solid. It was not only the flesh
that he had put on, but also the clothes, that made him hard to
recognise. In the old days, an imitation fur coat had seemed to be as
integral a part of him as were his ill-shorn lantern jaws. But now his
costume was a model of rich and sombre moderation, drawing, not
calling, attention to itself. He looked like a banker. Any one would
have been proud to be seen off by him.

`Stand back, please.' The train was about to start, and I waved
farewell to my friend. Le Ros did not stand back. He stood clasping in
both hands the hands of the young American. `Stand back, sir, please!'
He obeyed, but quickly darted forward again to whisper some final
word. I think there were tears in her eyes. There certainly were tears
in his when, at length, having watched the train out of sight, he
turned round. He seemed, nevertheless, delighted to see me. He asked
me where I had been hiding all these years; and simultaneously repaid
me the half-crown as though it had been borrowed yesterday. He linked
his arm in mine, and walked me slowly along the platform, saying with
what pleasure he read my dramatic criticisms every Saturday.

I told him, in return, how much he was missed on the stage. `Ah, yes,'
he said, `I never act on the stage nowadays.' He laid some emphasis on
the word `stage,' and I asked him where, then, he did act. `On the
platform,' he answered. `You mean,' said I, `that you recite at
concerts?' He smiled. `This,' he whispered, striking his stick on the
ground, `is the platform I mean.' Had his mysterious prosperity
unhinged him? He looked quite sane. I begged him to be more explicit.

`I suppose,' he said presently, giving me a light for the cigar which
he had offered me, `you have been seeing a friend off?' I assented. He
asked me what I supposed he had been doing. I said that I had watched
him doing the same thing. `No,' he said gravely. `That lady was not a
friend of mine. I met her for the first time this morning, less than
half an hour ago, here,' and again he struck the platform with his
stick.

I confessed that I was bewildered. He smiled. `You may,' he said,
`have heard of the Anglo-American Social Bureau?' I had not. He
explained to me that of the thousands of Americans who annually pass
through England there are many hundreds who have no English friends.
In the old days they used to bring letters of introduction. But the
English are so inhospitable that these letters are hardly worth the
paper they are written on. `Thus,' said Le Ros, `the A.A.S.B. supplies
a long-felt want. Americans are a sociable people, and most of them
have plenty of money to spend. The A.A.S.B. supplies them with English
friends. Fifty per cent. of the fees is paid over to the friends. The
other fifty is retained by the A.A.S.B. I am not, alas, a director. If
I were, I should be a very rich man indeed. I am only an employe'. But
even so I do very well. I am one of the seers-off.'

Again I asked for enlightenment. `Many Americans,' he said, `cannot
afford to keep friends in England. But they can all afford to be seen
off. The fee is only five pounds (twenty-five dollars) for a single
traveller; and eight pounds (forty dollars) for a party of two or
more. They send that in to the Bureau, giving the date of their
departure, and a description by which the seer-off can identify them
on the platform. And then--well, then they are seen off.'

`But is it worth it?' I exclaimed. `Of course it is worth it,' said Le
Ros. `It prevents them from feeling "out of it." It earns them the
respect of the guard. It saves them from being despised by their
fellow-passengers--the people who are going to be on the boat. It
gives them a footing for the whole voyage. Besides, it is a great
pleasure in itself. You saw me seeing that young lady off. Didn't you
think I did it beautifully?' `Beautifully,' I admitted. `I envied you.
There was I--' `Yes, I can imagine. There were you, shuffling from
foot to foot, staring blankly at your friend, trying to make
conversation. I know. That's how I used to be myself, before I
studied, and went into the thing professionally. I don't say I'm
perfect yet. I'm still a martyr to platform fright. A railway station
is the most difficult of all places to act in, as you have discovered
for yourself.' `But,' I said with resentment, `I wasn't trying to act.
I really felt.' `So did I, my boy,' said Le Ros. `You can't act
without feeling. What's his name, the Frenchman--Diderot, yes--said
you could; but what did he know about it? Didn't you see those tears
in my eyes when the train started? I hadn't forced them. I tell you I
was moved. So were you, I dare say. But you couldn't have pumped up a
tear to prove it. You can't express your feelings. In other words, you
can't act. At any rate,' he added kindly, `not in a railway station.'
`Teach me!' I cried. He looked thoughtfully at me. `Well,' he said at
length, `the seeing-off season is practically over. Yes, I'll give you
a course. I have a good many pupils on hand already; but yes,' he
said, consulting an ornate note-book, `I could give you an hour on
Tuesdays and Fridays.'

His terms, I confess, are rather high. But I don't grudge the
investment.


A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

Often I have presentiments of evil; but, never having had one of them
fulfilled, I am beginning to ignore them. I find that I have always
walked straight, serenely imprescient, into whatever trap Fate has
laid for me. When I think of any horrible thing that has befallen me,
the horror is intensified by recollection of its suddenness. `But a
moment before, I had been quite happy, quite secure. A moment later--'
I shudder. Why be thus at Fate's mercy always, when with a little
ordinary second sight...Yet no! That is the worst of a presentiment:
it never averts evil, it does but unnerve the victim. Best, after all,
to have only false presentiments like mine. Bolts that cannot be
dodged strike us kindliest from the blue.

And so let me be thankful that my sole emotion as I entered an empty
compartment at Holyhead was that craving for sleep which, after
midnight, overwhelms every traveller--especially the Saxon traveller
from tumultuous and quick-witted little Dublin. Mechanically,
comfortably, as I sank into a corner, I rolled my rug round me, laid
my feet against the opposite cushions, twitched up my coat collar
above my ears, twitched down my cap over my eyes.

It was not the jerk of the starting train that half awoke me, but the
consciousness that some one had flung himself into the compartment
when the train was already in motion. I saw a small man putting
something in the rack--a large black hand-bag. Through the haze of my
sleep I saw him, vaguely resented him. He had no business to have
slammed the door like that, no business to have jumped into a moving
train, no business to put that huge hand-bag into a rack which was
`for light baggage only,' and no business to be wearing, at this hour
and in this place, a top-hat. These four peevish objections floated
sleepily together round my brain. It was not till the man turned
round, and I met his eye, that I awoke fully--awoke to danger. I had
never seen a murderer, but I knew that the man who was so steadfastly
peering at me now...I shut my eyes. I tried to think. Could I be
dreaming? In books I had read of people pinching themselves to see
whether they were really awake. But in actual life there never was any
doubt on that score. The great thing was that I should keep all my
wits about me. Everything might depend on presence of mind. Perhaps
this murderer was mad. If you fix a lunatic with your eye...

Screwing up my courage, I fixed the man with my eye. I had never seen
such a horrible little eye as his. It was a sane eye, too. It radiated
a cold and ruthless sanity. It belonged not to a man who would kill
you wantonly, but to one who would not scruple to kill you for a
purpose, and who would do the job quickly and neatly, and not be found
out. Was he physically strong? Though he looked very wiry, he was
little and narrow, like his eyes. He could not overpower me by force,
I thought (and instinctively I squared my shoulders against the
cushions, that he might realise the impossibility of overpowering me),
but I felt he had enough `science' to make me less than a match for
him. I tried to look cunning and determined. I longed for a moustache
like his, to hide my somewhat amiable mouth. I was thankful I could
not see his mouth--could not know the worst of the face that was
staring at me in the lamplight. And yet what could be worse than his
eyes, gleaming from the deep shadow cast by the brim of his top-hat?
What deadlier than that square jaw, with the bone so sharply
delineated under the taut skin?

The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of the night.
I thought of the unseen series of placid landscapes that we were
passing through, of the unconscious cottagers snoring there in their
beds, of the safe people in the next compartment to mine--to his. Not
moving a muscle, we sat there, we two, watching each other, like two
hostile cats. Or rather, I thought, he watched me as a snake watches a
rabbit, and I, like a rabbit, could not look away. I seemed to hear my
heart beating time to the train. Suddenly my heart was at a
standstill, and the double beat of the train receded faintly. The man
was pointing upwards...I shook my head. He had asked me in a low
voice, whether he should pull the hood across the lamp.

He was standing now with his back turned towards me, pulling his hand-
bag out of the rack. He had a furtive back--the back of a man who, in
his day, had borne many an alias. To this day I am ashamed that I did
not spring up and pinion him, there and then. Had I possessed one
ounce of physical courage, I should have done so. A coward, I let slip
the opportunity. I thought of the communication-cord, but how could I
move to it? He would be too quick for me. He would be very angry with
me. I would sit quite still and wait. Every moment was a long reprieve
to me now. Something might intervene to save me. There might be a
collision on the line. Perhaps he was a quite harmless man...I caught
his eyes, and shuddered...

His bag was open on his knees. His right hand was groping in it.
(Thank Heaven he had not pulled the hood over the lamp!) I saw him
pull out something--a limp thing, made of black cloth, not unlike the
thing which a dentist places over your mouth when laughing-gas is to
be administered. `Laughing-gas, no laughing matter'--the irrelevant
and idiotic embryo of a pun dangled itself for an instant in my brain.
What other horrible thing would come out of the bag? Perhaps some
gleaming instrument?... He closed the bag with a snap, laid it beside
him. He took off his top-hat, laid that beside him. I was surprised (I
know not why) to see that he was bald. There was a gleaming high light
on his bald, round head. The limp, black thing was a cap, which he
slowly adjusted with both hands, drawing it down over the brow and
behind the ears. It seemed to me as though he were, after all, hooding
the lamp; in my feverish fancy the compartment grew darker when the
orb of his head was hidden. The shadow of another simile for his
action came surging up... He had put on the cap so gravely, so
judicially. Yes, that was it: he had assumed the black cap, that
decent symbol which indemnifies the taker of a life; and might the
Lord have mercy on my soul... Already he was addressing me... What had
he said? I asked him to repeat it. My voice sounded even further away
than his. He repeated that he thought we had met before. I heard my
voice saying politely, somewhere in the distance, that I thought not.
He suggested that I had been staying at some hotel in Colchester six
years ago. My voice, drawing a little nearer to me, explained that I
had never in my life been at Colchester. He begged my pardon and hoped
no offence would be taken where none had been meant. My voice, coming
right back to its own quarters, reassured him that of course I had
taken no offence at all, adding that I myself very often mistook one
face for another. He replied, rather inconsequently, that the world
was a small place.

Evidently he must have prepared this remark to follow my expected
admission that I had been at that hotel in Colchester six years ago,
and have thought it too striking a remark to be thrown away. A
guileless creature evidently, and not a criminal at all. Then I
reflected that most of the successful criminals succeed rather through
the incomparable guilelessness of the police than through any devilish
cunning in themselves. Besides, this man looked the very incarnation
of ruthless cunning. Surely, he must but have dissembled. My
suspicions of him resurged. But somehow, I was no longer afraid of
him. Whatever crimes he might have been committing, and be going to
commit, I felt that he meant no harm to me. After all, why should I
have imagined myself to be in danger? Meanwhile, I would try to draw
the man out, pitting my wits against his.

I proceeded to do so. He was very voluble in a quiet way. Before long
I was in possession of all the materials for an exhaustive biography
of him. And the strange thing was that I could not, with the best will
in the world, believe that he was lying to me. I had never heard a man
telling so obviously the truth. And the truth about any one, however
commonplace, must always be interesting. Indeed, it is the commonplace
truth--the truth of widest application--that is the most interesting
of all truths.

I do not now remember many details of this man's story; I remember
merely that he was `travelling in lace,' that he had been born at
Boulogne (this was the one strange feature of the narrative), that
somebody had once left him 100 in a will, and that he had a little
daughter who was `as pretty as a pink.' But at the time I was
enthralled. Besides, I liked the man immensely. He was a kind and
simple soul, utterly belying his appearance. I wondered how I ever
could have feared him and hated him. Doubtless, the reaction from my
previous state intensified the kindliness of my feelings. Anyhow, my
heart went out to him. I felt that we had known each other for many
years. While he poured out his recollections I felt that he was an old
crony, talking over old days which were mine as well as his. Little by
little, however, the slumber which he had scared from me came hovering
back. My eyelids drooped; my comments on his stories became few and
muffled. `There!' he said, `you're sleepy. I ought to have thought of
that.' I protested feebly. He insisted kindly. `You go to sleep,' he
said, rising and drawing the hood over the lamp. It was dawn when I
awoke. Some one in a top-hat was standing over me and saying `Euston.'
`Euston?' I repeated. `Yes, this is Euston. Good day to you.' `Good
day to you,' I repeated mechanically, in the grey dawn.

Not till I was driving through the cold empty streets did I remember
the episode of the night, and who it was that had awoken me. I wished
I could see my friend again. It was horrible to think that perhaps I
should never see him again. I had liked him so much, and he had seemed
to like me. I should not have said that he was a happy man. There was
something melancholy about him. I hoped he would prosper. I had a
foreboding that some great calamity was in store for him, and wished I
could avert it. I thought of his little daughter who was `as pretty as
a pink.' Perhaps Fate was going to strike him through her. Perhaps
when he got home he would find that she was dead. There were tears in
my eyes when I alighted on my doorstep.

Thus, within a little space of time, did I experience two deep
emotions, for neither of which was there any real justification. I
experienced terror, though there was nothing to be afraid of, and I
experienced sorrow, though there was nothing at all to be sorry about.
And both my terror and my sorrow were, at the time, overwhelming.

You have no patience with me? Examine yourselves. Examine one another.
In every one of us the deepest emotions are constantly caused by some
absurdly trivial thing, or by nothing at all. Conversely, the great
things in our lives--the true occasions for wrath, anguish, rapture,
what not--very often leave us quite calm. We never can depend on any
right adjustment of emotion to circumstance. That is one of many
reasons which prevent the philosopher from taking himself and his
fellow-beings quite so seriously as he would wish.


PORRO UNUM...

By graceful custom, every newcomer to a throne in Europe pays a round
of visits to his neighbours. When King Edward came back from seeing
the Tsar at Reval, his subjects seemed to think that he had fulfilled
the last demand on his civility. That was in the days of Abdul Hamid.
None of us wished the King to visit Turkey. Turkey is not
internationally powerful, nor had Abdul any Guelph blood in him; and
so we were able to assert, by ignoring her and him, our
humanitarianism and passion for liberty, quite safely, quite politely.
Now that Abdul is deposed from `his infernal throne,' it is taken as a
matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His
Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian
Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in
the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled
all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited
since his accession--a country which, oddly enough, none but I seems
to expect him to visit. Why, I ask, should Switzerland be cold-
shouldered?

I admit she does not appeal to the romantic imagination. She never
has, as a nation, counted for anything. Physically soaring out of
sight, morally and intellectually she has lain low and said nothing.
Not one idea, not one deed, has she to her credit. All that is worth
knowing of her history can be set forth without compression in a few
lines of a guide-book. Her one and only hero--William Tell--never, as
we now know, existed. He has been proved to be a myth. Also, he is the
one and only myth that Switzerland has managed to create. He exhausted
her poor little stock of imagination. Living as pigmies among the
blind excesses of Nature, living on sufferance there, animalculae, her
sons have been overwhelmed from the outset, have had no chance
whatsoever of development. Even if they had a language of their own,
they would have no literature. Not one painter, not one musician, have
they produced; only couriers, guides, waiters, and other parasites. A
smug, tame, sly, dull, mercenary little race of men, they exist by and
for the alien tripper. They are the fine flower of commercial
civilisation, the shining symbol of international comity, and have
never done anybody any harm. I cannot imagine why the King should not
give them the incomparable advertisement of a visit.

Not that they are badly in need of advertisement over here. Every year
the British trippers to Switzerland vastly outnumber the British
trippers to any other land--a fact which shows how little the romantic
imagination tells as against cheapness and comfort of hotels and the
notion that a heart strained by climbing is good for the health. And
this fact does but make our Sovereign's abstention the more
remarkable. Switzerland is not `smart,' but a King is not the figure-
head merely of his entourage: he is the whole nation's figure-head.
Switzerland, alone among nations, is a British institution, and King
Edward ought not to snub her. That we expect him to do so without
protest from us, seems to me a rather grave symptom of flunkeyism.

Fiercely resenting that imputation, you proceed to raise difficulties.
`Who,' you ask, `would there be to receive the King in the name of the
Swiss nation?' I promptly answer, `The President of the Swiss
Republic.' You did not expect that. You had quite forgotten, if indeed
you had ever heard, that there was any such person. For the life of
you, you could not tell me his name. Well, his name is not very widely
known even in Switzerland. A friend of mine, who was there lately,
tells me that he asked one Swiss after another what was the name of
the President, and that they all sought refuge in polite astonishment
at such ignorance, and, when pressed for the name, could only screw up
their eyes, snap their fingers, and feverishly declare that they had
it on the tips of their tongues. This is just as it should be. In an
ideal republic there should be no one whose name might not at any
moment slip the memory of his fellows. Some sort of foreman there must
be, for the State's convenience; but the more obscure he be, and the
more automatic, the better for the ideal of equality. In the Republics
of France and of America the President is of an extrusive kind. His
office has been fashioned on the monarchic model, and his whole
position is anomalous. He has to try to be ornamental as well as
useful, a symbol as well as a pivot. Obviously, it is absurd to single
out one man as a symbol of the equality of all men. And not less
unreasonable is it to expect him to be inspiring as a patriotic
symbol, an incarnation of his country. Only an anointed king, whose
forefathers were kings too, can be that. In France, where kings have
been, no one can get up the slightest pretence of emotion for the
President. If the President is modest and unassuming, and doesn't, as
did the late M. Faure, make an ass of himself by behaving in a kingly
manner, he is safe from ridicule: the amused smiles that follow him
are not unkind. But in no case is any one proud of him. Never does any
one see France in him. In America, where no kings have been, they are
able to make a pretence of enthusiasm for a President. But no real
chord of national sentiment is touched by this eminent gentleman who
has no past or future eminence, who has been shoved forward for a
space and will anon be sent packing in favour of some other upstart.
Let some princeling of a foreign State set foot in America, and lo!
all the inhabitants are tumbling over one another in their desire for
a glimpse of him--a desire which is the natural and pathetic outcome
of their unsatisfied inner craving for a dynasty of their own. Human
nature being what it is, a monarchy is the best expedient, all the
world over. But, given a republic, let the thing be done thoroughly,
let the appearance be well kept up, as in Switzerland. Let the
President be, as there, a furtive creature and insignificant, not
merely coming no man knows whence, nor merely passing no man knows
whither, but existing no man knows where; and existing not even as a
name--except on the tip of the tongue. National dignity, as well as
the republican ideal, is served better thus. Besides, it is less
trying for the President.

And yet, stronger than all my sense of what is right and proper is the
desire in me that the President of the Swiss Republic should, just for
once, be dragged forth, blinking, from his burrow in Berne (Berne is
the capital of Switzerland), into the glare of European publicity, and
be driven in a landau to the railway station, there to await the King
of England and kiss him on either cheek when he dismounts from the
train, while the massed orchestras of all the principal hotels play
our national anthem--and also a Swiss national anthem, hastily
composed for the occasion. I want him to entertain the King, that
evening, at a great banquet, whereat His Majesty will have the
President's wife on his right hand, and will make a brief but graceful
speech in the Swiss language (English, French, German, and Italian,
consecutively) referring to the glorious and never-to-be-forgotten
name of William Tell (embarrassed silence), and to the vast number of
his subjects who annually visit Switzerland (loud and prolonged
cheers). Next morning, let there be a review of twenty thousand
waiters from all parts of the country, all the head-waiters receiving
a modest grade of the Victorian Order. Later in the day, let the King
visit the National Gallery--a hall filled with picture post-cards of
the most picturesque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be
conducted to the principal factory of cuckoo-clocks, and, after some
of the clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking to the
President, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like that of the
cuckoo. How the second day of the visit would be filled up, I do not
know; I leave that to the President's discretion. Before his departure
to the frontier, the King will of course be made honorary manager of
one of the principal hotels.

I hope to be present in Berne during these great days in the
President's life. But, if anything happen to keep me here, I shall
content myself with the prospect of his visit to London. I long to see
him and his wife driving past, with the proper escort of Life Guards,
under a vista of quadrilingual mottoes, bowing acknowledgments to us.
I wonder what he is like. I picture him as a small spare man, with a
slightly grizzled beard, and pleasant though shifty eyes behind a
pince-nez. I picture him frock-coated, bowler-hatted, and evidently
nervous. His wife I cannot at all imagine.


A CLUB IN RUINS

An antique ruin has its privileges. The longer the period of its
crumbling, the more do the owls build their nests in it, the more do
the excursionists munch in it their sandwiches. Thus, year by year,
its fame increases, till it looks back with contempt on the days when
it was a mere upright waterproof. Local guide-books pander more and
more slavishly to its pride; leader-writers in need of a pathetic
metaphor are more and more frequently supplied by it. If there be any
sordid question of clearing it away to make room for something else,
the public outcry is positively deafening.

Not that we are still under the sway of that peculiar cult which beset
us in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A bad poet or
painter can no longer reap the reward of genius merely by turning his
attention to ruins under moonlight. Nor does any one cause to be built
in his garden a broken turret, for the evocation of sensibility in
himself and his guests. There used to be one such turret near the
summit of Campden Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year
or two ago, no one protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious
sentimentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is
as strong as ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually
tighten their hold on Britannia's heart.

I do not grudge them their success. But the very fact that they are so
successful inclines me to reserve my own personal sentiment rather for
those unwept, unsung ruins which so often confront me, here and there,
in the streets of this aggressive metropolis. The ruins made, not by
Time, but by the ruthless skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old
enough to be sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands
of a gasping and plethoric community--these are the ruins that move me
to tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers lunch in them. In no
guide-book or leading-article will you find them mentioned. Their
pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to the street, but nor gods nor
men hold out a hand to save them. The patterns of bedroom wall-papers,
(chosen with what care, after how long discussion! only a few short
years or months ago) stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for
mercy. And their dumb agony is echoed dumbly by the places where doors
have been--doors that lately were tapped at by respectful knuckles; or
the places where staircases have been--staircases down whose banisters
lately slid little children, laughing. Exposed, humiliated, doomed,
the home throws out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community
passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick.
Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them.
Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are carted
away. Soon other walls will be rising--red-brick `residential' walls,
more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the
ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I
haunt the door of the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently
mistaken for the foreman.

A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual emotion, the
rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover Square. There were
two reasons why this rasure especially affected me. I had known the
edifice so well, by sight, ever since I was a small boy, and I had
always admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which
is the most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed
it thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of
approval that gaunt and sombre faade, with its long straight windows,
its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London
sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must
perish. For sake of what they had sheltered, my heart deplored that
they must perish. The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It
had been even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It
had been a club.

Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club. Its
demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James
Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord
Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime
had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons
without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe,
found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript
affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club's a club tho' every one's in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest
hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and there are the news-
papers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and the not-to-be-tipped
waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If the members of this club
had but migrated to some other building, taking their effects and
their constitution with them, the ruin would have been pathetic
enough. But alas! the outward wreck was a symbol, a result, of inner
dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two pillars of the
front door told a sorry tale. Pasted on either of them was a dingy
bill, bearing the sinister imprimatur of an auctioneer, and offering
(in capitals of various sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and Mahogany),
Turkey, Indian and Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized Billiard-
Tables, a Remington Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof), and other
objects not less useful and delightful. The club, then, had gone to
smash. The members had been disbanded, driven out of this Eden by the
fiery sword of the Law, driven back to their homes. Sighing over the
marcescibility of human happiness, I peered between the pillars into
the excavated and chaotic hall. The porter's hatch was still there, in
the wall. There it was, wondering why no inquiries were made through
it now, or, may be, why it had not been sold into bondage with the
double-door and the rest of the fixtures. A melancholy relic of past
glories! I crossed over to the other side of the road, and passed my
eye over the whole ruin. The roof, the ceilings, most of the inner
walls, had already fallen. Little remained but the grim, familiar
faade--a thin husk. I noted (that which I had never noted before) two
iron grills in the masonry. Miserable travesties of usefulness,
ventilating the open air! Through the gaping windows, against the wall
of the next building, I saw in mid-air the greenish Lincrusta Walton
of what I guessed to have been the billiard-room--the billiard-room
that had boasted two full-sized tables. Above it ran a frieze of white
and gold. It was interspersed with flat Corinthian columns. The
gilding of the capitals was very fresh, and glittered gaily under the
summer sunbeams.

And hardly a day of the next autumn and winter passed but I was drawn
back to the ruin by a kind of lugubrious magnetism. The strangest
thing was that the ruin seemed to remain in practically the same state
as when first I had come upon it: the faade still stood high. This
might have been due to the proverbial laziness of British workmen, but
I did not think it could be. The workmen were always plying their
pick-axes, with apparent gusto and assiduity, along the top of the
building; bricks and plaster were always crashing down into the depths
and sending up clouds of dust. I preferred to think the building
renewed itself, by some magical process, every night. I preferred to
think it was prepared thus to resist its aggressors for so long a time
that in the end there would be an intervention from other powers.
Perhaps from this site no `residential' affair was destined to scrape
the sky? Perhaps that saint to whom the club had dedicated itself
would reappear, at length, glorious equestrian, to slay the dragons
who had infested and desecrated his premises? I wondered whether he
would then restore the ruins, reinstating the club, and setting it for
ever on a sound commercial basis, or would leave them just as they
were, a fixed signal to sensibility.

But, when first I saw the poor faade being pick-axed, I did not
`give' it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe
and pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of
inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building
seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it
had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every
rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when
sunset should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught
myself nodding to it--a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance.
Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I told
myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who had been
frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the
gaping, glassless windows through which they had been wont to watch
the human comedy. There they had stood, puffing their smoke and
cracking their jests, and tearing women's reputations to shreds.

Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman's reputation torn to
shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have
always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come
my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined
to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs
has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even
though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection
of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-
fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any member is
regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who looks genial and
says nothing at all. Most Englishmen find little difficulty in
conforming with this ideal. They belong to a silent race. Social clubs
flourish, therefore, in England. Intelligent foreigners, seeing them,
recognise their charm, and envy us them, and try to reproduce them at
home. But the Continent is too loquacious. On it social clubs quickly
degenerate into bear-gardens, and the basic ideal of good-fellowship
goes by the board. In Paris, Petersburg, Vienna, the only social clubs
that prosper are those which are devoted to games of chance--those
which induce silence by artificial means. Were I a foreign visitor,
taking cursory glances, I should doubtless be delighted with the clubs
of London. Had I the honour to be an Englishman, I should doubtless
love them. But being a foreign resident, I am somewhat oppressed by
them. I crave in them a little freedom of speech, even though such
freedom were their ruin. I long for their silence to be broken here
and there, even though such breakage broke them with it. It is not
enough for me to hear a hushed exchange of mild jokes about the
weather, or of comparisons between what the Times says and what the
Standard says. I pine for a little vivacity, a little boldness, a
little variety, a few gestures. A London club, as it is conducted,
seems to me very like a catacomb. It is tolerable so long as you do
not actually belong to it. But when you do belong to it, when you have
outlived the fleeting gratification at having been elected, when
you...but I ought not to have fallen into the second person plural.
You, readers, are free-born Englishmen. These clubs `come natural' to
you. You love them. To them you slip eagerly from your homes. As for
me, poor alien, had I been a member of the club whose demolition has
been my theme, I should have grieved for it not one whit the more
bitterly. Indeed, my tears would have been a trifle less salt. It was
my detachment that enabled me to be so prodigal of pity.

The poor waifs! Long did I stand, in the sunshine of that day when
first I saw the ruin, wondering and distressed, ruthful, indignant
that such things should be. I forgot on what errand I had come out. I
recalled it. Once or twice I walked away, bent on its fulfilment. But
I could not proceed further than a few yards. I halted, looked over my
shoulder, was drawn back to the spot, drawn by the crude, insistent
anthem of the pick-axes. The sun slanted towards Notting Hill. Still I
loitered, spellbound... I was aware of some one at my side, some one
asking me a question. `I beg your pardon?' I said. The stranger was a
tall man, bronzed and bearded. He repeated his question. In answer, I
pointed silently to the ruin. `That?' he gasped. He stared vacantly. I
saw that his face had become pale under its sunburn. He looked from
the ruin to me. `You're not joking with me?' he said thickly. I
assured him that I was not. I assured him that this was indeed the
club to which he had asked to be directed. `But,' he stammered, `but--
but--' `You were a member?' I suggested. `I am a member,' he cried.
`And what's more, I'm going to write to the Committee.' I suggested
that there was one fatal objection to such a course. I spoke to him
calmly, soothed him with words of reason, elicited from him, little by
little, his sad story. It appeared that he had been a member of the
club for ten years, but had never (except once, as a guest) been
inside it. He had been elected on the very day on which (by compulsion
of his father) he set sail for Australia. He was a mere boy at the
time. Bitterly he hated leaving old England; nor did he ever find the
life of a squatter congenial. The one thing which enabled him to
endure those ten years of unpleasant exile was the knowledge that he
was a member of a London club. Year by year, it was a keen pleasure to
him to send his annual subscription. It kept him in touch with
civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved to know that when, at
length, he found himself once again in the city of his birth he would
have a firm foothold on sociability. The friends of his youth might
die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he would find
substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks, all day
long, on the arid plains of Central Australia, he used to keep up his
spirits by thinking of that first whisky-and-soda which he would order
from a respectful waiter as he entered his club. All night long,
wrapped in his blanket beneath the stars, he used to dream of that
drink to come, that first symbol of an unlost grip on civilisation...
He had arrived in London this very afternoon. Depositing his luggage
at an hotel, he had come straight to his club. `And now...' He filled
up his aposiopesis with an uncouth gesture, signifying `I may as well
get back to Australia.'

I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him
his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an
extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard
for him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so
passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destined
never to cross its threshold. Why, after all, should he not cross its
threshold? I asked him if he would like to. `What,' he growled, `would
be the good?' I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of his
nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained matters to
the foreman; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he passed with the
foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I saw him crossing the
excavated hall, crossing it along a plank, slowly and cautiously. His
attitude was very like Blondin's, but it had a certain tragic dignity
which Blondin's lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I hailed a
cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do not know.
Often as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered by it, him I
never saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight back to Australia.
Or perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him alive in the
foundations. His fate, whatever it was, haunts me.


`273'

This is an age of prescriptions. Morning after morning, from the back-
page of your newspaper, quick and uncostly cures for every human ill
thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past. But
I would raise no false hopes of myself. I am no thaumaturgist. Do
you awake with a sinking sensation in the stomach? Have you lost the
power of assimilating food? Are you oppressed with an indescribable
lassitude? Can you no longer follow the simplest train of thought? Are
you troubled throughout the night with a hacking cough? Are you--in
fine, are you but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all the
most malignant maladies ancient and modern? If so, skip this essay,
and try Somebody's Elixir. The cure that I offer is but a cure for
overwrought nerves--a substitute for the ordinary `rest-cure.' Nor is
it absurdly cheap. Nor is it instant. It will take a week or so of
your time. But then, the `rest-cure' takes at least a month. The scale
of payment for board and lodging may be, per diem, hardly lower than
in the `rest-cure'; but you will save all but a pound or so of the
very heavy fees that you would have to pay to your doctor and your
nurse (or nurses). And certainly, my cure is the more pleasant of the
two. My patient does not have to cease from life. He is not undressed
and tucked into bed and forbidden to stir hand or foot during his
whole term. He is not forbidden to receive letters, or to read books,
or to look on any face but his nurse's (or nurses'). Nor, above all,
is he condemned to the loathsome necessity of eating so much food as
to make him dread the sight of food. Doubtless, the grim, inexorable
process of the `rest-cure' is very good for him who is strong enough
and brave enough to bear it, and rich enough to pay for it. I address
myself to the frailer, cowardlier, needier man. Instead of ceasing
from life, and entering purgatory, he need but essay a variation in
life. He need but go and stay by himself in one of those vast modern
hotels which abound along the South and East coasts.

You are disappointed? All simple ideas are disappointing. And all good
cures spring from simple ideas.

