by MAX BEERBOHM

TO MY WIFE

I offer here some of the essays that I have written in the course of the past ten years. While I was collecting them and (quite patiently) reading them again, I found that a few of them were in direct reference to the moments at which they were severally composed. It was clear that these must have their dates affixed to them. And for sake of uniformity I have dated all the others, and, doing so, have thought I need not exclude all such topical remarks as in them too were uttered, nor throw into a past tense such of those remarks as I have retained. Perhaps a book of essays ought to seem as if it had been written a few days before publication. On the other hand--but this is a Note, not a Preface.
M.B.
Rapallo, 1920.

CONTENTS

A RELIC (1918)
`HOW SHALL I WORD IT?' (1910)
MOBLED KING (1911)
KOLNIYATSCH (1913)
NO. 2. THE PINES (1914)
A LETTER THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN (1914)
BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS (1914)
THE GOLDEN DRUGGET (1918)
HOSTS AND GUESTS (1918)
A POINT TO BE REMEMBERED (1918)
SERVANTS (1918)
GOING OUT FOR A WALK (1918)
QUIA IMPERFECTUM (1918)
SOMETHING DEFEASIBLE (1919)
`A CLERGYMAN' (1918)
THE CRIME (1920)
IN HOMES UNBLEST (1919)
WILLIAM AND MARY (1920)
ON SPEAKING FRENCH (1919)
LAUGHTER (1920)

A RELIC
1918.

Yesterday I found in a cupboard an old, small, battered portmanteau
which, by the initials on it, I recognised as my own property. The
lock appeared to have been forced. I dimly remembered having forced it
myself, with a poker, in my hot youth, after some journey in which I
had lost the key; and this act of violence was probably the reason why
the trunk had so long ago ceased to travel. I unstrapped it, not
without dust; it exhaled the faint scent of its long closure; it
contained a tweed suit of Late Victorian pattern, some bills, some
letters, a collar-stud, and--something which, after I had wondered for
a moment or two what on earth it was, caused me suddenly to murmur,
`Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.'

Strange that these words had, year after long year, been existing in
some obscure cell at the back of my brain!--forgotten but all the
while existing, like the trunk in that cupboard. What released them,
what threw open the cell door, was nothing but the fragment of a fan;
just the butt-end of an inexpensive fan. The sticks are of white bone,
clipped together with a semicircular ring that is not silver. They are
neatly oval at the base, but variously jagged at the other end. The
longest of them measures perhaps two inches. Ring and all, they have
no market value; for a farthing is the least coin in our currency. And
yet, though I had so long forgotten them, for me they are not
worthless. They touch a chord... Lest this confession raise false
hopes in the reader, I add that I did not know their owner.

I did once see her, and in Normandy, and by moonlight, and her name
was Ange'lique. She was graceful, she was even beautiful. I was but
nineteen years old. Yet even so I cannot say that she impressed me
favourably. I was seated at a table of a cafe' on the terrace of a
casino. I sat facing the sea, with my back to the casino. I sat
listening to the quiet sea, which I had crossed that morning. The hour
was late, there were few people about. I heard the swing-door behind
me flap open, and was aware of a sharp snapping and crackling sound as
a lady in white passed quickly by me. I stared at her erect thin back
and her agitated elbows. A short fat man passed in pursuit of her--an
elderly man in a black alpaca jacket that billowed. I saw that she had
left a trail of little white things on the asphalt. I watched the
efforts of the agonised short fat man to overtake her as she swept
wraith-like away to the distant end of the terrace. What was the
matter? What had made her so spectacularly angry with him? The three
or four waiters of the cafe' were exchanging cynical smiles and
shrugs, as waiters will. I tried to feel cynical, but was thrilled
with excitement, with wonder and curiosity. The woman out yonder had
doubled on her tracks. She had not slackened her furious speed, but
the man waddlingly contrived to keep pace with her now. With every
moment they became more distinct, and the prospect that they would
presently pass by me, back into the casino, gave me that physical
tension which one feels on a wayside platform at the imminent passing
of an express. In the rushingly enlarged vision I had of them, the
wrath on the woman's face was even more saliently the main thing than
I had supposed it would be. That very hard Parisian face must have
been as white as the powder that coated it. `?coute, Ange'lique,'
gasped the perspiring bourgeois, `e'coute, je te supplie--' The swing-
door received them and was left swinging to and fro. I wanted to
follow, but had not paid for my bock. I beckoned my waiter. On his way
to me he stooped down and picked up something which, with a smile and
a shrug, he laid on my table: `Il semble que Mademoiselle ne s'en
servira plus.' This is the thing I now write of, and at sight of it I
understood why there had been that snapping and crackling, and what
the white fragments on the ground were.

I hurried through the rooms, hoping to see a continuation of that
drama--a scene of appeasement, perhaps, or of fury still implacable.
But the two oddly-assorted players were not performing there. My
waiter had told me he had not seen either of them before. I suppose
they had arrived that day. But I was not destined to see either of
them again. They went away, I suppose, next morning; jointly or
singly; singly, I imagine.

They made, however, a prolonged stay in my young memory, and would
have done so even had I not had that tangible memento of them. Who
were they, those two of whom that one strange glimpse had befallen me?
What, I wondered, was the previous history of each? What, in
particular, had all that tragic pother been about? Mlle. Ange'lique I
guessed to be thirty years old, her friend perhaps fifty-five. Each of
their faces was as clear to me as in the moment of actual vision--the
man's fat shiny bewildered face; the taut white face of the woman, the
hard red line of her mouth, the eyes that were not flashing, but
positively dull, with rage. I presumed that the fan had been a present
from him, and a recent present--bought perhaps that very day, after
their arrival in the town. But what, what had he done that she should
break it between her hands, scattering the splinters as who should sow
dragon's teeth? I could not believe he had done anything much amiss. I
imagined her grievance a trivial one. But this did not make the case
less engrossing. Again and again I would take the fan-stump from my
pocket, examining it on the palm of my hand, or between finger and
thumb, hoping to read the mystery it had been mixed up in, so that I
might reveal that mystery to the world. To the world, yes; nothing
less than that. I was determined to make a story of what I had seen--a
conte in the manner of great Guy de Maupassant. Now and again, in the
course of the past year or so, it had occurred to me that I might be a
writer. But I had not felt the impulse to sit down and write
something. I did feel that impulse now. It would indeed have been an
irresistible impulse if I had known just what to write.

I felt I might know at any moment, and had but to give my mind to it.
Maupassant was an impeccable artist, but I think the secret of the
hold he had on the young men of my day was not so much that we
discerned his cunning as that we delighted in the simplicity which his
cunning achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but
none that had made me feel as though I, if I were a writer, mightn't
have written it myself. Maupassant had an European reputation. It was
pleasing, it was soothing and gratifying, to feel that one could at
any time win an equal fame if one chose to set pen to paper. And now,
suddenly, the spring had been touched in me, the time was come. I was
grateful for the fluke by which I had witnessed on the terrace that
evocative scene. I looked forward to reading the MS. of `The Fan'--to-
morrow, at latest. I was not wildly ambitious. I was not inordinately
vain. I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the world, write
like Mr. George Meredith. Those wondrous works of his, seething with
wit, with poetry and philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me
with the sense that I might do something similar. I had full
consciousness of not being a philosopher, of not being a poet, and of
not being a wit. Well, Maupassant was none of these things. He was
just an observer, like me. Of course he was a good deal older than I,
and had observed a good deal more. But it seemed to me that he was not
my superior in knowledge of life. I knew all about life through him.

Dimly, the initial paragraph of my tale floated in my mind. I--not
exactly I myself, but rather that impersonal je familiar to me through
Maupassant--was to be sitting at that table, with a bock before me,
just as I had sat. Four or five short sentences would give the whole
scene. One of these I had quite definitely composed. You have already
heard it. `Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.'

These words, which pleased me much, were to do double duty. They were
to recur. They were to be, by a fine stroke, the very last words of my
tale, their tranquillity striking a sharp ironic contrast with the
stress of what had just been narrated. I had, you see, advanced
further in the form of my tale than in the substance. But even the
form was as yet vague. What, exactly, was to happen after Mlle.
Ange'lique and M. Joumand (as I provisionally called him) had rushed
back past me into the casino? It was clear that I must hear the whole
inner history from the lips of one or the other of them. Which? Should
M. Joumand stagger out on to the terrace, sit down heavily at the
table next to mine, bury his head in his hands, and presently, in
broken words, blurt out to me all that might be of interest?... `"And
I tell you I gave up everything for her--everything." He stared at me
with his old hopeless eyes. "She is more than the fiend I have
described to you. Yet I swear to you, monsieur, that if I had anything
left to give, it should be hers."

`Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.'

Or should the lady herself be my informant? For a while, I rather
leaned to this alternative. It was more exciting, it seemed to make
the writer more signally a man of the world. On the other hand, it was
less simple to manage. Wronged persons might be ever so communicative,
but I surmised that persons in the wrong were reticent. Mlle.
Ange'lique, therefore, would have to be modified by me in appearance
and behaviour, toned down, touched up; and poor M. Joumand must look
like a man of whom one could believe anything.... `She ceased
speaking. She gazed down at the fragments of her fan, and then, as
though finding in them an image of her own life, whispered, "To think
what I once was, monsieur!--what, but for him, I might be, even now!"
She buried her face in her hands, then stared out into the night.
Suddenly she uttered a short, harsh laugh.

`Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.'

I decided that I must choose the first of these two ways. It was the
less chivalrous as well as the less lurid way, but clearly it was the
more artistic as well as the easier. The `chose vue,' the `tranche de
la vie'--this was the thing to aim at. Honesty was the best policy. I
must be nothing if not merciless. Maupassant was nothing if not
merciless. He would not have spared Mlle. Ange'lique. Besides, why
should I libel M. Joumand? Poor--no, not poor M. Joumand! I warned
myself against pitying him. One touch of `sentimentality,' and I
should be lost. M. Joumand was ridiculous. I must keep him so. But--
what was his position in life? Was he a lawyer perhaps?--or the
proprietor of a shop in the Rue de Rivoli? I toyed with the
possibility that he kept a fan shop--that the business had once been a
prosperous one, but had gone down, down, because of his infatuation
for this woman to whom he was always giving fans--which she always
smashed.... `"Ah monsieur, cruel and ungrateful to me though she is, I
swear to you that if I had anything left to give, it should be hers;
but," he stared at me with his old hopeless eyes, "the fan she broke
to-night was the last--the last, monsieur--of my stock." Down below,'-
-but I pulled myself together, and asked pardon of my Muse.

It may be that I had offended her by my fooling. Or it may be that she
had a sisterly desire to shield Mlle. Ange'lique from my mordant art.
Or it may be that she was bent on saving M. de Maupassant from a
dangerous rivalry. Anyway, she withheld from me the inspiration I had
so confidently solicited. I could not think what had led up to that
scene on the terrace. I tried hard and soberly. I turned the `chose
vue' over and over in my mind, day by day, and the fan-stump over and
over in my hand. But the `chose a` figurer'--what, oh what, was that?
Nightly I revisited the cafe', and sat there with an open mind--a mind
wide-open to catch the idea that should drop into it like a ripe
golden plum. The plum did not ripen. The mind remained wide-open for a
week or more, but nothing except that phrase about the sea rustled to
and fro in it.

A full quarter of a century has gone by. M. Joumand's death, so far
too fat was he all those years ago, may be presumed. A temper so
violent as Mlle. Ange'lique's must surely have brought its owner to
the grave, long since. But here, all unchanged, the stump of her fan
is; and once more I turn it over and over in my hand, not learning its
secret--no, nor even trying to, now. The chord this relic strikes in
me is not one of curiosity as to that old quarrel, but (if you will
forgive me) one of tenderness for my first effort to write, and for my
first hopes of excellence.

`HOW SHALL I WORD IT?'
1910.

It would seem that I am one of those travellers for whom the railway
bookstall does not cater. Whenever I start on a journey, I find that
my choice lies between well-printed books which I have no wish to
read, and well-written books which I could not read without permanent
injury to my eyesight. The keeper of the bookstall, seeing me gaze
vaguely along his shelves, suggests that I should take `Fen Country
Fanny' or else `The Track of Blood' and have done with it. Not wishing
to hurt his feelings, I refuse these works on the plea that I have
read them. Whereon he, divining despite me that I am a superior
person, says `Here is a nice little handy edition of More's "Utopia"'
or `Carlyle's "French Revolution"' and again I make some excuse. What
pleasure could I get from trying to cope with a masterpiece printed in
diminutive grey-ish type on a semi-transparent little grey-ish page? I
relieve the bookstall of nothing but a newspaper or two.

The other day, however, my eye and fancy were caught by a book
entitled `How Shall I Word It?' and sub-entitled `A Complete Letter
Writer for Men and Women.' I had never read one of these manuals, but
had often heard that there was a great and constant `demand' for them.
So I demanded this one. It is no great fun in itself. The writer is no
fool. He has evidently a natural talent for writing letters. His style
is, for the most part, discreet and easy. If you were a young man
writing `to Father of Girl he wishes to Marry' or `thanking Fiance'e
for Present' or `reproaching Fiance'e for being a Flirt,' or if you
were a mother `asking Governess her Qualifications' or `replying to
Undesirable Invitation for her Child,' or indeed if you were in any
other one of the crises which this book is designed to alleviate, you
might copy out and post the specially-provided letter without making
yourself ridiculous in the eyes of its receiver--unless, of course, he
or she also possessed a copy of the book. But--well, can you conceive
any one copying out and posting one of these letters, or even taking
it as the basis for composition? You cannot. That shows how little you
know of your fellow-creatures. Not you nor I can plumb the abyss at
the bottom of which such humility is possible. Nevertheless, as we
know by that great and constant `demand,' there the abyss is, and
there multitudes are at the bottom of it. Let's peer down... No, all
is darkness. But faintly, if we listen hard, is borne up to us a sound
of the scratching of innumerable pens--pens whose wielders are all
trying, as the author of this handbook urges them, to `be original,
fresh, and interesting' by dint of more or less strict adherence to
sample.

Giddily you draw back from the edge of the abyss. Come!--here is a
thought to steady you. The mysterious great masses of helpless folk
for whom `How Shall I Word It' is written are sound at heart, delicate
in feeling, anxious to please, most loth to wound. For it must be
presumed that the author's style of letter-writing is informed as much
by a desire to give his public what it needs, and will pay for, as by
his own beautiful nature; and in the course of all the letters that he
dictates you will find not one harsh word, not one ignoble thought or
unkind insinuation. In all of them, though so many are for the use of
persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are
for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury, sweetness
and light do ever reign. Even `yours truly, Jacob Langton,' in his
`letter to his Daughter's Mercenary Fiance',' mitigates the sternness
of his tone by the remark that his `task is inexpressibly painful.'
And he, Mr. Langton, is the one writer who lets the post go out on his
wrath. When Horace Masterton, of Thorpe Road, Putney, receives from
Miss Jessica Weir, of Fir Villa, Blackheath, a letter `declaring her
Change of Feelings,' does he upbraid her? No; `it was honest and brave
of you to write to me so straightforwardly and at the back of my mind
I know you have done what is best.... I give you back your freedom
only at your desire. God bless you, dear.' Not less admirable is the
behaviour, in similar case, of Cecil Grant (14, Glover Street,
Streatham). Suddenly, as a bolt from the blue, comes a letter from
Miss Louie Hawke (Elm View, Deerhurst), breaking off her betrothal to
him. Haggard, he sits down to his desk; his pen traverses the
notepaper--calling down curses on Louie and on all her sex? No; `one
cannot say good-bye for ever without deep regret to days that have
been so full of happiness. I must thank you sincerely for all your
great kindness to me.... With every sincere wish for your future
happiness,' he bestows complete freedom on Miss Hawke. And do not
imagine that in the matter of self-control and sympathy, of power to
understand all and pardon all, the men are lagged behind by the women.
Miss Leila Johnson (The Manse, Carlyle) has observed in Leonard Wace
(Dover Street, Saltburn) a certain coldness of demeanour; yet `I do
not blame you; it is probably your nature'; and Leila in her sweet
forbearance is typical of all the other pained women in these pages:
she is but one of a crowd of heroines.

Face to face with all this perfection, the not perfect reader begins
to crave some little outburst of wrath, of hatred or malice, from one
of these imaginary ladies and gentlemen. He longs for--how shall he
word it?--a glimpse of some bad motive, of some little lapse from
dignity. Often, passing by a pillar-box, I have wished I could unlock
it and carry away its contents, to be studied at my leisure. I have
always thought such a haul would abound in things fascinating to a
student of human nature. One night, not long ago, I took a waxen
impression of the lock of the pillar-box nearest to my house, and had
a key made. This implement I have as yet lacked either the courage or
the opportunity to use. And now I think I shall throw it away.... No,
I shan't. I refuse, after all, to draw my inference that the bulk of
the British public writes always in the manner of this handbook. Even
if they all have beautiful natures they must sometimes be sent
slightly astray by inferior impulses, just as are you and I.

And, if err they must, surely it were well they should know how to do
it correctly and forcibly. I suggest to our author that he should
sprinkle his next edition with a few less righteous examples, thereby
both purging his book of its monotony and somewhat justifying its sub-
title. Like most people who are in the habit of writing things to be
printed, I have not the knack of writing really good letters. But let
me crudely indicate the sort of thing that our manual needs....

LETTER FROM POOR MAN TO OBTAIN MONEY FROM RICH ONE.

[The English law is particularly hard on what is called blackmail. It
is therefore essential that the applicant should write nothing that
might afterwards be twisted to incriminate him.--ED.]

DEAR SIR,
To-day, as I was turning out a drawer in my attic, I came across a
letter which by a curious chance fell into my hands some years ago,
and which, in the stress of grave pecuniary embarrassment, had escaped
my memory. It is a letter written by yourself to a lady, and the date
shows it to have been written shortly after your marriage. It is of a
confidential nature, and might, I fear, if it fell into the wrong
hands, be cruelly misconstrued. I would wish you to have the
satisfaction of destroying it in person. At first I thought of sending
it on to you by post. But I know how happy you are in your domestic
life; and probably your wife and you, in your perfect mutual trust,
are in the habit of opening each other's letters. Therefore, to avoid
risk, I would prefer to hand the document to you personally. I will
not ask you to come to my attic, where I could not offer you such
hospitality as is due to a man of your wealth and position. You will
be so good as to meet me at 3.0 A.M. (sharp) to-morrow (Thursday)
beside the tenth lamp-post to the left on the Surrey side of Waterloo
Bridge; at which hour and place we shall not be disturbed.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours respectfully,
JAMES GRIDGE.

LETTER FROM YOUNG MAN REFUSING TO PAY HIS TAILOR'S BILL.

Mr. Eustace Davenant has received the half-servile, half-insolent
screed which Mr. Yardley has addressed to him. Let Mr. Yardley cease
from crawling on his knees and shaking his fist. Neither this posture
nor this gesture can wring one bent farthing from the pockets of Mr.
Davenant, who was a minor at the time when that series of ill-made
suits was supplied to him and will hereafter, as in the past, shout
(without prejudice) from the house-tops that of all the tailors in
London Mr. Yardley is at once the most grasping and the least
competent.

LETTER TO THANK AUTHOR FOR INSCRIBED COPY OF BOOK.

DEAR MR. EMANUEL FLOWER,
It was kind of you to think of sending me a copy of your new book. It
would have been kinder still to think again and abandon that project.
I am a man of gentle instincts, and do not like to tell you that `A
Flight into Arcady' (of which I have skimmed a few pages, thus wasting
two or three minutes of my not altogether worthless time) is trash. On
the other hand, I am determined that you shall not be able to go
around boasting to your friends, if you have any, that this work was
not condemned, derided, and dismissed by your sincere well-wisher,
WREXFORD CRIPPS.

LETTER TO MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT UNSEATED AT GENERAL ELECTION.

DEAR MR. POBSBY-BURFORD,
Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the
crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are
moments when political conviction is overborne by personal sentiment;
and this is one of them. Your loss of the seat that you held is the
more striking by reason of the splendid manner in which the northern
and eastern divisions of Odgetown have been wrested from the Liberal
Party. The great bulk of the newspaper-reading public will be puzzled
by your extinction in the midst of our party's triumph. But then, the
great mass of the newspaper-reading public has not met you. I have.
You will probably not remember me. You are the sort of man who would
not remember anybody who might not be of some definite use to him.
Such, at least, was one of the impressions you made on me when I met
you last summer at a dinner given by our friends the Pelhams. Among
the other things in you that struck me were the blatant pomposity of
your manner, your appalling flow of cheap platitudes, and your hoggish
lack of ideas. It is such men as you that lower the tone of public
life. And I am sure that in writing to you thus I am but expressing
what is felt, without distinction of party, by all who sat with you in
the late Parliament.

The one person in whose behalf I regret your withdrawal into private
life is your wife, whom I had the pleasure of taking in to the
aforesaid dinner. It was evident to me that she was a woman whose
spirit was well-nigh broken by her conjunction with you. Such remnants
of cheerfulness as were in her I attributed to the Parliamentary
duties which kept you out of her sight for so very many hours daily. I
do not like to think of the fate to which the free and independent
electors of West Odgetown have just condemned her. Only, remember
this: chattel of yours though she is, and timid and humble, she
despises you in her heart.
I am, dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford,
Yours very truly,
HAROLD THISTLAKE.

LETTER FROM YOUNG LADY IN ANSWER TO INVITATION FROM OLD
SCHOOLMISTRESS.

MY DEAR MISS PRICE,
How awfully sweet of you to ask me to stay with you for a few days but
how can you think I may have forgotten you for of course I think of
you so very often and of the three ears I spent at your school because
it is such a joy not to be there any longer and if one is at all down
it bucks one up derectly to remember that thats all over atanyrate and
that one has enough food to nurrish one and not that awful monottany
of life and not the petty fogging daily tirrany you went in for and I
can imagin no greater thrill and luxury in a way than to come and see
the whole dismal grind still going on but without me being in it but
this would be rather beastly of me wouldnt it so please dear Miss
Price dont expect me and do excuse mistakes of English Composition and
Spelling and etcetra in your affectionate old pupil,
EMILY TH?RESE LYNN-ROYSTON.

ps, I often rite to people telling them where I was edducated and
highly reckomending you.

LETTER IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF WEDDING PRESENT.

DEAR LADY AMBLESHAM,
Who gives quickly, says the old proverb, gives twice. For this reason
I have purposely delayed writing to you, lest I should appear to thank
you more than once for the small, cheap, hideous present you sent me
on the occasion of my recent wedding. Were you a poor woman, that
little bowl of ill-imitated Dresden china would convict you of
tastelessness merely; were you a blind woman, of nothing but an odious
parsimony. As you have normal eyesight and more than normal wealth,
your gift to me proclaims you at once a Philistine and a miser (or
rather did so proclaim you until, less than ten seconds after I had
unpacked it from its wrappings of tissue paper, I took it to the open
window and had the satisfaction of seeing it shattered to atoms on the
pavement). But stay! I perceive a possible flaw in my argument.
Perhaps you were guided in your choice by a definite wish to insult
me. I am sure, on reflection, that this was so. I shall not forget.
Yours, etc.,
CYNTHIA BEAUMARSH.

PS. My husband asks me to tell you to warn Lord Amblesham to keep out
of his way or to assume some disguise so complete that he will not be
recognised by him and horsewhipped.

PPS. I am sending copies of this letter to the principal London and
provincial newspapers.

LETTER FROM...

But enough! I never thought I should be so strong in this line. I had
not foreseen such copiousness and fatal fluency. Never again will I
tap these deep dark reservoirs in a character that had always seemed
to me, on the whole, so amiable.

MOBLED KING
1911.

Just as a memorial, just to perpetuate in one's mind the dead man in
whose image and honour it has been erected, this statue is better than
any that I have seen.... No, pedantic reader: I ought not to have said
`than any other that I have seen' Except in shrouded and distorted
outline, I have not seen this statue.

Not as an image, then, can it be extolled by me. And I am bound to say
that even as an honour it seems to me more than dubious. Commissioned
and designed and chiselled and set up in all reverence, it yet serves
very well the purpose of a guy. This does not surprise you. You are
familiar with a host of statues that are open to precisely that
objection. Westminster Abbey abounds in them. They confront you
throughout London and the provinces. They stud the Continent. Rare
indeed is the statue that can please the well-wishers of the person
portrayed. Nor in every case is the sculptor to blame. There is in the
art of sculpture itself a quality intractable to the aims of personal
portraiture. Sculpture, just as it cannot fitly record the gesture of
a moment, is discommoded by personal idiosyncrasies. The details that
go to compose this or that gentleman's appearance--such as the little
wrinkles around his eyes, and the way his hair grows, and the special
convolutions of his ears--all these, presentable on canvas, or
evocable by words, are not right matter for the chisel or for the
mould and furnace. Translated into terms of bronze or marble,
howsoever cunningly, these slight and trivial things cease to be
trivial and slight. They assume a ludicrous importance. No man is
worthy to be reproduced as bust or statue. And if sculpture is too
august to deal with what a man has received from his Maker, how much
less ought it to be bothered about what he has received from his
hosier and tailor! Sculpture's province is the soul. The most
concrete, it is also the most spiritual of the arts. The very
heaviness and stubbornness of its material, precluding it from happy
dalliance with us fleeting individual creatures, fit it to cope with
that which in mankind is permanent and universal. It can through the
symbol give us incomparably the type. Wise is that sculptor who, when
portray an individual he must, treats arbitrarily the mere actual
husk, and strives but to show the soul. Of course, he must first catch
that soul. What M. Rodin knew about the character and career of Mr.
George Wyndham, or about the character and career of Mr. Bernard Shaw,
was not, I hazard, worth knowing; and Mr. Shaw is handed down by him
to posterity as a sort of bearded lady, and Mr. Wyndham as a sort of
beardless one. But about Honore' de Balzac he knew much. Balzac he
understood. Balzac's work, Balzac's soul, in that great rugged figure
aspiring and indeflexible, he gave us with a finality that could have
been achieved through no other art than sculpture.

There is a close kinship between that statue of Balzac and this statue
of which I am to tell you. Both induce, above all, a profound sense of
unrest, of heroic will to overcome all obstacles. The will to compass
self-expression, the will to emerge from darkness to light, from
formlessness to form, from nothing to everything--this it is that I
find in either statue; and this it is in virtue of which the Balzac
has unbeknown a brother on the Italian seaboard.

Here stands--or rather struggles--on his pedestal this younger
brother, in strange contrast with the scenery about him. Mildly,
behind his back, the sea laps the shingle. Mildly, in front of him, on
the other side of the road, rise some of those mountains whereby the
Earth, before she settled down to cool, compassed--she, too--some sort
of self-expression. Mildly around his pedestal, among rusty anchors
strewn there on the grass between road and beach, sit the fishermen,
mending their nets or their sails, or whittling bits of wood. What
will you say of these fishermen when----but I outstrip my narrative.

I had no inkling of tragedy when first I came to the statue. I did not
even know it was a statue. I had made by night the short journey from
Genoa to this place beside the sea; and, driving along the coast-road
to the hotel that had been recommended, I passed what in the starlight
looked like nothing but an elderly woman mounted on a square pedestal
and gazing out seaward--a stout, elderly, lonely woman in a poke
bonnet, indescribable except by that old Victorian term `a party,' and
as unlike Balzac's younger brother as only Sarah Gamp's elder sister
could be. How, I wondered in my hotel, came the elder sister of Sarah
Gamp to be here in Liguria and in the twentieth century? How clomb
she, puffing and panting, on to that pedestal? For what argosy of gin
was she straining her old eyes seaward? I knew there would be no sleep
for me until I had solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along
the way I had come. The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the
starlight the `party' who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous,
mysterious, there she stood, immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the
moon. By a slight shoreward lift of crinoline, as against the seaward
protrusion of poke bonnet, a grotesque balance was given to the
unshapely shape of her. For all her uncanniness, I thought I had never
seen any one, male or female, old or young, look so hopelessly common.
I felt that by daylight a noble vulgarity might be hers. In the
watches of the night she was hopelessly, she was transcendently
common.