The right method of treating overwrought nerves is to get the patient
away from himself--to make a new man of him; and this trick can be
done only by switching him off from his usual environment, his usual
habits. The ordinary rest-cure, by its very harshness, intensifies a
man's personality at first, drives him miserably within himself; and
only by its long duration does it gradually wear him down and build
him up anew. There is no harshness in the vast hotels which I have
recommended. You may eat there as little as you like, especially if
you are en pension. Letters may be forwarded to you there; though,
unless your case is a very mild one, I would advise you not to leave
your address at home. There are reading-rooms where you can see all
the newspapers; though I advise you to ignore them. You suffer under
no sense of tyranny. And yet, no sooner have you signed your name in
the visitors' book, and had your bedroom allotted to you, than you
feel that you have surrendered yourself irrepleviably. It is not
necessary to this illusion that you should pass under an assumed name,
unless you happen to be a very eminent actor, or cricketer, or other
idol of the nation, whose presence would flutter the young persons at
the bureau. If your nervous breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to
merely intellectual distinction, these young persons will mete out to
you no more than the bright callous civility which they mete out
impartially to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you
will be a number, and to yourself you will have suddenly become a
number--the number graven on the huge brass label that depends
clanking from the key put into the hand of the summoned chambermaid.
You are merely (let us say) 273.

Up you go in the lift, realising, as for the first time, your
insignificance in infinity, and rather proud to be even a number. You
recognise your double on the door that has been unlocked for you. No
prisoner, clapped into his cell, could feel less personal, less
important. A notice on the wall, politely requesting you to leave your
key at the bureau (as though you were strong enough or capacious
enough to carry it about with you) comes as a pleasant reminder of
your freedom. You remember joyously that you are even free from
yourself. You have begun a new life, have forgotten the old. This
mantelpiece, so strangely and brightly bare of photographs or
`knickknacks,' is meaning in its meaninglessness. And these blank,
fresh walls, that you have never seen, and that never were seen by any
one whom you know...their pattern is of poppies and mandragora,
surely. Poppies and mandragora are woven, too, on the brand-new
Axminster beneath your elastic step. `Come in!' A porter bears in your
trunk, deposits it on a trestle at the foot of the bed, unstraps it,
leaves you alone with it. It seems to be trying to remind you of some-
thing or other. You do not listen. You laugh as you open it. You know
that if you examined these shirts you would find them marked `273.'
Before dressing for dinner, you take a hot bath. There are patent
taps, some for fresh water, others for sea water. You hesitate. Yet
you know that whichever you touch will effuse but the water of Lethe,
after all. You dress before your fire. The coals have burnt now to a
lovely glow. Once and again, you eye them suspiciously. But no, there
are no faces in them. All's well.

Sleek and fresh, you sit down to dinner in the `Grande Salle a`
Manger.' Graven on your wine-glasses, emblazoned on your soup-plate,
are the armorial bearings of the company that shelters you. The
College of Arms might sneer at them, be down on them, but to you they
are a joy, in their grand lack of links with history. They are a
sympathetic symbol of your own newness, your own impersonality. You
glance down the endless menu. It has been composed for a community.
None of your favourite dishes (you once had favourite dishes) appears
in it, thank heaven! You will work your way through it, steadily,
unquestioningly, gladly, with a communal palate. And the wine? All
wines are alike here, surely. You scour the list vaguely, and order a
pint of 273. Your eye roves over the adjacent tables.

You behold a galaxy of folk evidently born, like yourself, anew. Some,
like yourself, are solitary. Others are with wives, with children--but
with new wives, new children. The associations of home have been
forgotten, even though home's actual appendages be here. The members
of the little domestic circles are using company manners. They are
actually making conversation, `breaking the ice.' They are new here to
one another. They are new to themselves. How much newer to you! You
cannot `place' them. That paterfamilias with the red moustache--is he
a soldier, a solicitor, a stockbroker, what? You play vaguely, vainly,
at the game of attributions, while the little orchestra in yonder
bower of artificial palm-trees plays new, or seemingly new, cake-
walks. Who are they, these minstrels in the shadow? They seem not to
be the Red Hungarians, nor the Blue, nor the Hungarians of any other
colour of the spectrum. You set them down as the Colourless
Hungarians, and resume your study of the tables. They fascinate you,
these your fellow-diners. You fascinate them, doubtless. They,
doubtless, are cudgelling their brains to `spot' your state in life--
your past, which now has escaped you. Next day, some of them are gone;
and you miss them, almost bitterly. But others succeed them, not less
detached and enigmatic than they. You must never speak to one of them.
You must never lapse into those casual acquaintances of the `lounge'
or the smoking-room. Nor is it hard to avoid them. No Englishman, how
gregarious and garrulous soever, will dare address another Englishman
in whose eye is no spark of invitation. There must be no such spark in
yours. Silence is part of the cure for you, and a very important part.
It is mainly through unaccustomed silence that your nerves are made
trim again. Usually, you are giving out in talk all that you receive
through your senses of perception. Keep silence now. Its gold will
accumulate in you at compound interest. You will realise the joy of
being full of reflections and ideas. You will begin to hoard them
proudly, like a miser. You will gloat over your own cleverness--you,
who but a few days since, were feeling so stupid. Solitude in a crowd,
silence among chatterboxes--these are the best ministers to a mind
diseased. And with the restoration of the mind, the body will be
restored too. You, who were physically so limp and pallid, will be a
ruddy Hercules now. And when, at the moment of departure, you pass
through the hall, shyly distributing to the servants that largesse
which is so slight in comparison with what your doctor and nurse (or
nurses) would have levied on you, you will feel that you are more than
fit to resume that burden of personality whereunder you had sunk. You
will be victoriously yourself again.

Yet I think you will look back a little wistfully on the period of
your obliteration. People--for people are very nice, really, most of
them--will tell you that they have missed you. You will reply that you
did not miss yourself. And you will go the more strenuously to your
work and pleasure, so as to have the sooner an excuse for a good
riddance.


A STUDY IN DEJECTION

Riderless the horse was, and with none to hold his bridle. But he
waited patiently, submissively, there where I saw him, at the shabby
corner of a certain shabby little street in Chelsea. `My beautiful, my
beautiful, thou standest meekly by,' sang Mrs. Norton of her Arab
steed, `with thy proudly-arched and glossy neck, thy dark and fiery
eye.' Catching the eye of this other horse, I saw that such fire as
might once have blazed there had long smouldered away. Chestnut though
he was, he had no mettle. His chestnut coat was all dull and rough,
unkempt as that of an inferior cab-horse. Of his once luxuriant mane
there were but a few poor tufts now. His saddle was torn and weather-
stained. The one stirrup that dangled therefrom was red with rust.

I never saw in any creature a look of such unutterable dejection.
Dejection, in the most literal sense of the word, indeed was his. He
had been cast down. He had fallen from higher and happier things. With
his `arched neck,' and with other points which not neglect nor ill-
usage could rob of their old grace, he had kept something of his
fallen day about him. In the window of the little shop outside which
he stood were things that seemed to match him--things appealing to the
sense that he appealed to. A tarnished French mirror, a strip of faded
carpet, some rows of battered, tattered books, a few cups and saucers
that had erst been riveted and erst been dusted--all these, in a
gallimaufry of other languid odds and ends, seen through this mud-
splashed window, silently echoed the silent misery of the horse. They
were remembering Zion. They had been beautiful once, and expensive,
and well cared for, and admired, and coveted. And now...

They had, at least, the consolation of being indoors. Public laughing-
stock though they were, they had a barrier of glass between themselves
and the irreverent world. To be warm and dry, too, was something.
Piteous, they could yet afford to pity the horse. He was more
ludicrously, more painfully, misplaced than they. A real blood-horse
that has done his work is rightly left in the open air--turned out
into some sweet meadow or paddock. It would be cruel to make him spend
his declining years inside a house, where no grass is. Is it less
cruel that a fine old rocking-horse should be thrust from the nursery
out into the open air, upon the pavement?

Perhaps some child had just given the horse a contemptuous shove in
passing. For he was rocking gently when I chanced to see him. Nor did
he cease to rock, with a slight creak upon the pavement, so long as I
watched him. A particularly black and bitter north wind was blowing
round the corner of the street. Perhaps it was this that kept the
horse in motion. Boreas himself, invisible to my mortal eyes, may have
been astride the saddle, lashing the tired old horse to this futile
activity. But no, I think rather that the poor thing was rocking of
his own accord, rocking to attract my attention. He saw in me a
possible purchaser. He wanted to show me that he was still sound in
wind and limb. Had I a small son at home? If so, here was the very
mount for him. None of your frisky, showy, first-hand young brutes, on
which no fond parent ought to risk his offspring's bones; but a sound,
steady-going, well-mannered old hack with never a spark of vice in
him! Such was the message that I read in the glassy eye fixed on me.
The nostril of faded scarlet seemed for a moment to dilate and quiver.
At last, at last, was some one going to inquire his price?

Once upon a time, in a far-off fashionable toy-shop, his price had
been prohibitive; and he, the central attraction behind the gleaming
shop-window, had plumed himself on his expensiveness. He had been in
no hurry to be bought. It had seemed to him a good thing to stand
there motionless, majestic, day after day, far beyond the reach of
average purses, and having in his mien something of the frigid
nobility of the horses on the Parthenon frieze, with nothing at all of
their unreality. A coat of real chestnut hair, glossy, glorious! From
end to end of the Parthenon frieze not one of the horses had that.
>From end to end of the toy-shop that exhibited him not one of the
horses was thus graced. Their flanks were mere wood, painted white,
with arbitrary blotches of grey here and there. Miserable creatures!
It was difficult to believe that they had souls. No wonder they were
cheap, and `went off,' as the shopman said, so quickly, whilst he
stayed grandly on, cynosure of eyes that dared not hope for him. Into
bondage they went off, those others, and would be worked to death,
doubtless, by brutal little boys.

When, one fine day, a lady was actually not shocked by the price
demanded for him, his pride was hurt. And when, that evening, he was
packed in brown paper and hoisted to the roof of a four-wheeler, he
faced the future fiercely. Who was this lady that her child should
dare bestride him? With a biblical `ha, ha,' he vowed that the child
should not stay long in saddle: he must be thrown--badly--even though
it was his seventh birthday. But this wicked intention vanished while
the child danced around him in joy and wonder. Never yet had so many
compliments been showered on him. Here, surely, was more the manner of
a slave than of a master. And how lightly the child rode him, with
never a tug or a kick! And oh, how splendid it was to be flying thus
through the air! Horses were made to be ridden; and he had never
before savoured the true joy of life, for he had never known his own
strength and fleetness. Forward! Backward! Faster, faster! To floor!
To ceiling! Regiments of leaden soldiers watched his wild career.
Noah's quiet sedentary beasts gaped up at him in wonderment--as tiny
to him as the gaping cows in the fields are to you when you pass by in
an express train. This was life indeed! He remembered Katafalto--
remembered Eclipse and the rest nowhere. Aye, thought he, and even
thus must Black Bess have rejoiced along the road to York. And
Bucephalus, skimming under Alexander the plains of Asia, must have had
just this glorious sense of freedom. Only less so! Not Pegasus himself
can have flown more swiftly. Pegasus, at last, became a constellation
in the sky. `Some day,' reflected the rocking-horse, when the ride was
over, `I, too, shall die; and five stars will appear on the nursery
ceiling.'

Alas for the vanity of equine ambition! I wonder by what stages this
poor beast came down in the world. Did the little boy's father go
bankrupt, leaving it to be sold in a `lot' with the other toys? Or was
it merely given away, when the little boy grew up, to a poor but
procreative relation, who anon became poorer? I should like to think
that it had been mourned. But I fear that whatever mourning there may
have been for it must have been long ago discarded. The creature did
not look as if it had been ridden in any recent decade. It looked as
if it had almost abandoned the hope of ever being ridden again. It was
but hoping against hope now, as it stood rocking there in the bleak
twilight. Bright warm nurseries were for younger, happier horses.
Still it went on rocking, to show me that it could rock.

The more sentimental a man is, the less is he helpful; the more loth
is he to cancel the cause of his emotion. I did not buy the horse.

A few days later, passing that way, I wished to renew my emotion; but
lo! the horse was gone. Had some finer person than I bought it?--towed
it to the haven where it would be? Likelier, it had but been relegated
to some mirky recess of the shop... I hope it has room to rock there.


A PATHETIC IMPOSTURE

Lord Rosebery once annoyed the Press by declaring that his ideal
newspaper was one which should give its news without comment.
Doubtless he was thinking of the commonweal. Yet a plea for no
comments might be made, with equal force, in behalf of the
commentators themselves. Occupations that are injurious to the persons
engaged in them ought not to be encouraged. The writing of `leaders'
and `notes' is one of these occupations. The practice of it, more than
of any other, depends on, and fosters hypocrisy, worst of vices. In a
sense, every kind of writing is hypocritical. It has to be done with
an air of gusto, though no one ever yet enjoyed the act of writing.
Even a man with a specific gift for writing, with much to express,
with perfect freedom in choice of subject and manner of expression,
with indefinite leisure, does not write with real gusto. But in him
the pretence is justified: he has enjoyed thinking out his subject, he
will delight in his work when it is done. Very different is the
pretence of one who writes at top-speed, on a set subject, what he
thinks the editor thinks the proprietor thinks the public thinks nice.
If he happen to have a talent for writing, his work will be but the
more painful, and his hypocrisy the greater. The chances are, though,
that the talent has already been sucked out of him by Journalism, that
vampire. To her, too, he will have forfeited any fervour he may have
had, any learning, any gaiety. How can he, the jaded interpreter, hold
any opinion, feel any enthusiasm?--without leisure, keep his mind in
cultivation?--be sprightly to order, at unearthly hours in a whir-r-
ring office? To order! Yes, sprightliness is compulsory there; so are
weightiness, and fervour, and erudition. He must seem to abound in
these advantages, or another man will take his place. He must disguise
himself at all costs. But disguises are not easy to make; they require
time and care, which he cannot afford. So he must snatch up ready-made
disguises--unhook them, rather. He must know all the cant-phrases, the
cant-references. There are very, very many of them, and belike it is
hard to keep them all at one's finger-tips. But, at least, there is no
difficulty in collecting them. Plod through the `leaders' and `notes'
in half-a-dozen of the daily papers, and you will bag whole coveys of
them.

Most of the morning papers still devote much space to the old-
fashioned kind of `leader,' in which the pretence is of weightiness,
rather than of fervour, sprightliness, or erudition. The effect of
weightiness is obtained simply by a stupendous disproportion of
language to sense. The longest and most emphatic words are used for
the simplest and most trivial statements, and they are always so
elaborately qualified as to leave the reader with a vague impression
that a very difficult matter, which he himself cannot make head or
tail of, has been dealt with in a very judicial and exemplary manner.

A leader-writer would not, for instance, say--

Lord Rosebery has made a paradox.

He would say:--

Lord Rosebery

whether intentionally or otherwise, we leave our readers to decide,
or, with seeming conviction,
or, doubtless giving rein to the playful humour which is
characteristic of him,

has

expressed a sentiment,
or, taken on himself to enunciate a theory,
or, made himself responsible for a dictum,

which,

we venture to assert,
or, we have little hesitation in declaring,
or, we may be pardoned for thinking,
or, we may say without fear of contradiction,

is

nearly akin to
or, not very far removed from

the paradoxical.

But I will not examine further the trick of weightiness--it takes up
too much of my space. Besides, these long `leaders' are a mere
survival, and will soon disappear altogether. The `notes' are the
characteristic feature of the modern newspaper, and it is in them that
the modern journalist displays his fervour, sprightliness, and
erudition. `Note'-writing, like chess, has certain recognised
openings, e.g.:--

There is no new thing under the sun.
It is always the unexpected that happens.
Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum.
The late Lord Coleridge once electrified his court by inquiring `Who
is Connie Gilchrist?'

And here are some favourite methods of conclusion:--

A mad world, my masters!
'Tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.
There is much virtue in that `if.'
But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.
Si non e` vero, etc.

or (lighter style)

We fancy we recognise here the hand of Mr. Benjamin Trovato.

Not less inevitable are such parallelisms as:--

Like Topsy, perhaps it `growed.'
Like the late Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, `on the side of
the angels.'
Like Brer Rabbit, `To lie low and say nuffin.'
Like Oliver Twist, `To ask for more.'
Like Sam Weller's knowledge of London, `extensive and peculiar.'
Like Napoleon, a believer in `the big battalions.'

Nor let us forget Pyrrhic victory, Parthian dart, and Homeric
laughter; quos deus vult and nil de mortuis; Sturm und Drang; masterly
inactivity, unctuous rectitude, mute inglorious Miltons, and damned
good-natured friends; the sword of Damocles, the thin edge of the
wedge, the long arm of coincidence, and the soul of goodness in things
evil; Hobson's choice, Frankenstein's monster, Macaulay's schoolboy,
Lord Burleigh's nod, Sir Boyle Roche's bird, Mahomed's coffin, and
Davy Jones's locker.

A melancholy catalogue, is it not? But it is less melancholy for you
who read it here, than for them whose existence depends on it, who
draw from it a desperate means of seeming to accomplish what is
impossible. And yet these are the men who shrank in horror from Lord
Rosebery's merciful idea. They ought to be saved despite themselves.
Might not a short Act of Parliament be passed, making all comment in
daily newspapers illegal? In a way, of course, it would be hard on the
commentators. Having lost the power of independent thought, having
sunk into a state of chronic dulness, apathy and insincerity, they
could hardly, be expected to succeed in any of the ordinary ways of
life. They could not compete with their fellow-creatures; no door but
would be bolted if they knocked on it. What would become of them?
Probably they would have to perish in what they would call `what the
late Lord Goschen would have called "splendid isolation."' But such an
end were sweeter, I suggest to them, than the life they are leading.


THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES

Have you read The Young Lady's Book? You have had plenty of time to do
so, for it was published in 1829. It was described by the two
anonymous Gentlewomen who compiled it as `A Manual for Elegant
Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits.' You wonder they had nothing
better to think of? You suspect them of having been triflers? They
were not, believe me. They were careful to explain, at the outset,
that the Virtues of Character were what a young lady should most
assiduously cultivate. They, in their day, labouring under the shadow
of the eighteenth century, had somehow in themselves that high moral
fervour which marks the opening of the twentieth century, and is said
to have come in with Mr. George Bernard Shaw. But, unlike us, they
were not concerned wholly with the inward and spiritual side of life.
They cared for the material surface, too. They were learned in the
frills and furbelows of things. They gave, indeed, a whole chapter to
`Embroidery.' Another they gave to `Archery,' another to `The Aviary,'
another to `The Escrutoire.' Young ladies do not now keep birds, nor
shoot with bow and arrow; but they do still, in some measure, write
letters; and so, for sake of historical comparison, let me give you a
glance at `The Escrutoire.' It is not light reading.

`For careless scrawls ye boast of no pretence;
Fair Russell wrote, as well as spoke, with sense.'

Thus is the chapter headed, with a delightful little wood engraving of
`Fair Russell,' looking pre-eminently sensible, at her desk, to
prepare the reader for the imminent welter of rules for `decorous
composition.' Not that pedantry is approved. `Ease and simplicity, an
even flow of unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious
sentiments' is the ideal to be striven for. `A metaphor may be used
with advantage' by any young lady, but only `if it occur naturally.'
And `allusions are elegant,' but only `when introduced with ease, and
when they are well understood by those to whom they are addressed.'
`An antithesis renders a passage piquant'; but the dire results of a
too-frequent indulgence in it are relentlessly set forth. Pages and
pages are devoted to a minute survey of the pit-falls of punctuation.
But when the young lady of that period had skirted all these, and had
observed all the manifold rules of caligraphy that were here laid down
for her, she was not, even then, out of the wood. Very special stress
was laid on `the use of the seal.' Bitter scorn was poured on young
ladies who misused the seal. `It is a habit of some to thrust the wax
into the flame of the candle, and the moment a morsel of it is melted,
to daub it on the paper; and when an unsightly mass is gathered
together, to pass the seal over the tongue with ridiculous haste--
press it with all the strength which the sealing party possesses--and
the result is, an impression which raises a blush on her cheek.'

Well! The young ladies of that day were ever expected to exhibit
sensibility, and used to blush, just as they wept or fainted, for very
slight causes. Their tears and their swoons did not necessarily
betoken much grief or agitation; nor did a rush of colour to the cheek
mean necessarily that they were overwhelmed with shame. To exhibit
various emotions in the drawing-room was one of the Elegant Exercises
in which these young ladies were drilled thoroughly. And their habit
of simulation was so rooted in sense of duty that it merged into
sincerity. If a young lady did not swoon at the breakfast-table when
her Papa read aloud from The Times that the Duke of Wellington was
suffering from a slight chill, the chances were that she would swoon
quite unaffectedly when she realised her omission. Even so, we may be
sure that a young lady whose cheek burned not at sight of the letter
she had sealed untidily--`unworthily' the Manual calls it--would anon
be blushing for her shamelessness. Such a thing as the blurring of the
family crest, or as the pollution of the profile of Pallas Athene with
the smoke of the taper, was hardly, indeed, one of those `very slight
causes' to which I have referred. The Georgian young lady was imbued
through and through with the sense that it was her duty to be
gracefully efficient in whatsoever she set her hand to. To the young
lady of to-day, belike, she will seem accordingly ridiculous--seem
poor-spirited, and a pettifogger. True, she set her hand to no
grandiose tasks. She was not allowed to become a hospital nurse, for
example, or an actress. The young lady of to-day, when she hears in
herself a `vocation' for tending the sick, would willingly, without an
instant's preparation, assume responsibility for the lives of a whole
ward at St. Thomas's. This responsibility is not, however, thrust on
her. She has to submit to a long and tedious course of training before
she may do so much as smooth a pillow. The boards of the theatre are
less jealously hedged in than those of the hospital. If our young lady
have a wealthy father, and retain her schoolroom faculty for learning
poetry by heart, there is no power on earth to prevent her from making
her de'but, somewhere, as Juliet--if she be so inclined; and such is
usually her inclination. That her voice is untrained, that she cannot
scan blank-verse, that she cannot gesticulate with grace and
propriety, nor move with propriety and grace across the stage, matters
not a little bit--to our young lady. `Feeling,' she will say, `is
everything'; and, of course, she, at the age of eighteen, has more
feeling than Juliet, that `flapper,' could have had. All those other
things--those little technical tricks--`can be picked up,' or `will
come.' But no; I misrepresent our young lady. If she be conscious that
there are such tricks to be played, she despises them. When, later,
she finds the need to learn them, she still despises them. It seems to
her ridiculous that one should not speak and comport oneself as
artlessly on the stage as one does off it. The notion of speaking or
comporting oneself with conscious art in real life would seem to her
quite monstrous. It would puzzle her as much as her grandmother would
have been puzzled by the contrary notion.

Personally, I range myself on the grandmother's side. I take my stand
shoulder to shoulder with the Graces. On the banner that I wave is
embroidered a device of prunes and prisms.

I am no blind fanatic, however. I admit that artlessness is a charming
idea. I admit that it is sometimes charming as a reality. I applaud it
(all the more heartily because it is rare) in children. But then,
children, like the young of all animals whatsoever, have a natural
grace. As a rule, they begin to show it in their third year, and to
lose it in their ninth. Within that span of six years they can be
charming without intention; and their so frequent failure in charm is
due to their voluntary or enforced imitation of the ways of their
elders. In Georgian and Early Victorian days the imitation was always
enforced. Grown-up people had good manners, and wished to see them
reflected in the young. Nowadays, the imitation is always voluntary.
Grown-up people have no manners at all; whereas they certainly have a
very keen taste for the intrinsic charm of children. They wish
children to be perfectly natural. That is (aesthetically at least) an
admirable wish. My complaint against these grown-up people is, that
they themselves, whom time has robbed of their natural grace as surely
as it robs the other animals, are content to be perfectly natural.
This contentment I deplore, and am keen to disturb.

I except from my indictment any young lady who may read these words. I
will assume that she differs from the rest of the human race, and has
not, never had, anything to learn in the art of conversing prettily,
of entering or leaving a room or a vehicle gracefully, of writing
appropriate letters, et patati et patata. I will assume that all these
accomplishments came naturally to her. She will now be in a mood to
accept my proposition that of her contemporaries none seems to have
been so lucky as herself. She will agree with me that other girls need
training. She will not deny that grace in the little affairs of life
is a thing which has to be learned. Some girls have a far greater
aptitude for learning it than others; but, with one exception, no
girls have it in them from the outset. It is a not less complicated
thing than is the art of acting, or of nursing the sick, and needs for
the acquirement of it a not less laborious preparation.

Is it worth the trouble? Certainly the trouble is not taken. The
`finishing school,' wherein young ladies were taught to be graceful,
is a thing of the past. It must have been a dismal place; but the
dismalness of it--the strain of it--was the measure of its
indispensability. There I beg the question. Is grace itself
indispensable? Certainly, it has been dispensed with. It isn't
reckoned with. To sit perfectly mute `in company,' or to chatter on at
the top of one's voice; to shriek with laughter; to fling oneself into
a room and dash oneself out of it; to collapse on chairs or sofas; to
sprawl across tables; to slam doors; to write, without punctuation,
notes that only an expert in handwriting could read, and only an
expert in mis-spelling could understand; to hustle, to bounce, to go
straight ahead--to be, let us say, perfectly natural in the midst of
an artificial civilisation, is an ideal which the young ladies of to-
day are neither publicly nor privately discouraged from cherishing.
The word `cherishing' implies a softness of which they are not guilty.
I hasten to substitute `pursuing.' If these young ladies were not in
the aforesaid midst of an artificial civilisation, I should be the
last to discourage their pursuit. If they were Amazons, for example,
spending their lives beneath the sky, in tilth of stubborn fields, and
in armed conflict with fierce men, it would be unreasonable to expect
of them any sacrifice to the Graces. But they are exposed to no such
hardships. They have a really very comfortable sort of life. They are
not expected to be useful. (I am writing all the time, of course,
about the young ladies in the affluent classes.) And it seems to me
that they, in payment of their debt to Fate, ought to occupy the time
that is on their hands by becoming ornamental, and increasing the
world's store of beauty. In a sense, certainly, they are ornamental.
It is a strange fact, and an ironic, that they spend quite five times
the annual amount that was spent by their grandmothers on personal
adornment. If they can afford it, well and good: let us have no
sumptuary law. But plenty of pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty
manners are needed with them, and are prettier than they.

I had forgotten men. Every defect that I had noted in the modern young
woman is not less notable in the modern young man. Briefly, he is a
boor. If it is true that `manners makyth man,' one doubts whether the
British race can be perpetuated. The young Englishman of to-day is
inferior to savages and to beasts of the field in that they are eager
to show themselves in an agreeable and seductive light to the females
of their kind, whilst he regards any such effort as beneath his
dignity. Not that he cultivates dignity in demeanour. He merely
slouches. Unlike his feminine counterpart, he lets his raiment match
his manners. Observe him any afternoon, as he passes down Piccadilly,
sullenly, with his shoulders humped, and his hat clapped to the back
of his head, and his cigarette dangling almost vertically from his
lips. It seems only appropriate that his hat is a billy-cock, and his
shirt a flannel one, and that his boots are brown ones. Thus attired,
he is on his way to pay a visit of ceremony to some house at which he
has recently dined. No; that is the sort of visit he never pays. (I
must confess I don't myself.) But one remembers the time when no self-
respecting youth would have shown himself in Piccadilly without the
vesture appropriate to that august highway. Nowadays there is no care
for appearances. Comfort is the one aim. Any care for appearances is
regarded rather as a sign of effeminacy. Yet never, in any other age
of the world's history, has it been regarded so. Indeed, elaborate
dressing used to be deemed by philosophers an outcome of the sex-
instinct. It was supposed that men dressed themselves finely in order
to attract the admiration of women, just as peacocks spread their
plumage with a similar purpose. Nor do I jettison the old theory. The
declension of masculine attire in England began soon after the time
when statistics were beginning to show the great numerical
preponderance of women over men; and is it fanciful to trace the one
fact to the other? Surely not. I do not say that either sex is
attracted to the other by elaborate attire. But I believe that each
sex, consciously or unconsciously, uses this elaboration for this very
purpose. Thus the over-dressed girl of to-day and the ill-dressed
youth are but symbols of the balance of our population. The one is
pleading, the other scorning. `Take me!' is the message borne by the
furs and the pearls and the old lace. `I'll see about that when I've
had a look round!' is the not pretty answer conveyed by the billy-cock
and the flannel shirt.

I dare say that fine manners, like fine clothes, are one of the
stratagems of sex. This theory squares at once with the modern young
man's lack of manners. But how about the modern young woman's not less
obvious lack? Well, the theory will square with that, too. The modern
young woman's gracelessness may be due to her conviction that men like
a girl to be thoroughly natural. She knows that they have a very high
opinion of themselves; and what, thinks she, more natural than that
they should esteem her in proportion to her power of reproducing the
qualities that are most salient in themselves? Men, she perceives, are
clumsy, and talk loud, and have no drawing-room accomplishments, and
are rude; and she proceeds to model herself on them. Let us not blame
her. Let us blame rather her parents or guardians, who, though they
well know that a masculine girl attracts no man, leave her to the
devices of her own inexperience. Girls ought not to be allowed, as
they are, to run wild. So soon as they have lost the natural grace of
childhood, they should be initiated into that course of artificial
training through which their grandmothers passed before them, and in
virtue of which their grandmothers were pleasing. This will not, of
course, ensure husbands for them all; but it will certainly tend to
increase the number of marriages. Nor is it primarily for that
sociological reason that I plead for a return to the old system of
education. I plead for it, first and last, on aesthetic grounds. Let
the Graces be cultivated for their own sweet sake.

The difficulty is how to begin. The mothers of the rising generation
were brought up in the unregenerate way. Their scraps of oral
tradition will need to be supplemented by much research. I advise them
to start their quest by reading The Young Lady's Book. Exactly the
right spirit is therein enshrined, though of the substance there is
much that could not be well applied to our own day. That chapter on
`The Escrutoire,' for example, belongs to a day that cannot be
recalled. We can get rid of bad manners, but we cannot substitute the
Sedan-chair for the motor-car; and the penny post, with telephones and
telegrams, has, in our own beautiful phrase, `come to stay,' and has
elbowed the art of letter-writing irrevocably from among us. But notes
are still written; and there is no reason why they should not be
written well. Has the mantle of those anonymous gentlewomen who wrote
The Young Lady's Book fallen on no one? Will no one revise that
`Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits,' adapting it
to present needs?... A few hints as to Deportment in the Motor-Car;
the exact Angle whereat to hold the Receiver of a Telephone, and the
exact Key wherein to pitch the Voice; the Conduct of a Cigarette... I
see a wide and golden vista.


WHISTLER'S WRITING

No book-lover, I. Give me an uninterrupted view of my fellow-
creatures. The most tedious of them pleases me better than the best
book. You see, I admit that some of them are tedious. I do not deem
alien from myself nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-
creatures according to their contents. And in that respect I am not
more different in my way from the true humanitarian than from the true
bibliophile in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all.
He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by
the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear
to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as
good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness?
He doesn't want to read. `Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them;
and, even when he can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would
seem to him quite uncouth and preposterous The aforesaid snob would as
soon question His Grace about the state of His Grace's soul. I, on the
other hand, whenever human company is denied me, have often a desire
to read. Reading, I prefer cut edges, because a paper-knife is one of
the things that have the gift of invisibility whenever they are
wanted; and because one's thumb, in prising open the pages, so often
affects the text. Many volumes have I thus mutilated, and I hope that
in the sale-rooms of a sentimental posterity they may fetch higher
prices than their duly uncut duplicates. So long as my thumb tatters
merely the margin, I am quite equanimous. If I were reading a First
Folio Shakespeare by my fireside, and if the matchbox were ever so
little beyond my reach, I vow I would light my cigarette with a spill
made from the margin of whatever page I were reading. I am neat,
scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book,
as a book, is not one of these things.

Of course, a book may happen to be in itself a beautiful object. Such
a book I treat tenderly, as one would a flower. And such a book is, in
its brown-papered boards, whereon gleam little gilt italics and a
little gilt butterfly, Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies. It
happens to be also a book which I have read again and again--a book
that has often travelled with me. Yet its cover is as fresh as when
first, some twelve years since, it came into my possession. A flower
freshly plucked, one would say--a brown-and-yellow flower, with a
little gilt butterfly fluttering over it. And its inner petals, its
delicately proportioned pages, are as white and undishevelled as
though they never had been opened. The book lies open before me, as I
write. I must be careful of my pen's transit from inkpot to MS.

Yet, I know, many worthy folk would like the book blotted out of
existence. These are they who understand and love the art of painting,
but neither love nor understand writing as an art. For them The Gentle
Art of Making Enemies is but something unworthy of a great man.
Certainly, it is a thing incongruous with a great hero. And for most
people it is painful not to regard a great man as also a great hero;
hence all the efforts to explain away the moral characteristics
deducible from The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and to prove that
Whistler, beneath a prickly surface, was saturated through and through
with the quintessence of the Sermon on the Mount.