Little by little, as I came nearer, she ceased to illude me, and I
began to think of her as `it.' What `it' was, however, I knew not
until I was at quite close quarters to the pedestal it rose from.
There, on the polished granite, was carved this legend:

A UMBERTO I?

And instinctively, as my eye travelled up, my hand leapt to the
salute; for I stood before the veiled image of a dead king, and had
been guilty of a misconception that dishonoured him.

Standing respectfully at one angle and another, I was able to form, by
the outlines of the grey sheeting that enveloped him, some rough
notion of his posture and his costume. Round what was evidently his
neck the sheeting was constricted by ropes; and the height and girth
of the bundle above--to half-closed eyes, even now, an averted poke-
bonnet--gave token of a tall helmet with a luxuriant shock of plumes
waving out behind. Immediately beneath the ropes, the breadth and
sharpness of the bundle hinted at epaulettes. And the protrusion that
had seemed to be that of a wind-blown crinoline was caused, I thought,
by the king having his left hand thrust well out to grasp the hilt of
his inclined sword. Altogether, I had soon builded a clear enough idea
of his aspect; and I promised myself a curious gratification in
comparing anon this idea with his aspect as it really was.

Yes, I took it for granted that the expectant statue was to be
unveiled within the next few days. I was glad to be in time--not
knowing in how terribly good time I was--for the ceremony. Not since
my early childhood had I seen the unveiling of a statue; and on that
occasion I had struck a discordant note by weeping bitterly. I dare
say you know that statue of William Harvey which stands on the Leas at
Folkestone. You say you were present at the unveiling? Well, I was the
child who cried. I had been told that William Harvey was a great and
good man who discovered the circulation of the blood; and my mind had
leapt, in all the swiftness of its immaturity, to the conclusion that
his statue would he a bright blood-red. Cruel was the thrill of dismay
I had when at length the cord was pulled and the sheeting slid down,
revealing so dull a sight...

Contemplating the veiled Umberto, I remembered that sight, remembered
those tears unworthy (as my nurse told me) of a little gentleman.
Years had passed. I was grown older and wiser. I had learnt to expect
less of life. There was no fear that I should disgrace myself in the
matter of Umberto.

I was not so old, though, nor so wise, as I am now. I expected more
than there is of Italian speed, and less than there is of Italian
subtlety. A whole year has passed since first I set eyes on veiled
Umberto. And Umberto is still veiled.

And veiled for more than a whole year, as I now know, had Umberto been
before my coming. Four years before that, the municipal council, it
seems, had voted the money for him. His father, of sensational memory,
was here already, in the middle of the main piazza, of course. And
Garibaldi was hard by; so was Mazzini; so was Cavour. Umberto was
still implicit in a block of marble, high upon one of the mountains of
Carrara. The task of educing him was given to a promising young
sculptor who lived here. Down came the block of marble, and was
transported to the studio of the promising young sculptor; and out,
briskly enough, mustachios and all, came Umberto. He looked very
regal, I am sure, as he stood glaring around with his prominent marble
eyeballs, and snuffing the good fresh air of the world as far as might
be into shallow marble nostrils. He looked very authoritative and
fierce and solemn, I am sure. He made, anyhow, a deep impression on
the mayor and councillors, and the only question was as to just where
he should be erected. The granite pedestal had already been hewn and
graven; but a worthy site was to seek. Outside the railway station? He
would obstruct the cabs. In the Giardino Pubblico? He would clash with
Garibaldi. Every councillor had a pet site, and every other one a pet
objection to it. That strip of waste ground where the fishermen sat
pottering? It was too humble, too far from the centre of things.
Meanwhile, Umberto stayed in the studio. Dust settled on his
epaulettes. A year went by. Spiders ventured to spin their webs from
his plumes to his mustachios. Another year went by. Whenever the
councillors had nothing else to talk about they talked about the site
for Umberto.

Presently they became aware that among the poorer classes of the town
had arisen a certain hostility to the statue. The councillors
suspected that the priesthood had been at work. The forces of reaction
against the forces of progress! Very well! The councillors hurriedly
decided that the best available site, on the whole, was that strip of
waste ground where the fishermen sat pottering. The pedestal was
promptly planted. Umberto was promptly wrapped up, put on a lorry,
wheeled to the place, and hoisted into position. The date of the
unveiling was fixed. The mayor I am told, had already composed his
speech, and was getting it by heart. Around the pedestal the fishermen
sat pottering. It was not observed that they received any visits from
the priests.

But priests are subtle; and it is a fact that three days before the
date of the unveiling the fishermen went, all in their black Sunday
clothes, and claimed audience of the mayor. He laid aside the MS. of
his speech, and received them affably. Old Agostino, their spokesman,
he whose face is so marvellously wrinkled, lifted his quavering voice.
He told the mayor, with great respect, that the rights of the
fishermen had been violated. That piece of ground had for hundreds of
years belonged to them. They had not been consulted about that statue.
They did not want it there. It was in the way, and must (said
Agostino) be removed. At first the mayor was inclined to treat the
deputation with a light good humour, and to resume the study of his
MS. But Agostino had a MS. of his own. This was a copy of a charter
whereby, before mayors and councillors were, the right to that piece
of land had been granted in perpetuity to the fisherfolk of the
district. The mayor, not committing himself to any opinion of the
validity of the document, said that he--but there, it is tedious to
report the speeches of mayors. Agostino told his mayor that a certain
great lawyer would be arriving from Genoa to-morrow. It were tedious
to report what passed between that great lawyer and the mayor and
councillors assembled. Suffice it that the councillors were
frightened, the date of the unveiling was postponed, and the whole
matter, referred to high authorities in Rome, went darkly drifting
into some form of litigation, and there abides.

Technically, then, neither side may claim that it has won. The statue
has not been unveiled. But the statue has not been displaced.
Practically, though, and morally, the palm is, so far, to the
fishermen. The pedestal does not really irk them at all. On the
contrary, it and the sheeting do cast for them in the heat a pleasant
shadow, of which (the influence of Fleet Street, once felt, never
shaken off, forces me to say) they are not slow to avail themselves.
And the cost of the litigation comes not, you may be sure, out of
their light old pockets, but out of the coffers of some pious rich
folk hereabouts. The Pope remains a prisoner in the Vatican? Well,
here is Umberto, a kind of hostage. Yet with what a difference! Here
is no spiritual king stripped of earthly kingship. Here is an earthly
king kept swaddled up day after day, to be publicly ridiculous. The
fishermen, as I have said, pay him no heed. The mayor, passing along
the road, looks straight in front of him, with an elaborate assumption
of unconcern. So do the councillors. But there are others who look
maliciously up at the hapless figure. Now and again there comes a monk
from the monastery on that hill yonder. He laughs into his beard as he
goes by. Two by two, in their grey cloaks and their blue mantillas,
the little orphan girls are sometimes marched past. There they go, as
I write. Not malice, but a vague horror, is in the eyes they turn.
Umberto, belike, is used as a means to frighten them when, or lest,
they offend. The nun in whose charge they arc crosses herself.

Yet it is recorded of Umberto that he was kind to little children.
This, indeed, is one of the few things recorded of him. Fierce though
he looked, he was, for the most part, it must be confessed, null. He
seldom asserted himself. There was so little of that for him to
assert. He had, therefore, no personal enemies. In a negative way, he
was popular, and was positively popular, for a while, after his
assassination. And this it is that makes him now the less able, poor
fellow, to understand and endure the shame he is put to. `Stat rex
indignatus.' He does try to assert himself now--does strive, by day
and by night, poor petrefact, to rip off these fell and clownish
integuments. Of his elder brother in Paris he has never heard; but he
knows that Lazarus arisen from the tomb did not live in grave-clothes.
He forgets that after all he is only a statue. To himself he is still
a king--or at least a man who was once a king and, having done no
wrong, ought not now to be insulted. If he had in his composition one
marble grain of humour, he might... but no, a joke against oneself is
always cryptic. Fat men are not always the best drivers of fat oxen;
and cryptic statues cannot be depended on to see cryptic jokes.

If Umberto could grasp the truth that no man is worthy to be
reproduced as a statue; if he could understand, once and for all, that
the unveiling of him were itself a notable disservice to him, then
might his wrath be turned to acquiescence, and his acquiescence to
gratitude, and he be quite happy hid. Is he, really, more ridiculous
now than he always was? If you be an extraordinary man, as was his
father, win a throne by all means: you will fill it. If your son be
another extraordinary man, he will fill it when his turn comes. But if
that son be, as, alas, he most probably will be, like Umberto, quite
ordinary, then let parental love triumph over pride of dynasty: advise
your boy to abdicate at the earliest possible moment. A great king--
what better? But it is ill that a throne be sat on by one whose legs
dangle uncertainly towards the dai"s, and ill that a crown settle down
over the tip of the nose. And the very fact that for quite inadequate
kings men's hands do leap to the salute, instinctively, does but make
us, on reflection, the more conscious of the whole absurdity. Even
than a great man on a throne we can, when we reflect, imagine
something--ah, not something better perhaps, but something more remote
from absurdity. Let us say that Umberto's father was great, as well as
extraordinary. He was accounted great enough to be the incarnation of
a great idea. `United Italy'--oh yes, a great idea, a charming idea:
in the 'sixties I should have been all for it. But how shall I or any
other impartial person write odes to the reality? What people in all
this exquisite peninsula are to-day the happier for the things done by
and through Vittorio Emmanuele Liberator?

The question is not merely rhetorical. There is the large class of
politicians, who would have had no scope in the old days. And there
are the many men who in other days would have been fishing or
ploughing, but now strut in this and that official uniform. There
passes between me and the sea, as I write--how opportunely people do
pass here!--a little man with a peaked cap and light blue breeches and
a sword. His prime duty is to see that none of his fellow peasants
shall carry home a bucket of sea-water. For there is salt in sea-
water; and heavily, because they must have it or sicken, salt is
taxed; and this passing sentinel is to prevent them from cheating the
Revenue by recourse to the sea which, though here it is, they must not
regard as theirs. What becomes of the tax-money? It goes towards the
building of battleships, cruisers, gunboats and so forth. What are
these for? Why, for Italy to be a Great European Power with, of
course. In the little blue bay behind Umberto, while I write, there
lies at anchor an Italian gunboat. Opportunely again? I can but assure
you that it really and truly is there. It has been there for two days.
It delights the fishermen. They say it is `bella e pulita com' un
fiore.' They stand shading their eyes towards it, smiling and proud,
heirs of all the ages, neglecting their sails and nets and spars of
wood. They can imagine nothing better than it. They see nothing at all
sinister or absurd about it, these simple fellows. And simple Umberto,
their captive, strives to wheel round on his pedestal and to tear but
a peep-hole in his sheeting. He would be glad could he feast but one
eye on this bit of national glory. But he remains helpless--helpless
as a Sultana made ready for the Bosphorus, helpless as a pig is in a
poke. It enrages him that he who was so eminently respectable in life
should be made so ludicrous on his eminence after death. He is bitter
at the inertia of the men who set him up. Were he an ornament of the
Church, not of the State that he served so conscientiously, how very
different would be the treatment of his plight! If he were a Saint,
occluded thus by the municipality, how many the prayers that would be
muttered, the candles promised, for his release! There would be
processions, too; and who knows but that there might even be a miracle
vouchsafed, a rending of the veil? The only procession that passes him
is that of the intimidated orphans. No heavenly power intervenes for
him--perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for fear of offending the
Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously at his back, but
never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never rots it. There
is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a shame and incubus
to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted, yet made a fool
of; taken and left; a monument to Fate's malice.

>From under the hem of his weather-beaten domino, always, he just
displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and
serviceable marble boot. And this, I have begun to believe, is all
that I shall ever see of him. Else might I not be writing about him;
for else had he not so haunted me. If I knew myself destined to see
him--to see him steadily and see him whole--no matter how many years
hence, I could forthwith think about other things. I had hoped that by
this essay I might rid my mind of him. He is inexcutible, confound
him! His pedestal draws me to itself with some such fascination as had
the altar of the unknown god for the wondering Greek. I try to
distract myself by thinking of other images--images that I have seen.
I think of Bartolommeo Colleoni riding greatly forth under the shadow
of the church of Saint John and Saint Paul. Of Mr. Peabody I think,
cosy in his armchair behind the Royal Exchange; of Nelson above the
sparrows, and of Perseus among the pigeons; of golden Albert, and of
Harvey the not red. Up looms Umberto, uncouthly casting them one and
all into the shade. I think of other statues that I have not seen--
statues suspected of holding something back from even the clearest-
eyed men who have stood beholding and soliciting them. But how
obvious, beside Umberto, the Sphinx would be! And Memnon, how tamely
he sits waiting for the dawn!

Matchless as a memorial, then, I say again, this statue is. And as a
work of art it has at least the advantage of being beyond criticism.
In my young days, I wrote a plea that all the statues in the streets
and squares of London should be extirpated and, according to their
materials, smashed or melted. From an aesthetic standpoint, I went a
trifle too far: London has a few good statues. From an humane
standpoint, my plea was all wrong. Let no violence be done to the
effigies of the dead. There is disrespect in setting up a dead man's
effigy and then not unveiling it . But there would be no disrespect,
and there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London
were ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as
they are. That is a scheme which occurred to me soon after I saw the
veiled Umberto. Mr. Birrell has now stepped in and forestalled my
advocacy. Pereant qui--but no, who could wish that charming man to
perish? The realisation of that scheme is what matters.

Let an inventory be taken of those statues. Let it be submitted to
Lord Rosebery, and he be asked to tick off all those statesmen, poets,
philosophers and other personages about whom he would wish to orate.
Then let the list be passed on to other orators, until every statue on
it shall have its particular spokesman. Then let the dates for the
various veilings be appointed. If there be four or five veilings every
week, I conceive that the whole list will be exhausted in two years or
so. And my enjoyment of the reported speeches will not be the less
keen because I can so well imagine them.... In conclusion, Lord
Rosebery said that the keynote to the character of the man in whose
honour they were gathered together to-day was, first and last,
integrity. (Applause.) He did not say of him that he had been
infallible. Which of us was infallible? (Laughter.) But this he would
say, that the great man whose statue they were looking on for the last
time had been actuated throughout his career by no motive but the
desire to do that, and that only, which would conduce to the honour
and to the stability of the country that gave him birth. Of him it
might truly be said, as had been said of another, `That which he had
to give, he gave.' (Loud and prolonged applause.) His Lordship then
pulled the cord, and the sheeting rolled up into position...

Not, however, because those speeches will so edify and soothe me, nor
merely because those veiled statues will make less uncouth the city I
was born in, do I feverishly thrust on you my proposition. The wish in
me is that posterity shall be haunted by our dead heroes even as I am
by Umberto. Rather hard on posterity? Well, the prevision of its
plight would cheer me in mine immensely.

KOLNIYATSCH
1913.

None of us who keep an eye on the heavens of European literature can
forget the emotion that we felt when, but a few years since, the red
star of Kolniyatsch swam into our ken. As nobody can prove that I
wasn't, I claim now that I was the first to gauge the magnitude of
this star and to predict the ascendant course which it has in fact
triumphantly taken. That was in the days when Kolniyatsch was still
alive. His recent death gives the cue for the boom. Out of that boom
I, for one, will not be left. I rush to scrawl my name, large, on the
tombstone of Kolniyatsch.

These foreign fellows always are especially to be commended. By the
mere mention of their names you evoke in reader or hearer a vague
sense of your superiority and his. Thank heaven, we are no longer
insular. I don't say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it,
pyramids of it, all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would
England be but for her good fortune in being able to draw on a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of anguished souls from the Continent--
infantile wide-eyed Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted
Scandinavians, all of them different, but all of them raving in one
common darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals
for exportation? There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this
commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used
to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We have learnt to be vibrant.

Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it
is true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he
was. But the quality of his genius, albeit nothing if not national and
also universal, is at the same time so deeply personal that we cannot
afford to close our eyes on his life--a life happily not void of those
sensational details which are what we all really care about.

`If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.' Kolniyatsch was born,
last of a long line of rag-pickers, in 1886. At the age of nine he had
already acquired that passionate alcoholism which was to have so great
an influence in the moulding of his character and on the trend of his
thought. Otherwise he does not seem to have shown in childhood any
exceptional promise. It was not before his eighteenth birthday that he
murdered his grandmother and was sent to that asylum in which he wrote
the poems and plays belonging to what we now call his earlier manner.
In 1907 he escaped from his sanctum, or chuzketc (cell) as he
sardonically called it, and, having acquired some money by an act of
violence, gave, by sailing for America, early proof that his genius
was of the kind that crosses frontiers and seas. Unfortunately, it was
not of the kind that passes Ellis Island. America, to her lasting
shame, turned him back. Early in 1908 we find him once more in his old
quarters, working at those novels and confessions on which, in the
opinion of some, his fame will ultimately rest. Alas, we don't find
him there now. It will be a fortnight ago to-morrow that Luntic
Kolniyatsch passed peacefully away, in the twenty-eighth year of his
age. He would have been the last to wish us to indulge in any sickly
sentimentality. `Nothing is here for tears, nothing but well and fair,
and what may quiet us in a death so noble.'

Was Kolniyatsch mad? It depends on what we mean by that word. If we
mean, as the bureaucrats of Ellis Island and, to their lasting shame,
his friends and relations presumably meant, that he did not share our
own smug and timid philosophy of life, then indeed was Kolniyatsch not
sane. Granting for sake of argument that he was mad in a wider sense
than that, we do but oppose an insuperable stumbling-block to the
Eugenists . Imagine what Europe would be to-day, had Kolniyatsch not
been! As one of the critics avers, `It is hardly too much to say that
a time may be not far distant, and may indeed be nearer than many of
us suppose, when Luntic Kolniyatsch will, rightly or wrongly, be
reckoned by some of us as not the least of those writers who are
especially symptomatic of the early twentieth century and are possibly
" for all time" or for a more or less certainly not inconsiderable
period of time.' That is finely said. But I myself go somewhat
further. I say that Kolniyatsch's message has drowned all previous
messages and will drown any that may be uttered in the remotest
future. You ask me what, precisely, that message was? Well, it is too
elemental, too near to the very heart of naked Nature, for exact
definition. Can you describe the message of an angry python more
satisfactorily than as S-s-s-s? Or that of an infuriated bull better
than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies somewhere between these two.
Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we find him hard to fit into
any single category. Was he a realist or a romantic? He was neither,
and he was both. By more than one critic he has been called a
pessimist, and it is true that a part of his achievement may be gauged
by the lengths to which he carried pessimism--railing and raging, not,
in the manner of his tame forerunners, merely at things in general, or
at women, or at himself, but lavishing an equally fierce scorn and
hatred on children, on trees and flowers and the moon, and indeed on
everything that the sentimentalists have endeavoured to force into
favour. On the other hand, his burning faith in a personal Devil, his
frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that
every one but himself will be brought back to life in time to be
frozen to death in the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as
an optimist. By birth and training a man of the people, he was yet an
aristocrat to the finger-tips, and Byron would have called him
brother, though one trembles to think what he would have called Byron.
First and last, he was an artist, and it is by reason of his technical
mastery that he most of all outstands. Whether in prose or in verse,
he compasses a broken rhythm that is as the very rhythm of life
itself, and a cadence that catches you by the throat, as a terrier
catches a rat, and wrings from you the last drop of pity and awe. His
skill in avoiding `the inevitable word' is simply miraculous. He is
the despair of the translator. Far be it from me to belittle the
devoted labours of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway, whose monumental translation
of the Master's complete works is now drawing to its splendid close.
Their promised biography of the murdered grandmother is awaited
eagerly by all who take--and which of us does not take?--a breathless
interest in Kolniyatschiana. But Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway would be the
first to admit that their renderings of the prose and verse they love
so well are a wretched substitute for the real thing. I wanted to get
the job myself, but they nipped in and got it before me. Thank heaven,
they cannot deprive me of the power to read Kolniyatsch in the
original Gibrisch and to crow over you who can't.

Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege and
the permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories.
His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was
beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving
lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a
touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse
to spring at one's throat. The voice had notes that recalled M.
Mounet-Sully's in the later and more important passages of Oedipe Roi.
I remember that he always spoke with the greatest contempt of Mr. and
Mrs. Pegaway's translations. He likened them to--but enough! His boom
is not yet at the full. A few weeks hence I shall be able to command
an even higher price than I could now for my `Talks with Kolniyatsch.'

No. 2. THE PINES

[Early in the year 1914 Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain
of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of
Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another; and he
was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by
myself. Ifound it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent. I
failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a
grotesque. So I took refuge in an ampler scope. I wrote a
reminiscential essay. From that essay I made an extract, which I gave
to Mr. Gosse. From that extract he made a quotation in his enchanting
biography. The words quoted by him reappear here in the midst of the
whole essay as I wrote it. I dare not hope they are unashamed of their
humble surroundings.--M. B.]

In my youth the suburbs were rather looked down on--I never quite knew
why. It was held anomalous, and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne
lived in one of them. For my part, had I known as a fact that Catullus
was still alive, I should have been as ready to imagine him living in
Putney as elsewhere. The marvel would have been merely that he lived.
And Swinburne's survival struck as surely as could his have struck in
me the chord of wonder.

Not, of course, that he had achieved a feat of longevity. He was far
from the Psalmist's limit. Nor was he one of those men whom one
associates with the era in which they happened to be young. Indeed, if
there was one man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian days,
Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that
he had blazed--blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of
splendour; and in the light of that conflagration all that he had
since done, much and magnificent though this was, paled. The essential
Swinburne was still the earliest. He was and would always be the
flammiferous boy of the dim past--a legendary creature, sole kin to
the phoenix. It had been impossible that he should ever surpass
himself in the artistry that was from the outset his; impossible that
he should bring forth rhythms lovelier and greater than those early
rhythms, or exercise over them a mastery more than--absolute. Also, it
had been impossible that the first wild ardour of spirit should abide
unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And there was not in Swinburne that
basis on which a man may in his maturity so build as to make good, in
some degree, the loss of what is gone. He was not a thinker: his mind
rose ever away from reason to rhapsody; neither was he human. He was a
king crowned but not throned. He was a singing bird that could build
no nest. He was a youth who could not afford to age. Had he died
young, literature would have lost many glories; but none so great as
the glories he had already given, nor any such as we should fondly
imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death. A great part of Keats'
fame rests on our assumption of what he would have done. But--even
granting that Keats may have had in him more than had Swinburne of
stuff for development--I believe that had he lived on we should think
of him as author of the poems that in fact we know. Not philosophy,
after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the
primal thing in poetry. Ideas, and flesh and blood, are but reserves
to be brought up when the poet's youth is going. When the bird can no
longer sing in flight, let the nest be ready. After the king has
dazzled us with his crown, let him have something to sit down on. But
the session on throne or in nest is not the divine period. Had
Swinburne's genius been of the kind that solidifies, he would yet at
the close of the nineteenth century have been for us young men
virtually--though not so definitely as in fact he was--the writer of
`Atalanta in Calydon' and of `Poems and Ballads.'

Tennyson's death in '98 had not taken us at all by surprise. We had
been fully aware that he was alive. He had always been careful to keep
himself abreast of the times. Anything that came along--the Nebular
Hypothesis at one moment, the Imperial Institute at another--won
mention from his Muse. He had husbanded for his old age that which he
had long ago inherited: middle age. If in our mourning for him there
really was any tincture of surprise, this was due to merely the vague
sense that he had in the fullness of time died rather prematurely: his
middle-age might have been expected to go on flourishing for ever. But
assuredly Tennyson dead laid no such strain on our fancy as Swinburne
living.

It is true that Swinburne did, from time to time, take public notice
of current affairs; but what notice he took did but seem to mark his
remoteness from them, from us. The Boers, I remember, were the theme
of a sonnet which embarrassed even their angriest enemies in our
midst. He likened them, if I remember rightly, to `hell-hounds foaming
at the jaws.' This was by some people taken as a sign that he had
fallen away from that high generosity of spirit which had once been
his. To me it meant merely that he thought of poor little England
writhing under the heel of an alien despotism, just as, in the days
when he really was interested in such matters, poor little Italy had
writhen. I suspect, too, that the first impulse to write about the
Boers came not from the Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton
without.... `Now, Algernon, we're at war, you know--at war with the
Boers. I don't want to bother you at all, but I do think, my dear old
friend, you oughtn't to let slip this opportunity of,' etc., etc.

Some such hortation is easily imaginable by any one who saw the two
old friends together. The first time I had this honour, this sight for
lasting and affectionate memory, must have been in the Spring of '99.
In those days Theodore Watts (he had but recently taken on the -
Dunton) was still something of a gad-about. I had met him here and
there, he had said in his stentorian tones pleasant things to me about
my writing, I sent him a new little book of mine, and in acknowledging
this he asked me to come down to Putney and `have luncheon and meet
Swinburne.' Meet Catullus!

On the day appointed `I came as one whose feet half linger.' It is but
a few steps from the railway-station in Putney High Street to No. 2.
The Pines. I had expected a greater distance to the sanctuary--a walk
in which to compose my mind and prepare myself for initiation. I laid
my hand irresolutely against the gate of the bleak trim front-garden,
I withdrew my hand, I went away. Out here were all the aspects of
common modern life. In there was Swinburne. A butcher-boy went by,
whistling. He was not going to see Swinburne. He could afford to
whistle. I pursued my dilatory course up the slope of Putney, but at
length it occurred to me that unpunctuality would after all be an
imperfect expression of reverence, and I retraced my footsteps.

No. 2--prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I
had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of
the ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past.
Here, in this dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid
and vital on the walls those women of Rossetti whom I had known but as
shades. Familiar to me in small reproductions by photogravure, here
they themselves were, life-sized, `with curled-up lips and amorous
hair' done in the original warm crayon, all of them intently looking
down on me while I took off my overcoat--all wondering who was this
intruder from posterity. That they hung in the hall, evidently no more
than an overflow, was an earnest of packed plenitude within. The room
I was ushered into was a back-room, a dining-room, looking on to a
good garden. It was, in form and `fixtures,' an inalienably Mid-
Victorian room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its
proportions, its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its
folding-doors (through which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming
mysteriously in the front room), its mantel-piece, its gas-brackets,
all proclaimed that nothing ever would seduce them from their
allegiance to Martin Tupper. `Nor me from mine,' said the sturdy
cruet-stand on the long expanse of table-cloth. The voice of Watts-
Dunton ceased suddenly, and a few moments later its owner appeared. He
had been dictating, he explained. `A great deal of work on hand just
now--a great deal of work.'... I remember that on my subsequent visits
he was always, at the moment of my arrival, dictating, and always
greeted me with that phrase, `A great deal of work on hand just now.'
I used to wonder what work it was, for he published little enough. But
I never ventured to inquire, and indeed rather cherished the mystery:
it was a part of the dear little old man; it went with the something
gnome-like about his swarthiness and chubbiness--went with the shaggy
hair that fell over the collar of his eternally crumpled frock-coat,
the shaggy eyebrows that overhung his bright little brown eyes, the
shaggy moustache that hid his small round chin. It was a mystery
inherent in the richly-laden atmosphere of The Pines....

While I stood talking to Watts-Dunton--talking as loudly as he, for he
was very deaf--I enjoyed the thrill of suspense in watching the door
through which would appear--Swinburne. I asked after Mr. Swinburne's
health. Watts-Dunton said it was very good: `He always goes out for
his long walk in the morning--wonderfully active. Active in mind, too.
But I'm afraid you won't be able to get into touch with him. He's
almost stone-deaf, poor fellow--almost stone-deaf now.' He changed the
subject, and I felt I must be careful not to seem interested in
Swinburne exclusively. I spoke of `Aylwin.' The parlourmaid brought in
the hot dishes. The great moment was at hand.