Well! hero-worship is a very good thing. It is a wholesome exercise
which we ought all to take, now and again. Only, let us not strain
ourselves by overdoing it. Let us not indulge in it too constantly.
Let hero-worship be reserved for heroes. And there was nothing heroic
about Whistler, except his unfaltering devotion to his own ideals in
art. No saint was he, and none would have been more annoyed than he by
canonisation; would he were here to play, as he would have played
incomparably, the devil's advocate! So far as he possessed the
Christian virtues, his faith was in himself, his hope was for the
immortality of his own works, and his charity was for the defects in
those works. He is known to have been an affectionate son, an
affectionate husband; but, for the rest, all the tenderness in him
seems to have been absorbed into his love for such things in nature as
were expressible through terms of his own art. As a man in relation to
his fellow-men, he cannot, from any purely Christian standpoint, be
applauded. He was inordinately vain and cantankerous. Enemies, as he
has wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to
have valued friendship (a thing never really valuable, in itself, to a
really vain man) as just the needful foundation for future enmity.
Quarrelling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life
blithely. Most of these quarrels were quite trivial and tedious. In
the ordinary way, they would have been forgotten long ago, as the
trivial and tedious details in the lives of other great men are
forgotten. But Whistler was great not merely in painting, not merely
as a wit and dandy in social life. He had, also, an extraordinary
talent for writing. He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way,
perfectly; and his way was his own, and the secret of it has died with
him. Thus, conducting them through the Post Office, he has conducted
his squabbles to immortality.

Immortality is a big word. I do not mean by it that so long as this
globe shall endure, the majority of the crawlers round it will spend
the greater part of their time in reading The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies. Even the pre-eminently immortal works of Shakespeare are read
very little. The average of time devoted to them by Englishmen cannot
(even though one assess Mr. Frank Harris at eight hours per diem, and
Mr. Sidney Lee at twenty-four) tot up to more than a small fraction of
a second in a lifetime reckoned by the Psalmist's limit. When I dub
Whistler an immortal writer, I do but mean that so long as there are a
few people interested in the subtler ramifications of English prose as
an art-form, so long will there be a few constantly-recurring readers
of The Gentle Art.

There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom prose
appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done justice to
Whistler's prose. None has taken it with the seriousness it deserves.
I am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media,
people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he
devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not
less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care
about it more than they care about the other. Perhaps this very
preference in them creates a prejudice against the man who does not
share it, and so makes them sceptical of his power. Anyhow, if
Disraeli had been unable to express himself through the medium of
political life, Disraeli's novels would long ago have had the due
which the expert is just beginning to give them. Had Rossetti not been
primarily a poet, the expert in painting would have acquired long ago
his present penetration into the peculiar value of Rossetti's
painting. Likewise, if Whistler had never painted a picture, and, even
so, had written no more than he actually did write, this essay in
appreciation would have been forestalled again and again. As it is, I
am a sort of herald. And, however loudly I shall blow my trumpet, not
many people will believe my message. For many years to come, it will
be the fashion among literary critics to pooh-pooh Whistler, the
writer, as an amateur. For Whistler was primarily a painter--not less
than was Rossetti primarily a poet, and Disraeli a statesman. And he
will not live down quicklier than they the taunt of amateurishness in
his secondary art. Nevertheless, I will, for my own pleasure, blow the
trumpet.

I grant you, Whistler was an amateur. But you do not dispose of a man
by proving him to be an amateur. On the contrary, an amateur with real
innate talent may do, must do, more exquisite work than he could do if
he were a professional. His very ignorance and tentativeness may be,
must be, a means of especial grace. Not knowing `how to do things,'
having no ready-made and ready-working apparatus, and being in
constant fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of
his own soul for the best way to express his soul's meaning. He has to
shift for himself, and to do his very best. Consequently, his work has
a more personal and fresher quality, and a more exquisite `finish,'
than that of a professional, howsoever finely endowed. All of the much
that we admire in Walter Pater's prose comes of the lucky chance that
he was an amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him
out of Oxford upon the world, the world would have been the richer for
the prose of another John Addington Symonds, and would have forfeited
Walter Pater's prose. In other words, we should have lost a half-crown
and found a shilling. Had Fate withdrawn from Whistler his vision for
form and colour, leaving him only his taste for words and phrases and
cadences, Whistler would have settled solidly down to the art of
writing, and would have mastered it, and, mastering it, have lost that
especial quality which the Muse grants only to them who approach her
timidly, bashfully, as suitors.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Whistler would never, in any case, have
acquired the professional touch in writing. For we know that he never
acquired it in the art to which he dedicated all but the surplus of
his energy. Compare him with the other painters of his day. He was a
child in comparison with them. They, with sure science, solved roughly
and readily problems of modelling and drawing and what not that he
never dared to meddle with. It has often been said that his art was an
art of evasion. But the reason of the evasion was reverence. He kept
himself reverently at a distance. He knew how much he could not do,
nor was he ever confident even of the things that he could do; and
these things, therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope
for the means in the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of
exquisiteness and freshness that gives to all his work, whether on
canvas or on stone or on copper, a distinction from and above any
contemporary work, and makes it dearer to our eyes and hearts, is a
quality that came to him because he was an amateur, and that abided
with him because he never ceased to be an amateur. He was a master
through his lack of mastery. In the art of writing, too, he was a
master through his lack of mastery. There is an almost exact parallel
between the two sides of his genius. Nothing could be more absurd than
the general view of him as a masterly professional on the one side and
a trifling amateur on the other. He was, certainly, a painter who
wrote; but, by the slightest movement of Fate's little finger, he
might have been a writer who painted, and this essay have been written
not by me from my standpoint, but by some painter, eager to suggest
that Whistler's painting was a quite serious thing.

Yes, that painting and that writing are marvellously akin; and such
differences as you will see in them are superficial merely. I spoke of
Whistler's vanity in life, and I spoke of his timidity and reverence
in art. That contradiction is itself merely superficial. Bob Acres was
timid, but he was also vain. His swagger was not an empty assumption
to cloak his fears; he really did regard himself as a masterful and
dare-devil fellow, except when he was actually fighting. Similarly,
except when he was at his work, Whistler, doubtless, really did think
of himself as a brilliant effortless butterfly. The pose was,
doubtless a quite sincere one, a necessary reaction of feeling. Well,
in his writing he displays to us his vanity; whilst in his Painting we
discern only his reverence. In his writing, too, he displays his
harshness--swoops hither and thither a butterfly equipped with sharp
little beak and talons; whereas in his painting we are conscious only
of his caressing sense of beauty. But look from the writer, as shown
by himself, to the means by which himself is shown. You will find that
for words as for colour-tones he has the same reverent care, and for
phrases as for forms the same caressing sense of beauty.
Fastidiousness--`daintiness,' as he would have said--dandyishness, as
we might well say: by just that which marks him as a painter is he
marked as a writer too. His meaning was ever ferocious; but his
method, how delicate and tender! The portrait of his mother, whom he
loved, was not wrought with a more loving hand than were his portraits
of Mr. Harry Quilter for The World.

His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever
blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. There,
after all, in that vocal quality, is the chief test of good writing.
Writing, as a means of expression, has to compete with talking. The
talker need not rely wholly on what he says. He has the help of his
mobile face and hands, and of his voice, with its various inflexions
and its variable pace, whereby he may insinuate fine shades of
meaning, qualifying or strengthening at will, and clothing naked words
with colour, and making dead words live. But the writer? He can
express a certain amount through his handwriting, if he write in a
properly elastic way. But his writing is not printed in facsimile. It
is printed in cold, mechanical, monotonous type. For his every effect
he must rely wholly on the words that he chooses, and on the order in
which he ranges them, and on his choice among the few hard-and-fast
symbols of punctuation. He must so use those slender means that they
shall express all that he himself can express through his voice and
face and hands, or all that he would thus express if he were a good
talker. Usually, the good talker is a dead failure when he tries to
express himself in writing. For that matter, so is the bad talker. But
the bad talker has the better chance of success, inasmuch as the
inexpressiveness of his voice and face and hands will have sharpened
his scent for words and phrases that shall in themselves convey such
meanings as he has to express. Whistler was that rare phenomenon, the
good talker who could write as well as he talked. Read any page of The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and you will hear a voice in it, and see
a face in it, and see gestures in it. And none of these is quite like
any other known to you. It matters not that you never knew Whistler,
never even set eyes on him. You see him and know him here. The voice
drawls slowly, quickening to a kind of snap at the end of every
sentence, and sometimes rising to a sudden screech of laughter; and,
all the while, the fine fierce eyes of the talker are flashing out at
you, and his long nervous fingers are tracing extravagant arabesques
in the air. No! you need never have seen Whistler to know what he was
like. He projected through printed words the clean-cut image and
clear-ringing echo of himself. He was a born writer, achieving
perfection through pains which must have been infinite for that we see
at first sight no trace of them at all.

Like himself, necessarily, his style was cosmopolitan and eccentric.
It comprised Americanisms and Cockneyisms and Parisian argot, with
constant reminiscences of the authorised version of the Old Testament,
and with chips off Molie`re, and with shreds and tags of what-not
snatched from a hundred-and-one queer corners. It was, in fact, an
Autolycine style. It was a style of the maddest motley, but of motley
so deftly cut and fitted to the figure, and worn with such an air, as
to become a gracious harmony for all beholders.

After all, what matters is not so much the vocabulary as the manner in
which the vocabulary is used. Whistler never failed to find right
words, and the right cadence for a dignified meaning, when dignity was
his aim. `And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry,
as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces
in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland
is before us...' That is as perfect, in its dim and delicate beauty,
as any of his painted `nocturnes.' But his aim was more often to pour
ridicule and contempt. And herein the weirdness of his natural
vocabulary and the patchiness of his reading were of very real value
to him. Take the opening words of his letter to Tom Taylor: `Dead for
a ducat, dead! my dear Tom: and the rattle has reached me by post.
Sans rancune, say you? Bah! you scream unkind threats and die
badly...' And another letter to the same unfortunate man: `Why, my
dear old Tom, I never was serious with you, even when you were among
us. Indeed, I killed you quite, as who should say, without
seriousness, "A rat! A rat!" you know, rather cursorily...' There the
very lack of coherence in the style, as of a man gasping and choking
with laughter, drives the insults home with a horrible precision.
Notice the technical skill in the placing of `you know, rather
cursorily' at the end of the sentence. Whistler was full of such
tricks--tricks that could never have been played by him, could never
have occurred to him, had he acquired the professional touch And not a
letter in the book but has some such little sharp felicity of cadence
or construction.

The letters, of course, are the best thing in the book, and the best
of the letters are the briefest. An exquisite talent like Whistler's,
whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small
scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed. Thus the `Ten
o'Clock,' from which I took that passage about the evening mist and
the riverside, does not leave me with a sense of artistic
satisfaction. It lacks structure. It is not a roundly conceived whole:
it is but a row of fragments. Were it otherwise, Whistler could never
have written so perfectly the little letters. For no man who can
finely grasp a big theme can play exquisitely round a little one.

Nor can any man who excels in scoffing at his fellows excel also in
taking abstract subjects seriously. Certainly, the little letters are
Whistler's passport among the elect of literature. Luckily, I can
judge them without prejudice. Whether in this or that case Whistler
was in the right or in the wrong is not a question which troubles me
at all. I read the letters simply from the literary standpoint. As
controversial essays, certainly, they were often in very bad taste. An
urchin scribbling insults upon somebody's garden-wall would not go
further than Whistler often went. Whistler's mode of controversy
reminds me, in another sense, of the writing on the wall. They who
were so foolish as to oppose him really did have their souls required
of them. After an encounter with him they never again were quite the
same men in the eyes of their fellows. Whistler's insults always
stuck--stuck and spread round the insulted, who found themselves at
length encased in them, like flies in amber.

You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I am
content to laud the amber.


ICHABOD

It is not cast from any obvious mould of sentiment. It is not a
memorial urn, nor a ruined tower, nor any of those things which he who
runs may weep over. Though not less really deplorable than they, it
needs, I am well aware, some sort of explanation to enable my reader
to mourn with me. For it is merely a hat-box.

It is nothing but that--an ordinary affair of pig-skin, with a brass
lock. As I write, it stands on a table near me. It is of the kind that
accommodates two hats, one above the other. It has had many tenants,
and is sun-tanned, rain-soiled, scarred and dented by collision with
trucks and what not other accessories to the moving scenes through
which it has been bandied. Yes! it has known the stress of many
journeys; yet has it never (you would say, seeing it) received its
baptism of paste: it has not one label on it. And there, indeed, is
the tragedy that I shall unfold.

For many years this hat-box had been my travelling companion, and was,
but a few days since, a dear record of all the big and little journeys
I had made. It was much more to me than a mere receptacle for hats. It
was my one collection, my collection of labels. Well! last week its
lock was broken. I sent it to the trunk-makers, telling them to take
the greatest care of it. It came back yesterday. The idiots, the
accursed idots! had carefully removed every label from its surface. I
wrote to them--it matters not what I said. My fury has burnt itself
out. I have reached the stage of craving general sympathy. So I have
sat down to write, in the shadow of a tower which stands bleak, bare,
prosaic, all the ivy of its years stripped from it; in the shadow of
an urn commemorating nothing.

I think that every one who is or ever has been a collector will pity
me in this dark hour of mine. In other words, I think that nearly
every one will pity me. For few are they who have not, at some time,
come under the spell of the collecting spirit and known the joy of
accumulating specimens of something or other. The instinct has its
corner, surely, in every breast. Of course, hobby-horses are of many
different breeds; but all their riders belong to one great cavalcade,
and when they know that one of their company has had his steed shot
under him, they will not ride on without a backward glance of
sympathy. Lest my fall be unnoted by them, I write this essay. I want
that glance.

Do not, reader, suspect that because I am choosing my words nicely,
and playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper
places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write
elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less easily broken
than hearts. I could no more `dash off' this my cri de coeur than I
could an elegy on a broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader,
bear with me, despite my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me,
though my prose be, like those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over
Chloe"'s grave, `of a character to cool emotion.' For indeed my
anguish is very real. The collection I had amassed so carefully,
during so many years, the collection I loved and revelled in, has been
obliterated, swept away, destroyed utterly by a pair of ruthless,
impious, well-meaning, idiotic, unseen hands. It cannot be restored to
me. Nothing can compensate me for it gone. It was part and parcel of
my life.

Orchids, jade, majolica, wines, mezzotints, old silver, first
editions, harps, copes, hookahs, cameos, enamels, black-letter folios,
scarabaei--such things are beautiful and fascinating in themselves.
Railway-labels are not, I admit. For the most part, they are crudely
coloured, crudely printed, without sense of margin or spacing; in
fact, quite worthless as designs. No one would be a connoisseur in
them. No one could be tempted to make a general collection of them. My
own collection of them was strictly personal: I wanted none that was
not a symbol of some journey made by myself, even as the hunter of big
game cares not to possess the tusks, and the hunter of women covets
not the photographs, of other people's victims. My collection was one
of those which result from man's tendency to preserve some obvious
record of his pleasures--the points he has scored in the game. To
Nimrod, his tusks; to Lothario, his photographs; to me (who cut no
dash in either of those veneries, and am not greedy enough to preserve
menus nor silly enough to preserve press-cuttings, but do delight in
travelling from place to place), my railway-labels. Had nomady been my
business, had I been a commercial traveller or a King's Messenger,
such labels would have held for me no charming significance. But I am
only by instinct a nomad. I have a tether, known as the four-mile
radius. To slip it is for me always an event, an excitement. To come
to a new place, to awaken in a strange bed, to be among strangers! To
have dispelled, as by sudden magic, the old environment! It is on the
scoring of such points as these that I preen myself, and my memory is
always ringing the `changes' I have had, complacently, as a man
jingles silver in his pocket. The noise of a great terminus is no jar
to me. It is music. I prick up my ears to it, and paw the platform.
Dear to me as the bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering
of the birds in the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry
of `Take your seats please!' or--better still--`En voiture!' or
`Partenza!' Had I the knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence
of the journey to Newhaven or Dover--a sonnet for every station one
does not stop at. I await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the
iron road. There is one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the
insides of engines; but he will not do at all. I look for another, who
shall show us the heart of the passenger, the exhilaration of
travelling by day, the exhilaration and romance and self-importance of
travelling by night.

`Paris!' How it thrills me when, on a night in spring, in the hustle
and glare of Victoria, that label is slapped upon my hat-box! Here,
standing in the very heart of London, I am by one sweep of a paste-
brush transported instantly into that white-grey city across the sea.
To all intents and purposes I am in Paris already. Strange, that the
porter does not say, `V'la`, M'sieu'!' Strange, that the evening
papers I buy at the bookstall are printed in the English language.
Strange, that London still holds my body, when a corduroyed magician
has whisked my soul verily into Paris. The engine is hissing as I
hurry my body along the platform, eager to reunite it with my soul...
Over the windy quay the stars are shining as I pass down the gangway,
hat-box in hand. They twinkle brightly over the deck I am now pacing--
amused, may be, at my excitement. The machinery grunts and creaks. The
little boat quakes in the excruciating throes of its departure. At
last!... One by one, the stars take their last look at me, and the sky
grows pale, and the sea blanches mysteriously with it. Through the
delicate cold air of the dawn, across the grey waves of the sea, the
outlines of Dieppe grow and grow. The quay is lined with its blue-
bloused throng. These porters are as excited by us as though they were
the aborigines of some unknown island. (And yet, are they not here, at
this hour, in these circumstances, every day of their lives?) These
gestures! These voices, hoarse with passion! The dear music of French,
rippling up clear for me through all this hoarse confusion of its
utterance, and making me happy!... I drink my cup of steaming coffee--
true coffee!--and devour more than one roll. At the tables around me,
pale and dishevelled from the night, sit the people whom I saw--years
ago!--at Charing Cross. How they have changed! The coffee sends a glow
throughout my body. I am fulfilled with a sense of material well-
being. The queer ethereal exaltation of the dawn has vanished. I climb
up into the train, and dispose myself in the dun-cushioned coupe'.
`Chemins de Fer de l'Ouest' is perforated on the white antimacassars.
Familiar and strange inscription! I murmur its impressive iambs over
and over again. They become the refrain to which the train vibrates on
its way. I smoke cigarettes, a little drowsily gazing out of the
window at the undulating French scenery that flies past me, at the
silver poplars. Row after slanted row of these incomparably gracious
trees flies past me, their foliage shimmering in the unawoken
landscape Soon I shall be rattling over the cobbles of unawoken Paris,
through the wide white-grey streets with their unopened jalousies. And
when, later, I awake in the unnatural little bedroom of walnut-wood
and crimson velvet, in the bed whose curtains are white with that
whiteness which Paris alone can give to linen, a Parisian sun will be
glittering for me in a Parisian sky.

Yes! In my whole collection the Paris specimens were dearest to me,
meant most to me, I think. But there was none that had not some
tendrils on sentiment. All of them I prized, more or less. Of the
Aberdeen specimens I was immensely fond. Who can resist the thought of
that express by which, night after night, England is torn up its
centre? I love well that cab-drive in the chill autumnal night through
the desert of Bloomsbury, the dead leaves rustling round the horse's
hoofs as we gallop through the Squares. Ah, I shall be across the
Border before these doorsteps are cleaned, before the coming of the
milk-carts. Anon, I descry the cavernous open jaws of Euston. The
monster swallows me, and soon I am being digested into Scotland. I sit
ensconced in a corner of a compartment. The collar of my ulster is
above my ears, my cap is pulled over my eyes, my feet are on a hot-
water tin, and my rug snugly envelops most of me. Sleeping-cars are
for the strange beings who love not the act of travelling. Them I
should spurn even if I could not sleep a wink in an ordinary
compartment. I would liefer forfeit sleep than the consciousness of
travelling. But it happens that I, in an ordinary compartment, am
blest both with the sleep and with the consciousness, all through the
long night. To be asleep and to know that you are sleeping, and to
know, too, that even as you sleep you are being borne away through
darkness into distance--that, surely, is to go two better than
Endymion. Surely, nothing is more mysteriously delightful than this
joint consciousness of sleep and movement. Pitiable they to whom it is
denied. All through the night the vibration of the train keeps one-
third of me awake, while the other two parts of me profoundly slumber.
Whenever the train stops, and the vibration ceases, then the one-third
of me falls asleep, and the other two parts stir. I am awake just
enough to hear the hollow-echoing cry of `Crewe' or `York,' and to
blink up at the green-hooded lamp in the ceiling. May be, I raise a
corner of the blind, and see through the steam-dim window the
mysterious, empty station. A solitary porter shuffles along the
platform. Yonder, those are the lights of the refreshment room, where,
all night long, a barmaid is keeping her lonely vigil over the beer-
handles and the Bath-buns in glass cases. I see long rows of
glimmering milk-cans, and wonder drowsily whether they contain forty
modern thieves. The engine snorts angrily in the benighted silence.
Far away is the faint, familiar sound--clink-clank, clink-clank--of
the man who tests the couplings. Nearer and nearer the sound comes. It
passes, recedes It is rather melancholy.... A whistle, a jerk, and the
two waking parts of me are asleep again, while the third wakes up to
mount guard over them, and keeps me deliciously aware of the rhythmic
dream they are dreaming about the hot bath and the clean linen, and
the lovely breakfast that I am to have at Aberdeen; and of the Scotch
air, crisp and keen, that is to escort me, later along the Deeside.

Little journeys, as along the Deeside, have a charm of their own.
Little journeys from London to places up the river, or to places on
the coast of Kent--journeys so brief that you lunch at one end and
have tea at the other--I love them all, and loved the labels that
recalled them to me. But the labels of long journeys, of course, took
precedence in my heart. Here and there on my hat-box were labels that
recalled to me long journeys in which frontiers were crossed at dead
of night--dim memories of small, crazy stations where I shivered half-
awake, and was sleepily conscious of a strange tongue and strange
uniforms, of my jingling bunch of keys, of ruthless arms diving into
the nethermost recesses of my trunks, of suspicious grunts and
glances, and of grudging hieroglyphics chalked on the slammed lids.
These were things more or less painful and resented in the moment of
experience, yet even then fraught with a delicious glamour. I
suffered, but gladly. In the night, when all things are mysteriously
magnified, I have never crossed a frontier without feeling some of the
pride of conquest. And, indeed, were these conquests mere illusions?
Was I not actually extending the frontiers of my mind, adding new
territories to it? Every crossed frontier, every crossed sea, meant
for me a definite success--an expansion and enrichment of my soul.
When, after seven days and nights of sea traversed, I caught my first
glimpse of Sandy Hook, was there no comparison between Columbus and
myself? To see what one has not seen before, is not that almost as
good as to see what no one has ever seen?

Romance, exhilaration, self-importance these are what my labels
symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running
record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was
my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one
work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had
travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have
described it--its depth and girth, its cunningly fashioned lock and
fair lining withal! And in how interminable a torrent of hexameters
would he have catalogued all the labels on it, including those
attractive views of the Ho^tel Circe, the Ho^tel Calypso, and other
high-class resorts. Yet no! Had such a hat-box existed and had it been
preserved in his day, Homer would have seen in it a sufficient record,
a better record than even he could make, of Odysseus' wanderings. We
should have had nothing from him but the Iliad. I, certainly never
felt any need of commemorating my journeys till my labels were lost to
me. And I am conscious how poor and chill is the substitute.

My collection like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does
not say to himself, `I am going to collect' this thing or that. True,
the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word,
collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never
look back--there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor
have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He
starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for
doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely
that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in
climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and
impale; for stamps...really, I do not know why he, why any sane
creature goes in for stamps. It follows that he has no real love of
his collection and soon abandons it for something else. The sincere
collector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of personal
preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it.
He sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another.
He does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from the rest of
his possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he
has acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them as
mere items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little
table, or a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look
there! How they intensify one another! He really must get some one to
give him that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in
Wardour Street. Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the
collector. Or take the case of one whose collection is not of
beautiful things, but of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the
glutton. He will have pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to
arrange them in an album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of
labels had been pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as souvenirs, and
determined that in future my hat-box should always travel with me and
so commemorate my every darling escape.

In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one kind or
another; which, to overleap, is part of the fun. As a collector of
labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any much-belabelled piece of
baggage the porter always pastes the new label over that which looks
most recent; else the thing might miss its destination. Now, paste
dries before the end of the briefest journey; and one of my canons was
that, though two labels might overlap, none must efface the
inscription of another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my
hat-box, for this would have entailed inquiries, and descriptions, and
telegraphing up the line, and all manner of agitation. What, then, was
I to do? I might have taken my hat-box with me in the carriage? That,
indeed, is what I always did. But, unless a thing is to go in the van,
it receives no label at all. So I had to use a mild stratagem. `Yes,'
I would say, `everything in the van!' The labels would be duly
affixed. `Oh,' I would cry, seizing the hat-box quickly, `I forgot. I
want this with me in the carriage.' (I learned to seize it quickly,
because some porters are such martinets that they will whisk the label
off and confiscate it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would
remove the label from the place he had chosen for it and press it on
some unoccupied part of the surface. You cannot think how much I
enjoyed these manoeuvres. There was the moral pleasure of having both
outwitted a railway company and secured another specimen for my
collection; and there was the physical pleasure of making a limp slip
of paper stick to a hard substance--that simple pleasure which appeals
to all of us and is, perhaps, the missing explanation of philately.
Pressed for time, I could not, of course, have played my trick. Nor
could I have done so--it would have seemed heartless--if any one had
come to see me off and be agitated at parting. Therefore, I was always
very careful to arrive in good time for my train, and to insist that
all farewells should be made on my own doorstep.

Only in one case did I break the rule that no label must be
obliterated by another. It is a long story; but I propose to tell it.
You must know that I loved my labels not only for the meanings they
conveyed to me, but also, more than a little, for the effect they
produced on other people. Travelling in a compartment, with my hat-box
beside me, I enjoyed the silent interest which my labels aroused in my
fellow-passengers. If the compartment was so full that my hat-box had
to be relegated to the rack, I would always, in the course of the
journey, take it down and unlock it, and pretend to be looking for
something I had put into it. It pleased me to see from beneath my
eyelids the respectful wonder and envy evoked by it. Of course, there
was no suspicion that the labels were a carefully formed collection;
they were taken as the wild-flowers of an exquisite restlessness, of
an unrestricted range in life. Many of them signified beautiful or
famous places. There was one point at which Oxford, Newmarket, and
Assisi converged, and I was always careful to shift my hat-box round
in such a way that this purple patch should be lost on none of my
fellow-passengers. The many other labels, English or alien, they, too,
gave their hints of a life spent in fastidious freedom, hints that I
had seen and was seeing all that is best to be seen of men and cities
and country-houses. I was respected, accordingly, and envied. And I
had keen delight in this ill-gotten homage. A despicable delight, you
say? But is not yours, too, a fallen nature? The love of impressing
strangers falsely, is it not implanted in all of us? To be sure, it is
an inevitable outcome of the conditions in which we exist. It is a
result of the struggle for life. Happiness, as you know, is our aim in
life; we are all struggling to be happy. And, alas! for every one of
us, it is the things he does not possess which seem to him most
desirable, most conducive to happiness. For instance, the poor
nobleman covets wealth, because wealth would bring him comfort,
whereas the nouveau riche covets a pedigree, because a pedigree would
make him of what he is merely in. The rich nobleman who is an invalid
covets health, on the assumption that health would enable him to enjoy
his wealth and position. The rich, robust nobleman hankers after an
intellect. The rich, robust, intellectual nobleman is (be sure of it)
as discontented, somehow, as the rest of them. No man possesses all he
wants. No man is ever quite happy. But, by producing an impression
that he has what he wants--in fact, by `bluffing'--a man can gain some
of the advantages that he would gain by really having it. Thus, the
poor nobleman can, by concealing his `balance' and keeping up
appearances, coax more or less unlimited credit from his tradesman.
The nouveau riche, by concealing his origin and trafficking with the
College of Heralds, can intercept some of the homage paid to high
birth. And (though the rich nobleman who is an invalid can make no
tangible gain by pretending to be robust, since robustness is an
advantage only from within) the rich, robust nobleman can, by
employing a clever private secretary to write public speeches and
magazine articles for him, intercept some of the homage which is paid
to intellect.

These are but a few typical cases, taken at random from a small area.
But consider the human race at large, and you will find that
`bluffing' is indeed one of the natural functions of the human animal.
Every man pretends to have what (not having it) he covets, in order
that he may gain some of the advantages of having it. And thus it
comes that he makes his pretence, also, by force of habit, when there
is nothing tangible to be gained by it. The poor nobleman wishes to be
thought rich even by people who will not benefit him in their
delusion; and the nouveau riche likes to be thought well-born even by
people who set no store on good birth; and so forth. But pretences,
whether they be an end or a means, cannot be made successfully among
our intimate friends. These wretches know all about us--have seen
through us long ago. With them we are, accordingly, quite natural.
That is why we find their company so restful. Among acquaintances the
pretence is worth making. But those who know anything at all about us
are apt to find us out. That is why we find acquaintances such a
nuisance. Among perfect strangers, who know nothing at all about us,
we start with a clean slate. If our pretence do not come off, we have
only ourselves to blame. And so we `bluff' these strangers, blithely,
for all we are worth, whether there be anything to gain or nothing. We
all do it. Let us despise ourselves for doing it, but not one another.
By which I mean, reader, do not be hard on me for making a show of my
labels in railway-carriages. After all, the question is whether a man
`bluff' well or ill. If he brag vulgarly before his strangers, away
with him! by all means. He does not know how to play the game. He is a
failure. But, if he convey subtly (and, therefore, successfully) the
fine impression he wishes to convey, then you should stifle your
wrath, and try to pick up a few hints. When I saw my fellow-passengers
eyeing my hat-box, I did not, of course, say aloud to them, `Yes, mine
is a delightful life! Any amount of money, any amount of leisure! And,
what's more, I know how to make the best use of them both!' Had I done
so, they would have immediately seen through me as an impostor. But I
did nothing of the sort. I let my labels proclaim distinction for me,
quietly, in their own way. And they made their proclamation with
immense success. But there came among them, in course of time, one
label that would not harmonise with them. Came, at length, one label
that did me actual discredit. I happened to have had influenza, and my
doctor had ordered me to make my convalescence in a place which,
according to him, was better than any other for my particular
condition. He had ordered me to Ramsgate, and to Ramsgate I had gone.
A label on my hat-box duly testified to my obedience. At the time, I
had thought nothing of it. But, in subsequent journeys, I noticed that
my hat-box did not make its old effect, somehow. My fellow-passengers
looked at it, were interested in it; but I had a subtle sense that
they were not reverencing me as of yore. Something was the matter. I
was not long in tracing what it was. The discord struck by Ramsgate
was the more disastrous because, in my heedlessness, I had placed that
ignoble label within an inch of my point d'appui--the trinity of
Oxford, Newmarket and Assisi. What was I to do? I could not explain to
my fellow-passengers, as I have explained to you, my reason for
Ramsgate. So long as the label was there, I had to rest under the
hideous suspicion of having gone there for pleasure, gone of my own
free will. I did rest under it during the next two or three journeys.
But the injustice of my position maddened me. At length, a too obvious
sneer on the face of a fellow-passenger steeled me to a resolve that I
would, for once, break my rule against obliteration. On the return
journey, I obliterated Ramsgate with the new label, leaving visible
merely the final TE, which could hardly compromise me.

Steterunt those two letters because I was loth to destroy what was,
primarily, a symbol for myself: I wished to remember Ramsgate, even
though I had to keep it secret. Only in a secondary, accidental way
was my collection meant for the public eye. Else, I should not have
hesitated to deck the hat-box with procured symbols of Seville, Simla,
St. Petersburg and other places which I had not (and would have liked
to be supposed to have) visited. But my collection was, first of all,
a private autobiography, a record of my scores of Fate; and thus
positively to falsify it would have been for me as impossible as
cheating at `Patience.' From that to which I would not add I hated to
subtract anything--even Ramsgate. After all, Ramsgate was not London;
to have been in it was a kind of score. Besides, it had restored me to
health. I had no right to rase it utterly.