Nor was I disappointed. Swinburne's entry was for me a great moment.
Here, suddenly visible in the flesh, was the legendary being and
divine singer. Here he was, shutting the door behind him as might
anybody else, and advancing--a strange small figure in grey, having an
air at once noble and roguish, proud and skittish. My name was roared
to him. In shaking his hand, I bowed low, of course--a bow de coeur;
and he, in the old aristocratic manner, bowed equally low, but with
such swiftness that we narrowly escaped concussion. You do not usually
associate a man of genius, when you see one, with any social class;
and, Swinburne being of an aspect so unrelated as it was to any
species of human kind, I wondered the more that almost the first
impression he made on me, or would make on any one, was that of a very
great gentleman indeed. Not of an old gentleman, either. Sparse and
straggling though the grey hair was that fringed the immense pale dome
of his head, and venerably haloed though he was for me by his
greatness, there was yet about him something--boyish? girlish?
childish, rather; something of a beautifully well-bred child. But he
had the eyes of a god, and the smile of an elf. In figure, at first
glance, he seemed almost fat; but this was merely because of the way
he carried himself, with his long neck strained so tightly back that
he all receded from the waist upwards. I noticed afterwards that this
deportment made the back of his jacket hang quite far away from his
legs; and so small and sloping were his shoulders that the jacket
seemed ever so likely to slip right off. I became aware, too, that
when he bowed he did not unbend his back, but only his neck--the
length of the neck accounting for the depth of the bow. His hands were
tiny, even for his size, and they fluttered helplessly, touchingly,
unceasingly.

Directly after my introduction, we sat down to the meal. Of course I
had never hoped to `get into touch with him' reciprocally. Quite apart
from his deafness, I was too modest to suppose he could be interested
in anything I might say. But--for I knew he had once been as high and
copious a singer in talk as in verse--I had hoped to hear utterances
from him. And it did not seem that my hope was to be fulfilled. Watts-
Dunton sat at the head of the table, with a huge and very Tupperesque
joint of roast mutton in front of him, Swinburne and myself close up
to him on either side. He talked only to me. This was the more
tantalising because Swinburne seemed as though he were bubbling over
with all sorts of notions. Not that he looked at either of us. He
smiled only to himself, and to his plateful of meat, and to the small
bottle of Bass's pale ale that stood before him--ultimate allowance of
one who had erst clashed cymbals in Naxos. This small bottle he eyed
often and with enthusiasm, seeming to waver between the rapture of
broaching it now and the grandeur of having it to look forward to. It
made me unhappy to see what trouble he had in managing his knife and
fork. Watts-Dunton told me on another occasion that this infirmity of
the hands had been lifelong--had begun before Eton days. The Swinburne
family had been alarmed by it and had consulted a specialist, who said
that it resulted from `an excess of electric vitality,' and that any
attempt to stop it would be harmful. So they had let it be. I have
known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or
defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Here, in this fluttering of his tiny hands, was a part of the price
that Swinburne had to pay. No doubt he had grown accustomed to it many
lustres before I met him, and I need not have felt at all unhappy at
what I tried not to see. He, evidently, was quite gay, in his silence-
-and in the world that was for him silent. I had, however, the
maddening suspicion that he would have liked to talk. Why wouldn't
Watts-Dunton roar him an opportunity? I felt I had been right perhaps
in feeling that the lesser man was--no, not jealous of the greater
whom he had guarded so long and with such love, but anxious that he
himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as his fine gifts
warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk. He seemed to
regard me as a source of information about all the latest `movements,'
and I had to shout banalities while he munched his mutton--banalities
whose one saving grace for me was that they were inaudible to
Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne's gaze, I should have faltered. Now and
again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the table, darting this
way and that--across the room, up at the ceiling, out of the window;
only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint of indifference.
It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners--the good manners of
a child `sitting up to table,' not `staring,' not `asking questions,'
and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old nurse. The child sat
happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child was content not to
speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it did want to he
spoken to. And, at length, it was.

So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton
leaned forward and `Well, Algernon,' he roared, `how was it on the
Heath to-day?' Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the
question, now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the
cooing of a dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke
to us of his walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been
taking his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a
Peri who had at long last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And
rather than that he spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly
sang of his experience. The wonders of this morning's wind and sun and
clouds were expressed in a flow of words so right and sentences so
perfectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic had they not
been clearly as spontaneous as the wordless notes of a bird in song.
The frail, sweet voice rose and fell, lingered, quickened, in all
manner of trills and roulades. That he himself could not hear it,
seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness inflicted on him. One
would have expected this disability to mar the music; but it didn't;
save that now and again a note would come out metallic and over-
shrill, the tones were under good control. The whole manner and method
had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one incapable of
condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called it
affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne's now
reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and
I now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived
it in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points
familiar to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing
extremely, and lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable.
In Swinburne this trick was delightful--because it wasn't a trick, but
a need of his heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and
immensity of pause when he described how he had seen in a perambulator
on the Heath to-day `the most BEAUT--iful babbie ever beheld by mortal
eyes.' For babies, as some of his later volumes testify, he had a sort
of idolatry. After Mazzini had followed Landor to Elysium, and Victor
Hugo had followed Mazzini, babies were what among live creatures most
evoked Swinburne's genius for self-abasement. His rapture about this
especial `babbie' was such as to shake within me my hitherto firm
conviction that, whereas the young of the brute creation are already
beautiful at the age of five minutes, the human young never begin to
be so before the age of three years. I suspect Watts-Dunton of having
shared my lack of innate enthusiasm. But it was one of Swinburne's
charms, as I was to find, that he took for granted every one's delight
in what he himself so fervidly delighted in. He could as soon have
imagined a man not loving the very sea as not doting on the aspect of
babies and not reading at least one play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean
dramatist every day.

I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he
described a storm in which, one night years ago, with Watts-Dunton, he
had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the
rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like
the wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and
darkness, the thunder and foam and phosphorescence--`You remember,
Theodore? You remember the PHOS--phorescence?'--all so beautifully and
vividly that I almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To
disentangle one from another of the several occasions on which I heard
him talk is difficult because the procedure was so invariable: Watts-
Dunton always dictating when I arrived, Swinburne always appearing at
the moment of the meal, always the same simple and substantial fare,
Swinburne never allowed to talk before the meal was half over. As to
this last point, I soon realised that I had been quite unjust in
suspecting Watts-Dunton of selfishness. It was simply a sign of the
care with which he watched over his friend's welfare. Had Swinburne
been admitted earlier to the talk, he would not have taken his proper
quantity of roast mutton. So soon, always, as he had taken that, the
embargo was removed, the chance was given him. And, swiftly though he
embraced the chance, and much though he made of it in the courses of
apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed touchingly ashamed of `holding
forth.' Often, before he had said his really full say on the theme
suggested by Watts-Dunton's loud interrogation, he would curb his
speech and try to eliminate himself, bowing his head over his plate;
and then, when he had promptly been brought in again, he would always
try to atone for his inhibiting deafness by much reference and
deference to all that we might otherwise have to say. `I hope,' he
would coo to me, `my friend Watts-Dunton, who'--and here he would turn
and make a little bow to Watts-Dunton--`is himself a scholar, will
bear me out when I say'--or `I hardly know,' he would flute to his old
friend, `whether Mr. Beerbohm'--here a bow to me--`will agree with me
in my opinion of' some delicate point in Greek prosody or some
incident in an old French romance I had never heard of.

On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, Watts-Dunton
had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of
M. Rostand's `Cyrano de Bergerac.' He then took my information as the
match to ignite the Swinburnian tinder. `Well, Algernon, it seems that
" Cyrano de Bergerac"'--but this first spark was enough: instantly
Swinburne was praising the works of Cyrano de Bergerac. Of M. Rostand
he may have heard, but him he forgot. Indeed I never heard Swinburne
mention a single contemporary writer. His mind ranged and revelled
always in the illustrious or obscure past. To him the writings of
Cyrano de Bergerac were as fresh as paint--as fresh as to me, alas,
was the news of their survival. Of course, of course, you have read
" L'Histoire Comique des ?tats et des Empires de la Lune"?' I admitted,
by gesture and facial expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled
out curious extracts from that allegory--`almost as good as
" Gulliver"'--with a memorable instance of the way in which the
traveller to the moon was shocked by the conversation of the natives,
and the natives' sense of propriety was outraged by the conversation
of the traveller.

In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events, of
anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the
medium of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have
led him to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names
of those men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed
for me by Swinburne's presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a
bit of the present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it
was not enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad
to see that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own
as I in the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had
been told in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--`one of the
Ashburnhams'; how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a
county ball, a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through
the frosty and snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped:
there was a crowd of dark figures in the way...at which point
Swinburne stopped too, before saying, with an ineffable smile and in a
voice faint with appreciation, `They were burying a suicide at the
crossroads.'

Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it
another scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-
backed chair, and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary
little nephew with masses of auburn hair and with tiny hands clasped
in supplication--`Tell me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more!'

And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see
that dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth,
with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it;
Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and
hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which
Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as
Alice sat. And, had the hare been a great poet, and the hatter a great
gentleman, and neither of them mad but each only very odd and
vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.

When the meal ended--for, alas! it was not, like that meal in
Wonderland, unending--Swinburne would dart round the table, proffer
his hand to me, bow deeply, bow to Watts-Dunton also, and disappear.
`He always walks in the morning, writes in the afternoon, and reads in
the evening,' Watts-Dunton would say with a touch of tutorial pride in
this regimen.

That parting bow of Swinburne to his old friend was characteristic of
his whole relation to him. Cronies though they were, these two, knit
together with bonds innumerable, the greater man was always aux petits
soins for the lesser, treating him as a newly-arrived young guest
might treat an elderly host. Some twenty years had passed since that
night when, ailing and broken--thought to be nearly dying, Watts-
Dunton told me--Swinburne was brought in a four-wheeler to The Pines.
Regular private nursing-homes either did not exist in those days or
were less in vogue than they are now. The Pines was to he a sort of
private nursing-home for Swinburne. It was a good one. He recovered.
He was most grateful to his friend and saviour. He made as though to
depart, was persuaded to stay a little longer, and then a little
longer than that. But I rather fancy that, to the last, he never did,
in the fullness of his modesty and good manners, consent to regard his
presence as a matter of course, or as anything but a terminable
intrusion and obligation. His bow seemed always to convey that.

Swinburne having gone from the room, in would come the parlourmaid.
The table was cleared, the fire was stirred, two leather arm-chairs
were pushed up to the hearth. Watts-Dunton wanted gossip of the
present. I wanted gossip of the great past. We settled down for a
long, comfortable afternoon together.

Only once was the ritual varied. Swinburne (I was told before
luncheon) had expressed a wish to show me his library. So after the
meal he did not bid us his usual adieu, but with much courtesy invited
us and led the way. Up the staircase he then literally bounded--three,
literally three, stairs at a time. I began to follow at the same rate,
but immediately slackened speed for fear that Watts-Dunton behind us
might be embittered at sight of so much youth and legerity. Swinburne
waited on the threshold to receive us, as it were, and pass us in.
Watts-Dunton went and ensconced himself snugly in a corner. The sun
had appeared after a grey morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big
living-room whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of
books. Here, as host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than
ever attractive. He was as happy as was any mote in the sunshine about
him; and the fluttering of his little hands, and feet too, was but as
a token of so much felicity. He looked older, it is true, in the
strong light. But these added years made only more notable his
youngness of heart. An illustrious bibliophile among his books? A
birthday child, rather, among his toys.

Proudly he explained to me the general system under which the volumes
were ranged in this or that division of shelves. Then he conducted me
to a chair near the window, left me there, flew away, flew up the
rungs of a mahogany ladder, plucked a small volume, and in a twinkling
was at my side: `This, I think, will please you! `It did. It had a
beautifully engraved title-page and a pleasing scent of old, old
leather. It was editio princeps of a play by some lesser Elizabethan
or Jacobean. `Of course you know it?' my host fluted.

How I wished I could say that I knew it and loved it well! I revealed
to him (for by speaking very loudly towards his inclined head I was
able to make him hear) that I had not read it. He envied any one who
had such pleasure in store. He darted to the ladder, and came back
thrusting gently into my hands another volume of like date: `Of course
you know this?'

Again I had to confess that I did not, and to shout my appreciation of
the fount of type, the margins, the binding. He beamed agreement, and
fetched another volume. Archly he indicated the title, cooing, `You
are a lover of this, I hope?' And again I was shamed by my
inexperience.

I did not pretend to know this particular play, but my tone implied
that I had always been meaning to read it and had always by some
mischance been prevented. For his sake as well as my own I did want to
acquit myself passably. I wanted for him the pleasure of seeing his
joys shared by a representative, however humble, of the common world.
I turned the leaves caressingly, looking from them to him, while he
dilated on the beauty of this and that scene in the play. Anon he
fetched another volume, and another, always with the same faith that
this was a favourite of mine. I quibbled, I evaded, I was very
enthusiastic and uncomfortable. It was with intense relief that I
beheld the title-page of yet another volume which (silently, this
time) he laid before me--The Country Wench. `This of course I have
read,' I heartily shouted.

Swinburne stepped back. `You have? You have read it? Where?' he cried,
in evident dismay.

Something was wrong. Had I not, I quickly wondered, read this play?
`Oh yes,' I shouted, `I have read it.'

`But when? Where?' entreated Swinburne, adding that he had supposed it
to be the sole copy extant.

I floundered. I wildly said I thought I must have read it years ago in
the Bodleian. `Theodore! Do you hear this? It seems that they have now
a copy of "The Country Wench" in the Bodleian! Mr. Beerbohm found one
there--oh when? in what year?' he appealed to me.

I said it might have been six, seven, eight years ago. Swinburne knew
for certain that no copy had been there twelve years ago, and was
surprised that he had not heard of the acquisition. `They might have
told me,' he wailed.

I sacrificed myself on the altar of sympathy. I admitted that I might
have been mistaken--must have been--must have confused this play with
some other. I dipped into the pages and `No,' I shouted, `this I have
never read.'

His equanimity was restored. He was up the ladder and down again,
showing me further treasures with all pride and ardour. At length,
Watts-Dunton, afraid that his old friend would tire himself, arose
from his corner, and presently he and I went downstairs to the dining-
room. It was in the course of our session together that there suddenly
flashed across my mind the existence of a play called `The Country
Wife,' by--wasn't it Wycherley? I had once read it--or read something
about it.... But this matter I kept to myself. I thought I had
appeared fool enough already.

I loved those sessions in that Tupperossettine dining-room, lair of
solid old comfort and fervid old romanticism. Its odd duality befitted
well its owner. The distinguished critic and poet, Rossetti's closest
friend and Swinburne's, had been, for a while, in the dark ages, a
solicitor; and one felt he had been a good one. His frock-coat, though
the Muses had crumpled it, inspired confidence in his judgment of
other things than verse. But let there be no mistake. He was no mere
bourgeois parnassien, as his enemies insinuated. No doubt he had been
very useful to men of genius, in virtue of qualities they lacked, but
the secret of his hold on them was in his own rich nature. He was not
only a born man of letters, he was a deeply emotional human being
whose appeal was as much to the heart as to the head. The romantic
Celtic mysticism of `Aylwin,' with its lack of fashionable Celtic
nebulosity, lends itself, if you will, to laughter, though personally
I saw nothing funny in it: it seemed to me, before I was in touch with
the author, a work of genuine expression from within; and that it
truly was so I presently knew. The mysticism of Watts-Dunton (who,
once comfortably settled at the fireside, knew no reserve) was in
contrast with the frock-coat and the practical abilities; but it was
essential, and they were of the surface. For humorous Rossetti, I
daresay, the very contrast made Theodore's company the more precious.
He himself had assuredly been, and the memory of him still was, the
master-fact in Watts-Dunton's life. `Algernon' was as an adopted
child, `Gabriel' as a long-lost only brother. As he was to the outer
world of his own day, so too to posterity Rossetti, the man, is
conjectural and mysterious. We know that he was in his prime the most
inspiring and splendid of companions. But we know this only by faith.
The evidence is as vague as it is emphatic. Of the style and substance
of not a few great talkers in the past we can piece together some more
or less vivid and probably erroneous notion. But about Rossetti
nothing has been recorded in such a way as to make him even faintly
emerge. I suppose he had in him what reviewers seem to find so often
in books a quality that defies analysis. Listening to Watts-Dunton, I
was always in hope that when next the long-lost turned up--for he was
continually doing so--in the talk, I should see him, hear him, and
share the rapture. But the revelation was not to be. You might think
that to hear him called `Gabriel' would have given me a sense of
propinquity. But I felt no nearer to him than you feel to the
Archangel who bears that name and no surname.

It was always when Watts-Dunton spoke carelessly, casually, of some to
me illustrious figure in the past, that I had the sense of being
wafted right into that past and plumped down in the very midst of it.
When he spoke with reverence of this and that great man whom he had
known, he did not thus waft and plump me; for I, too, revered those
names. But I had the magical transition whenever one of the immortals
was mentioned in the tone of those who knew him before he had put on
immortality. Browning, for example, was a name deeply honoured by me.
`Browning, yes,' said Watts-Dunton, in the course of an afternoon,
`Browning,' and he took a sip of the steaming whisky-toddy that was a
point in our day's ritual. `I was a great diner-out in the old times.
I used to dine out every night in the week. Browning was a great
diner-out, too. We were always meeting. What a pity he went on writing
all those plays! He hadn't any gift for drama--none. I never could
understand why he took to play-writing.' He wagged his head, gazing
regretfully into the fire, and added, `Such a clever fellow, too!'

Whistler, though alive and about, was already looked to as a hierarch
by the young. Not so had he been looked to by Rossetti. The thrill of
the past was always strong in me when Watts-Dunton mentioned--seldom
without a guffaw did he mention--`Jimmy Whistler.' I think he put in
the surname because `that fellow' had not behaved well to Swinburne.
But he could not omit the nickname, because it was impossible for him
to feel the right measure of resentment against `such a funny fellow.'
As heart-full of old hates as of old loves was Watts-Dunton, and I
take it as high testimony to the charm of Whistler's quaintness that
Watts-Dunton did not hate him. You may be aware that Swinburne, in
'88, wrote for one of the monthly reviews a criticism of the `Ten
O'Clock' lecture. He paid courtly compliments to Whistler as a
painter, but joined issue with his theories. Straightway there
appeared in the World a little letter from Whistler, deriding `one
Algernon Swinburne--outsider--Putney.' It was not in itself a very
pretty or amusing letter; and still less so did it seem in the light
of the facts which Watts-Dunton told me in some such words as these:
After he'd published that lecture of his, Jimmy Whistler had me to
dine with him at Kettner's or somewhere. He said "Now, Theodore, I
want you to do me a favour." He wanted to get me to get Swinburne to
write an article about his lecture. I said "No, Jimmy Whistler, I
can't ask Algernon to do that. He's got a great deal of work on hand
just now--a great deal of work. And besides, this sort of thing
wouldn't be at all in his line.' But Jimmy Whistler went on appealing
to me. He said it would do him no end of good if Swinburne wrote about
him. And--well, I half gave in: I said perhaps I would mention the
matter to Algernon. And next day I did. I could see Algernon didn't
want to do it at all. But--well, there, he said he'd do it to please
me. And he did it. And then Jimmy Whistler published that letter. A
very shabby trick--very shabby indeed.' Of course I do not vouch for
the exact words in which Watts-Dunton told me this tale; but this was
exactly the tale he told me. I expressed my astonishment. He added
that of course he `never wanted to see the fellow again after that,
and never did.' But presently, after a long gaze into the coals, he
emitted a chuckle, as for earlier memories of `such a funny fellow.'
One quite recent memory he had, too. `When I took on the name of
Dunton, I had a note from him. Just this, with his butterfly
signature: Theodore! What's Dunton? That was very good--very good....
But, of course,' he added gravely, `I took no notice.' And no doubt,
quite apart from the difficulty of finding an answer in the same vein,
he did well in not replying. Loyalty to Swinburne forbade. But I see a
certain pathos in the unanswered message. It was a message from the
hand of an old jester, but also, I think, from the heart of an old
man--a signal waved jauntily, but in truth wistfully, across the gulf
of years and estrangement; and one could wish it had not been ignored.

Some time after Whistler died I wrote for one of the magazines an
appreciation of his curious skill in the art of writing. Watts-Dunton
told me he had heard of this from Swinburne. `I myself,' he said,
`very seldom read the magazines. But Algernon always has a look at
them.' There was something to me very droll, and cheery too, in this
picture of the illustrious recluse snatching at the current issues of
our twaddle. And I was immensely pleased at hearing that my article
had `interested him very much.' I inwardly promised myself that as
soon as I reached home I would read the article, to see just how it
might have struck Swinburne. When in due course I did this, I
regretted the tone of the opening sentences, in which I declared
myself `no book-lover' and avowed a preference for `an uninterrupted
view of my fellow-creatures.' I felt that had I known my article would
meet the eye of Swinburne I should have cut out that overture. I dimly
remembered a fine passage in one of his books of criticism--something
(I preferred not to verify it) about `the dotage of duncedom which
cannot perceive, or the impudence of insignificance so presumptuous as
to doubt, that the elements of life and literature are indivisibly
mingled one in another, and that he to whom books are less real than
life will assuredly find in men and women as little reality as in his
accursed crassness he deserves to discover.' I quailed, I quailed. But
mine is a resilient nature, and I promptly reminded myself that
Swinburne's was a very impersonal one: he would not think the less
highly of me, for he never had thought about me in any way whatsoever.
All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when next Watts-Dunton
should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day I am rather proud
of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not consciously, and
unfavourably, by Swinburne.

I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one
third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual
number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was
unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course;
but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it;
strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that
of one's actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a
remnant clings about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past
within a past, there was not a minute nor a second that I did not
spend with pleasure. Memory is a great artist, we are told; she
selects and rejects and shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons
would be utterly intolerable if they remembered everything.
Everything, nevertheless, is just what they themselves would like to
remember, and just what they would like to tell to everybody. Be sure
that the Ancient Mariner, though he remembered quite as much as his
audience wanted to hear, and rather more, about the albatross and the
ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at the sketchiness of his own mind;
and believe me that his stopping only one of three was the merest
oversight. I should like to impose on the world many tomes about The
Pines.

But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and
warm in me is the whole fused memory of the two dear old men that
lived there. I wish I had Watts-Dunton's sure faith in meetings beyond
the grave. I am glad I do not disbelieve that people may so meet. I
like to think that some day in Elysium I shall--not without
diffidence--approach those two and reintroduce myself. I can see just
how courteously Swinburne will bow over my hand, not at all
remembering who I am. Watts-Dunton will remember me after a moment:
`Oh, to be sure, yes indeed! I've a great deal of work on hand just
now--a great deal of work, but' we shall sit down together on the
asphodel, and I cannot but think we shall have whisky-toddy even
there. He will not have changed. He will still be shaggy and old and
chubby, and will wear the same frock-coat, with the same creases in
it. Swinburne, on the other hand, will be quite, quite young, with a
full mane of flaming auburn locks, and no clothes to hinder him from
plunging back at any moment into the shining Elysian waters from which
he will have just emerged. I see him skim lightly away into that
element. On the strand is sitting a man of noble and furrowed brow. It
is Mazzini, still thinking of Liberty. And anon the tiny young English
amphibian comes ashore to fling himself dripping at the feet of the
patriot and to carol the Republican ode he has composed in the course
of his swim. `He's wonderfully active--active in mind and body,'
Watts-Dunton says to me. `I come to the shore now and then, just to
see how he's getting on. But I spend most of my time inland. I find
I've so much to talk over with Gabriel. Not that he's quite the fellow
he was. He always had rather a cult for Dante, you know, and now he's
more than ever under the Florentine influence. He lives in a sort of
monastery that Dante has here; and there he sits painting imaginary
portraits of Beatrice, and giving them all to Dante. But he still has
his great moments, and there's no one quite like him--no one. Algernon
won't ever come and see him, because that fellow Mazzini's as Anti-
Clerical as ever and makes a principle of having nothing to do with
Dante. Look!--there's Algernon going into the water again! He'll tire
himself out, he'll catch cold, he'll--' and here the old man rises and
hurries down to the sea's edge. `Now, Algernon,' he roars, `I don't
want to interfere with you, but I do think, my dear old friend,'--and
then, with a guffaw, he breaks off, remembering that his friend is not
deaf now nor old, and that here in Elysium, where no ills are, good
advice is not needed.

A LETTER THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN
1914.

One morning lately I saw in my newspaper an announcement that enraged
me. It was made in the driest, most casual way, as though nobody would
care a rap; and this did but whet the wrath I had in knowing that Adam
Street, Adelphi, was to be undone. The Tivoli Music Hall, about to be
demolished and built anew, was to have a frontage of thirty feet, if
you please, in Adam Street. Why? Because the London County Council,
with its fixed idea that the happiness of mankind depends on the
widening of the Strand, had decreed that the Tivoli's new frontage
thereon should be thirty feet further back, and had granted as
consolation to the Tivoli the right to spread itself around the corner
and wreck the work of the Brothers Adam. Could not this outrage be
averted? There sprang from my lips that fiery formula which has sprung
from the lips of so many choleric old gentlemen in the course of the
past hundred years and more: `I shall write to The Times.'

If Adam Street were a thing apart I should have been stricken enough,
heaven knows, at thought of its beauty going, its dear tradition being
lost. But not as an unrelated masterpiece was Adam Street built by the
Brothers whose name it bears. An integral part it is in their noble
design of the Adelphi. It is the very key to the Adelphi, the well-
ordained initiation for us into that small, matchless quarter of
London, where peace and dignity do still reign--peace the more
beatific, and dignity the finer, by instant contrast with the chaos of
hideous sounds and sights hard by. What man so gross that, passing out
of the Strand into Adam Street, down the mild slope to the river, he
has not cursed the age he was born into--or blessed it because the
Adelphi cannot in earlier days have had for any one this fullness of
peculiar magic? Adam Street is not so beautiful as the serene Terrace
it goes down to, nor so curiously grand as crook-backed John Street.
But the Brothers did not mean it to be so. They meant it just as an
harmonious `lead' to those inner glories of their scheme. Ruin that
approach, and how much else do you ruin of a thing which--done
perfectly by masters, and done by them here as nowhere else could they
have done it--ought to be guarded by us very jealously! How to raise
on this irregular and `barbarous' ground a quarter that should be
`polite', congruous in tone with the smooth river beyond it--this was
the irresistible problem the Brothers set themselves and slowly,
coolly, perfectly solved. So long as the Adelphi remains to us, a
microcosm of the eighteenth century is ours. If there is any meaning
in the word sacrilege--

That, I remember, was the beginning of one of the sentences I composed
while I paced my room, thinking out my letter to The Times. I rejected
that sentence. I rejected scores of others. They were all too
vehement. Though my facility for indignation is not (I hope) less than
that of my fellows, I never had written to The Times. And now, though
I flattered myself I knew how the thing ought to be done, I was unsure
that I could do it. Was I beginning too late? Restraint was the prime
effect to be aimed at. If you are intemperate, you don't convince. I
wanted to convince the readers of The Times that the violation of the
Adelphi was a thing to be prevented at all costs. Soberness of
statement, a simple, direct, civic style, with only an underthrob of
personal emotion, were what I must at all costs achieve. Not too much
of mere aesthetics, either, nor of mere sentiment for the past. No
more than a brief eulogy of `those admirably proportioned streets so
familiar to all students of eighteenth century architecture,' and
perhaps a passing reference to `the shades of Dr. Johnson, Garrick,
Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Topham Beauclerk, and how many
others!' The sooner my protest were put in terms of commerce, the
better for my cause. The more clearly I were to point out that such
antiquities as the Adelphi are as a magnet to the moneyed tourists of
America and Europe, the likelier would my readers be to shudder at `a
proposal which, if carried into effect, will bring discredit on all
concerned and will in some measure justify Napoleon's hitherto-
unjustified taunt that we are a nation of shopkeepers.--I am, Sir,
your obedient servant'--good! I sat down to a table and wrote out that
conclusion, and then I worked backwards, keeping well in view the idea
of ` restraint.' But that quality which is little sister to restraint,
and is yet far more repulsive to the public mind than vehemence,
emerged to misguide my pen. Irony, in fact, played the deuce. I found
myself writing that a nation which, in its ardour for beauty and its
reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed after
only a few months' hesitation ?250,000 to save the Crystal Palace,
where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been spoilt by the
utter gloom and nullity of the place--a nullity and gloom that will,
however and of course, be dispelled so soon as the place is devoted to
permanent exhibitions of New Zealand pippins, Rhodesian tobacco,
Australian mutton, Canadian snow-shoes, and other glories of Empire--
might surely not be asked in vain to'--but I deleted that sentence,
and tried another in another vein. My desire to be straightforward did
but topple me into excess of statement. My sorrow for the Adelphi came
out as sentimentality, my anger against the authorities as vulgar
abuse. Only the urgency of my cause upheld me. I would get my letter
done somehow and post it. But there flitted through my mind that
horrid doubt which has flitted through the minds of so many choleric
old gentlemen in the course of the past hundred years and more: `Will
The Times put my letter in?'