But such tendresse was not my sole reason for sparing those two
letters. Already I was reaching that stage where the collector loves
his specimens not for their single sakes, but as units in the sum-
total. To every collector comes, at last, a time when he does but
value his collection--how shall I say?--collectively. He who goes in
for beautiful things begins, at last, to value his every acquisition
not for its beauty, but because it enhances the worth of the rest.
Likewise, he who goes in for autobiographic symbols begins, at last,
to care not for the symbolism of another event in his life, but for
the addition to the objects already there. He begins to value every
event less for its own sake than because it swells his collection.
Thus there came for me a time when I looked forward to a journey less
because it meant movement and change for myself than because it meant
another label for my hat-box. A strange state to fall into? Yes,
collecting is a mania, a form of madness. And it is the most pleasant
form of madness in the whole world. It can bring us nearer to real
happiness than can any form of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is
never happy, because he is always craving something of another kind
than what he has got. The collector, in his mad concentration, wants
only more and more of what he has got already; and what he has got
already he cherishes with a passionate joy. I cherished my gallimaufry
of rainbow-coloured labels almost as passionately as the miser his
hoard of gold. Why do we call the collector of current coin a miser?
Wretched? He? True, he denies himself all the reputed pleasures of
life; but does he not do so of his own accord, gladly? He sacrifices
everything to his mania; but that merely proves how intense his mania
is. In that the nature of his collection cuts him off from all else,
he is the perfect type of the collector. He is above all other
collectors. And he is the truly happiest of them all. It is only when,
by some merciless stroke of Fate, he is robbed of his hoard, that he
becomes wretched. Then, certainly, he suffers. He suffers
proportionately to his joy. He is smitten with sorrow more awful than
any sorrow to be conceived by the sane. I whose rainbow-coloured hoard
has been swept from me, seem to taste the full savour of his anguish.

I sit here thinking of the misers who, in life or in fiction, have
been despoiled. Three only do I remember: Melanippus of Sicyon, Pierre
Baudouin of Limoux, Silas Marner. Melanippus died of a broken heart.
Pierre Baudouin hanged himself. The case of Silas Marner is more
cheerful. He, coming into his cottage one night, saw by the dim light
of the hearth, that which seemed to be his gold restored, but was
really nothing but the golden curls of a little child, whom he was
destined to rear under his own roof, finding in her more than solace
for his bereavement. But then, he was a character in fiction: the
other two really existed. What happened to him will not happen to me.
Even if little children with rainbow-coloured hair were so common that
one of them might possibly be left on my hearth-rug, I know well that
I should not feel recompensed by it, even if it grew up to be as
fascinating a paragon as Eppie herself. Had Silas Marner really
existed (nay! even had George Eliot created him in her maturity)
neither would he have felt recompensed. Far likelier, he would have
been turned to stone, in the first instance, as was poor Niobe when
the divine arrows destroyed that unique collection on which she had
lavished so many years. Or, may be, had he been a very strong man, he
would have found a bitter joy in saving up for a new hoard. Like
Carlyle, when the MS. of his masterpiece was burned by the housemaid
of John Stuart Mill, he might have begun all over again, and builded a
still nobler monument on the tragic ashes.

That is a fine, heartening example! I will be strong enough to follow
it. I will forget all else. I will begin all over again. There stands
my hat-box! Its glory is departed, but I vow that a greater glory
awaits it. Bleak, bare and prosaic it is now, but--ten years hence!
Its career, like that of the Imperial statesman in the moment of his
downfall, `is only just beginning.'

There is a true Anglo-Saxon ring in this conclusion. May it appease
whomever my tears have been making angry.


GENERAL ELECTIONS

I admire detachment. I commend a serene indifference to hubbub. I like
Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other
sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity
in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and
excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is
with some shame that I haunt the tape-machine whenever a General
Election is going on.

Of politics I know nothing. My mind is quite open on the subject of
fiscal reform, and quite empty; and the void is not an aching one: I
have no desire to fill it. The idea of the British Empire leaves me
quite cold. If this or that subject race threw off our yoke, I should
feel less vexation than if one comma were misplaced in the printing of
this essay. The only feeling that our Colonies inspire in me is a
determination not to visit them. Socialism neither affrights nor
attracts me--or, rather, it has both these effects equally. When I
think of poverty and misery crushing the greater part of humanity, and
most of all when I hear of some specific case of distress, I become a
socialist indeed. But I am not less an artist than a human being, and
when I think of Demos, that chin-bearded god, flushed with victory,
crowned with leaflets of the Social Democratic League, quaffing
temperance beverages in a world all drab; when I think of model
lodging-houses in St. James's Park, and trams running round and round
St. James's Square--the mighty fallen, and the lowly swollen, and, in
Elysium, the shade of Matthew Arnold shedding tears on the shoulder of
a shade so different as George Brummell's--tears, idle tears, at sight
of the Barbarians, whom he had mocked and loved, now annihilated by
those others whom he had mocked and hated; when such previsions as
these come surging up in me, I do deem myself well content with the
present state of things, dishonourable though it is. As to socialism,
then, you see, my mind is evenly divided. It is with no political bias
that I go and hover around the tape-machine. My interest in General
Elections is a merely `sporting' interest. I do not mean that I lay
bets. A bad fairy decreed over my cradle that I should lose every bet
that I might make; and, in course of time, I abandoned a practice
which took away from coming events the pleasing element of
uncertainty. `A merely dramatic interest' is less equivocal, and more
accurate.

`This,' you say, `is rank incivism.' I assume readily that you are an
ardent believer in one political party or another, and that, having
studied thoroughly all the questions at issue, you could give cogent
reasons for all the burning faith that is in you. But how about your
friends and acquaintances? How many of them can cope with you in
discussion? How many of them show even a desire to cope with you?
Travel, I beg you, on the Underground Railway, or in a Tube. Such
places are supposed to engender in their passengers a taste for
political controversy. Yet how very elementary are such arguments as
you will hear there! It is obvious that these gentlemen know and care
very little about `burning questions.' What they do know and care
about is the purely personal side of politics. They have their likes
and their dislikes for a few picturesque and outstanding figures.
These they will attack or defend with fervour. But you will be lucky
if you overhear any serious discussion of policy. Emerge from the
nether world. Range over the whole community--from the costermonger
who says `Good Old Winston!' to the fashionable woman who says `I do
think Mr. Balfour is rather wonderful!'--and you will find the same
plentiful lack of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You
will find that almost every one is interested in politics only as a
personal conflict between certain interesting men--as a drama, in
fact. Frown not, then, on me alone.

Whenever a General Election occurs, the conflict becomes sharper and
more obvious--the play more exciting--the audience more tense. The
stage is crowded with supernumeraries, not interesting in themselves,
but adding a new interest to the merely personal interest. There is
the stronger `side,' here the weaker, ranged against each other. Which
will be vanquished? It rests with the audience to decide. And, as
human nature is human nature, of course the audience decides that the
weaker side shall be victorious. That is what politicians call `the
swing of the pendulum.' They believe that the country is alienated by
the blunders of the Government, and is disappointed by the
unfulfilment of promises, and is anxious for other methods of policy.
Bless them! the country hardly noticed their blunders, has quite
forgotten their promises, and cannot distinguish between one set of
methods and another. When the man in the street sees two other men in
the street fighting, he doesn't care to know the cause of the combat:
he simply wants the smaller man to punish the bigger, and to punish
him with all possible severity. When a party with a large majority
appeals to the country, its appeal falls, necessarily, on deaf ears.
Some years ago there happened an exception to this rule. But then the
circumstances were exceptional. A small nation was fighting a big
nation, and, as the big nation happened to be yourselves, your
sympathy was transferred to the big nation. As the little party was
suspected of favouring the little nation, your sympathy was
transferred likewise to the big party. Barring `khaki,' sympathy takes
its usual course in General Elections. The bigger the initial
majority, the bigger the collapse. It is not enough that Goliath shall
fall: he must bite the dust, and bite plenty of it. It is not enough
that David shall have done what he set out to do: a throne must be
found for this young man. Away with the giant's body! Hail, King
David!

I should like to think that chivalry was the sole motive of our zeal.
I am afraid that the mere craving for excitement has something to do
with it. Pelion has never been piled on Ossa; and no really useful
purpose could be served by the superimposition. But we should like to
see the thing done. It would appeal to our sense of the grandiose--our
hankering after the unlimited. When the man of science shows us a drop
of water in a test-tube, and tells us that this tiny drop contains
more than fifteen billions of infusoria, we are subtly gratified, and
cherish a secret hope that the number of infusoria is very much more
than fifteen billions. In the same way, we hope that the number of
seats gained by the winning party will be even greater to-morrow than
it is to-day. `We are sweeping the country,' exclaims (say) the
professed Liberal; and at the word `sweeping' there is in his eyes a
gleam that no mere party feeling could have lit there. It is a gleam
that comes from the very depths of his soul--a reflection of the
innate human passion for breaking records, or seeing them broken, no
matter how or why. `Yes,' says the professed Tory, `you certainly are
sweeping the country.' He tries to put a note of despondency into his
voice; but hark how he rolls the word `sweeping' over his tongue! He,
too, though he may not admit it, is longing to creep into the smoking-
room of the National Liberal Club and feast his eyes on the blazing
galaxy of red seals affixed to the announcements of the polling. He
turns to his evening paper, and reads again the list of ex-Cabinet
ministers who have been unseated. He feels, in his heart of hearts,
what fun it would be if they had all been unseated. He grudges the
exceptions. For political bias is one thing; human nature another.


A PARALLEL

The club-room looked very like the auditorium of a music-hall. Indeed,
that is what it must once have been. But now there were tiers of
benches on the stage; and on these was packed a quarter or so of the
members and their friends. The other three-quarters or so were packed
opposite the proscenium and down either side of the hall. And in the
middle of this human oblong was a raised platform, roped around.
Therefrom, just as I was ushered to my place, a stout man in evening
dress was making some announcement. I did not catch its import; but it
was loudly applauded. The stout man--most of the audience indeed,
seemed to have put on flesh--bowed himself off, and disappeared from
my ken in the clouds of tobacco-smoke that hung about the hall. Almost
immediately, two young people, nimbly insinuating themselves through
the rope fence, leapt upon the platform. One was a man of about twenty
years of age; the other, a girl of about seventeen. She was very
pretty; he was very handsome; both were becomingly dressed, with
evident aim at attractiveness. They proceeded to opposite corners of
the platform. At a signal from some one, they advanced to the middle;
and each made a hideous grimace at the other. The grimace, strange in
itself, was stranger still in the light of what followed. For the
young man began to make passionate protestations of love, to which the
girl responded with equal ardour. The young man fell to his knees; the
girl raised him, and clung to his breast. His language became more and
more lyrical, his eyes more and more ecstatic. Suddenly in the middle
of a pretty sentence, wherein his love was likened to a flight of
doves, a bell rang; whereat, not less abruptly, the couple separated,
retiring to the aforesaid corners of the platform and sinking back on
their chairs with every manifestation of fatigue. Their friends or
attendants, however, rallied round them, counselling them, cooling
them with fans, heartening them to fresh endeavour; and when, at the
end of a minute, the signal was sounded for a second tryst, the two
young people seemed fresher and more eager than ever. This time, most
of the love-making was done by the girl; the young man joyously
drinking in her words, and now and then interpolating a few of his
own. There were four trysts in all, with three intervals for
recuperation. At the fourth sound of the bell, the lovers, stepping
asunder, repeated their hideous mutual grimace, and disappeared from
the platform as suddenly as they had come. Their place was soon taken
by another, a more mature, and heavier, but not less personable,
couple, who proceeded to make love in their own somewhat different
way. The lyrical notes seemed to be missing in them. But maturity,
though it had stripped away magic, had not blunted their passion--had,
rather, sharpened the edge of it, and made it a stronger and more
formidable instrument. Throughout the evening, indeed, in the long
succession that there was of amorous encounters, it seemed to be the
encounters of mature couples that excited in the smoke-laden audience
the keenest interest. It was evidently not etiquette to interrupt the
lovers while they were talking; but, whenever the bell sounded, there
was a frantic outburst of sympathy, straight from the heart; and
sometimes, even while a love-scene was proceeding, this or that stout
gentleman would snatch the cigar from his lips and emit a heart-cry.
Now and again, it seemed to be thought that the lovers were
insufficiently fervid--were but dallying with passion; and then there
were stentorian grunts of disapproval and hortation. I did not gather
that the audience itself was composed mainly of active lovers. I
guessed that the greater number consisted of men who do but take an
active interest in other people's love affairs--men who, vigilant from
a detached position, have developed in themselves an extraordinarily
sound critical knowledge of what is due to Venus. `Plaisir d'amour ne
dure qu'un moment,' I murmured; `chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.
And wise are ye who, immune from all love's sorrow, win incessant joy
in surveying Cythara through telescopes. Suave mari magno,' I
murmured. And this second tag caused me to awake from my dream
shivering.

A strange dream? Yet a precisely parallel reality had inspired it. I
had been taken over-night--my first visit--to the National Sporting
Club.

The instinct to fight, like the instinct to love, is a quite natural
instinct. To fight and to love are the primary instincts of primitive
man. I know that people with strongly amorous natures are not trained
and paid to make love ceremoniously, in accordance to certain rules
laid down for them by certain authorities, and for the delectation of
highly critical audiences. But, if this custom prevailed, it would not
seem to me stranger than the custom of training and paying pugnacious
people to hit one another on the face and breast, with the greatest
possible skill and violence, for the delectation of highly critical
audiences. I do not say that a glove-fight is in itself a visually
disgusting exhibition. I saw no blood spilt, the other night, and no
bruises expressed, by either the `light-weights' or the `heavy-
weights.' I dare say, too, that the fighters enjoy their profession,
on the whole. But I contend that it is a very lamentable profession,
in that it depends on the calculated prostitution of good natural
energies. A declaration of love prefaced by a grimace, such as I saw
in my dream, seems to me not one whit more monstrous than a violent
onslaught prefaced by a hand-shake. If two men are angry with each
other, let them fight it out (provided I be not one of them) in the
good old English fashion, by all means. But prize-fighting is to be
deplored as an offence against the soul of man. And this offence is
committed, not by the fighters themselves, but by us soft and
sedentary gentlemen who set them on to fight. Looking back at ancient
Rome, no one blames the poor gladiators in the arena. Every one
reserves his pious horror for the citizens in the amphitheatre. Yet
how are we superior to them? Are we not even as they--suspended at
exactly their point between barbarism and civilisation. In course of
time, doubtless, `the ring'will die out. For either we shall become so
civilised that we shall not rejoice in the sight of painful violence,
or we shall relapse into barbarism and go into the mauling business on
our own account. Our present stage--the stage of our transition--is
not pretty, I think.


A MORRIS FOR MAY-DAY

Not long ago a prospectus was issued by some more or less aesthetic
ladies and gentlemen who, deeming modern life not so cheerful as it
should be, had laid their cheerless heads together and decided that
they would meet once every month and dance old-fashioned dances in a
hall hired for the purpose. Thus would they achieve a renascence--I am
sure they called it a renascence--of `Merrie England.' I know not
whether subscriptions came pouring in. I know not even whether the
society ever met. If it ever did meet, I conceive that its meetings
must have been singularly dismal. If you are depressed by modern life,
you are unlikely to find an anodyne in the self-appointed task of
cutting certain capers which your ancestors used to cut because they,
in their day, were happy. If you think modern life so pleasant a thing
that you involuntarily prance, rather than walk, down the street, I
dare say your prancing will intensify your joy. Though I happen never
to have met him out-of-doors, I am sure my friend Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton always prances thus--prances in some wild way symbolical of
joy in modern life. His steps, and the movements of his arms and body,
may seem to you crude, casual, and disconnected at first sight; but
that is merely because they are spontaneous. If you studied them
carefully, you would begin to discern a certain rhythm, a certain
harmony. You would at length be able to compose from them a specific
dance--a dance not quite like any other--a dance formally expressive
of new English optimism. If you are not optimistic, don't hope to
become so by practising the steps. But practise them assiduously if
you are; and get your fellow-optimists to practise them with you. You
will grow all the happier through ceremonious expression of a light
heart. And your children and your children's children will dance `The
Chesterton' when you are no more. May be, a few of them will still be
dancing it now and then, on this or that devious green, even when
optimism shall have withered for ever from the land. Nor will any man
mock at the survival. The dance will have lost nothing of its old
grace, and will have gathered that quality of pathos which makes even
unlovely relics dear to us--that piteousness which Time gives ever to
things robbed of their meaning and their use. Spectators will love it
for its melancholy not less than for its beauty. And I hope no mere
spectator will be so foolish as to say, `Let us do it' with a view to
reviving cheerfulness at large. I hope it will be held sacred to those
in whom it will be a tradition--a familiar thing handed down from
father to son. None but they will be worthy of it. Others would ruin
it. Be sure I trod no measure with the Morris-dancers whom I saw last
May-day.

It was in the wide street of a tiny village near Oxford that I saw
them. Fantastic--high-fantastical--figures they did cut in their
finery. But in demeanour they were quite simple, quite serious, these
eight English peasants. They had trudged hither from the neighbouring
village that was their home. And they danced quite simply, quite
seriously. One of them, I learned, was a cobbler, another a baker, and
the rest were farm-labourers. And their fathers and their fathers'
fathers had danced here before them, even so, every May-day morning.
They were as deeply rooted in antiquity as the elm outside the inn.
They were here always in their season as surely as the elm put forth
its buds. And the elm, knowing them, approving them, let its green-
flecked branches dance in unison with them.

The first dance was in full swing when I approached. Only six of the
men were dancers. Of the others, one was the `minstrel,' the other the
`dysard.' The minstrel was playing a flute; and the dysard I knew by
the wand and leathern bladder which he brandished as he walked around,
keeping a space for the dancers, and chasing and buffeting merrily any
man or child who ventured too near. He, like the others, wore a white
smock decked with sundry ribands, and a top-hat that must have
belonged to his grandfather. Its antiquity of form and texture
contrasted strangely with the freshness of the garland of paper roses
that wreathed it. I was told that the wife or sweetheart of every
Morris-dancer takes special pains to deck her man out more gaily than
his fellows. But this pious endeavour had defeated its own end. So
bewildering was the amount of brand-new bunting attached to all these
eight men that no matron or maiden could for the life of her have
determined which was the most splendid of them all. Besides his
adventitious finery, every dancer, of course, had in his hands the
scarves which are as necessary to his performance of the Morris as are
the bells strapped about the calves of his legs. Waving these scarves
and jangling these bells with a stolid rhythm, the six peasants danced
facing one another, three on either side, while the minstrel fluted
and the dysard strutted around. That minstrel's tune runs in my head
even now--a queer little stolid tune that recalls vividly to me the
aspect of the dance. It is the sort of tune Bottom the Weaver must
often have danced to in his youth. I wish I could hum it for you on
paper. I wish I could set down for you on paper the sight that it
conjures up. But what writer that ever lived has been able to write
adequately about a dance? Even a slow, simple dance, such as these
peasants were performing, is a thing that not the cunningest writer
could fix in words. Did not Flaubert say that if he could describe a
valse he would die happy? I am sure he would have said this if it had
occurred to him.

Unable to make you see the Morris, how can I make you feel as I felt
in seeing it? I cannot explain even to myself the effect it had on me.
My critics have often complained of me that I lack `heart'--presumably
the sort of heart that is pronounced with a rolling of the r; and I
suppose they are right. I remember having read the death of Little
Nell on more than one occasion without floods of tears. How can I
explain to myself the tears that came into my eyes at sight of the
Morris? They are not within the rubric of the tears drawn by mere
contemplation of visual beauty. The Morris, as I saw it, was curious,
antique, racy, what you will: not beautiful. Nor was there any obvious
pathos in it. Often, in London, passing through some slum where a tune
was being ground from an organ, I have paused to watch the little
girls dancing. In the swaying dances of these wan, dishevelled, dim
little girls I have discerned authentic beauty, and have wondered
where they had learned the grace of their movements, and where the
certainty with which they did such strange and complicated steps.
Surely, I have thought, this is no trick of to-day or yesterday: here,
surely, is the remainder of some old tradition; here, may be, is
Merrie England, run to seed. There is an obvious pathos in the dances
of these children of the gutter--an obvious symbolism of sadness, of a
wistful longing for freedom and fearlessness, for wind and sunshine.
No wonder that at sight of it even so heartless a person as the
present writer is a little touched. But why at sight of those
rubicund, full-grown, eupeptic Morris-dancers on the vernal highroad?
No obvious pathos was diffusing itself from them. They were Merrie
England in full flower. In part, I suppose, my tears were tears of joy
for the very joyousness of these men; in part, of envy for their fine
simplicity; in part, of sorrow in the thought that they were a
survival of the past, not types of the present, and that their knell
would soon be tolled, and the old elm see their like no more.

After they had drunk some ale, they formed up for the second dance--a
circular dance. And anon, above the notes of the flute and the
jangling of the bells and the stamping of the boots, I seemed to hear
the knell actually tolling, Hoot! Hoot! Hoot! A motor came fussing and
fuming in itscloud of dust. Hoot! Hoot! The dysard ran to meet it,
brandishing his wand of office. He had to stand aside. Hoot! The
dancers had just time to get out of the way. The scowling motorists
vanished. Dancers and dysard, presently visible through the subsiding
dust, looked rather foolish and crestfallen. And all the branches of
the conservative old elm above them seemed to be quivering with
indignation.

In a sense this elm was a mere parvenu as compared with its beloved
dancers. True, it had been no mere sapling in the reign of the seventh
Henry, and so could remember distinctly the first Morris danced here.
But the first Morris danced on English soil was not, by a long chalk,
the first Morris. Scarves such as these were waved, and bells such as
these were jangled, and some such measure as this was trodden, in the
mists of a very remote antiquity. Spanish buccaneers, long before the
dawn of the fifteenth century, had seen the Moors dancing somewhat
thus to the glory of Allah. Home-coming, they had imitated that
strange and savage dance, expressive, for them, of the joy of being on
firm native land again. The `Morisco' they called it; and it was much
admired; and the fashion of it spread throughout Spain--scaled the
very Pyrenees, and invaded France. To the `Maurisce' succumbed `tout
Paris' as quickly as in recent years it succumbed to the cake-walk. A
troupe of French dancers braved the terrors of the sea, and, with
their scarves and their bells, danced for the delectation of the
English court. `The Kynge,' it seems, `was pleased by the bels and
sweet dauncing.' Certain of his courtiers `did presentlie daunce so in
open playces.' No one with any knowledge of the English nature will be
surprised to hear that the cits soon copied the courtiers. But `the
Morrice was not for longe practysed in the cittie. It went to countrie
playces.' London, apparently, even in those days, did not breed joy in
life. The Morris sought and found its proper home in the fields and by
the wayside. Happy carles danced it to the glory of God, even as it
had erst been danced to the glory of Allah.

It was no longer, of course, an explicitly religious dance. But
neither can its origin have been explicitly religious. Every dance,
however formal it become later, begins as a mere ebullition of high
spirits. The Dionysiac dances began in the same way as `the
Chesterton.' Some Thessalian vintner, say, suddenly danced for sheer
joy that the earth was so bounteous; and his fellow vintners, sharing
his joy, danced with him; and ere their breath was spent they
remembered who it was that had given them such cause for merry-making,
and they caught leaves from the vine and twined them in their hair,
and from the fig-tree and the fir-tree they snatched branches, and
waved them this way and that, as they danced, in honour of him who was
lord of these trees and of this wondrous vine. Thereafter this dance
of joy became a custom, ever to be observed at certain periods of the
year. It took on, beneath its joyousness, a formal solemnity. It was
danced slowly around an altar of stone, whereon wood and salt were
burning--burning with little flames that were pale in the sunlight.
Formal hymns were chanted around this altar. And some youth, clad in
leopard's skin and wreathed with ivy, masqueraded as the god himself,
and spoke words appropriate to that august character. It was from
these beginnings that sprang the art-form of drama. The Greeks never
hid the origin of this their plaything. Always in the centre of the
theatre was the altar to Dionysus; and the chorus, circling around it,
were true progeny of those old agrestic singers; and the mimes had
never been but for that masquerading youth. It is hard to realise, yet
it is true, that we owe to the worship of Dionysus so dreary a thing
as the modern British drama. Strange that through him who gave us the
juice of the grape, `fiery, venerable, divine,' came this gift too!
Yet I dare say the chorus of a musical comedy would not be awestruck--
would, indeed, `bridle'--if one unrolled to them their illustrious
pedigree.

The history of the Dionysiac dance has a fairly exact parallel in that
of the `Morisco.' Each dance has travelled far, and survives, shorn of
its explicitly religious character, and in many other ways `diablement
change' en route.' The `Morisco,' of course, has changed the less of
the two. Besides the scarves and the bells, it seemed to me last May-
day that the very steps danced and figures formed were very like to
those of which I had read, and which I had seen illustrated in old
English and French engravings. Above all, the dancers seemed to
retain, despite their seriousness, something of the joy in which the
dance originated. They frowned as they footed it, but they were
evidently happy. Their frowns did but betoken determination to do well
and rightly a thing that they loved doing--were proud of doing. The
smiles of the chorus in a musical comedy seem but to express
depreciation of a rather tedious and ridiculous exercise. The
coryphe'es are quite evidently bored and ashamed. But these eight be-
ribanded sons of the soil were hardly less glad in dancing than was
that antique Moor who, having slain beneath the stars some long-feared
and long-hated enemy, danced wildly on the desert sand, and, to make
music, tore strips of bells from his horse's saddle and waved them in
either hand while he danced, and made so great a noise in the night
air that other Moors came riding to see what had happened, and
marvelled at the sight and sound of the dance, and, praising Allah,
leapt down and tore strips of bells from their own saddles, and danced
as nearly as they could in mimicry of that glad conqueror, to Allah's
glory.

As this scene is mobled in the aforesaid mists of antiquity, I cannot
vouch for the details. Nor can I say just when the Moors found that
they could make a finer and more rhythmic jangle by attaching the
bells to their legs than by swinging them in their hands. Nor can I
fix the day when they tore strips from their turbans for their idle
hands to wave. I cannot say how long the rite's mode had been set when
first the adventurers from Spain beheld it with their keen wondering
eyes and fixed it for ever in their memories.

In Spain, and then in France, and then in London, the dance was
secular. But perhaps I ought not to have said that it was `not
explicitly religious' in the English countryside. The cult for Robin
Hood was veritably a religion throughout the Midland Counties. Rites
in his honour were performed on certain days of the year with a not
less hearty reverence, a not less quaint elaboration, than was infused
into the rustic Greek rites for Dionysus. The English carles danced,
not indeed around an altar, but around a bunt pole crowned with such
flowers as were in season; and one of them, like the youth who in the
Dionysiac dance masqueraded as the god, was decked out duly as Robin
Hood--`with a magpye's plume to hys capp,' we are told, and sometimes
`a russat bearde compos'd of horses hair.' The most famous of the
dances for Robin Hood was the `pageant.' Herein appeared, besides the
hero himself and various tabours and pipers, a `dysard' or fool, and
Friar Tuck, and Maid Marian--`in a white kyrtele and her hair all
unbrayded, but with blossoms thereyn.' This `pageant' was performed at
Whitsun, at Easter, on New-Year's day, and on May-day. The Morris,
when it had become known in the villages, was very soon incorporated
in the `pageant.' The Morris scarves and bells, the Morris steps and
figures, were all pressed into the worship of Robin Hood. In most
villages the properties for the `pageant' had always rested in the
custody of the church-wardens. The properties for the Morris were now
kept with them. In the Kingston accounts for 1537-8 are enumerated `a
fryers cote of russat, and a kyrtele weltyd with red cloth, a Mowrens
cote of buckram, and four morres daunsars cotes of white fustian
spangelid, and two gryne saten cotes, and disarddes cote of cotton,
and six payre of garters with belles.' The `pageant' itself fell,
little by little, into disuse; the Morris, which had been affiliated
to it, superseded it. Of the `pageant' nothing remained but the
minstrel and the dysard and an occasional Maid Marian. In the original
Morris there had been no music save that of the bells. But now there
was always a flute or tabor. The dysard, with his rod and leathern
bladder, was promoted to a sort of leadership. He did not dance, but
gave the signal for the dance, and distributed praise or blame among
the performers, and had power to degrade from the troupe any man who
did not dance with enough skill or enough heartiness. Often there were
in one village two rival troupes of dancers, and a prize was awarded
to whichever acquitted itself the more admirably. But not only the
`ensemble' was considered. A sort of `star system' seems to have crept
in. Often a prize would be awarded to some one dancer who had excelled
his fellows. There were, I suppose, `born' Morris-dancers. Now and
again, one of them, flushed with triumph, would secern himself from
his troupe, and would `star' round the country for his livelihood.

Such a one was Mr. William Kemp, who, at the age of seventeen, and in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, danced from his native village to
London, where he educated himself and became an actor. Perhaps he was
not a good actor, for he presently reverted to the Morris. He danced
all the way from London to Norwich, and wrote a pamphlet about it--
`Kemp's Nine Dajes' Wonder, performed in a daunce from London to
Norwich. Containing the pleasures, paines, and kind entertainment of
William Kemp betweene London and that Citty, in his late Morrice.' He
seems to have encountered more pleasures than `paines.' Gentle and
simple, all the way, were very cordial. The gentle entertained him in
their mansions by night. The simple danced with him by day. In Sudbury
`there came a lusty tall fellow, a butcher by his profession, that
would in a Morice keepe me company to Bury. I gave him thankes, and
forward wee did set; but ere ever wee had measur'd halfe a mile of our
way, he gave me over in the plain field, protesting he would not hold
out with me; for, indeed, my pace in dauncing is not ordinary. As he
and I were parting, a lusty country lasse being among the people,
cal'd him faint-hearted lout, saying, "If I had begun to daunce, I
would have held out one myle, though it had cost my life." At which
words many laughed. "Nay," saith she, "if the dauncer will lend me a
leash of his belles, I'le venter to treade one myle with him myself."
I lookt upon her, saw mirth in her eies, heard boldness in her words,
and beheld her ready to tucke up her russat petticoate; and I fitted
her with bels, which she merrily taking garnisht her thicke short
legs, and with a smooth brow bad the tabur begin. The drum strucke;
forward marcht I with my merry Mayde Marian, who shook her stout
sides, and footed it merrily to Melford, being a long myle. There
parting with her (besides her skinfull of drinke), and English crowne
to buy more drinke; for, good wench, she was in a pittious heate; my
kindness she requited with dropping a dozen good courtsies, and
bidding God blesse the dauncer. I bade her adieu; and, to give her her
due, she had a good eare, daunst truly, and wee parted friends.' Kemp,
you perceive, wrote as well as he danced. I wish he had danced less
and written more. It seems that he never wrote anything but this one
delightful pamphlet. He died three years later, in the thirtieth year
of his age--died dancing, with his bells on his legs, in the village
of Ockley.

John Thorndrake, another professional Morris-dancer, was not so
brilliant a personage as poor Kemp; but was of tougher fibre, it would
seem. He died in his native town, Canterbury, at the age of seventy-
eight; and had danced--never less than a mile, seldom less than five
miles--every day, except Sunday, for sixty years. But even his record
pales beside the account of a Morris that was danced by eight men, in
Hereford, one May-day in the reign of James I. The united ages of
these dancers, according to a contemporary pamphleteer, exceeded eight
hundred years. The youngest of them was seventy-nine, and the ages of
the rest ranged between ninety-five and a hundred and nine. `And they
daunced right well.' Of the hold that the Morris had on England, could
there be stronger proof than in the feat of these indomitable dotards?
The Morris ceased not even during the Civil Wars. Some of King
Charles's men (according to Groby, the Puritan) danced thus on the eve
of Naseby. Not even the Protectorate could stamp the Morris out,
though we are told that Groby and other preachers throughout the land
inveighed against it as `lewde' and `ungodlie.' The Restoration was in
many places celebrated by special Morrises. The perihelion of this
dance seems, indeed, to have been in the reign of Charles II. Georgian
writers treated it somewhat as a survival, and were not always even
tender to it. Says a writer in Bladud's Courier, describing a `soire'e
de beaute'' given by Lady Jersey, `Mrs. -- (la belle) looked as silly
and gaudy, I do vow, as one of the old Morris Dancers.' And many other
writers--from Horace Walpole to Captain Harver--have their sneer at
the Morris. Its rusticity did not appeal to the polite Georgian mind;
and its Moorishness, which would have appealed strongly, was
overlooked. Still, the Morris managed to survive urban disdain--was
still dear to the carles whose fathers had taught it them.

And long may it linger!