If The Times wouldn't, what then? At least my conscience would be
clear: I should have done what I could to save my beloved quarter. But
the process of doing it was hard and tedious, and I was glad of the
little respite presented by the thought that I must, before stating my
case thoroughly, revisit Adam Street itself, to gauge precisely the
extent of the mischief threatened there. On my way to the Strand I met
an old friend, one of my links with whom is his love of the Adams'
work. He had not read the news, and I am sorry to say that I, in my
selfish agitation, did not break it to him gently. Rallying, he
accompanied me on my sombre quest.

I had forgotten there was a hosier's shop next to the Tivoli, at the
corner of the right-hand side of Adam Street. We turned past it, and
were both of us rather surprised that there were other shops down that
side. They ought never to have been allowed there; but there they
were; and of course, I felt, it was the old fa‡ades above them that
really counted. We gazed meanwhile at the fa‡ades on the left-hand
side, feasting our eyes on the proportions of the pilasters, the
windows; the old seemly elegance of it all; the greatness of the
manner with the sweet smallness of the scale it wrought on.

`Well,' I said, turning abruptly away, `to business! Thirty feet--how
much, about, is that? My friend moved to the exact corner of the
Strand, and then, steadily, methodically, with his eyes to the
pavement, walked thirty toe-to-heal paces down Adam Street.

`This,' he said, `is where the corner of the Tivoli would come'--not
`will come,' observe; I thanked him for that. He passed on, measuring
out the thirty additional feet. There was in his demeanour something
so finely official that I felt I should at least have the Government
on my side.

Thus it was with no sense of taking a farewell look, but rather to
survey a thing half-saved already, that I crossed over to the other
side of the road, and then, lifting my eyes, and looking to and fro,
beheld--what?

I blankly indicated the thing to my friend. How long had it been
there, that horrible, long, high frontage of grey stone? It must
surely have been there before either of us was born. It seemed to be a
very perfect specimen of 1860--1870 architecture--perfect in its
pretentious and hateful smugness.

And neither of us had ever known it was there.

Neither of us, therefore, could afford to laugh at the other; nor did
either of us laugh at himself; we just went blankly away, and parted.
I daresay my friend found presently, as I did, balm in the knowledge
that the Tivoli's frontage wouldn't, because it couldn't, be so bad as
that which we had just, for the first time, seen.

For me there was another, a yet stronger, balm. And I went as though I
trod on air, my heart singing within me. For I had not, after all, to
resume my task of writing that letter to The Times.

BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS
1914.

They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia [Greek]. Ignored
in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any
uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of
them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by
this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good
will.

But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his
kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that
aren't. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A
volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book
because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was
worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the
specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use
this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his
words well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to
these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of `book' deserved.
If Lamb were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than
he did. Published volumes were few in his day (though not, of course,
few enough). Even he, in all the plenitude of his indulgence, would
now have to demur that at least 90 per cent. of the volumes that the
publishers thrust on us, so hectically, every spring and autumn, are
abiblia [Greek].

What would he have to say of the novels, for example? These
commodities are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have
no illusions as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings
of sausages does not pretend that every individual sausage is in
itself remarkable. He does not assure us that `this is a sausage that
gives furiously to think,' or `this is a singularly beautiful and
human sausage,' or `this is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.' Why
are such distinctions drawn by the publisher? When he publishes, as he
sometimes does, a novel that is a book (or at any rate would be a book
if it were decently printed and bound) then by all means let him
proclaim its difference--even at the risk of scaring away the majority
of readers.

I admit that I myself might be found in that majority. I am shy of
masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been
disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers
expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are
dim in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers'
opinions as my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the
advice of a few highly literary friends. But so soon as I am told that
I `must' read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I
become strangely loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like
about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience.
It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don't exist.

And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can't stir sweet
longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books! What
fun, what a queer emotion, to fish out from a fourpenny-box, in a
windy by-street, WALTER LORRAINE, by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, or PASSION
FLOWERS, by ROSA BUNION! I suppose poor Rosa's muse, so fair and so
fervid in Rosa's day, would seem a trifle fatigued now; but what
allowances one would make! Lord Steyne said of WALTER LORRAINE that it
was `very clever and wicked.' I fancy we should apply neither epithet
now. Indeed, I have always suspected that Pen's maiden effort may have
been on a plane with `The Great Hoggarty Diamond.' Yet I vow would I
not skip a line of it.

WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor
Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in
the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped
that perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that
the novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion
and found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.

"He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while
it was still in proof; after its appearance and alarming failure, the
modesty of the author had become more pressing, and the secret was now
likely to be better kept than that of the authorship of `Waverley.'"

Such an humiliation as Gideon's is the more poignant to me because it
is so rare in English fiction. In nine cases out of ten, a book within
a book is an immediate, an immense success.

On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism--especially
they who have written mainly to please their public. It pleases the
public to read about any sort of success. The greater, the more sudden
and violent the success, the more valuable is it as ingredient in a
novel. And since the average novelist lives always in a dream that one
of his works will somehow `catch on' as no other work ever has caught
on yet, it is very natural that he should fondly try meanwhile to get
this dream realised for him, vicariously, by this or that creature of
his fancy. True, he is usually too self-conscious to let this creature
achieve his sudden fame and endless fortune through a novel. Usually
it is a play that does the trick. In the Victorian time it was almost
always a book of poems. Oh for the spacious days of Tennyson and
Swinburne! In how many a three-volume novel is mentioned some `slim
octavo' which seems, from the account given, to have been as arresting
as `Poems and Ballads' without being less acceptable than `Idylls of
the King'! These verses were always the anonymous work of some very
young, very poor man, who supposed they had fallen still-born from the
press until, one day, a week or so after publication, as he walked
`moodily' and `in a brown study' along the Strand, having given up all
hope now that he would ever be in a position to ask Hilda to be his
wife, a friend accosted him--`Seen "The Thunderer" this morning? By
George, there's a column review of a new book of poems,' etc. In some
three-volume novel that I once read at a seaside place, having
borrowed it from the little circulating library, there was a young
poet whose sudden leap into the front rank has always laid a special
hold on my imagination. The name of the novel itself I cannot recall;
but I remember the name of the young poet--Aylmer Deane; and the
forever unforgettable title of his book of verse was POMENTS: BEING
POEMS OF THE MOOD AND THE MOMENT. What would I not give to possess a
copy of that work?

Though he had suffered, and though suffering is a sovereign
preparation for great work, I did not at the outset foresee that
Aylmer Deane was destined to wear the laurel. In real life I have
rather a flair for future eminence. In novels I am apt to be wise only
after the event. There the young men who do in due course take the
town by storm have seldom shown (to my dull eyes) promise. Their
spoken thoughts have seemed to me no more profound or pungent than my
own. All that is best in these authors goes into their work. But,
though I complain of them on this count, I admit that the thrill for
me of their triumphs is the more rapturous because every time it
catches me unawares. One of the greatest emotions I ever had was from
the triumph of THE GIFT OF GIFTS. Of this novel within a novel the
author was not a young man at all, but an elderly clergyman whose life
had been spent in a little rural parish. He was a dear, simple old
man, a widower. He had a large family, a small stipend. Judge, then,
of his horror when he found that his eldest son, `a scholar at
Christminster College, Oxbridge,' had run into debt for many hundreds
of pounds. Where to turn? The father was too proud to borrow of the
neighbourly nobleman who in Oxbridge days had been his `chum.' Nor had
the father ever practised the art of writing. (We are told that `his
sermons were always extempore.') But, years ago, `he had once thought
of writing a novel based on an experience which happened to a friend
of his.' This novel, in the fullness of time, he now proceeded to
write, though `without much hope of success.' He knew that he was
suffering from heart-disease. But he worked `feverishly, night after
night,' we are told, `in his old faded dressing-gown, till the dawn
mingled with the light of his candle and warned him to snatch a few
hours' rest, failing which he would be little able to perform the
round of parish duties that awaited him in the daytime.' No wonder he
had `not much hope.' No wonder I had no spark of hope for him. But
what are obstacles for but to be overleapt? What avails heart-disease,
what avail eld and feverish haste and total lack of literary training,
as against the romantic instinct of the lady who created the Rev.
Charles Hailing? `THE GIFT OF GIFTS was acclaimed as a masterpiece by
all the first-class critics.' Also, it very soon `brought in' ten
times as much money as was needed to pay off the debts of its author's
eldest son. Nor, though Charles Hailing died some months later, are we
told that he died from the strain of composition. We are left merely
to rejoice at knowing he knew at the last `that his whole family was
provided for.'

I wonder why it is that, whilst these Charles Hailings and Aylmer
Deanes delightfully abound in the lower reaches of English fiction, we
have so seldom found in the work of our great novelists anything at
all about the writing of a great book. It is true, of course, that our
great novelists have never had for the idea of literature itself that
passion which has always burned in the great French ones. Their own
art has never seemed to them the most important and interesting thing
in life. Also it is true that they have had other occupations--fox-
hunting, preaching, editing magazines, what not. Yet to them
literature must, as their own main task, have had a peculiar interest
and importance. No fine work can be done without concentration and
self-sacrifice and toil and doubt. It is nonsense to imagine that our
great novelists have just forged ahead or ambled along, reaching their
goal, in the good old English fashion, by sheer divination of the way
to it. A fine book, with all that goes to the making of it, is as fine
a theme as a novelist can have. But it is a part of English hypocrisy-
-or, let it be more politely said, English reserve--that, whilst we
are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist
on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us.
And just there, I suppose, is the reason why our great novelists have
shunned great books as subject-matter. It is fortunate for us (jarring
though it is to our patriotic sense) that Mr. Henry James was not born
an Englishman, that he was born of a race of specialists--men who are
impenitent specialists in whatever they take up, be it sport,
commerce, politics, anything. And it is fortunate for us that in
Paris, and in the straitest literary sect there, his method began to
form itself, and the art of prose fiction became to him a religion. In
that art he finds as much inspiration as Swinburne found in the art of
poetry. Just as Swinburne was the most learned of our poets, so is Mr.
James the most learned of our--let us say `our'--prose-writers. I
doubt whether the heaped total of his admirations would be found to
outweigh the least one of the admirations that Swinburne had. But,
though he has been a level-headed reader of the works that are good
enough for him to praise, his abstract passion for the art of fiction
itself has always been fierce and constant. Partly to the Parisian,
partly to the American element in him we owe the stories that he, and
of `our' great writers he only, has written about books and the
writers of books.

Here, indeed, in these incomparable stories, are imaginary great books
that are as real to us as real ones are. Sometimes, as in `The Author
of "Beltraffio,"' a great book itself is the very hero of the story.
(We are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which
Ambient's wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he
should grow up under the influence of its author; but I have a queer
conviction that it was THE DAISIES.) Usually, in these stories, it is
through the medium of some ardent young disciple, speaking in the
first person, that we become familiar with the great writer. It is
thus that we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was
woven that message, or meaning, that `figure in the carpet,' which
eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS.
of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically.
And it is also through Paraday's disciple that we make incidental
acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS,
and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote
THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior books
mentioned by Mr. James. But stay, I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE
TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those nearly forty volumes by Henry St.
George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George
is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE
was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame--the shame
he bore so bravely--in the ruck of his `output.' He is the only one of
those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said
that he was `generous and delicate and pursued the prize.' He is a
more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the author of THE MIDDLE
YEARS. Dencombe's grievance was against fate, not against himself.

"It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art
The art had come, but it had come after everything else. `Ah, for
another go !--ah, for a better chance.'... `A second chance--that's
the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark--we
do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our
passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'"

The scene of Dencombe's death is one of the most deeply-beautiful
things ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad;
it rises and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in
THE MIDDLE YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James's art can always
carry to us the conviction that his characters' books are as fine as
his own.

I crave--it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave--ocular evidence for
my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to
see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one
of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye, was
broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the
surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were
mimicked; and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books
were pasted congruously with the whole effect. Some of these backs had
been taken from actual books, others had been made specially and were
stamped with facetious titles that rather depressed me. `Here,'
thought I, `are the shelves on which Dencombe's works ought to be made
manifest. And Neil Paraday's too, and Vereker's.' Not Henry St.
George's, of course: he would not himself have wished it, poor fellow!
I would have nothing of his except SHADOWMERE. But Ray Limbert!--I
would have all of his, including a first edition of THE MAJOR KEY,
`that fiery-hearted rose as to which we watched in private the
formation of petal after petal, and flame after flame'; and also THE
HIDDEN HEART, `the shortest of his novels, but perhaps the loveliest,'
as Mr. James and I have always thought.... How my fingers would hover
along these shelves, always just going to alight, but never, lest the
spell were broken, alighting!