THE HOUSE OF COMMONS MANNER

A grave and beautiful place, the Palace of Westminster. I sometimes go
to that little chamber of it wherein the Commons sit sprawling or
stand spouting. I am a constant reader of the `graphic reports' of
what goes on in the House of Commons; and the writers of these things
always strive to give one the impression that nowhere is the human
comedy so fast and furious, nowhere played with such skill and brio,
as at St. Stephen's; and I am rather easily influenced by anything
that appears in daily print, for I have a burning faith in the
sagacity and uprightness of sub-editors; and so, when the memory of my
last visit to the House has lost its edge, and when there is a crucial
debate in prospect, to the House I go, full of hope that this time I
really shall be edified or entertained. With an open mind I go,
reeking naught of the pro's and con's of the subject of the debate. I
go as to a gladiatorial show, eager to applaud any man who shall wield
his sword brilliantly. If a `stranger' indulge in applause, he is
tapped on the shoulder by one of those courteous, magpie-like
officials, and conducted beyond the precincts of the Palace of
Westminster. I speak from hearsay. I do not think I have ever seen a
`stranger' applauding. My own hands, certainly, never have offended.

Years ago, when to be a member of the House of Commons was to be (or
to deem oneself) a personage of great importance, the debates were
conducted with a keen eye to effect. Members who had a sense of beauty
made their speeches beautiful, and even those to whom it was denied
did their best. Grace of ample gesture was cultivated, and sonorous
elocution, and lucid ordering of ideas, and noble language. In fact,
there was a school of oratory. This is no mere superstition, bred of
man's innate tendency to exalt the past above the present. It is a
fact that can easily be verified through contemporary records. It is a
fact which I myself have verified in the House with my own eyes and
ears. More than once, I heard there--and it was a pleasure and
privilege to hear--a speech made by Sir William Harcourt. And from his
speeches I was able to deduce the manner of his coevals and his
forerunners. Long past his prime he was, and bearing up with very
visible effort against his years. An almost extinct volcano! But
sufficient to imagination these glimpses of the glow that had been,
and the sight of these last poor rivulets of the old lava. An almost
extinct volcano, but majestic among mole-hills! Assuredly, the old
school was a fine one. It had its faults, of course--floridness,
pomposity, too much histrionism. It was, indeed, very like the old
school of acting, in its defects as in its qualities. With all his
defects, what a relief it is to see one of the old actors among a cast
of new ones! How he takes the stage, making himself felt--and heard!
How surely he achieves his effects in the grand manner! Robustious?
Yes. But it is better to exaggerate a style than to have no style at
all. That is what is the matter with these others--these quiet,
shifty, shamefaced others they have no style at all. And as is the
difference between the old actor and them, so, precisely was the
difference between Sir William Harcourt and the modern members.

I do not desire the new actors to model themselves on the old, whose
manner is quite incongruous with the character of modern drama. All I
would have them do is to achieve the manner for which they are darkly
fumbling. Even so, I do not demand oratory of the modern senators.
Oratory I love, but I admit that the time for it is bygone. It
belonged to the age of port. On plenty of port the orator spoke, and
on plenty of port his audience listened to him. A diet-bound
generation can hardly produce an orator; and if, by some mysterious
throw-back, an orator actually is produced, he falls very flat. There
was in my college at Oxford a little `Essay Society,' to which I found
myself belonging. We used to meet every Thursday evening in the room
of this or that member; and, when coffee had been handed round, one of
us read an essay--a calm little mild essay on one of those vast themes
that no undergraduate can resist. After this, we had a calm little
mild discussion `It seems to me that the reader of the paper has
hardly laid enough stress on...' One of these evenings I can recall
most distinctly. A certain freshman had been elected. The man who was
to have read an essay had fallen ill, and the freshman had been asked
to step into the breach. This he did, with an essay on `The Ideals of
Mazzini,' and with strange and terrific effect. During the exordium we
raised our eyebrows. Presently we were staring open-mouthed. Where
were we? In what wild dream were we drifting? To this day I can recite
the peroration. Mazzini is dead. But his spirit lives, and can never
be crushed. And his motto--the motto that he planted on the gallant
banner of the Italian Republic, and sealed with his life's blood,
remains, and shall remain, till, through the eternal ages, the
universal air re-echoes to the inspired shout--`GOD AND THE PEOPLE!'

The freshman had begun to read his essay in a loud, declamatory style;
but gradually, knowing with an orator's instinct, I suppose, that his
audience was not `with' him, he had quieted down, and become rather
nervous--too nervous to skip, as I am sure he wished to skip, the
especially conflagrant passages. But, as the end hove in sight, his
confidence was renewed. A wave of emotion rose to sweep him ashore
upon its crest. He gave the peroration for all it was worth. Mazzini
is dead. I can hear now the hushed tone in which he spoke those words;
the pause that followed them; and the gradual rising of his voice to a
culmination at the words `inspired shout'; and then another pause
before that husky whisper `GOD AND THE PEOPLE.' There was no
discussion. We were petrified. We sat like stones; and presently, like
shadows, we drifted out into the evening air. The little society met
once or twice again; but any activity it still had was but the faint
convulsion of a murdered thing. Old wine had been poured into a new
bottle, with the usual result. Broken even so, belike, would be the
glass roof of the Commons if a member spouted up to it such words as
we heard that evening in Oxford. At any rate, the member would be
howled down. So strong is the modern distaste for oratory. The day for
oratory, as for toping, is past beyond redemption. `Debating' is the
best that can be done and appreciated by so abstemious a generation as
ours. You will find a very decent level of `debating' in the Oxford
Union, in the Balham Ethical Society, in the Pimlico Parliament, and
elsewhere. But not, I regret to say, in the House of Commons.

No one supposes that in a congeries of--how many?--six hundred and
seventy men, chosen by the British public, there will be a very high
average of mental capacity. If any one were so sanguine, a glance at
the faces of our Conscript Fathers along the benches would soon bleed
him. (I have no doubt that the custom of wearing hats in the House
originated in the members' unwillingness to let strangers spy down on
the shapes of their heads.) But it is not unreasonable to expect that
the more active of these gentlemen will, through constant practice,
not only in the senate, but also at elections and public dinners and
so forth, have acquired a rough-and-ready professionalism in the art
of speaking. It is not unreasonable to expect that they will be fairly
fluent--fairly capable of arranging in logical sequence such ideas as
they may have formed, and of reeling out words more or less expressive
of these ideas. Well! certain of the Irishmen, certain of the
Welshmen, proceed easily enough. But oh! those Saxon others! Look at
them, hark at them, poor dears! See them clutching at their coats, and
shuffling from foot to foot in travail, while their ideas--ridiculous
mice, for the most part--get jerked painfully out somehow and anyhow.
`It seems to me that the Right--the honourable member for--er--er (the
speaker dives to be prompted)--yes, of course--South Clapham--er--
(temporising) the Southern division of Clapham--(long pause; his lips
form the words `Where was I?')--oh yes, the honourable gentleman the
member for South Clapham seems to me to me--to be--in the position of
one who, whilst the facts on which his propo--supposition are based--
er-- may or may not be in themselves acc--correct (gasps)--yet
inasmuch--because--nevertheless...I should say rather--er--what it
comes to is this: the honourable member for North--South Clapham seems
to be labouring under a total, an entire, a complete (emphatic
gesture, which throws him off his tack)--a contire--a complete disill-
-misunderstanding of the things which he himself relies on as--as--as
a backing-up of the things that he would have us take or--er--accept
and receive as the right sort of reduction--deduction from the facts
of...in fact, from the facts of the case.' Then the poor dear heaves a
deep sigh of relief, which is drowned by other members in a hideous
cachinnation meant to express mirth.

And the odd thing is that the mirth is quite sincere and quite
friendly. The speaker has just scored a point, though you mightn't
think it. He has just scored a point in the true House of Commons
manner. Possibly you have never been to the House of Commons, and
suspect that I have caricatured its manner. Not at all. Indeed, to
save space in these pages, I have rather improved it. If a phonograph
were kept in the house, you would learn from it that the average
sentence of the average speaker is an even more grotesque abortion
than I have adumbrated. Happily for the prestige of the House,
phonographs are excluded. Certain skilled writers--modestly dubbing
themselves `reporters'--are admitted, and by them cosmos is conjured
out of chaos. `The member for South Clapham appeared to be labouring
under a misapprehension of the nature of the facts on which his
argument was based (Laughter).' That is the finished article that your
morning paper offers to you. And you, enjoying the delicious epigram
over your tea and toast, are as unconscious of the toil that went to
make it, and of the crises through which it passed, as you are of
those poor sowers and reapers, planters and sailors and colliers, but
for whom there would be no fragrant tea and toast for you.

The English are a naturally silent race. The most popular type of
national hero is the `strong silent man.' And most of the members of
the House of Commons are, at any rate, silent members. Mercifully
silent. Seeing the level attained by such members as have an impulse
to speak, I shudder to conceive an oration by one of those unimpelled
members... Perhaps I am too nervous. Surely I am too nervous. Surely
the House of Commons manner cannot be a natural growth. Such perfect
virtuosity in dufferdom can be acquired only by constant practice. But
how comes it to be practised? I can only repeat that the English are a
naturally silent race. They are apt to mistrust fluency. `Glibness'
they call it, and scent behind it the adventurer, the player of the
confidence trick or the three-card trick, the robber of the widow and
the orphan. Be smooth-tongued, and the Englishman will withdraw from
you as quickly as may be, walking sideways like a crab, and looking
askance at you with panic in his eyes. But stammer and blurt to him,
and he will fall straight under the spell of your transparent honesty.
A silly superstition; but there it is, ineradicable; and through it,
undoubtedly, has come the house of Commons manner. Sometimes, through
sheer nervousness, a new member achieves something like that manner;
insomuch that his maiden speech is adjudged rich in promise, and `the
ear of the House' is assured to him when next he rises. Then is the
dangerous time for him. He has conquered his nervousness now, but has
not yet acquired that complex and delicate technique whereby a man can
produce the illusion that he is striving hopelessly to utter something
which, really, he could say with perfect ease. Thus he forfeits the
sympathy of the House. Members stroll listlessly out. There is a buzz
of conversation along the benches--perhaps the horrific refrain
`'Vide, 'Vide, 'Vide.' But the time will come when they shall hear
him. Years hence--a beacon to show the heights that can be sealed by
perseverance--he shall stand fumbling and floundering in a rapt
senate.

Well! I take off my hat to virtuosity in any form. I admire
Demosthenes, for whom pebbles in the mouth were a means to the end of
oratory. I admire the Demosthenes de nos jours, for whom oratory is a
means to the end of pebbles in the mouth. But I desire that the
intelligent foreigner and the intelligent country cousin be not
disappointed when they visit the House of Commons. Hitherto, strangers
have expected to find there an exhibition of the art of speaking. That
is the fault partly of those reporters to whom I have paid a well-
deserved tribute. But it is more especially the fault of those other
`graphic' reporters, who write their lurid impressions of the debates.
These gentlemen are most wildly misleading. I don't think they mislead
you intentionally. If a man criticises one kind of ill-done thing
exclusively, he cannot but, in course of time, lower his standard.
Seeing nothing good, he will gradually forget what goodness is; and
will accept as good that which is least bad. So it is with the graphic
reporter in Parliament. He really does imagine that Hob `raked the
Treasury Bench with a merciless fire of raillery,' and that Nob `went,
as is his way, straight to the root of the subject,' and that
Chittabob `struck a deep note of pathos that will linger long in the
memory of all who heard him.' If Hob, Nob, and Chittabob happen to be
in opposition to the politics of the newspaper which he adorns, he
will perhaps tell the truth about their respective performances. But
he will tell it without believing it. All his geese are swans--bless
him!--even when he won't admit it. The moral is that no man should be
employed as graphic reporter for more than one session. Then the
public would begin to learn the truth about St. Stephen's. Nor need
the editors flinch from such a consummation. They used to entertain a
theory that it was safest to have the productions at every theatre
praised, in case any manager should withdraw his advertisements. But
there need be no such fear in regard to St. Stephen's. That
establishment does not advertise itself in the press as a place of
amusement. Why should the press advertise it gratuitously?

For utility's sake, as well as for truth's, I would have the public
enlightened. Exposed to ruthless criticism, our Commons might be
shamed into an attempt at proficiency in the art of speaking. Then the
sessions would be comparatively brief. After all, it is on the nation
itself that falls the cost of lighting, warming, and ventilating St.
Stephen's during the session. All the aforesaid dufferdom, therefore,
increases the burden of the taxpayer. All those hum's and ha's mean so
many pence from the pockets of you, reader, and me.


THE NAMING OF STREETS

`The Rebuilding of London' proceeds ruthlessly apace. The humble old
houses that dare not scrape the sky are being duly punished for their
timidity. Down they come; and in their place are shot up new
tenements, quick and high as rockets. And the little old streets, so
narrow and exclusive, so shy and crooked--we are making an example of
them, too. We lose our way in them, do we?--we whose time is money.
Our omnibuses can't trundle through them, can't they? Very well, then.
Down with them! We have no use for them. This is the age of `noble
arteries.'

`The Rebuilding of London' is a source of much pride and pleasure to
most of London's citizens, especially to them who are county
councillors, builders, contractors, navvies, glaziers, decorators, and
so forth. There is but a tiny residue of persons who do not swell and
sparkle. And of these glum bystanders at the carnival I am one. Our
aloofness is mainly irrational, I suppose. It is due mainly to
temperamental Toryism. We say `The old is better.' This we say to
ourselves, every one of us feeling himself thereby justified in his
attitude. But we are quite aware that such a postulate would not be
accepted by time majority. For the majority, then, let us make some
show of ratiocination. Let us argue that, forasmuch as London is an
historic city, with many phases and periods behind her, and forasmuch
as many of these phases and periods are enshrined in the aspect of her
buildings, the constant rasure of these buildings is a disservice to
the historian not less than to the mere sentimentalist, and that it
will moreover (this is a more telling argument) filch from Englishmen
the pleasant power of crowing over Americans, and from Americans the
unpleasant necessity of balancing their pity for our present with envy
of our past. After all, our past is our point d'appui. Our present is
merely a bad imitation of what the Americans can do much better.

Ignoring as mere scurrility this criticism of London's present, but
touched by my appeal to his pride in its history, the average citizen
will reply, reasonably enough, to this effect: `By all means let us
have architectural evidence of our epochs--Caroline, Georgian,
Victorian, what you will. But why should the Edvardian be ruled out?
London is packed full of architecture already. Only by rasing much of
its present architecture can we find room for commemorating duly the
glorious epoch which we have just entered. To this reply there are two
rejoinders: (1) let special suburbs be founded for Edvardian
buildings; (2) there are no really Edvardian buildings, and there
won't be any. Long before the close of the Victorian Era our
architects had ceased to be creative. They could not express in their
work the spirit of their time. They could but evolve a medley of old
styles, some foreign, some native, all inappropriate. Take the case of
Mayfair. Mayfair has for some years been in a state of transition. The
old Mayfair, grim and sombre, with its air of selfish privacy and
hauteur and leisure, its plain bricked faades, so disdainful of show-
-was it not redolent of the century in which it came to being? Its
wide pavements and narrow roads between--could not one see in them the
time when by day gentlemen and ladies went out afoot, needing no
vehicle to whisk them to a destination, and walked to and fro amply,
needing elbow-room for their dignity and their finery, and by night
were borne in chairs, singly? And those queer little places of
worship, those stucco chapels, with their very secular little columns,
their ample pews, and their negligible altars over which one saw the
Lion and the Unicorn fighting, as who should say, for the Cross--did
they not breathe all the inimitable Erastianism of their period? In
qua te qaero proseucha, my Lady Powderbox? Alas! every one of your
tabernacles is dust now--dust turned to mud by the tears of the ghost
of the Rev. Charles Honeyman, and by my own tears.... I have strayed
again into sentiment. Back to the point--which is that the new houses
and streets in Mayfair mean nothing. Let me show you Mount Street. Let
me show you that airy stretch of sham antiquity, and defy you to say
that it symbolises, how remotely soever, the spirit of its time. Mount
Street is typical of the new Mayfair. And the new Mayfair is typical
of the new London. In the height of these new houses, in the width of
these new roads, future students will find, doubtless, something
characteristic of this pressing and bustling age. But from the style
of the houses he will learn nothing at all. The style might mean
anything; and means, therefore, nothing. Original architecture is a
lost art in England; and an art that is once lost is never found
again. The Edvardian Era cannot be commemorated in its architecture.

Erection of new buildings robs us of the past and gives us in exchange
nothing of the present. Consequently, the excuse put by me into the
gaping mouth of the average Londoner cannot be accepted. I had no idea
that my case was such a good one. Having now vindicated on grounds of
patriotic utility that which I took to be a mere sentimental
prejudice, I may be pardoned for dragging `beauty' into the question.
The new buildings are not only uninteresting through lack of temporal
and local significance: they are also hideous. With all his learned
eclecticism, the new architect seems unable to evolve a fake that
shall be pleasing to the eye. Not at all pleasing is a mad hotch-potch
of early Victorian hospital, Jacobean manor-house, Venetian palace,
and bride-cake in Gunter's best manner. Yet that, apparently, is the
modern English architect's pet ideal. Even when he confines himself to
one manner, the result (even if it be in itself decent) is made
horrible by vicinity to the work of a rival who has been dabbling in
some other manner. Every street in London is being converted into a
battlefield of styles, all shrieking at one another, all murdering one
another. The tumult may be exciting, especially to the architects, but
it is not beautiful. It is not good to live in.

However, I am no propagandist. I am not sanguine enough to suppose
that I could do anything to stop either the adulteration or the
demolition of old streets. I do not wish to infect the public with my
own misgivings. On the contrary, my motive for this essay is to
inoculate the public with my own placid indifference in a certain
matter which seems always to cause them painful anxiety. Whenever a
new highway is about to be opened, the newspapers are filled with
letters suggesting that it ought to be called by this or that
beautiful name, or by the name of this or that national hero. Well, in
point of fact, a name cannot (in the long-run) make any shadow of
difference in our sentiment for the street that bears it, for our
sentiment is solely according to the character of the street itself;
and, further, a street does nothing at all to keep green the memory of
one whose name is given to it.

For a street one name is as good as another. To prove this
proposition, let us proceed by analogy of the names borne by human
beings. Surnames and Christian names may alike be divided into two
classes: (1) those which, being identical with words in the
dictionary, connote some definite thing; (2) those which, connoting
nothing, may or may not suggest something by their sound. Instances of
Christian names in the first class are Rose, Faith; of surnames,
Lavender, Badger; of Christian names in the second class, Celia, Mary;
of surnames, Jones, Vavasour. Let us consider the surnames in the
first class. You will say, off-hand, that Lavender sounds pretty, and
that Badger sounds ugly. Very well. Now, suppose that Christian names
connoting unpleasant things were sometimes conferred at baptisms.
Imagine two sisters named Nettle and Envy. Off-hand, you will say that
these names sound ugly, whilst Rose and Faith sound pretty. Yet,
believe me, there is not, in point of actual sound, one pin to choose
either between Badger and Lavender, or between Rose and Nettle, or
between Faith and Envy. There is no such thing as a singly euphonious
or a singly cacophonous name. There is no word which, by itself,
sounds ill or well. In combination, names or words may be made to
sound ill or well. A sentence can be musical or unmusical. But in
detachment words are no more preferable one to another in their sound
than are single notes of music. What you take to be beauty or ugliness
of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or ugliness of meaning. You are
pleased by the sound of such words as gondola, vestments, chancel,
ermine, manor-house. They seem to be fraught with a subtle
onomatopoeia, severally suggesting by their sounds the grace or
sanctity or solid comfort of the things which they connote. You murmur
them luxuriously, dreamily. Prepare for a slight shock. Scrofula,
investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse. Horrible words, are they not?
But say gondola--scrofula, vestments--investments, and so on; and then
lay your hand on your heart, and declare that the words in the first
list are in mere sound nicer than the words in the second. Of course
they are not. If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a
beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word
would be exactly the reverse of what it is. This rule may be applied
to all the other words in the two lists. And these lists might, of
course, be extended to infinity. The appropriately beautiful or ugly
sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word
connotes. Beauty sounds as ugly as ugliness sounds beautiful. Neither
of them has by itself any quality in sound.

It follows, then, that the Christian names and surnames in my first
class sound beautiful or ugly according to what they connote. The
sound of those in the second class depends on the extent to which it
suggests any known word more than another. Of course, there might be a
name hideous in itself. There might, for example, be a Mr.
Griggsbiggmiggs. But there is not. And the fact that I, after
prolonged study of a Postal Directory, have been obliged to use my
imagination as factory for a name that connotes nothing and is ugly in
itself may be taken as proof that such names do not exist actually.
You cannot stump me by citing Mr. Matthew Arnold's citation of the
words `Ragg is in custody,' and his comment that `there was no Ragg by
the Ilyssus.' `Ragg' has not an ugly sound in itself. Mr. Arnold was
jarred merely by its suggestion of something ugly, a rag, and by the
cold brutality of the police-court reporter in withholding the prefix
`Miss' from a poor girl who had got into trouble. If `Ragg' had been
brought to his notice as the name of some illustrious old family, Mr.
Arnold would never have dragged in the Ilyssus. The name would have
had for him a savour of quaint distinction. The suggestion of a rag
would never have struck him. For it is a fact that whatever thing may
be connoted or suggested by a name is utterly overshadowed by the
name's bearer (unless, as in the case of poor `Ragg,' there is seen to
be some connexion between the bearer and the thing implied by the
name). Roughly, it may be said that all names connote their bearers,
and them only.

To have a `beautiful' name is no advantage. To have an `ugly' name is
no drawback. I am aware that this is a heresy. In a famous passage,
Bulwer Lytton propounded through one of his characters a theory that
`it is not only the effect that the sound of a name has on others
which is to be thoughtfully considered; the effect that his name
produces on the man himself is perhaps still more important. Some
names stimulate and encourage the owner, others deject and paralyse
him.'

Bulwer himself, I doubt not, believed that there was something in this
theory. It is natural that a novelist should. He is always at great
pains to select for his every puppet a name that suggests to himself
the character which he has ordained for that puppet. In real life a
baby gets its surname by blind heredity, its other names by the blind
whim of its parents, who know not at all what sort of a person it will
eventually become. And yet, when these babies grow up, their names
seem every whit as appropriate as do the names of the romantic
puppets. `Obviously,' thinks the novelist, `these human beings must
"grow to" their names; or else, we must be viewing them in the light
of their names.' And the quiet ordinary people, who do not write
novels, incline to his conjectures. How else can they explain the fact
that every name seems to fit its bearer so exactly, to sum him or her
up in a flash? The true explanation, missed by them, is that a name
derives its whole quality from its bearer, even as does a word from
its meaning. The late Sir Redvers Buller, taure^don hupoblepsas
[spelled in Greek, from Plato's Phaedo 117b], was thought to be
peculiarly well fitted with his name. Yet had it belonged not to him,
but to (say) some gentle and thoughtful ecclesiastic, it would have
seemed quite as inevitable. `Gore' is quite as taurine as `Buller,'
and yet does it not seem to us the right name for the author of Lux
Mundi? In connection with him, who is struck by its taurinity? What
hint of ovinity would there have been for us if Sir Redvers' surname
had happened to be that of him who wrote the Essays of Elia?
Conversely, `Charles Buller' seems to us now an impossible nom de vie
for Elia; yet it would have done just as well, really. Even `Redvers
Buller' would have done just as well. `Walter Pater' means for us--how
perfectly!--the author of Marius the Epicurean, whilst the author of
All Sorts and Conditions of Men was summed up for us, not less
absolutely, in `Walter Besant.' And yet, if the surnames of these two
opposite Walters had been changed at birth, what difference would have
been made? `Walter Besant' would have signified a prose style sensuous
in its severity, an exquisitely patient scholarship, an exquisitely
sympathetic way of criticism. `Walter Pater' would have signified no
style, but an unslakable thirst for information, and a bustling human
sympathy, and power of carrying things through. Or take two names
often found in conjunction--Johnson and Boswell. Had the dear great
oracle been named Boswell, and had the sitter-at-his-feet been named
Johnson, would the two names seem to us less appropriate than they do?
Should we suffer any greater loss than if Salmon were Gluckstein, and
Gluckstein Salmon? Finally, take a case in which the same name was
borne by two very different characters. What name could seem more
descriptive of a certain illustrious Archbishop of Westminster than
`Manning'? It seems the very epitome of saintly astuteness. But for
`Cardinal' substitute `Mrs.' as its prefix, and, presto! it is equally
descriptive of that dreadful medio-Victorian murderess who in the dock
of the Old Bailey wore a black satin gown, and thereby created against
black satin a prejudice which has but lately died. In itself black
satin is a beautiful thing. Yet for many years, by force of
association, it was accounted loathsome. Conversely, one knows that
many quite hideous fashions in costume have been set by beautiful
women. Such instances of the subtle power of association will make
clear to you how very easily a name (being neither beautiful nor
hideous in itself) can be made hideous or beautiful by its bearer--how
inevitably it becomes for us a symbol of its bearer's most salient
qualities or defects, be they physical, moral, or intellectual.

Streets are not less characteristic than human beings. `Look!' cried a
friend of mine, whom lately I found studying a map of London, `isn't
it appalling? All these streets--thousands of them--in this tiny
compass! Think of the miles and miles of drab monotony this map
contains! I pointed out to him (it is a thinker's penalty to be always
pointing things out to people) that his words were nonsense. I told
him that the streets on this map were no more monotonous than the
rivers on the map of England. Just as there were no two rivers alike,
every one of them having its own speed, its own windings, depths, and
shallows, its own way with the reeds and grasses, so had every street
its own claim to an especial nymph, forasmuch as no two streets had
exactly the same proportions, the same habitual traffic, the same type
of shops or houses, the same inhabitants. In some cases, of course,
the difference between the `atmosphere' of two streets is a subtle
difference. But it is always there, not less definite to any one who
searches for it than the difference between (say) Hill Street and Pont
Street, High Street Kensington and High Street Notting Hill, Fleet
Street and the Strand. I have here purposely opposed to each other
streets that have obvious points of likeness. But what a yawning gulf
of difference is between each couple! Hill Street, with its staid
distinction, and Pont Street, with its eager, pushful `smartness,' its
air de petit parvenu, its obvious delight in having been `taken up';
High Street Notting Hill, down-at-heels and unashamed, with a placid
smile on its broad ugly face, and High Street Kensington, with its
traces of former beauty, and its air of neatness and self-respect, as
befits one who in her day has been caressed by royalty; Fleet Street,
that seething channel of business, and the Strand, that swollen river
of business, on whose surface float so many aimless and unsightly
objects. In every one of these thoroughfares my mood and my manner are
differently affected. In Hill Street, instinctively, I walk very
slowly--sometimes, even with a slight limp, as one recovering from an
accident in the hunting-field. I feel very well-bred there, and,
though not clever, very proud, and quick to resent any familiarity
from those whom elsewhere I should regard as my equals. In Pont Street
my demeanour is not so calm and measured. I feel less sure of myself,
and adopt a slight swagger. In High Street, Kensington, I find myself
dapper and respectable, with a timid leaning to the fine arts. In High
Street, Notting Hill, I become frankly common. Fleet Street fills me
with a conviction that if I don't make haste I shall be jeopardising
the national welfare. The Strand utterly unmans me, leaving me with
only two sensations: (1) a regret that I have made such a mess of my
life; (2) a craving for alcohol. These are but a few instances. If I
had time, I could show you that every street known to me in London has
a definite effect on me, and that no two streets have exactly the same
effect. For the most part, these effects differ in kind according only
to the different districts and their different modes of life; but they
differ in detail according to such specific little differences as
exist between such cognate streets as Bruton Street and Curzon Street,
Doughty Street and Great Russell Street. Every one of my readers,
doubtless, realises that he, too, is thus affected by the character of
streets. And I doubt not that for him, as for me, the mere sound or
sight of a street's name conjures up the sensation he feels when he
passes through that street. For him, probably, the name of every
street has hitherto seemed to be also its exact, inevitable symbol, a
perfect suggestion of its character. He has believed that the grand or
beautiful streets have grand or beautiful names, the mean or ugly
streets mean or ugly names. Let me assure him that this is a delusion.
The name of a street, as of a human being, derives its whole quality
from its bearer.

`Oxford Street' sounds harsh and ugly. `Manchester Street' sounds
rather charming. Yet `Oxford' sounds beautiful, and `Manchester'
sounds odious. `Oxford' turns our thoughts to that `adorable dreamer,
whispering from her spires the last enchantments of the Middle Age.'
An uproarious monster, belching from its factory-chimneys the latest
exhalations of Hell--that is the image evoked by `Manchester.' But
neither in `Manchester Street' is there for us any hint of that
monster, nor in `Oxford Street' of that dreamer. The names have become
part and parcel of the streets. You see, then, that it matters not
whether the name given to a new street be one which in itself suggests
beauty, or one which suggests ugliness. In point of fact, it is
generally the most pitiable little holes and corners that bear the
most ambitiously beautiful names. To any one who has studied London,
such a title as `Paradise Court' conjures up a dark fetid alley, with
untidy fat women gossiping in it, untidy thin women quarrelling across
it, a host of haggard and shapeless children sprawling in its mud, and
one or two drunken men propped against its walls. Thus, were there an
official nomenclator of streets, he might be tempted to reject such
names as in themselves signify anything beautiful. But his main
principle would be to bestow whatever name first occurred to him, in
order that he might save time for thinking about something that really
mattered.

I have yet to fulfil the second part of my promise: show the futility
of trying to commemorate a hero by making a street his namesake. By
implication I have done this already. But, for the benefit of the less
nimble among my readers, let me be explicit. Who, passing through the
Cromwell Road, ever thinks of Cromwell, except by accident? What
journalist ever thinks of Wellington in Wellington Street? In
Marlborough Street, what policeman remembers Marlborough? In St.
James's Street, has any one ever fancied he saw the ghost of a pilgrim
wrapped in a cloak, leaning on a staff? Other ghosts are there in
plenty. The phantom chariot of Lord Petersham dashes down the slope
nightly. Nightly Mr. Ball Hughes appears in the bow-window of White's.
At cock-crow Charles James Fox still emerges from Brooks's. Such men
as these were indigenous to the street. Nothing will ever lay their
ghosts there. But the ghost of St. James--what should it do in that
galley?... Of all the streets that have been named after famous men, I
know but one whose namesake is suggested by it. In Regent Street you
do sometimes think of the Regent; and that is not because the street
is named after him, but because it was conceived by him, and was
designed and built under his auspices, and is redolent of his
character and his time. When a national hero is to be commemorated by
a street, he must be allowed to design the street himself. The mere
plastering-up of his name is no mnemonic.


ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY

My florist has standing orders to deliver early on the morning of this
day a chaplet of laurel. With it in my hand, I reach by a step-ladder
the nobly arched embrasure that is above my central book-case, and
crown there the marble brow of him whose name is the especial glory of
our literature--of all literature. The greater part of the morning is
spent by me in contemplation of that brow, and in silent meditation.
And, year by year, always there intrudes itself into this meditation
the hope that Shakespeare's name will, one day, be swept into
oblivion.

I am not--you will have perceived that I certainly am not--a
`Baconian.' So far as I have examined the evidence in the controversy,
I do not feel myself tempted to secede from the side on which
(rightly, inasmuch as it is the obviously authoritative side) every
ignorant person ranges himself. Even the hottest Baconian, filled with
the stubbornest conviction, will, I fancy, admit in confidence that
the utmost thing that could, at present, be said for his conclusions
by a judicial investigator is that they are `not proven.' To be
convinced of a thing without being able to establish it is the surest
recipe for making oneself ridiculous. The Baconians have thus made
themselves very ridiculous; and that alone is reason enough for not
wishing to join them. And yet my heart is with them, and my voice
urges them to carry on the fight. It is a good fight, in my opinion,
and I hope they will win it.

I do not at all understand the furious resentment they rouse in the
bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down
as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an
Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and
married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and
afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few
lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our
reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that
second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and
sonnets, we give that reverence. But our belief is not such as we give
to the proposition that one and two make three. It is a belief that
has to be upheld by argument when it is assailed. When a man says to
us that one and two make four, we smile and are silent. But when he
argues, point by point, that in Bacon's life and writings there is
nothing to show that Bacon might not have written the plays and
sonnets, and that there is much to show that he did write them, and
that in what we know about Shakespeare there is little evidence that
Shakespeare wrote those works, and much evidence that he did not write
them, then we pull ourselves together, marshalling all our facts and
all out literary discernment, so as to convince our interlocutor of
his error. But why should we not do our task urbanely? The cyphers,
certainly, are stupid and tedious things, deserving no patience. But
the more intelligent Baconians spurn them as airily as do you or I.
Our case is not so strong that the arguments of these gentlemen can be
ignored; and naughty temper does but hamper us in the task of
demolition. If Bacon were proved to have written Shakespeare's plays
and sonnets, would mankind be robbed of one of those illusions which
are necessary to its happiness and welfare? If so, we have a good
excuse for browbeating the poor Baconians. But it isn't so, really and
truly.

Suppose that one fine morning, Mr. Blank, an ardent Baconian, stumbled
across some long-sought document which proved irrefragably that Bacon
was the poet, and Shakespeare an impostor. What would be our
sentiments? For the second-rate actor we should have not a moment's
sneaking kindness or pity. On the other hand, should we not experience
an everlasting thrill of pride and gladness in the thought that he who
had been the mightiest of our philosophers had been also, by some
unimaginable grace of heaven, the mightiest of our poets? Our pleasure
in the plays and sonnets would be, of course, not one whit greater
than it is now. But the pleasure of hero-worship for their author
would be more than reduplicated. The Greeks revelled in reverence of
Heracles by reason of his twelve labours. They would have been
disappointed had it been proved to them that six of those labours had
been performed by some quite obscure person. The divided reverence
would have seemed tame. Conversely, it is pleasant to revere Bacon, as
we do now, and to revere Shakespeare, as we do now; but a wildest
ecstasy of worship were ours could we concentrate on one of those two
demigods all that reverence which now we apportion to each apart.

It is for this reason, mainly, that I wish success to the Baconians.
But there is another reason, less elevated perhaps, but not less
strong for me. I should like to watch the multifarious comedies which
would spring from the downfall of an idol to which for three centuries
a whole world had been kneeling. Glad fancy makes for me a few
extracts from the issue of a morning paper dated a week after the
publication of Mr. Blank's discovery. This from a column of Literary
Notes:

>From Baiham, Sydenham, Lewisham, Clapham, Herne Hill and Peckham comes
news that the local Shakespeare Societies have severally met and
decided to dissolve. Other suburbs are expected to follow.

This from the same column:

Mr. Sidney Lee is now busily engaged on a revised edition of his
monumental biography of Shakespeare. Yesterday His Majesty the King
graciously visited Mr. Lee's library in order to personally inspect
the progress of the work, which, in its complete form, is awaited with
the deepest interest in all quarters.

And this, a leaderette:

Yesterday at a meeting of the Parks Committee of the London County
Council it was unanimously resolved to recommend at the next meeting
of the Council that the statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square
should be removed. This decision was arrived at in view of the fact
that during the past few days the well-known effigy has been the
centre of repeated disturbances, and is already considerably damaged.
We are surprised to learn that there are in our midst persons capable
of doing violence to a noble work of art merely because its subject is
distasteful to them. But even the most civilised communities have
their fits of vandalism. `'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis
true.'

And this from a page of advertisements:

To be let or sold. A commodious and desirable Mansion at Stratford-on-
Avon. Delightful flower and kitchen gardens. Hot and cold water on
every floor. Within easy drive of station. Hitherto home of Miss Marie
Corelli.

And this, again from the Literary Notes:

Mr. Hall Caine is in town. Yesterday, at the Authors' Club, he passed
almost unrecognised by his many friends, for he has shaved his beard
and moustache, and has had his hair cropped quite closely to the head.
This measure he has taken, he says, owing to the unusually hot weather
prevailing.

A sonnet, too, printed in large type on the middle page, entitled `To
Shakespeare,' signed by the latest fashionable poet, and beginning
thus:

O undetected during so long years,
O irrepleviably infamous,
Stand forth!

A cable, too, from `Our Own Correspondent' in New York:

This afternoon the Carmania came into harbour. Among the passengers
was Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, who had come over in personal charge of
Anne Hathaway's Cottage, his purchase of which for 2,000,000 excited
so much attention on your side a few weeks ago. Mr. Blank's
sensational revelations not having been published to the world till
two days after the Carmania left Liverpool, the millionaire collector
had, of course, no cognisance of the same. On disembarking he
proceeded straight to the Customs Office and inquired how much duty
was to be imposed on the cottage. On being courteously informed that
the article would be passed into the country free of charge, he
evinced considerable surprise. I then ventured to approach Mr. Morgan
and to hand him a journal containing the cabled summary of Mr. Blank's
disclosures, which he proceeded to peruse. His comments I must reserve
for the next mail, the cable clerks here demurring to their
transmission.

Only a dream? But a sweet one. Bustle about, Baconians, and bring it
true. Don't listen to my florist.


A HOME-COMING

Belike, returning from a long pilgrimage, in which you have seen many
strange men and strange cities, and have had your imagination stirred
by marvellous experiences, you have never, at the very end of your
journey, almost in sight of your home, felt suddenly that all you had
been seeing and learning was as naught--a pack of negligible
illusions, faint and forgotten. From me, however, this queer sensation
has not been withheld. It befell me a few days ago; in a cold grey
dawn, and in the Buffet of Dover Harbour.

I had spent two months far away, wandering and wondering; and now I
had just fulfilled two thirds of the little tripartite journey from
Paris to London. I was sleepy, as one always is after that brief and
twice broken slumber. I was chilly, for is not the dawn always bleak
at Dover, and perforated always with a bleak and drizzling rain? I was
sad, for I had watched from the deck the white cliffs of Albion coming
nearer and nearer to me, towering over me, and in the familiar drizzle
looking to me more than ever ghastly for that I had been so long and
so far away from them. Often though that harsh, chalky coast had thus
borne down on me, I had never yet felt so exactly and lamentably like
a criminal arrested on an extradition warrant.

In its sleepy, chilly shell my soul was still shuddering and
whimpering. Piteously it conjured me not to take it back into this
cruel hum-drum. It rose up and fawned on me. `Down, Sir, down!' said I
sternly. I pointed out to it that needs must when the devil drives,
and that it ought to think itself a very lucky soul for having had two
happy, sunny months of fresh and curious adventure. `A sorrow's crown
of sorrow,' it murmured, `is remembering happier things.' I declared
the sentiment to be as untrue as was the quotation trite, and told my
soul that I looked keenly forward to the pleasure of writing, in
collaboration with it, that book of travel for which I had been so
sedulously amassing notes and photographs by the way.

This colloquy was held at a table in the Buffet. I was sorry, for my
soul's sake, to be sitting there. Britannia owns nothing more crudely
and inalienably Britannic than her Buffets. The barmaids are but
incarnations of her own self, thinly disguised. The stale buns and the
stale sponge-cakes must have been baked, one fancies, by her own heavy
hand. Of her everything is redolent. She it is that has cut the thick
stale sandwiches, bottled the bitter beer, brewed the unpalatable
coffee. Cold and hungry though I was, one sip of this coffee was one
sip too much for me. I would not mortify my body by drinking more of
it, although I had to mortify my soul by lingering over it till one of
the harassed waiters would pause to be paid for it. I was somewhat
comforted by the aspect of my fellow-travellers at the surrounding
tables. Dank, dishevelled, dismal, they seemed to be resenting as much
as I the return to the dear home-land. I suppose it was the contrast
between them and him that made me stare so hard at the large young man
who was standing on the threshold and surveying the scene.

He looked, as himself would undoubtedly have said, `fit as a fiddle,'
or `right as rain.' His cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling. He had
his arms akimbo, and his feet planted wide apart. His grey bowler
rested on the back of his head, to display a sleek coating of hair
plastered down over his brow. In his white satin tie shone a dubious
but large diamond, and there was the counter-attraction of geraniums
and maidenhair fern in his button-hole. So fresh was the nosegay that
he must have kept it in water during the passage! Or perhaps these
vegetables had absorbed by mere contact with his tweeds, the subtle
secret of his own immarcescibility. I remembered now that I had seen
him, without realising him, on the platform of the Gare du Nord. `Gay
Paree' was still written all over him. But evidently he was no
repiner.

Unaccountable though he was, I had no suspicion of what he was about
to do. I think you will hardly believe me when I tell you what he did.
`A traveller's tale' you will say, with a shrug. Yet I swear to you
that it is the plain and solemn truth. If you still doubt me, you have
the excuse that I myself hardly believed the evidence of my eyes. In
the Buffet of Dover Harbour, in the cold grey dawn, in the brief
interval between boat and train, the large young man, shooting his
cuffs, strode forward, struck a confidential attitude across the
counter, and began to flirt with the barmaid.

Open-mouthed, fascinated, appalled, I watched this monstrous and
unimaginable procedure. I was not near enough to overhear what was
said. But I knew by the respective attitudes that the time-honoured
ritual was being observed strictly by both parties. I could see the
ice of haughty indifference thawing, little by little, under the fire
of gallant raillery. I could fix the exact moment when `Indeed?'
became `I daresay,' and when `Well, I must say' gave place to `Go
along,' and when `Oh, I don't mind you--not particularly' was
succeeded by `Who gave you them flowers?'... All in the cold grey
dawn...

The cry of `Take your places, please!' startled me into realisation
that all the other passengers had vanished. I hurried away, leaving
the young man still in the traditional attitude which he had assumed
from the first--one elbow sprawling on the counter, one foot cocked
over the other. My porter had put my things into a compartment exactly
opposite the door of the Buffet. I clambered in.

Just as the guard blew his whistle, the young man or monster came
hurrying out. He winked at me. I did not return his wink.

I suppose I ought really to have raised my hat to him. Pre-eminently,
he was one of those who have made England what it is. But they are the
very men whom one does not care to meet just after long truancy in
preferable lands. He was the backbone of the nation. But ought
backbones to be exposed?

Though I would rather not have seen him then and there, I did realise,
nevertheless, the overwhelming interest of him. I knew him to be a
stranger sight, a more memorable and instructive, than any of the fair
sights I had been seeing. He made them all seem nebulous and unreal to
me. Beside me lay my despatch-box. I unlocked it, drew from it all the
notes and all the photographs I had brought back with me. These, one
by one, methodically, I tore up, throwing their fragments out of the
window, not grudging them to the wind.


`THE RAGGED REGIMENT'

--`commonly called "Longshanks" on account of his great height he was
the first king crowned in the Abbey as it now appears and was interred
with great pomp on St. Simon's and St. Jude's Day October 28th 1307 in
1774 the tomb was opened when the king's body was found almost entire
in the right hand was a richly embossed sceptre and in the left'--

So much I gather as I pass one of the tombs on my way to the Chapel of
Abbot Islip. Anon the verger will have stepped briskly forward,
drawing a deep breath, with his flock well to heel, and will be
telling the secrets of the next tomb on his tragic beat.

To be a verger in Westminster Abbey--what life could be more
unutterably tragic? We are, all of us, more or less enslaved to
sameness; but not all of us are saying, every day, hour after hour,
exactly the same thing, in exactly the same place, in exactly the same
tone of voice, to people who hear it for the first time and receive it
with a gasp of respectful interest. In the name of humanity, I suggest
to the Dean and Chapter that they should relieve these sad-faced men
of their intolerable mission, and purchase parrots. On every tomb, by
every bust or statue, under every memorial window, let a parrot be
chained by the ankle to a comfortable perch, therefrom to enlighten
the rustic and the foreigner. There can be no objection on the ground
of expense; for parrots live long. Vergers do not, I am sure.

It is only the rustic and the foreigner who go to Westminster Abbey
for general enlightenment. If you pause beside any one of the verger-
led groups, and analyse the murmur emitted whenever the verger has
said his say, you will find the constituent parts of the sound to be
such phrases as `Lor!' `Ach so!' `Deary me!' `Tiens!' and `My!'  `My!'
preponderates; for antiquities appeal with greatest force to the one
race that has none of them; and it is ever the Americans who hang the
most tenaciously, in the greatest numbers, on the vergers' tired lips.
We of the elder races are capable of taking antiquities as a matter of
course. Certainly, such of us as reside in London take Westminster
Abbey as a matter of course. A few of us will be buried in it, but
meanwhile we don't go to it, even as we don't go to the Tower, or the
Mint, or the Monument. Only for some special purpose do we go--as to
hear a sensational bishop preaching, or to see a monarch anointed. And
on these rare occasions we cast but a casual glance at the Abbey--that
close-packed chaos of beautiful things and worthless vulgar things.
That the Abbey should be thus chaotic does not seem strange to us; for
lack of orderliness and discrimination is an essential characteristic
of the English genius. But to the Frenchman, with his passion for
symmetry and harmony, how very strange it must all seem! How very
whole-hearted a generalising `Tiens! must he utter when he leaves the
edifice!

My own special purpose in coming is to see certain old waxen effigies
that are here. [In its original form this essay had the good fortune
to accompany two very romantic drawings by William Nicholson--one of
Queen Elizabeth's effigy, the other of Charles II.'s.] A key grates in
the lock of a little door in the wall of (what I am told is) the North
Ambulatory; and up a winding wooden staircase I am ushered into a tiny
paven chamber. The light is dim, through the deeply embrased and
narrow window, and the space is so obstructed that I must pick my way
warily. All around are deep wooden cupboards, faced with glass; and I
become dimly aware that through each glass some one is watching me.
Like sentinels in sentry-boxes, they fix me with their eyes, seeming
as though they would challenge me. How shall I account to them for my
presence? I slip my note-book into my pocket, and try, in the dim
light, to look as unlike a spy as possible. But I cannot, try as I
will, acquit myself of impertinence. Who am I that I should review
this `ragged regiment'? Who am I that I should come peering in upon
this secret conclave of the august dead? Immobile and dark, very gaunt
and withered, these personages peer out at me with a malign dignity,
through the ages which separate me from them, through the twilight in
which I am so near to them. Their eyes... Come, sir, their eyes are
made of glass. It is quite absurd to take wax-works seriously. Wax-
works are not a serious form of art. The aim of art is so to imitate
life as to produce in the spectator an illusion of life. Wax-works, at
best, can produce no such illusion. Don't pretend to be illuded. For
its power to illude, an art depends on its limitations. Art never can
be life, but it may seem to be so if it do but keep far enough away
from life. A statue may seem to live. A painting may seem to live.
That is because each is so far away from life that you do not apply
the test of life to it. A statue is of bronze or marble, than either
of which nothing could be less flesh-like. A painting is a thing in
two dimensions, whereas man is in three. If sculptor or painter tried
to dodge these conventions, his labour would be undone. If a painter
swelled his canvas out and in according to the convexities and
concavities of his model, or if a sculptor overlaid his material with
authentic flesh-tints, then you would demand that the painted or
sculptured figure should blink, or stroke its chin, or kick its foot
in the air. That it could do none of these things would rob it of all
power to illude you. An art that challenges life at close quarters is
defeated through the simple fact that it is not life. Wax-works, being
so near to life, having the exact proportions of men and women, having
the exact texture of skin and hair and habiliments, must either be
made animate or continue to be grotesque and pitiful failures.
Lifelike? They? Rather do they give you the illusion of death. They
are akin to photographs seen through stereoscopic lenses--those
photographs of persons who seem horribly to be corpses, or, at least,
catalepts; and... You see, I have failed to cheer myself up. Having
taken up a strong academic line, and set bravely out to prove to
myself the absurdity of wax-works, I find myself at the point where I
started, irrefutably arguing to myself that I have good reason to be
frightened, here in the Chapel of Abbot Islip, in the midst of these,
the Abbot's glowering and ghastly tenants. Catalepsy! death! that is
the atmosphere I am breathing.

If I were writing in the past tense, I might pause here to consider
whether this emotion was a genuine one or a mere figment for literary
effect. As I am writing in the present tense, such a pause would be
inartistic, and shall not be made. I must seem not to be writing, but
to be actually on the spot, suffering. But then, you may well ask, why
should I stay here, to suffer? why not beat a hasty retreat? The
answer is that my essay would then seem skimpy; and that you,
moreover, would know hardly anything about the wax-works. So I must
ask you to imagine me fighting down my fears, and consoling myself
with the reflection that here, after all, a sense of awe and
oppression is just what one ought to feel--just what one comes for. At
Madame Tussaud's exhibition, by which I was similarly afflicted some
years ago, I had no such consolation. There my sense of fitness was
outraged. The place was meant to be cheerful. It was brilliantly lit.
A band was playing popular tunes. Downstairs there was even a
restaurant. (Let fancy fondly dwell, for a moment, on the thought of a
dinner at Madame Tussaud's: a few carefully-selected guests, and a
menu well thought out; conversation becoming general; corks popping;
quips flying; a sense of bien-e^tre; `thank you for a most delightful
evening.') Madame's figures were meant to be agreeable and lively
presentments. Her visitors were meant to have a thoroughly good time.
But the Islip Chapel has no cheerful intent. It is, indeed, a place
set aside, with all reverence, to preserve certain relics of a grim,
yet not unlovely, old custom. These fearful images are no stock-in-
trade of a showman; we are not invited to `walk-up' to them. They were
fashioned with a solemn and wistful purpose. The reason of them lies
in a sentiment which is as old as the world--lies in man's vain revolt
from the prospect of death. If the soul must perish from the body, may
not at least the body itself be preserved, somewhat in the semblance
of life, and, for at least a while, on the face of the earth? By
subtle art, with far-fetched spices, let the body survive its day and
be (even though hidden beneath the earth) for ever. Nay more, since
death cause it straightway to dwindle somewhat from the true semblance
of life, let cunning artificers fashion it anew--fashion it as it was.
Thus, in the earliest days of England, the kings, as they died, were
embalmed, and their bodies were borne aloft upon their biers, to a
sepulture long delayed after death. In later days, an image of every
king that died was forthwith carved in wood, and painted according to
his remembered aspect, and decked in his own robes; and, when they had
sealed his tomb, the mourners, humouring, to the best of their power,
his hatred of extinction, laid this image upon the tomb's slab, and
left it so. In yet later days, the pretence became more realistic. The
hands and the face were modelled in wax; and the figure stood upright,
in some commanding posture, on a valanced platform above the tomb. Nor
were only the kings thus honoured. Every one who was interred in the
Abbey, whether in virtue of lineage or of achievements, was honoured
thus. It was the fashion for every great lady to write in her will
minute instructions as to the posture in which her image was to be
modelled, and which of her gowns it was to be clad in, and with what
of her jewellery it was to glitter. Men, too, used to indulge in such
precautions. Of all the images thus erected in the Abbey, there remain
but a few. The images had to take their chance, in days that were
without benefit of police. Thieves, we may suppose, stripped the
finery from many of them. Rebels, we know, broke in, less ignobly, and
tore many of them limb from limb, as a protest against the governing
classes. So only a poor remnant, a `ragged regiment,' has been
rallied, at length, into the sanctuary of Islip's Chapel. Perhaps, if
they were not so few, these images would not be so fascinating.

Yes, I am fascinated by them now. Terror has been toned to wonder. I
am filled with a kind of wondering pity. My academic theory about wax-
works has broken down utterly. These figures--kings, princes,
duchesses, queens--all are real to me now, and all are infinitely
pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With
what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded
silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now
would be shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the
glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them
company, always. I think they like me. I am afraid they will miss me.
Perhaps it would be better for us never to have met. Even Queen
Elizabeth, beholding whom, as she stands here, gaunt and imperious and
appalling, I echo the words spoken by Philip's envoy, `This woman is
possessed of a hundred thousand devils'--even she herself, though she
gazes askance into the air, seems to be conscious of my presence, and
to be willing me to stay. It is a relief to meet the friendly
bourgeois eye of good Queen Anne. It has restored my common sense.
`These figures really are most curious, most interesting...' and anon
I am asking intelligent questions about the contents of a big press,
which, by special favour, has been unlocked for me.

Perhaps the most romantic thing in the Islip Chapel is this press.
Herein, huddled one against another in dark recesses, lie the battered
and disjected remains of the earlier effigies--the primitive wooden
ones. Edward I. and Eleanor are known to be among them; and Henry VII.
and Elizabeth of York; and others not less illustrious. Which is
which? By size and shape you can distinguish the men from the women;
but beyond that is mere guesswork, be you never so expert. Time has
broken and shuffled these erst so significant effigies till they have
become as unmeaning for us as the bones in one of the old plague-pits.
I feel that I ought to be more deeply moved than I am by this sad
state of things. But I seem to have exhausted my capacity for
sentiment; and I cannot rise to the level of my opportunity. Would
that I were Thackeray! Dear gentleman, how promptly and copiously he
would have wept and moralised here, in his grandest manner, with that
perfect technical mastery which makes even now his tritest and
shallowest sermons sound remarkable, his hollowest sentiment ring
true! What a pity he never came to beat the muffled drum, on which he
was so supreme a performer, around the Islip Chapel! As I make my way
down the stairs, I am trying to imagine what would have been the
cadence of the final sentence in this essay by Thackeray. And, as I
pass along the North Ambulatory, lo! there is the same verger with a
new party; and I catch the words `was interred with great pomp on St.
Simon's and St. Jude's Day October 28 1307 in 1774 the tomb was opened
when--


THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC

They often tell me that So-and-so has no sense of humour. Lack of this
sense is everywhere held to be a horrid disgrace, nullifying any
number of delightful qualities. Perhaps the most effective means of
disparaging an enemy is to lay stress on his integrity, his erudition,
his amiability, his courage, the fineness of his head, the grace of
his figure, his strength of purpose, which has overleaped all
obstacles, his goodness to his parents, the kind word that he has for
every one, his musical voice, his freedom from aught that in human
nature is base; and then to say what a pity it is that he has no sense
of humour. The more highly you extol any one, the more eagerly will
your audience accept anything you may have to say against him.
Perfection is unloved in this imperfect world, but for imperfection
comes instant sympathy. Any excuse is good enough for exalting the bad
or stupid brother of us, but any stick is a valued weapon against him
who has the effrontery to have been by Heaven better graced than we.
And what could match for deadliness the imputation of being without
sense of humour? To convict a man of that lack is to strike him with
one blow to a level with the beasts of the field--to kick him, once
and for all, outside the human pale. What is it that mainly
distinguishes us from the brute creation? That we walk erect? Some
brutes are bipeds. That we do not slay one another? We do. That we
build houses? So do they. That we remember and reason? So, again, do
they. That we converse? They are chatterboxes, whose lingo we are not
sharp enough to master. On no possible point of superiority can we
preen ourselves save this: that we can laugh, and that they, with one
notable exception, cannot. They (so, at least, we assert) have no
sense of humour. We have. Away with any one of us who hasn't!

Belief in the general humorousness of the human race is the more deep-
rooted for that every man is certain that he himself is not without
sense of humour. A man will admit cheerfully that he does not know one
tune from another, or that he cannot discriminate the vintages of
wines. The blind beggar does not seek to benumb sympathy by telling
his patrons how well they are looking. The deaf and dumb do not
scruple to converse in signals. `Have you no sense of beauty?' I said
to a friend who in the Accademia of Florence suggested that we had
stood long enough in front of the `Primavera.' `No!' was his simple,
straightforward, quite unanswerable answer. But I have never heard a
man assert that he had no sense of humour. And I take it that no such
assertion ever was made. Moreover, were it made, it would be a lie.
Every man laughs. Frequently or infrequently, the corners of his mouth
are drawn up into his cheeks, and through his parted lips comes his
own particular variety, soft or loud, of that noise which is called
laughter. Frequently or infrequently, every man is amused by
something. Every man has a sense of humour, but not every man the same
sense. A may be incapable of smiling at what has convulsed B, and B
may stare blankly when he hears what has rolled A off his chair. Jokes
are so diverse that no one man can see them all. The very fact that he
can see one kind is proof positive that certain other kinds will be
invisible to him. And so egoistic in his judgment is the average man
that he is apt to suspect of being humourless any one whose sense of
humour squares not with his own. But the suspicion is always false,
incomparably useful though it is in the form of an accusation.

Having no love for the public, I have often accused that body of
having no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me
withdraw my oft-made imputation, and show its hollowness by examining
with you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public
than I am), what are the main features of that sense of humour which
the public does undoubtedly possess.

The word `public' must, like all collective words, be used with
caution. When we speak of our hair, we should remember not only that
the hairs on our heads are all numbered, but also that there is a
catalogue raisonne' in which every one of those hairs is shown to be
in some respect unique. Similarly, let us not forget that `public'
denotes a collection not of identical units, but of units separable
and (under close scrutiny) distinguishable one from another. I have
said that not every man has the same sense of humour. I might have
said truly that no two men have the same sense of humour, for that no
two men have the same brain and heart and experience, by which things
the sense of humour is formed and directed. One joke may go round the
world, tickling myriads, but not two persons will be tickled in
precisely the same way, to precisely the same degree. If the
vibrations of inward or outward laughter could be (as some day,
perhaps, they will be) scientifically registered, differences between
them all would be made apparent to us. `Oh,' is your cry, whenever you
hear something that especially amuses you, `I must tell that to'
whomever you credit with a sense of humour most akin to your own. And
the chances are that you will be disappointed by his reception of the
joke. Either he will laugh less loudly than you hoped, or he will say
something which reveals to you that it amuses him and you not in quite
the same way. Or perhaps he will laugh so long and loudly that you are
irritated by the suspicion that you have not yourself gauged the full
beauty of it. In one of his books (I do not remember which, though
they, too, I suppose, are all numbered) Mr. Andrew Lang tells a story
that has always delighted and always will delight me. He was in a
railway-carriage, and his travelling-companions were two strangers,
two silent ladies, middle-aged. The train stopped at Nuneaton. The two
ladies exchanged a glance. One of them sighed, and said, `Poor Eliza!
She had reason to remember Nuneaton!'... That is all. But how much!
how deliciously and memorably much! How infinite a span of conjecture
is in those dots which I have just made! And yet, would you believe
me? some of my most intimate friends, the people most like to myself,
see little or nothing of the loveliness of that pearl of price.
Perhaps you would believe me. That is the worst of it: one never
knows. The most sensitive intelligence cannot predict how will be
appraised its any treasure by its how near soever kin.

This sentence, which I admit to be somewhat mannered, has the merit of
bringing me straight to the point at which I have been aiming; that,
though the public is composed of distinct units, it may roughly be
regarded as a single entity. Precisely because you and I have
sensitive intelligences, we cannot postulate certainly anything about
each other. The higher an animal be in grade, the more numerous and
recondite are the points in which its organism differs from that of
its peers. The lower the grade, the more numerous and obvious the
points of likeness. By `the public' I mean that vast number of human
animals who are in the lowest grade of intelligence. (Of course, this
classification is made without reference to social `classes.' The
public is recruited from the upper, the middle, and the lower class.
That the recruits come mostly from the lower class is because the
lower class is still the least well-educated. That they come in as
high proportion from the middle class as from the less well-educated
upper class, is because the `young Barbarians,' reared in a more
gracious environment, often acquire a grace of mind which serves them
as well as would mental keenness.) Whereas in the highest grade, to
which you and I belong, the fact that a thing affects you in one way
is no guarantee that it will not affect me in another, a thing which
affects one man of the lowest grade in a particular way is likely to
affect all the rest very similarly. The public's sense of humour may
be regarded roughly as one collective sense.

It would be impossible for any one of us to define what are the things
that amuse him. For him the wind of humour bloweth where it listeth.
He finds his jokes in the unlikeliest places. Indeed, it is only there
that he finds them at all. A thing that is labelled `comic' chills his
sense of humour instantly--perceptibly lengthens his face. A joke that
has not a serious background, or some serious connexion, means nothing
to him. Nothing to him, the crude jape of the professional jester.
Nothing to him, the jangle of the bells in the wagged cap, the thud of
the swung bladder. Nothing, the joke that hits him violently in the
eye, or pricks him with a sharp point. The jokes that he loves are
those quiet jokes which have no apparent point--the jokes which never
can surrender their secret, and so can never pall. His humour is an
indistinguishable part of his soul, and the things that stir it are
indistinguishable from the world around him. But to the primitive and
untutored public, humour is a harshly definite affair. The public can
achieve no delicate process of discernment in humour. Unless a joke
hits in the eye, drawing forth a shower of illuminative sparks, all is
darkness. Unless a joke be labelled `Comic. Come! why don't you
laugh?' the public is quite silent. Violence and obviousness are thus
the essential factors. The surest way of making a thing obvious is to
provide it in some special place, at some special time. It is thus
that humour is provided for the public, and thus that it is easy for
the student to lay his hand on materials for an analysis of the
public's sense of humour. The obviously right plan for the student is
to visit the music-halls from time to time, and to buy the comic
papers. Neither these halls nor these papers will amuse him directly
through their art, but he will instruct himself quicklier and
soundlier from them than from any other source, for they are the
authentic sources of the public's laughter. Let him hasten to
patronise them.

He will find that I have been there before him. The music-halls I have
known for many years. I mean, of course, the real old-fashioned music-
halls, not those depressing palaces where you see by grace of a
biograph things that you have seen much better, and without a
headache, in the street, and pitiable animals being forced to do
things which Nature has forbidden them to do--things which we can do
so very much better than they, without any trouble. Heaven defend me
from those meaningless palaces! But the little old music-halls have
always attracted me by their unpretentious raciness, their quaint
monotony, the reality of the enjoyment on all those stolidly rapt
faces in the audience. Without that monotony there would not be the
same air of general enjoyment, the same constant guffaws. That
monotony is the secret of the success of music-halls. It is not enough
for the public to know that everything is meant to be funny, that
laughter is craved for every point in every `turn.' A new kind of
humour, however obvious and violent, might take the public unawares,
and be received in silence. The public prefers always that the old
well-tested and well-seasoned jokes be cracked for it. Or rather, not
the same old jokes, but jokes on the same old subjects. The quality of
the joke is of slight import in comparison with its subject. It is the
matter, rather than the treatment, that counts, in the art of the
music-hall. Some subjects have come to be recognised as funny. Two or
three of them crop up in every song, and before the close of the
evening all of them will have cropped up many times. I speak with
authority, as an earnest student of the music-halls. Of comic papers I
know less. They have never allured me. They are not set to music--an
art for whose cheaper and more primitive forms I have a very real
sensibility; and I am not, as I peruse one of them, privy to the
public's delight: my copy cannot be shared with me by hundreds of
people whose mirth is wonderful to see and hear. And the bare contents
are not such as to enchant me. However, for the purpose of this essay,
I did go to a bookstall and buy as many of these papers as I could
see--a terrific number, a terrific burden to stagger away with.

I have gone steadily through them, one by one. My main impression is
of wonder and horror at the amount of hebdomadal labour implicit in
them. Who writes for them? Who does the drawings for them--those
thousands of little drawings, week by week, so neatly executed? To
think that daily and nightly, in so many an English home, in a room
sacred to the artist, sits a young man inventing and executing designs
for Chippy Snips! To think how many a proud mother must be boasting to
her friends: `Yes, Edward is doing wonderfully well--more than
fulfilling the hopes we always had of him. Did I tell you that the
editor of Natty Tips has written asking him to contribute to his
paper? I believe I have the letter on me. Yes, here it is,' etc.,
etc.! The awful thing is that many of the drawings in these comic
papers are done with very real skill. Nothing is sadder than to see
the hand of an artist wasted by alliance to a vacant mind, a common
spirit. I look through these drawings, conceived all so tritely and
stupidly, so hopelessly and helplessly, yet executed--many of them--so
very well indeed, and I sigh over the haphazard way in which mankind
is made. However, my concern is not with the tragedy of these
draughtsmen, but with the specific forms taken by their humour. Some
of them deal in a broad spirit with the world-comedy, limiting
themselves to no set of funny subjects, finding inspiration in the
habits and manners of men and women at large. `HE WON HER' is the
title appended to a picture of a young lady and gentleman seated in a
drawing-room, and the libretto runs thus: `Mabel: Last night I dreamt
of a most beautiful woman. Harold: Rather a coincidence. I dreamt of
you, too, last night.' I have selected this as a typical example of
the larger style. This style, however, occupies but a small space in
the bulk of the papers that lie before me. As in the music-halls, so
in these papers, the entertainment consists almost entirely of
variations on certain ever-recurring themes. I have been at pains to
draw up a list of these themes. I think it is exhaustive. If any
fellow-student detect an omission, let him communicate with me.
Meanwhile, here is my list:--

Mothers-in-law
Hen-pecked husbands
Twins
Old maids
Jews
Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers (not Russians, or other
foreigners of any denomination)
Fatness
Thinness
Long hair (worn by a man)
Baldness
Sea-sickness
Stuttering
Bad cheese
`Shooting the moon' (slang expression for leaving a lodging-house
without paying the bill).

You might argue that one week's budget of comic papers is no real
criterion--that the recurrence of these themes may be fortuitous. My
answer to that objection is that this list coincides exactly with a
list which (before studying these papers) I had made of the themes
commonest, during the past few years, in the music-halls. This twin
list, which results from separate study of the two chief forms of
public entertainment, may be taken as a sure guide to the goal of our
inquiry.

Let us try to find some unifying principle, or principles, among the
variegated items. Take the first item--Mothers-in-law. Why should the
public roar, as roar it does, at the mere mention of that
relationship? There is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion of a
woman with a married daughter. It is probable that she will sympathise
with her daughter in any quarrel that may arise between husband and
wife. It is probable, also, that she will, as a mother, demand for her
daughter more unselfish devotion than the daughter herself expects.
But this does not make her ridiculous. The public laughs not at her,
surely. It always respects a tyrant. It laughs at the implied concept
of the oppressed son-in-law, who has to wage unequal warfare against
two women. It is amused by the notion of his embarrassment. It is
amused by suffering. This explanation covers, of course, the second
item on my list--Hen-pecked husbands. It covers, also, the third and
fourth items. The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to
double expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her
destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew-
baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British
public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the
whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait
the Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which
alone can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians, Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. The
British public has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks
of speech. The only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of
Frenchmen, etc., is that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of
Russians and other foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no
idea what they are like: it has seen too few samples of them.)

So far, then, we have found two elements in the public's humour:
delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar. The former motive
is the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other
items: extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness,
stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) `shooting the
moon.' The motive of contempt for the unfamiliar accounts for long
hair (worn by a man). Remains one item unexplained. How can mirth
possibly be evoked by the notion of bad cheese? Having racked my
brains for the solution, I can but conjecture that it must be the mere
ugliness of the thing. Why any one should be amused by mere ugliness I
cannot conceive. Delight in cruelty, contempt for the unfamiliar, I
can understand, though I cannot admire them. They are invariable
elements in children's sense of humour, and it is natural that the
public, as being unsophisticated, should laugh as children laugh. But
any nurse will tell you that children are frightened by ugliness. Why,
then, is the public amused by it? I know not. The laughter at bad
cheese I abandon as a mystery. I pitch it among such other insoluble
problems, as Why does the public laugh when an actor and actress in a
quite serious play kiss each other? Why does it laugh when a meal is
eaten on the stage? Why does it laugh when any actor has to say
`damn'?

If they cannot be solved soon, such problems never will be solved. For
Mr. Forster's Act will soon have had time to make apparent its
effects; and the public will proudly display a sense of humour as
sophisticated as our own.


DULCEDO JUDICIORUM

When a `sensational' case is being tried, the court is well filled by
lay persons in need of a thrill. Their presence seems to be rather
resented as a note of frivolity, a discord in the solemnity of the
function, even a possible distraction for the judge and jury. I am not
a lawyer, nor a professionally solemn person, and I cannot work myself
up into a state of indignation against the interlopers. I am, indeed,
one of them myself. And I am worse than one of them. I do not merely
go to this or that court on this or that special occasion. I frequent
the courts whenever I have nothing better to do. And it is rarely
that, as one who cares to study his fellow-creatures, I have anything
better to do. I greatly wonder that the courts are frequented by so
few other people who have no special business there.

I can understand the glamour of the theatre. You find yourself in a
queerly-shaped place, cut off from the world, with plenty of gilding
and red velvet or blue satin. An orchestra plays tunes calculated to
promote suppressed excitement. Presently up goes a curtain, revealing
to you a mimic world, with ladies and gentlemen painted and padded to
appear different from what they are. It is precisely the people most
susceptible to the glamour of the theatre who are the greatest
hindrances to serious dramatic art. They will stand anything, no
matter how silly, in a theatre. Fortunately, there seems to be a
decline in the number of people who are acutely susceptible to the
theatre's glamour. I rather think the reason for this is that the
theatre has been over-exploited by the press. Quite old people will
describe to you their early playgoings with a sense of wonder, an
enthusiasm, which--leaving a wide margin for the charm that past
things must always have--will not be possible to us when we babble to
our grandchildren. Quite young people, people ranging between the ages
of four and five, who have seen but one or two pantomimes, still seem
to have the glamour of the theatre full on them. But adolescents, and
people in the prime of life, do merely, for the most part, grumble
about the quality of the plays. Yet the plays of our time are somewhat
better than the plays that were written for our elders. Certainly the
glamour of the theatre has waned. And so much the better for the
drama's future.

It is a matter of concern, that future, to me who have for so long a
time been a dramatic critic. A man soon comes to care, quite
unselfishly, about the welfare of the thiing in which he has
specialised. Of course, I care selfishly too. For, though it is just
as easy for a critic to write interestingly about bad things as about
good things, he would rather, for choice, be in contact with good
things. It is always nice to combine business and pleasure. But one
regrets, even then, the business. If I were a forensic critic, my
delight in attending the courts would still be great; but less than it
is in my irresponsibility. In the courts I find satisfied in me just
those senses which in the theatre, nearly always, are starved. Nay, I
find them satisfied more fully than they ever could be, at best, in
any theatre. I do not merely fall back on the courts, in disgust of
the theatre as it is. I love the courts better than the theatre as it
ideally might be. And, I say again, I marvel that you leave me so much
elbow-room there.

No artificial light is needed, no scraping of fiddles, to excite or
charm me as I pass from the echoing corridor, through the swing-doors,
into the well of this or that court. It matters not much to me what
case I shall hear, so it be of the human kind, with a jury and with
witnesses. I care little for Chancery cases. There is a certain
intellectual pleasure in hearing a mass of facts subtly wrangled over.
The mind derives therefrom something of the satisfaction that the eye
has in watching acrobats in a music-hall. One wonders at the
ingenuity, the agility, the perfect training. Like acrobats, these
Chancery lawyers are a relief from the average troupe of actors and
actresses, by reason of their exquisite alertness, their thorough
mastery (seemingly exquisite and thorough, at any rate, to the dazzled
layman). And they have a further advantage in their material. The
facts they deal with are usually dull, but seldom so dull as facts
become through the fancies of the average playwright. It is seldom
that an evening in a theatre can be so pleasantly and profitably spent
as a day in a Chancery court. But it is ever into one or another of
the courts of King's Bench that I betake myself, for choice. Criminal
trials, of which I have seen a few, I now eschew absolutely. I cannot
stomach them. I know that it is necessary for the good of the
community that such persons as infringe that community's laws should
be punished. But, even were the mode of punishment less barbarous than
it is, I should still prefer not to be brought in sight of a prisoner
in the dock. Perhaps because I have not a strongly developed
imagination, I have little or no public spirit. I cannot see the
commonweal. On the other hand, I have plenty of personal feeling. And
I have enough knowledge of men and women to know that very often the
best people are guilty of the worst things. Is the prisoner in the
dock guilty or not guilty of the offence with which he is charged?
That is the question in the mind of the court. What sort of man is he?
That is the question in my own mind. And the answer to the other
question has no bearing whatsoever on the answer to this one. The
English law assumes the prisoner innocent until he shall have been
proved guilty. And, seeing him there a prisoner, a man who happens to
have been caught, while others (myself included) are pleasantly at
large after doing, unbeknown, innumerable deeds worse in the eyes of
heaven than the deed with which this man is charged--deeds that do not
prevent us from regarding our characters as quite fine really--I
cannot but follow in my heart the example of the English law and
assume (pending proof, which cannot be forthcoming) that the prisoner
in the dock has a character at any rate as fine as my own. The war
that this assumption wages in my breast against the fact that the man
will perhaps be sentenced is too violent a war not to discommode me.
Let justice be done. Or rather, let our rough-and-ready, well-meant
endeavours towards justice go on being made. But I won't be there to
see, thank you very much.

It is the natural wish of every writer to be liked by his readers. But
how exasperating, how detestable, the writer who obviously touts for
our affection, arranging himself for us in a mellow light, and
inviting us, with gentle persistence, to note how lovable he is! Many
essayists have made themselves quite impossible through their
determination to remind us of Charles Lamb--`St. Charles,' as they
invariably call him. And the foregoing paragraph, though not at all
would-be-Lamb-like in expression, looks to me horribly like a blatant
bid for your love. I hasten to add, therefore, that no absolutely
kind-hearted person could bear, as I rejoice, to go and hear cases
even in the civil courts. If it be true that the instinct of cruelty
is at the root of our pleasure in theatrical drama, how much more is
there of savagery in our going to look on at the throes of actual
litigation--real men and women struggling not in make-believe, but in
dreadful earnest! I mention this aspect merely as a corrective to what
I had written. I do not pretend that I am ever conscious, as I enter a
court, that I am come to gratify an evil instinct. I am but conscious
of being glad to be there, on tiptoe of anticipation, whether it be to
hear tried some particular case of whose matter I know already
something, or to hear at hazard whatever case happen to be down for
hearing. I never tire of the aspect of a court, the ways of a court.
Familiarity does but spice them. I love the cold comfort of the pale
oak panelling, the scurrying-in-and-out of lawyers' clerks, the
eagerness and ominousness of it all, the rustle of silk as a K.C.
edges his way to his seat and twists his head round for a quick
whispered parley with his junior, while his client, at the solicitors'
table, twists his head round to watch feverishly the quick mechanical
nods of the great man's wig--the wig that covers the skull that
contains the brain that so awfully much depends on. I love the mystery
of those dark-green curtains behind the exalted Bench. One of them
will anon be plucked aside, with a stentorian `Silence!' Thereat up we
jump, all of us as though worked by one spring; and in shuffles
swiftly My Lord, in a robe well-fashioned for sitting in, but not for
walking in anywhere except to a bath-room. He bows, and we bow;
subsides, and we subside; and up jumps some grizzled junior--`My Lord,
may I mention to your Lordship the case of "Brown v. Robinson and
Another"?' It is music to me ever, the cadence of that formula. I
watch the judge as he listens to the application, peering over his
glasses with the lack-lustre eyes that judges have, eyes that stare
dimly out through the mask of wax or parchment that judges wear. My
Lord might be the mummy of some high tyrant revitalised after
centuries of death and resuming now his sway over men. Impassive he
sits, aloof and aloft, ramparted by his desk, ensconced between
curtains to keep out the draught--for might not a puff of wind scatter
the animated dust that he consists of? No creature of flesh and blood
could impress us quite as he does, with a sense of puissance quite so
dispassionate, so supernal. He crouches over us in such manner that we
are all of us levelled one with another, shorn of aught that elsewhere
differentiates us. The silk-gownsmen, as soon as he appears, fade to
the semblance of juniors, of lawyers' clerks, of jurymen, of oneself.
Always, indeed, in any public place devoted to some special purpose,
one finds it hard to differentiate the visitors, hard to credit them
with any private existence. Cast your eye around the tables of a
cafe': how subtly similar all the people seem! How like a swarm of
gregarious insects, in their unity of purpose and of aspect! Above
all, how homeless! Cast your eye around the tables of a casino's
gambling-room. What an uniform and abject herd, huddled together with
one despondent impulse! Here and there, maybe, a person whom we know
to be vastly rich; yet we cannot conceive his calm as not the calm of
inward desperation; cannot conceive that he has anything to bless
himself with except the roll of bank-notes that he has just produced
from his breast-pocket. One and all, the players are levelled by the
invisible presence of the goddess they are courting. Well, the visible
presence of the judge in a court of law oppresses us with a yet keener
sense of lowliness and obliteration. He crouches over us, visible
symbol of the majesty of the law, and we wilt to nothingness beneath
him. And when I say `him' I include the whole judicial bench. Judges
vary, no doubt. Some are young, others old, by the calendar. But the
old ones have an air of physical incorruptibility--are `well-
preserved,' as by swathes and spices; and the young ones are just as
mummified as they. Some of them are pleased to crack jokes; jokes of
the sarcophagus, that twist our lips to obsequious laughter, but send
a chill through our souls. There are `strong' judges and weak ones (so
barristers will tell you). Perhaps--who knows?--Minos was a strong
judge, and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus were weak ones. But all three seem
equally terrible to us. And so seem, in virtue of their position, and
of the manner and aspect it invests them with, all the judges of our
own high courts.

I hearken in awe to the toneless murmur in which My Lord comments on
the application in the case of `Brown v. Robinson and Another.' He
says something about the Court of Crown Cases Reserved... Ah, what
place on this earth bears a name so mystically majestic? Even in the
commonest forensic phrases there is often this solemnity of cadence,
always a quaintness, that stirs the imagination... The grizzled junior
dares interject something `with submission,' and is finally advised to
see `my learned brother in chambers.' `As your Lordship pleases.'...
We pass to the business of the day. I settle myself to enjoy the
keenest form of aesthetic pleasure that is known to me.

Aesthetic, yes. In the law-courts one finds an art-form, as surely as
in the theatre. What is drama? Its theme is the actions of certain
opposed persons, historical or imagined, within a certain period of
time; and these actions, these characters, must be shown to us in a
succinct manner, must be so arranged that we know just what in them is
essential to our understanding of them. Very similar is the art-form
practised in the law-courts. The theme of a law-suit is the actions of
certain actual opposed persons within a certain period of time; and
these actions, these characters, must be set forth succinctly, in
such-wise that we shall know just as much as is essential to our
understanding of them. In drama, the presentment is, in a sense, more
vivid. It is not--not usually, at least--retrospective. We see the
actions being committed, hear the words as they are uttered. But how
often do we have an illusion of their reality? Seldom. It is seldom
that a masterpiece in drama is performed perfectly by an ideal cast.
In a law-court, on the other hand, it is always in perfect form that
the matter is presented to us. First the outline of the story, in the
speech for the plaintiff; then this outline filled in by the
examination of the plaintiff himself; then the other side of the story
adumbrated by his cross-examination. Think of the various further
stages of a law-suit, culminating in the judge's summing up; and you
will agree with me that the whole thing is a perfect art-form. Drama,
at its best, is clumsy, arbitrary, unsatisfying, by comparison. But
what makes a law-suit the most fascinating, to me, of all art-forms,
is that not merely its material, but the chief means of its
expression, is life itself. Here, cited before us, are the actual
figures in the actual story that has been told to us. Here they are,
not as images to be evoked through the medium of printed page, or of
painted canvas, or of disinterested ladies and gentlemen behind
footlights. Actual, authentic, they stand before us, one by one, in
the harsh light of day, to be made to reveal all that we need to know
of them.

The most interesting witnesses, I admit, are they who are determined
not to accommodate us--not to reveal themselves as they are, but to
make us suppose them something quite different. All witnesses are more
or less interesting. As I have suggested, there is no such thing as a
dull law-suit. Nothing that has happened is negligible. And, even so,
every human being repays attention--especially so when he stands forth
on his oath. The strangeness of his position, and his consciousness of
it, suffice in themselves to make him interesting. But it is
disingenuousness that makes him delightful. And the greatest of all
delights that a law-court can give us is a disingenuous witness who is
quick-minded, resourceful, thoroughly master of himself and his story,
pitted against a counsel as well endowed as himself. The most vivid
and precious of my memories is of a case in which a gentleman, now
dead, was sued for breach of promise, and was cross-examined
throughout a whole hot day in midsummer by the late Mr. Candy. The
lady had averred that she had known him for many years. She called
various witnesses, who testified to having seen him repeatedly in her
company. She produced stacks of letters in a handwriting which no
expert could distinguish from his. The defence was that these letters
were written by the defendant's secretary, a man who was able to
imitate exactly his employer's handwriting, and who was, moreover,
physically a replica of his employer. He was dead now; and the
defendant, though he was a very well-known man, with many friends, was
unable to adduce any one who had seen that secretary dead or alive.
Not a soul in court believed the story. As it was a complicated story,
extending over many years, to demolish it seemed child's play. Mr.
Candy was no child. His performance was masterly. But it was not so
masterly as the defendant's; and the suit was dismissed. In the light
of common sense, the defendant hadn't a leg to stand on. Technically,
his case was proved. I doubt whether I shall ever have a day of such
acute mental enjoyment as was the day of that cross-examination.

I suppose that the most famous cross-examination in our day was Sir
Charles Russell's of Pigott. It outstands by reason of the magnitude
of the issue, and the flight and suicide of the witness. Had Pigott
been of the stuff to stand up to Russell, and make a fight of it, I
should regret far more keenly than I do that I was not in court. As it
is, my regret is keen enough. I was reading again, only the other day,
the verbatim report of Pigott's evidence, in one of the series of
little paper volumes published by The Times; and I was revelling again
in the large perfection with which Russell accomplished his too easy
task. Especially was I amazed to find how vividly Russell, as I
remember him, lived again, and could be seen and heard, through the
medium of that little paper volume. It was not merely as though I had
been in court, and were now recalling the inflections of that deep,
intimidating voice, the steadfast gaze of those dark, intimidating
eyes, and were remembering just at what points the snuff-box was
produced, and just how long the pause was before the pinch was taken
and the bandana came into play. It was almost as though these effects
were proceeding before my very eyes--these sublime effects of the
finest actor I have ever seen. Expressed through a perfect technique,
his personality was overwhelming. `Come, Mr. Pigott,' he is reported
as saying, at a crucial moment, `try to do yourself justice. Remember!
you are face to face with My Lords.' How well do I hear, in that awful
hortation, Russell's pause after the word `remember,' and the lowered
voice in which the subsequent words were uttered slowly, and the
richness of solemnity that was given to the last word of all, ere the
thin lips snapped together--those lips that were so small, yet so
significant, a feature of that large, white, luminous and inauspicious
face. It is an hortation which, by whomsoever delivered, would tend to
dispirit the bravest and most honest of witnesses. The presence of a
judge is always, as I have said, oppressive. The presence of three is
trebly so. Yet not a score of them serried along the bench could have
outdone in oppressiveness Sir Charles Russell. He alone, among the
counsel I have seen, was an exception to the rule that by a judge
every one in court is levelled. On the bench, in his last years, he
was not notably more predominant than he ever had been. And the reason
of his predominance at the Bar was not so much in the fact that he had
no rival in swiftness, in subtlety, in grasp, as in the passionate
strength of his nature, the intensity that in him was at the root of
the grand manner.

In the courts, as in parliament and in the theatre, the grand manner
is a thing of the past. Mr. Lloyd-George is not, in style and method,
more remote from Gladstone, nor Mr. George Alexander from Macready,
than is Mr. Rufus Isaacs, the type of modern advocate, from Russell.
Strength, passion, sonorousness, magnificence of phrasing, are things
which the present generation vaguely approves in retrospect; but it
would titter at a contemporary demonstration of them. While I was
reading Pigott's cross-examination, an idea struck me; why do not the
managers of our theatres, always querulous about the dearth of plays,
fall back on scenes from famous trials? A trial-scene in a play,
though usually absurd, is almost always popular. Why not give us
actual trial-scenes? They could not, of course, be nearly so exciting
as the originals, for the simple reason that they would not be real;
but they would certainly be more exciting than the average play. Thus
I mused, hopefully. But I was brought up sharp by the reflection that
it were hopeless to look for an actor who could impersonate Russell--
could fit his manner to Russell's words, or indeed to the words of any
of those orotund advocates. To reproduce recent trials would be a
hardly warrantable thing. The actual participators in them would have
a right to object (delighted though many of them would be). Vain,
then, is my dream of theatres invigorated by the leavings of the law-
courts. On the other hand, for the profit of the law-courts, I have a
quite practicable notion. They provide the finest amusement in London,
for nothing. Why for nothing? Let some scale of prices for admission
be drawn up--half-a-guinea, say, for a seat in the well of the court,
a shilling for a seat in the gallery, five pounds for a seat on the
bench.
Then, I dare swear, people would begin to realise how fine the
amusement is.


WORDS FOR PICTURES

`HARLEQUIN'
A SIGN-BOARD, PAINTED ON COPPER, SIGNED
`W. EVANS, LONDON' CIRCA 1820

Harlequin dances, and, over the park he dances in, surely there is
thunder brooding. His figure stands out, bright, large, and fantastic.
But all around him is sultry twilight, and the clouds, pregnant with
thunder, lower over him as he dances, and the elms are dim with
unusual shadow. There is a tiny river in the dim distance. Under one
of the nearest elms you may descry a square tomb, topped with an urn.
What lord or lady underlies it? I know not. Harlequin dances. Sheathed
in his gay suit of red and green and yellow lozenges, he ambles
lightly over the gravel. At his feet lie a tambourine and a mask.
Brown ferns fringe his pathway. With one hand he clasps the baton to
his hip, with the other he points mischievously to his forehead. He
wears a flat, loose cap of yellow. There is a ruff about his neck, and
a pair of fine buckles to his shoes, and he always dances. He has his
back to the thunderclouds, but there is that in his eyes which tells
us that he has seen them, and that he knows their presage. He is
afraid. Yet he dances. Never, howsoever slightly, swerves he, see!
from his right posture, nor fail his feet in their pirouette. All a`
merveille! Nor fades the smile from his face, though he smiles through
the tarnished air of a sultry twilight, under the shadow of impending
storm.


`THE GARDEN OF LOVE'
A PAINTING BY RUBENS, IN THE PRADO

Here they are met.

Here, by the balustrade, these lords and lusty ladies are met to romp
and wanton in the fulness of love, under the solstice of a noon in
midsummer. Water gushes in fantastic arcs from the grotto, making a
cold music to the emblazoned air, while a breeze swells the sun-shot
satin of every lady's skirt, and tosses the ringlets that hang like
bunches of yellow grapes on either side of her brow, and stirs the
plumes of her gallant. But the very breeze is laden with heat, and the
fountain's noise does but whet the thirst of the grass, the flowers,
the trees. The earth sulks under the burden of the unmerciful sun.
Love itself, one had said, would be languid here, pale and supine,
and, faintly sighing for things past or for future things, would sink
into siesta. But behold! these are no ordinary lovers. The gushing
fountains are likelier to run dry there in the grotto than they to
falter in their redundant energy. These sanguine lords and ladies
crave not an instant's surcease. They are tyrants and termagants of
love.

If they are thus at noon, here under the sun's rays, what, one
wonders, must be their manner in the banqueting hall, when the tapers
gleam adown the long tables, and the fruits are stripped of their
rinds, and the wine brims over the goblets, all to the music of the
viols? Somehow, one cannot imagine them anywhere but in this sunlight.
To it they belong. They are creatures of Nature, pagans untamed,
lawless and unabashed. For all they are robed in crimson and saffron,
and are with such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from
their exuberant bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple
era; but for the ease of their deportment in their frippery, they
might be Maenads in masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that
civilisation fosters in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as
men. A `wooing' were wasted on them, for they have no sense of
antagonism, and seek not by any means to elude men. They meet men even
as rivers meet the sea. Even as, when fresh water meets salt water in
the estuary, the two tides revolve in eddies and leap up in foam, so
do these men and women laugh and wrestle in the rapture of
concurrence. How different from the first embrace which marks the
close of a wooing! that moment when the man seeks to conceal his
triumph under a semblance of humility, and the woman her humiliation
under a pretty air of patronage. Here, in the Garden of Love, they
have none of those spiritual reservations and pretences. Nor is here
any savour of fine romance. Nothing is here but the joy of satisfying
a physical instinct--a joy that expresses itself not in any exaltation
of words or thoughts, but in mere romping. See! Some of the women are
chasing one another through the grotto. They are rushing headlong
under the fountain. What though their finery be soaked? Anon they will
come out and throw themselves on the grass, and the sun will quickly
dry them.

Leave them, then, to their riot. Look upon these others who sit and
stand here in a voluptuous bevy, hand in hand under the brazen sun, or
flaunt to and fro, lolling in one another's arms and laughing in one
another's faces. And see how closely above them hover the winged
loves! One, upside down in the air, sprinkles them with rose-leaves;
another waves over them a blazing torch; another tries to frighten
them with his unarrowed bow. Another yet has dared to descend into the
group; he nestles his fat cheek on a lady's lap, and is not rebuked.
These little chubby Cythareans know they are privileged to play any
pranks here. Doubtless they love to be on duty in this garden, for
here they are patted and petted, and have no real work to do. At close
of day, when they fly back to their mother, there is never an unmated
name in the report they bring her; and she, belike, being pleased with
them, allows them to sit up late, and to have each a slice of ambrosia
and a sip of nectar. But elsewhere they have hard work, and often fly
back in dread of Venus' anger. At that other balustrade, where
Watteau, remembering this one, painted for us the `Plaisirs du Bal,'
how often they have lain in ambush, knowing that were one of them to
show but the tip of his wings those sedate and migniard masqueraders
would faint for very shame; yet ever hoping that they might, by their
unseen presence, turn that punctilio of flirtation into love. And
always they have flown back from Dulwich unrequited for all the pains
they had taken, and pouting that Venus should ever send them on so
hard an errand. But a day in this garden is always for them a dear
holiday. They live in dread lest Venus discover how superfluous they
are here. And so, knowing that the hypocrite's first dupe must be
himself, they are always pretending to themselves that they are of
some use. See that child yonder, perched on the balustrade, reading
aloud from a scroll the praise of love as earnestly as though his
congregation were of infidels. And that other, to the side, pushing
two lovers along as though they were the veriest laggarts. The torch-
bearer, too, and the archer, and the sprinkler of the rose-leaves--
they are all, after their kind, trying to persuade themselves that
they are needed. All but he who leans over and nestles his fat cheek
on a lady's lap, as fondly and confidingly as though she were his
mother... And truly, the lady is very like his mother. So, indeed, are
all the other ladies. Strange! In all their faces is an uniformity of
divine splendour. Can it be that Venus, impatient of mere sequences of
lovers, has obtained leave of Jove to multiply herself, and that to-
day by a wild coincidence her every incarnation has trysted an adorer
to this same garden? Look closely! It must be so...

Hush! Let us keep her secret.


`ARIANE ET DIONYSE'
A PAINTING BY PAUL BERGERON, 1740

PAUVRETTE! no wonder she is startled. All came on her so suddenly. A
moment since, she was alone on this island. Theseus had left her. Her
lover had crept from her couch as she lay sleeping, and had sailed
away with his comrades, noiselessly, before the sun rose and woke her.
>From the top of yonder hillock she had seen the last sail of his
argosy fading over the sea-line. Vainly she had waved her arms, and
vainly her cries had echoed through all the island. She had run
distraught through the valleys, the goats scampering before her to
their own rocks. She had strayed, wildly weeping, along the shore, and
the very sky had seemed to mock her. At length, spent with sorrow and
wan with her tears, she had lain upon the sand. Above her the cliff
sloped gently down to the shore, and all around her was the hot
noontide, and no sound save the rustling of the sea over the sand.
Theseus had left her. The sea had taken him from her. Let the sea take
her in its tide.... Suddenly--what was that?--she leapt up and
listened. Voices, voices, the loud clash of cymbals! She looked round
for some place to hide in. Too late! Some man (goat or man) came
bounding towards her down the cliff. Another came after him. Then
others, a whole company, and with them many naked, abominable women,
laughing and shrieking and waving leafy wands, as they rushed down
towards her. And in their midst, in a brazen chariot drawn by
panthers, sped one whose yellow hair streamed far behind him in the
wind. And from his chariot he sprang and stood before her.

But she shrinks from his smile. She shrinks from the riot and ribaldry
that encompass her. She is but a young bride whom the bridegroom has
betrayed, and she would fain be alone in the bitterness of her anguish
and her humiliation. Why have they come, these creatures who are
stamping and reeling round her, these flushed women who clap the
cymbals, and these wild men with the hoofs and the horns of goats? How
should they comfort her? She is not of their race; no! nor even of
their time. She stands among them, just as Bergeron saw her, a
delicate, timid figurine du dix-huitie`me sie`cle. With her powdered
hair and her hooped skirt and her stiff bodice of rose silk, she seems
more fit for the consolations of some old Monsignore than for the
homage of these frenzied Pagans and the amorous regard of their
master. At him, pressing her shut fan to her lips, she is gazing
across her shoulder. With one hand she seems to ward him from her. Her
whole body is bent to flight, but she is `affear'd of her own feet.'
She is well enough educated to know that he who smiles at her is no
mortal, but Bacchus himself, the very lord of Naxos. He stands before
her, the divine debauchee racemiferis frontem circumdatus uvis; and
all around her, a waif on his territory, are the symbols of his
majesty and his power. It is in his honour that the ivy trails down
the cliff, and are not the yews and the firs and the fig-trees that
overshadow the cliff's edge all sacred to him? and the vines beyond,
are they not all his? His four panthers are clawing the sand, and four
tipsy Satyrs hold them, the impatient beasts, by their bridles.
Another Satyr drags to execution a goat that he has caught cropping
the vine; and in his slanted eyes one can see thirst for the blood of
his poor cousin. The Maenads are dancing in one another's arms, and
their tresses are coiled and crowned with tiny serpents. One of them
kneels apart, sucking a great wine-skin. And yonder, that old cupster,
Silenus, that horrible old favourite, wobbles along on a donkey, and
would tumble off, you may be sure, were he not upheld by two fairly
sober Satyrs. But the eyes of Ariadne are fixed only on the smooth-
faced god. See how he smiles back at her with that lascivious
condescension which is all that a god's love can be for a mortal girl!
In his hand he holds a long thyrsus. Behind him is borne aloft a
chaplet of seven gold stars.

Ariadne is but a little waif in the god's power. Not Theseus himself
could protect her. One tap of the god's wand, and, lo! she, too, would
be filled with the frenzy of worship, and, with a wild cry, would join
the dancers, his for ever. But the god is not unscrupulous. He would
fain win her by gentle and fair means, even by wedlock. That chaplet
of seven stars is his bridal offering. Why should not she accept it?
Why should she be coy of his desire? It is true that he drinks. But in
time, may be, a wife might be able to wean him from the wine-skin, and
from the low company he affects. That will be for time to show. And,
meanwhile, how brilliant a match! Not even Pasiphae", her mother, ever
contemplated for her such splendour. In her great love, Ariadne risked
her whole future by eloping with Theseus. For her--the daughter of a
far mightier king than Aegeus, and, on the distaff side, the
granddaughter of Apollo--even marriage with Theseus would have been a
me'salliance. And now, here is a chance, a chance most marvellous, of
covering her silly escapade. She will be sensible, I think, though she
is still a little frightened. She will accept this god's suit, if only
to pique Theseus--Theseus, who, for all his long, tedious anecdotes of
how he slew Procrustes and the bull of Marathon and the sow of
Cromyon, would even now lie slain or starving in her father's
labyrinth, had she not taken pity on him. Yes, it was pity she felt
for him. She never loved him. And then, to think that he, a mere
mortal, dared to cast her off--oh, it is too absurd, it is too
monstrous!


`PETER THE DOMINICAN'
A PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

`Credo in Dominum' were the words this monk wrote in the dust of the
high-road, as he lay a-dying there of Cavina's dagger; and they,
according to the Dominican record, were presently washed away by his
own blood--`rapida profusio sui sanguinis delevit professionem suoe
fidei.' Yet they had not been written in vain. On Cavina himself their
impression was less delible, for did he not submit himself to the
Church, and was he not, after absolution, received into that monastery
which his own victim had founded? Here, before this picture by
Bellini, one looks instinctively for the three words in the dust. They
are not yet written there; for scarcely, indeed, has the dagger been
planted in the Saint's breast. But here, to the right, on this little
scroll of parchment that hangs from a fence of osiers, there are some
words written, and one stoops to decipher them... JOANNES BELLINUS
FECIT.

Now, had the Saint and his brother Dominican not been waylaid on their
journey, they would have passed by this very fence, and would have
stooped, as we do, to decipher the scroll, and would have very much
wondered who was Bellinus, and what it was that he had done. The
woodmen and the shepherd in the olive-grove by the roadside, the
cowherds by the well, yonder--they have seen the scroll, I dare say,
but they are not scholars enough to have read its letters. Cavina and
his comrade in arms, lying in wait here, probably did not observe it,
so intent were they for that pious and terrible Inquisitor who was to
pass by. How their hearts must have leapt when they saw him, at
length, with his companion, coming across that little arched bridge
from the town--a conspicuous, unmistakable figure, clad in the pied
frock of his brotherhood and wearing the familiar halo above his
closely-shorn pate.

Cavina stands now over the fallen Saint, planting the short dagger in
his heart. The other Dominican is being chased by Cavina's comrade,
his face wreathed in a bland smile, his hands stretched childishly
before him. Evidently he is quite unconscious how grave his situation
is. He seems to think that this pursuit is merely a game, and that if
he touch the wood of the olive-trees first, he will have won, and that
then it will be his turn to run after this man in the helmet. Or does
he know perhaps that this is but a painting, and that his pursuer will
never be able to strike him, though the chase be kept up for many
centuries? In any case, his smile is not at all seemly or dramatic.
And even more extraordinary is the behaviour of the woodmen and the
shepherd and the cowherds. Murder is being done within a yard or two
of them, and they pay absolutely no attention. How Tacitus would have
delighted in this example of the `inertia rusticorum'! It is a great
mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily
excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the
contrary, the very absence of `sensations' produces an atrophy of the
senses. It is the constant supply of `sensations' which creates a real
demand for them in cities. Suppose that in our day some specially
unpopular clergyman were martyred `at the corner of Fenchurch Street,'
how the `same old crush' would be intensified! But here, in this quiet
glade 'twixt Milan and Como, on this quiet, sun-steeped afternoon in
early Spring, with a horrible outrage being committed under their very
eyes, these callous clowns pursue their absurd avocations, without so
much as resting for one moment to see what is going on.

Cavina plants the dagger methodically, and the Inquisitor himself is
evidently filled with that intense self-consciousness which sustains
all martyrs in their supreme hour and makes them, it may be,
insensible to actual pain. One feels that this martyr will write his
motto in the dust with a firm hand. His whole comportment is quite
exemplary. What irony that he should be unobserved! Even we,
posterity, think far less of St. Peter than of Bellini when we see
this picture; St. Peter is no more to us than the blue harmony of
those little hills beyond, or than that little sparrow perched on a
twig in the foreground. After all, there have been so many martyrs--
and so many martyrs named Peter--but so few great painters. The little
screed on the fence is no mere vain anachronism. It is a sly, rather
malicious symbol. PERIIT PETRUS: BILLINUS FECIT, as who should say.


`L'OISEAU BLEU'
A PAINTING ON SILK BY CHARLES CONDER

Over them, ever over them, floats the Blue Bird; and they, the
ennuye'es and the ennuyants, the ennuyantes and the ennuye's, these
Parisians of 1830, are lolling in a charmed, charming circle, whilst
two of their order, the young Duc de Belhabit et Profil-Perdu with the
girl to whom he has but recently been married, move hither or thither
vaguely, their faces upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the
elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden
which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very
clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage,
and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white
clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly.
One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the
curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time,
all these ladies, and all their lovers with them, have tried to catch
this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come
fluttering down to them at last. Now they are tired of trying, knowing
that to try were foolish and of no avail. Yet it is pleasant for them
to see, as here, others intent on the old pastime. Perhaps--who
knows?--some day the bird will be trapped... Ah, look! Monsieur Le Duc
almost touched its wing! Well for him, after all, that he did not more
than that! Had he caught it and caged it, and hung the gilt cage in
the boudoir of Madame la Duchesse, doubtless the bird would have
turned out to be but a moping, drooping, moulting creature, with not a
song to its little throat; doubtless the blue colour is but dye, and
would soon have faded from wings and breast. And see! Madame la
Duchesse looks a shade fatigued. She must not exert herself too much.
Also, the magic hour is all but over. Soon there will be sunbeams to
dispel the dawn's vapour; and the Blue Bird, with the sun sparkling on
its wings, will have soared away out of sight. Allons! The little
rogue is still at large.


`MACBETH AND THE WITCHES'
A PAINTING BY COROT, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION

Look! Across the plain yonder, those three figures, dark and gaunt
against the sky.... Who are they? What are they? One of them is
pointing with rigid arm towards the gnarled trees that from the
hillside stretch out their storm-broken boughs and ragged leaves
against the sky. Shifting thither, my eye discerns through the shadows
two horsemen, riding slowly down the incline. Hush! I hold up a
warning finger to my companion, lest he move. On what strange and
secret tryst have we stumbled? They must not know they are observed.
Could we creep closer up to them? Nay, the plain is so silent: they
would hear us; and so barren: they would surely see us. Here, under
cover of this rock, we can crouch and watch them.... We discern now
more clearly those three expectants. One of them has a cloak of faded
blue; it is fluttering in the wind. Women or men are they? Scarcely
human they seem: inauspicious beings from some world of shadows,
magically arisen through that platform of broken rock whereon they
stand. The air around, even the fair sky above, is fraught by them
with I know not what of subtle bale. One would say they had been
waiting here for many days, motionless, eager but not impatient,
knowing that at this hour the two horsemen would come. And we--it is
strange--have we not ere now beheld them waiting? In some waking
dream, surely, we have seen them, and now dimly recognise them. And
the two horsemen, forcing their steeds down the slope--them, too, we
have seen, even so. The light through a break in the trees faintly
reveals them to us. They are accoutred in black armour. They seem not
to be yet aware of the weird figures confronting them across the
plain. But the horses, with some sharper instinct, are aware and
afraid, straining, quivering. One of them throws back its head, but
dares not whinny. As though under some evil spell, all nature seems to
be holding its breath. Stealthily, noiselessly, I turn the leaves of
my catalogue... `Macbeth and the Witches.' Why, of course!

Of the two horsemen, which is Macbeth, which Banquo? Though we peer
intently, we cannot in those distant shadows distinguish which is he
that shall be king hereafter, which is he that shall merely beget
kings. It is mainly in virtue of this very vagueness and mystery of
manner that the picture is so impressive. An illustration should stir
our fancy, leaving it scope and freedom. Most illustrations, being
definite, do but affront us. Usually, Shakespeare is illustrated by
some Englishman overawed by the poet's repute, and incapable of
treating him, as did Corot, vaguely and offhand. Shakespeare expressed
himself through human and superhuman characters; therefore in England
none but a painter of figures would dare illustrate him. Had Corot
been an Englishman, this landscape would have had nothing to do with
Shakespeare. Luckily, as an alien, he was untrammelled by piety to the
poet. He could turn Shakespeare to his own account. In this picture,
obviously, he was creating, and only in a secondary sense
illustrating. For him the landscape was the thing. Indeed, the five
little figures may have been inserted by him as an afterthought, to
point and balance the composition. Vaguely he remembered hearing of
Macbeth, or reading it in some translation. Ce Sac-espe`re...un beau
talent...ne' romantique. Hugo he would not have attempted to
illustrate. But Sac-espe`re--why not? And so the little figures came
upon the canvas, dim sketches. Charles Lamb disliked theatrical
productions of Shakespeare's plays, because of the constraint thus
laid on his imagination. But in the theatre, at least, we are diverted
by movement, recompensed by the sound of the poet's words and (may be)
by human intelligence interpreting his thoughts; whereas from a
definite painting of Shakespearean figures we get nothing but an
equivalent for the mimes' appearance: nothing but the painter's bare
notion (probably quite incongruous with our notion) of what these
figures ought to look like. Take Macbeth as an instance. From a
definite painting of him what do we get? At worst, the impression of a
kilted man with a red beard and red knees, brandishing a claymore. At
best, a sombre barbarian doing nothing in particular. In either case,
all the atmosphere, all the character, all the poetry, all that makes
Macbeth live for us, is lost utterly. If these definite illustrations
of Shakespeare's human figures affront us, how much worse is it when
an artist tries his hand at the figures that are superhuman! Imagine
an English illustrator's projection of the weird sisters--with long
grey beards duly growing on their chins, and belike one of them duly
holding in her hand a pilot's thumb. It is because Corot had no
reverence for Shakespeare's text--because he was able to create in his
own way, with scarcely a thought of Shakespeare, an independent
masterpiece--that this picture is worthy of its theme. The largeness
of the landscape in proportion to the figures seems to show us the
tragedy in its essential relation to the universe. We see the heath
lying under infinity, under true sky and winds. No hint of the theatre
is there. All is as the poet may have conceived it in his soul. And
for us Corot's brush-work fills the place of Shakespeare's music. Time
has tessellated the surface of the canvas; but beauty, intangible and
immortal, dwells in its depths safely--dwells there even as it dwells
in the works of Shakespeare, though the folios be foxed and seared.

The longer we gaze, the more surely does the picture illude us and
enthral us, steeping us in that tragedy of `the fruitless crown and
barren sceptre.' We forget all else, watching the unkind witches as
they await him whom they shall undo, driving him to deeds he dreams
not of, and beguiling him, at length, to his doom. Against `the set of
sun' they stand forth, while he who shall be king hereafter, with the
comrade whom he shall murder, rides down to them, guileless of aught
that shall be. Privy to his fate, we experience a strange compassion.
Anon the fateful colloquy will begin. `All hail, Macbeth' the
unearthly voices will be crying across the heath. Can nothing be done?
Can we stand quietly here while... Nay, hush! We are powerless. These
witches, if we tried to thwart them, would swiftly blast us. There are
things with which no mortal must meddle. There are things which no
mortal must behold. Come away!

So, casting one last backward look across the heath, we, under cover
of the rock, steal fearfully away across the parquet floor of the
gallery.


`CARLOTTA GRISI'
A COLOURED PRINT

It is not among the cardboard glades of the King's Theatre, nor,
indeed, behind any footlights, but in a real and twilit garden that
Grisi, gimp-waisted sylphid, here skips for posterity. To her right,
the roses on the trellis are not paper roses--one guesses them quite
fragrant. And that is a real lake in the distance; and those delicate
pale trees around it, they too are quite real. Yes! surely this is the
garden of Grisi's villa at Uxbridge; and her guests, quoting Lord
Byron's `al fresco, nothing more delicious,' have tempted her to a
daring by-show of her genius. To her left there is a stone cross,
which has been draped by one of the guests with a scarf bearing the
legend GISELLE. It is Sunday evening, I fancy, after dinner. Cannot
one see the guests, a group entranced by its privilege--the ladies
with bandeaux and with little shawls to ward the dew from their
shoulders; the gentlemen, D'Orsayesque all, forgetting to puff the
cigars which the ladies, `this once,' have suffered them to light? One
sees them there; but they are only transparent phantoms between us and
Grisi, not interrupting our vision. As she dances--the peerless
Grisi!--one fancies that she is looking through them at us, looking
across the ages to us who stand looking back at her. Her smile is but
the formal Cupid's-bow of the ballerina; but I think there is a
clairvoyance of posterity in the large eyes, and, in the pose, a self-
consciousness subtler than merely that of one who, dancing, leads all
men by the heart-strings. A something is there which is almost
shyness. Clearly, she knows it to be thus that she will be remembered;
feels this to be the moment of her immortality. Her form is all but in
profile, swaying far forward, but her face is full-turned to us. Her
arms float upon the air. Below the stark ruff of muslin about her
waist, her legs are as a tilted pair of compasses; one point in the
air, the other impinging the ground. One tiptoe poised ever so lightly
upon the earth, as though the muslin wings at her shoulders were not
quite strong enough to bear her up into the sky! So she remains,
hovering betwixt two elements; a creature exquisitely ambiguous, being
neither aerial nor of the earth. She knows that she is mortal, yet is
conscious of apotheosis. She knows that she, though herself must
perish, is imperishable; for she sees us, her posterity, gazing fondly
back at her. She is touched. And we, a little envious of those who did
once see Grisi plain, always shall find solace in this pretty picture
of her; holding it to be, for all the artificiality of its convention,
as much more real as it is prettier than the stringent ballet-girls of
Degas.


`HO-TEI'
A COLOURED DRAWING BY HOKUSAI

What monster have we here? Who is he that sprawls thus, ventrirotund,
against the huge oozing wine-skin? Wide his nose, narrowly-slit his
eyes, and with little teeth he smiles at us through a beard of bright
russet--a beard soft as the russet coat of a squirrel, and sprouting
in several tiers according to the several chins that ascend behind it
from his chest. Nude he is but for a few dark twists of drapery. One
dimpled foot is tucked under him, the other cocked before him. With a
bifurcated fist (such is his hand) he pillows the bald dome of his
head. He seems to be very happy, sprawling here in the twilight. The
wine oozes from the wine-skin; but he, replete, takes no heed of it.
On the ground before him are a few almond-blossoms, blown there by the
wind. He is snuffing their fragrance, I think.

Who is he? `Ho-Tei,' you tell me; `god of increase, god of the corn-
fields and rice-fields, patron of all little children in Japan--a
blend of Dionysus and Santa Claus.' So? Then his look belies him. He
is far too fat to care for humanity, too gross to be divine. I suspect
he is but some self-centred sage, whom Hokusai beheld with his own
eyes in a devious corner of Yedo. A hermit he is, surely; one not more
affable than Diogenes, yet wiser than he, being at peace with himself
and finding (as it were) the honest man without emerging from his own
tub; a complacent Diogenes; a Diogenes who has put on flesh. Looking
at him, one is reminded of that over-swollen monster gourd which to
young Nevil Beauchamp and his Marquise, as they saw it from their
river-boat, `hanging heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow
cheek, in prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below,'
so sinisterly recalled Monsieur le Marquis. But to us this `self-
adored, gross bald Cupid' has no such symbolism, and we revel as
whole-heartedly as he in his monstrous contours. `I am very
beautiful,' he seems to murmur. And we endorse the boast. At the same
time, we transfer to Hokusai the credit which this glutton takes all
to himself. It is Hokusai who made him, delineating his paunch in that
one soft summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin
that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome
for words; but here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than
Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his
abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of
astricted god or athlete that would suffer not by incarnation...

Presently, we forget again that he is unreal. He seems alive to us,
and somehow he is still beautiful. `It is a beauty,' like that of Mona
Lisa, `wrought out from within upon the flesh, the' adipose `deposit,
little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and
exquisite passions.' It is the beauty of real fatness--that fatness
which comes from within, and reacts on the soul that made it, until
soul and body are one deep harmony of fat; that fatness which gave us
the geniality of Silenus, of the late Major O'Gorman; which soothes
all nerves in its owner, and creates the earthy, truistic wisdom of
Sancho Pauza, of Franisque Sarcey; which makes a man selfish, because
there is so much of him, and venerable because he seems to be a knoll
of the very globe we live on, and lazy inasmuch as the form of
government under which he lives is an absolute gastrocracy--the belly
tyrannising over the members whom it used to serve, and wielding its
power as unscrupulously as none but a promoted slave could.

Such is the true fatness. It is not to be confounded with mere
stoutness. Contrast with this Japanese sage that orgulous hidalgo who,
in black velvet, defies modern Prussia from one of Velasquez's
canvases in Berlin. Huge is that other, and gross; and, so puffed his
cheeks are that the light, cast up from below, strives vainly to creep
over them to his eyes, like a tourist vainly striving to creep over a
boulder on a mountainside. Yet is he not of the hierarchy of true
fatness. He bears his bulk proudly, and would sit well any charger
that were strong enough to bear him, and, if such a steed were not in
stables, would walk the distance swingingly. He is a man of action, a
fighter, an insolent dominator of men and women. In fact, he is merely
a stout man--uniform with Porthos, and Arthur Orton, and Sir John
Falstaff; spiced, like them, with charlatanism and braggadocio, and
not the less a fine fellow for that. Indeed, such bulk as his and
theirs is in the same kind as that bulk which, lesser in degree, is
indispensable to greatness in practical affairs. No man, as Prince
Bismarck declared, is to be trusted in state-craft until he can show a
stomach. A lack of stomach betokens lack of mental solidity, of
humanity, of capacity for going through with things; and these three
qualities are essential to statesmanship. Poets and philosophers can
afford to be thin--cannot, indeed, afford to be otherwise; inasmuch as
poetry and philosophy thrive but in the clouds aloft, and a stomach
ballasts you to earth. Such ballast the statesman must have. Thin
statesmen may destroy, but construct they cannot; have achieved chaos,
but cosmos never.

But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can
gaze on this exquisitely concrete thing--this glad and simple creature
of Hokusai? Let us emulate his calm, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls
before us--pinguis, iners, placidus--in the pale twilight. Let us not
seek to identify him as god or mortal, nor guess his character from
his form. Rather, let us take him as he is; for all time the perfect
type of fatness.

Lovely and excessive monster! Monster immensurable! What belt could
inclip you? What blade were long enough to prick the heart of you?


`THE VISIT'
A PAINTING BY GEORGE MORLAND, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION

Never, I suppose, was a painter less maladif in his work than Morland,
that lover of simple and sun-bright English scenes. Probably, this
picture of his is all cheerful in intention. Yet the effect of it is
saddening.

Superficially, the scene is cheerful enough. Our first impression is
of a happy English home, of childish high-spirits and pretty manners.
We note how genial a lady is the visitor, and how eager the children
are to please. One of them trips respectfully forward--a wave of
yellow curls fresh and crisp from the brush, a rustle of white muslin
fresh and crisp from the wash. She is supported on one side by her
grown-up sister, on the other by her little brother, who displays the
nectarine already given to him by the kind lady. Splendid in far-
reaching furbelows, that kind lady holds out both her hands, beaming
encouragement. On her ample lap is a little open basket with other
ripe nectarines in it--one for every child.

Modest, demure, the girl trips forward as though she were dancing a
quadrille. In the garden, just beyond the threshold, stand two smaller
sisters, shyly awaiting their turn. They, too, are in their Sunday-
best, and on the tiptoe of excitement--infant coryphe'es, in whom, as
they stand at the wings, stage-fright is overborne by the desire to be
seen and approved. I fancy they are rehearsing under their breath the
`Yes, ma' am,' and the `No, ma'am,' and the `I thank you, ma'am, very
much,' which their grown-up sister has been drilling into them during
the hurried toilet they have just been put through in honour of this
sudden call.

How anxious their mother is during the ceremony of introduction! How
keenly, as she sits there, she keeps her eyes fixed on the visitor's
face! Maternal anxiety, in that gaze, seems to be intensified by
social humility. For this is no ordinary visitor. It is some great
lady of the county, very rich, of high fashion, come from a great
mansion in a great park, bringing fruit from one of her own many hot-
houses. That she has come at all is an act of no slight condescension,
and the mother feels it. Even so did homely Mrs. Fairchild look up to
Lady Noble. Indeed, I suspect that this visitor is Lady Noble herself,
and that the Fairchilds themselves are neighbours of this family.
These children have been coached to say `Yes, my lady,' and `No, my
lady,' and `I thank you, my lady, very much'; and their mother has
already been hoping that Mrs. Fairchild will haply pass through the
lane and see the emblazoned yellow chariot at the wicket. But just now
she is all maternal--`These be my jewels.' See with what pride she
fingers the sampler embroidered by one of her girls, knowing well that
`spoilt' Miss Augusta Noble could not do such embroidery to save her
life--that life which, through her Promethean naughtiness in playing
with fire, she was so soon to lose.

Other exemplary samplers hang on the wall yonder. On the mantelshelf
stands a slate, with an ink-pot and a row of tattered books, and other
tokens of industry. The schoolroom, beyond a doubt. Lady Noble has
expressed a wish to see the children here, in their own haunt, and her
hostess has led the way hither, somewhat flustered, gasping many
apologies for the plainness of the apartment. A plain apartment it is:
dark, bare-boarded, dingy-walled. And not merely a material gloom
pervades it. There is a spiritual gloom, also--the subtly oppressive
atmosphere of a room where life has not been lived happily.

Though these children are cheerful now, it is borne in on us by the
atmosphere (as preserved for us by Morland's master-hand) that their
life is a life of appalling dismalness. Even if we had nothing else to
go on, this evidence of our senses were enough. But we have other
things to go on. We know well the way in which children of this period
were brought up. We remember the life of `The Fairchild Family,' those
putative neighbours of this family--in any case, its obvious
contemporaries; and we know that the life of those hapless little
prigs was typical of child-life in the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Depend on it, this family (whatever its name may be: the Thompsons, I
conjecture) is no exception to the dismal rule. In this schoolroom,
every day is a day of oppression, of forced endeavour to reach an
impossible standard of piety and good conduct--a day of tears and
texts, of texts quoted and tears shed, incessantly, from morning unto
evening prayers. After morning prayers (read by Papa), breakfast. The
bread-and-butter of which, for the children, this meal consists, must
be eaten (slowly) in a silence by them unbroken except with prompt
answers to such scriptural questions as their parents (who have ham-
and-eggs) may, now and again, address to them. After breakfast, the
Catechism (heard by Mamma). After the Catechism, a hymn to be learnt.
After the repetition of this hymn, arithmetic, caligraphy, the use of
the globes. At noon, a decorous walk with Papa, who for their benefit
discourses on the General Depravity of Mankind in all Countries after
the Fall, occasionally pausing by the way to point for them some moral
of Nature. After a silent dinner, the little girls sew, under the
supervision of Mamma, or of the grown-up sister, or of both these
authorities, till the hour in which (if they have sewn well) they reap
permission to play (quietly) with their doll. A silent supper, after
which they work samplers. Another hymn to be learnt and repeated.
Evening prayers. Bedtime: `Good-night, dear Papa; good-night, dear
Mamma.'

Such, depend on it, is the Thompsons' curriculum. What a painful
sequence of pictures a genre-painter might have made of it! Let us be
thankful that we see the Thompsons only in this brief interlude of
their life, tearless and unpinafored, in this hour of strange
excitement, glorying in that Sunday-best which on Sundays is to them
but a symbol of intenser gloom.

But their very joy is in itself tragic. It reveals to us, in a flash,
the tragedy of their whole existence. That so much joy should result
from mere suspension of the usual re'gime, the sight of Lady Noble,
the anticipation of a nectarine! For us there is no comfort in the
knowledge that their present degree of joy is proportionate to their
usual degree of gloom, that for them the Law of Compensation drops
into the scale of these few moments an exact counter-weight of joy to
the misery accumulated in the scale of all their other moments. We,
who do not live their life, who regard Lady Noble as a mere Hecuba,
and who would accept one of her nectarines only in sheer politeness,
cannot rejoice with them that do rejoice thus, can but pity them for
all that has led up to their joy. We may reflect that the harsh system
on which they are reared will enable them to enjoy life with infinite
gusto when they are grown up, and that it is, therefore, a better
system than the indulgent modern one. We may reflect, further, that it
produces a finer type of man or woman, less selfish, better-mannered,
more capable and useful. The pretty grown-up daughter here, leading
her little sister by the hand, so gracious and modest in her mien, so
sunny and affectionate, so obviously wholesome and high-principled--is
she not a walking testimonial to the system? Yet to us the system is
not the less repulsive in itself. Its results may be what you please,
but its practice were impossible. We are too tender, too sentimental.
We have not the nerve to do our duty to children, nor can we bear to
think of any one else doing it. To children we can do nothing but
`spoil' them, nothing but bless their hearts and coddle their souls,
taking no thought for their future welfare. And we are justified,
maybe, in our flight to this opposite extreme. Nobody can read one
line ahead in the book of fate. No child is guaranteed to become an
adult. Any child may die to-morrow. How much greater for us the sting
of its death if its life shall not have been made as pleasant as
possible! What if its short life shall have been made as unpleasant as
possible? Conceive the remorse of Mrs. Thompson here if one of her
children were to die untimely--if one of them were stricken down now,
before her eyes, by this surfeit of too sudden joy!

However, we do not fancy that Mrs. Thompson is going to be thus
afflicted. We believe that there is a saving antidote in the cup of
her children's joy. There is something, we feel, that even now
prevents them from utter ecstasy. Some shadow, even now, hovers over
them. What is it? It is not the mere atmosphere of the room, so
oppressive to us. It is something more definite than that, and even
more sinister. It looms aloft, monstrously, like one of those
grotesque actual shadows which a candle may cast athwart walls and
ceiling. Whose shadow is it? we wonder, and, wondering, become sure
that it is Mr. Thompson's--Papa's.

The papa of Georgian children! We know him well, that awfully massive
and mysterious personage, who seemed ever to his offspring so remote
when they were in his presence, so frighteningly near when they were
out of it. In Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories in Verse he occurs
again and again. Mr. Fairchild was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet,
when the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have
been another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from
the many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the
girls had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the
lines of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster
about him. He, however, is disqualified as a type by the fact that he
was `an entirely honest merchant.' For one of the most salient
peculiarities in the true Georgian Papa was his having apparently no
occupation whatever--his being simply and solely a Papa. Even in
social life he bore no part: we never hear of him calling on a
neighbour or being called on. Even in his own household he was seldom
visible. Except at their meals, and when he took them for their walk,
and when they were sent to him to be reprimanded, his children never
beheld him in the flesh. Mamma, poor lady, careful of many other
things, superintended her children unremittingly, to keep them in the
thorny way they should go. Hers the burden and heat of every day, hers
to double the ro^les of Martha and Cornelia, that her husband might be
left ever calmly aloof in that darkened room, the Study. There, in a
high armchair, with one stout calf crossed over the other, immobile
throughout the long hours sate he, propping a marble brow on a dexter
finger of the same material. On the table beside him was a vase of
flowers, daily replenished by the children, and a closed volume. It is
remarkable that in none of the many woodcuts in which he has been
handed down to us do we see him reading; he is always meditating on
something he has just read. Occasionally, he is fingering a portfolio
of engravings, or leaning aside to examine severely a globe of the
world. That is the nearest he ever gets to physical activity. In him
we see the static embodiment of perfect wisdom and perfect
righteousness. We take him at his own valuation, humbly. Yet we have a
queer instinct that there was a time when he did not diffuse all this
cold radiance of good example. Something tells us that he has been a
sinner in his day--a rattler of the ivories at Almack's, and an ogler
of wenches in the gardens of Vauxhall, a sanguine backer of the Negro
against the Suffolk Bantam, and a devil of a fellow at boxing the
watch and wrenching the knockers when Bow Bells were chiming the small
hours. Nor do we feel that he is a penitent. He is too Olympian for
that. He has merely put these things behind him--has calmly, as a
matter of business, transferred his account from the worldly bank to
the heavenly. He has seen fit to become `Papa.' As such, strong in the
consciousness of his own perfection, he has acquired, gradually,
quasi-divine powers over his children. Himself invisible, we know that
he can always see them. Himself remote, we know that he is always with
them, and that always they feel his presence. He prevents them in all
their ways. The Mormon Eye is not more direly inevitable than he.
Whenever they offend in word or deed, he knows telepathically, and
fixes their punishment, long before they are arraigned at his
judgment-seat.

At this moment, as at all others, Mr. Thompson has his inevitable eye
on his children, and they know that it is on them. He is well enough
pleased with them at this moment. But alas! we feel that ere the sun
sets they will have incurred his wrath. Presently Lady Noble will have
finished her genial inspection, and have sailed back, under convoy of
the mother and the grown-up daughter, to the parlour, there to partake
of that special dish of tea which is even now being brewed for her.
When the children are left alone, their pent excitement will overflow
and wash them into disgrace. Belike, they will quarrel over the
nectarines. There will be bitter words, and a pinch, and a scratch,
and a blow, screams, a scrimmage. The rout will be heard afar in the
parlour. The grown-up sister will hasten back and be beheld suddenly,
a quelling figure, on the threshold: `For shame, Clara! Mary, I wonder
at you! Henry, how dare you, sir? Silence, Ethel! Papa shall hear of
this.' Flushed and rumpled, the guilty four will hang their heads,
cowed by authority and by it perversely reconciled one with another.
Authority will bid them go upstairs `this instant,' there to shed
their finery and resume the drab garb of every day. From the bedroom-
windows they will see Lady Noble step into her yellow chariot and
drive away. Envy--an inarticulate, impotent envy--will possess their
hearts: why cannot they be rich, and grown-up, and bowed to by every
one? When the chariot is out of sight, envy will be superseded by the
play-instinct. Silently, in their hearts, the children will play at
being Lady Noble.... Mamma's voice will be heard on the stairs,
rasping them back to the realities. Sullenly they will go down to the
schoolroom, and resume their tasks. But they will not be able to
concentrate their unsettled minds. The girls will make false stitches
in the pillow-slips which they had been hemming so neatly when the
yellow chariot drove up to the front-door; and Master Harry will be
merely dazed by that page of the Delectus which he had almost got by
heart. Their discontent will be inspissated by the knowledge that they
are now worse-off than ever--are in dire disgrace, and that even now
the grown-up sister is `telling Papa' (who knows already, and has but
awaited the formal complaint). Presently the grown-up sister will come
into the schoolroom, looking very grave: `Children, Papa has something
to say to you.' In the Study, to which, quaking, they will proceed, an
endless sermon awaits them. The sin of Covetousness will be expatiated
on, and the sins of Discord and Hatred, and the eternal torment in
store for every child who is guilty of them. All four culprits will be
in tears soon after the exordium. Before the peroration (a graphic
description of the Lake of Fire) they will have become hysterical.
They will be sent supperless to bed. On the morrow they will have to
learn and repeat the chapter about Cain and Abel. A week, at least,
will have elapsed before they are out of disgrace. Such are the
inevitable consequences of joy in a joyless life. It were well for
these children had `The Visit' never been paid.

Morland, I suppose, discerned naught of all this tragedy in his
picture. To him, probably, the thing was an untainted idyll, was but
one of those placid homely scenes which he loved as dearly as could
none but the brawler and vagabond that he was. And yet... and yet...
perhaps he did intend something of what we discern here. He may have
been thinking, bitterly, of his own childhood, and of the home he ran
away from.


`YET AGAIN'

SOME CRITICISMS OF THE FIRST EDITION

Mr. Edmund Gosse, in THE WORLD: `We may find it hard to realise that
Max may become a classic, but I see no other essayist who seems to
have more chance of it.... There is no question of "reserved places"
on Parnassus, but it is my individual conviction that where La
Bruye`re and Addison and Stevenson are, there Max will be.... It is
perhaps his final charm as an essayist that, underneath a ceremonious
style, an exquisite demeanour and advance, a low voice, a graceful
hearing, a polished cadence, there exists a powerful, sometimes what
almost seems a furious independence of character.'

THE TIMES: `So few men can trifle without being silly or be intimate
without being tiresome, so few have either the mental power or the
unity of vision necessary for a decent transition from mood to mood,
that essayists fit to be ranked with Steele, Addison, Stevenson, are
still few. Mr. Max Beerbohm has proved his title.... There, where
every idea is the author's, and every phrase is scrupulously adapted
to the best expression by the author of his own idea, we get the true
originality in art. Through all the play of fancy, the wit and humour,
the swift transitions, the caprice and jesting, that ultimate
sincerity shines; and it is that which lights Mr. Beerbohm's fine
taste and knowledge of his craft to beauty.'

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: `As an artist whose medium is the essay, Mr. Max
Beerbohm should stand for this generation as Lamb stands for the first
generation of the nineteenth century.'

THE DAILY NEWS: `He has wit, and charm, and good humour--and these are
the qualities which characterise this completely delightful volume of
essays.'

THE MORNING LEADER: `Max sees himself in a hundred different ways. In
any capacity he is unique. He remains our best essayist.'

THE OBSERVER: `Charles Lamb a` la Max is never obtrusive. It is only
the ghost of him that stalks in and about. We soon fall away from the
reminiscence; and the caricaturist becomes a personality.'

Mr. Sidney Dark in THE DAILY EXPRESS: `Max is always delightful in his
dainty, leisurely tolerance of everybody and everything. No other
living writer could have produced "Yet Again." It is individual--and
thoroughly good to read.'

THE EVENING STANDARD: `Mr. Beerbohm is always in holiday mood; and
this we gradually catch from him. We begin by enjoying him; we end by
enjoying life and ourselves.'

THE NATION: `Blessed are they who possess the gift of extracting
sunbeams from cucumbers.... The simplicity of Mr. Beerbohm's themes
serves but to enhance the elegance of his mind.'

Mr. G. S. Street in THE ENGLISHWOMAN: `I trust sincerely I shall not
damage his reputation if I say that the play of his fancy is never
inconsistent with two strong qualities of his mind and temperament, a
sound judgment and a kindly heart.'

Mr. W. H. Chesson in THE DAILY CHRONICLE: `He is undoubtedly one of
our benefactors. He excels in the humour which creates humour.'

THE GLOBE: `In their different ways, all these essays will delight the
appreciative reader, and we can only bid him or her buy, beg, borrow,
or steal Max's latest volume immediately.'

Mr. James Douglas in LONDON OPINION: `The style of these essays is not
eccentric, and yet it is dyed with the hues of a personality as rich
and rare as Elia's own, There is no contemporary prose which is so
uncorrupted by current influences, and which is so sure to defy the
corrosion of time. In a hundred years it will not be a dated or
derelict thing. Its colour and its cadence will delight the
connoisseur then as the colour and cadence of Lamb's prose delights
him now.'

THE MORNING POST: `He is naturally gifted with something that is
called talent in life and genius after death.'





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Yet Again, by Max Beerbohm