How well they would look there, those treasures of mine! And, most of
them having been issued in the seemly old three-volume form, how many
shelves they would fill! But I should find a place certainly for a
certain small brown book adorned with a gilt griffin between
wheatsheaves. THE PILGRIM'S SCRIP, that delightful though anonymous
work of my old friend Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel. And I should
like to find a place for POEMS, by AURORA LEIGH. Mr. Snodgrass's book
of verses might grace one of the lower shelves. (What is the title of
it? AMELIA'S BOWER, I hazard.) RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE LORD BYRON
AND OTHERS, by CAPTAIN SUMPH, would be somewhere; for Sumph did, you
will be glad to hear, take Shandon's advice and compile a volume.
Bungay published it. Indeed, of the books for which I should find room
there are a good few that bear the imprimatur of Bungay. DESPERATIN,
OR THE FUGITIVE DUCHESS, by THE HON. PERCY Popjoy, was Bungay's; and
so, of course, were PASSION FLOWERS and WALTER LORRAINE. Of the books
issued by the rival firm of Bacon I possess but one: MEMOIRS OF THE
POISONERS, by DR. SLOCUM. Near to Popjoy's romance would be THE LADY
FLABELLA, of which Mrs. Wititterly said to Kate Nickleby, `So
voluptuous is it not--so soft?' WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? would have a
place of honour (unearned by its own merits?). Among other novels that
I could not spare, THE GIFT OF GIFTS would conspicuously gleam. As for
POMENTS--ah, I should not be content with one copy of that. Even at
the risk of crowding out a host of treasures, I vow I would have a
copy of every one of the editions that POMENTS ran through.

THE GOLDEN DRUGGET
1918.

Primitive and essential things have great power to touch the heart of
the beholder. I mean such things as a man ploughing a field, or sowing
or reaping; a girl filling a pitcher from a spring; a young mother
with her child; a fisherman mending his nets; a light from a lonely
hut on a dark night.

Things such as these are the best themes for poets and painters, and
appeal to aught that there may be of painter or poet in any one of us.
Strictly, they are not so old as the hills, but they are more
significant and eloquent than hills. Hills will outlast them; but
hills glacially surviving the life of man on this planet are of as
little account as hills tremulous and hot in ages before the life of
man had its beginning. Nature is interesting only because of us. And
the best symbols of us are such sights as I have just mentioned--
sights unalterable by fashion of time or place, sights that in all
countries always were and never will not be.

It is true that in many districts nowadays there are elaborate new
kinds of machinery for ploughing the fields and reaping the corn. In
the most progressive districts of all, I daresay, the very sowing of
the grain is done by means of some engine, with better results than
could be got by hand. For aught I know, there is a patented invention
for catching fish by electricity. It is natural that we should, in
some degree, pride ourselves on such triumphs. It is well that we
should have poems about them, and pictures of them. But such poems and
pictures cannot touch our hearts very deeply. They cannot stir in us
the sense of our kinship with the whole dim past and the whole dim
future. The ancient Egyptians were great at scientific dodges--very
great indeed, nearly as great as we, the archaeologists tell us. Sand
buried the memory of those dodges for a rather long time. How are we
to know that the glories of our present civilisation will never be
lost? The world's coal-mines and oil-fields are exhaustible; and it is
not, I am told, by any means certain that scientists will discover any
good substitutes for the materials which are necessary to mankind's
present pitch of glory. Mankind may, I infer, have to sink back into
slow and simple ways, continent be once more separated from continent,
nation from nation, village from village. And, even supposing that the
present rate of traction and communication and all the rest of it can
forever be maintained, is our modern way of life so great a success
that mankind will surely never be willing to let it lapse? Doubtless,
that present rate can be not only maintained, but also accelerated
immensely, in the near future. Will these greater glories be voted,
even by the biggest fools, an improvement? We smile already at the
people of the early nineteenth century who thought that the vistas
opened by applied science were very heavenly. We have travelled far
along those vistas. Light is not abundant in them, is it? We are proud
of having gone such a long way, but...peradventure, those who come
after us will turn back, sooner or later, of their own accord. This is
a humbling thought. If the wonders of our civilisation are doomed, we
should prefer them to cease through lack of the minerals and mineral
products that keep them going. Possibly they are not doomed at all.
But this chance counts for little as against the certainty that,
whatever happens, the primitive and essential things will never,
anywhere, wholly cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that
Brown's Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones' Sonnet Sequence on the
Automatic Reaping Machine, and Robinson's Epic of the Piscicidal
Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of emotion in us. The
subjects chosen by these three great poets do not much impress us when
we regard them sub specie aeternitatis. Smith has painted nothing more
masterly than his picture of a girl turning a hot-water tap. But has
he never seen a girl fill a pitcher from a spring? Smithers' picture
of a young mother seconding a resolution at a meeting of a Board of
Guardians is magnificent, as brushwork. But why not have cut out the
Board and put in the baby? I yield to no one in admiration of
Smithkins' `Fa‡ade of the Waldorf Hotel by Night, in Peace Time.' But
a single light from a lonely hut would have been a finer theme.

I should like to show Smithkins the thing that I call The Golden
Drugget. Or rather, as this thing is greatly romantic to me, and that
painter is so unfortunate in his surname, I should like Smithkins to
find it for himself.

These words are written in war time and in England. There are, I hear,
`lighting restrictions' even on the far Riviera di Levante. I take it
that the Golden Drugget is not outspread now-anights across the high
dark coast-road between Rapallo and Zoagli. But the lonely wayside inn
is still there, doubtless; and its narrow door will again stand open,
giving out for wayfarers its old span of brightness into darkness,
when peace comes.

It is nothing by daylight, that inn. If anything, it is rather an
offence. Steep behind it rise mountains that are grey all over with
olive trees, and beneath it, on the other side of the road, the cliff
falls sheer to the sea. The road is white, the sea and sky are usually
of a deep bright blue, there are many single cypresses among the
olives. It is a scene of good colour and noble form. It is a gay and a
grand scene, in which the inn, though unassuming, is unpleasing, if
you pay attention to it. An ugly little box-like inn. A stuffy-looking
and uninviting inn. Salt and tobacco, it announces in faint letters
above the door, may be bought there. But one would prefer to buy these
things elsewhere. There is a bench outside, and a rickety table with a
zinc top to it, and sometimes a peasant or two drinking a glass or two
of wine. The proprietress is very unkempt. To Don Quixote she would
have seemed a princess, and the inn a castle, and the peasants notable
magicians. Don Quixote would have paused here and done something. Not
so do I.

By daylight, on the way down from my little home to Rapallo, or up
from Rapallo home, I am indeed hardly conscious that this inn exists.
By moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to
it. But on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but
a strip of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door,
great always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean
also will be. And so I cleave to the present tense--the nostalgic
present, as grammarians might call it.

Likewise, when I say that thoroughly dark nights are rare here, I mean
that they are rare in the Gulf of Genoa. Clouds do not seem to like
our landscape. But it has often struck me that Italian nights,
whenever clouds do congregate, are somehow as much darker than English
nights as Italian days are brighter than days in England. They have a
heavier and thicker nigritude. They shut things out from you more
impenetrably. They enclose you as in a small pavilion of black velvet.
This tenement is not very comfortable in a strong gale. It makes you
feel rather helpless. And gales can be strong enough, in the late
autumn, on the Riviera di Levante.

It is on nights when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift
anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I
approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo
and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves
and zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first
mile it runs straight for three or four hundred yards; and, as the inn
stands at a point midway on this straight course, the Golden Drugget
is visible to me long before I come to it. Even by starlight, it is
good to see. How much better, if I happen to be out on a black rough
night when nothing is disclosed but this one calm bright thing.
Nothing? Well, there has been descriable, all the way, a certain grey
glimmer immediately in front of my feet. This, in point of fact, is
the road, and by following it carefully I have managed to escape
collision with trees, bushes, stone walls. The continuous shrill
wailing of trees' branches writhing unseen but near, and the great
hoarse roar of the sea against the rocks far down below, are no
cheerful accompaniment for the buffeted pilgrim. He feels that he is
engaged in single combat with Nature at her unfriendliest. He isn't
sure that she hasn't supernatural allies working with her--witches on
broomsticks circling closely round him, demons in pursuit of him or
waiting to leap out on him. And how about mere robbers and cutthroats?
Suppose--but look! that streak, yonder, look!--the Golden Drugget.

There it is, familiar, serene, festal. That the pilgrim knew he would
see it in due time does not diminish for him the queer joy of seeing
it; nay, this emotion would be far less without that foreknowledge.
Some things are best at first sight. Others--and here is one of them--
do ever improve by recognition. I remember that when first I beheld
this steady strip of light, shed forth over a threshold level with the
road, it seemed to me conceivably sinister. It brought Stevenson to my
mind: the chink of doubloons and the clash of cutlasses; and I think I
quickened pace as I passed it. But now!--now it inspires in me a sense
of deep trust and gratitude; and such awe as I have for it is
altogether a loving awe, as for holy ground that should he trod
lightly. A drugget of crimson cloth across a London pavement is rather
resented by the casual passer-by, as saying to him `Step across me,
stranger, but not along me, not in!' and for answer he spurns it with
his heel. `Stranger, come in!' is the clear message of the Golden
Drugget. `This is but a humble and earthly hostel, yet you will find
here a radiant company of angels and archangels.' And always I cherish
the belief that if I obeyed the summons I should receive fulfilment of
the promise. Well, the beliefs that one most cherishes one is least
willing to test. I do not go in at that open door. But lingering, but
reluctant, is my tread as I pass by it; and I pause to bathe in the
light that is as the span of our human life, granted between one great
darkness and another.

HOSTS AND GUESTS
1918.

Beautifully vague though the English language is, with its meanings
merging into one another as softly as the facts of landscape in the
moist English climate, and much addicted though we always have been to
ways of compromise, and averse from sharp hard logical outlines, we do
not call a host a guest, nor a guest a host. The ancient Romans did
so. They, with a language that was as lucid as their climate and was a
perfect expression of the sharp hard logical outlook fostered by that
climate, had but one word for those two things. Nor have their equally
acute descendants done what might have been expected of them in this
matter. Ho^te and ospite and he'spide are as mysteriously equivocal as
hospes. By weight of all this authority I find myself being dragged to
the conclusion that a host and a guest must be the same thing, after
all. Yet in a dim and muzzy way, deep down in my breast, I feel sure
that they are different. Compromise, you see, as usual. I take it that
strictly the two things are one, but that our division of them is yet
another instance of that sterling common-sense by which, etc., etc.

I would go even so far as to say that the difference is more than
merely circumstantial and particular. I seem to discern also a
temperamental and general difference. You ask me to dine with you in a
restaurant, I say I shall be delighted, you order the meal, I praise
it, you pay for it, I have the pleasant sensation of not paying for
it; and it is well that each of us should have a label according to
the part he plays in this transaction. But the two labels are
applicable in a larger and more philosophic way. In every human being
one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or
positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive
instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant
of character that one might well say that mankind is divisible into
two great classes: hosts and guests.

I have already (see third sentence of foregoing paragraph) somewhat
prepared you for the shock of a confession which candour now forces
from me. I am one of the guests. You are, however, so shocked that you
will read no more of me? Bravo! Your refusal indicates that you have
not a guestish soul. Here am I trying to entertain you, and you will
not be entertained. You stand shouting that it is more blessed to give
than to receive. Very well. For my part, I would rather read than
write, any day. You shall write this essay for me. Be it never so
humble, I shall give it my best attention and manage to say something
nice about it. I am sorry to see you calming suddenly down. Nothing
but a sense of duty to myself, and to guests in general, makes me
resume my pen. I believe guests to be as numerous, really, as hosts.
It may be that even you, if you examine yourself dispassionately, will
find that you are one of them. In which case, you may yet thank me for
some comfort. I think there are good qualities to be found in guests,
and some bad ones in even the best hosts.

Our deepest instincts, bad or good, are those which we share with the
rest of the animal creation. To offer hospitality, or to accept it, is
but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his self-
development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do birds
keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been so
seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to accept
man's hospitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he run
out and invite another dog to share it with him?--and does your cat
insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk?
Quite the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all
these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have acquired some
willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may;
cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though
certain monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than
any wolves or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we
began to be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that
now and again--say, towards the end of the Stone Age--one or another
among the more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked
an eagle that he had snared the day before, `That red-haired man who
lives in the next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of
person. And sometimes I fancy he is rather lonely. I think I will ask
him to dine with us to-night,' and, presently going out, met the red-
haired man and said to him, `Are you doing anything to-night? If not,
won't you dine with us? It would be a great pleasure to my wife. Only
ourselves. Come just as you are.' `That is most good of you, but,'
stammered the red-haired man, `as ill-luck will have it, I am engaged
to-night. A long-standing, formal invitation. I wish I could get out
of it, but I simply can't. I have a morbid conscientiousness about
such things.' Thus we see that the will to offer hospitality was an
earlier growth than the will to accept it. But we must beware of
thinking these two things identical with the mere will to give and the
mere will to receive. It is unlikely that the red-haired man would
have refused a slice of eagle if it had been offered to him where he
stood. And it is still more unlikely that his friend would have handed
it to him. Such is not the way of hosts. The hospitable instinct is
not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it, as
I shall show.

Meanwhile, why did the red-haired man babble those excuses? It was
because he scented danger. He was not by nature suspicious, but--what
possible motive, except murder, could this man have for enticing him
to that cave? Acquaintance in the open valley was all very well and
pleasant, but a strange den after dark--no, no! You despise him for
his fears? Yet these were not really so absurd as they may seem. As
man progressed in civilisation, and grew to be definitely gregarious,
hospitality became more a matter of course. But even then it was not
above suspicion. It was not hedged around with those unwritten laws
which make it the safe and eligible thing we know to-day. In the
annals of hospitality there are many pages that make painful reading;
many a great dark blot is there which the Recording Angel may wish,
but will not be able, to wipe out with a tear.

If I were a host, I should ignore those tomes. Being a guest, I
sometimes glance into them, but with more of horror, I assure you,
than of malicious amusement. I carefully avoid those which treat of
hospitality among barbarous races. Things done in the best periods of
the most enlightened peoples are quite bad enough. The Israelites were
the salt of the earth. But can you imagine a deed of colder-blooded
treachery than Jael's? You would think it must have been held accursed
by even the basest minds. Yet thus sang Deborah and Barak, `Blessed
above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall
she be among women in the tent.' And Barak, remember, was a gallant
soldier, and Deborah was a prophetess who `judged Israel at that
time.' So much for the ideals of hospitality among the children of
Israel.

Of the Homeric Greeks it may be said that they too were the salt of
the earth; and it may be added that in their pungent and antiseptic
quality there was mingled a measure of sweetness, not to be found in
the children of Israel. I do not say outright that Odysseus ought not
to have slain the suitors. That is a debatable point. It is true that
they were guests under his roof. But he had not invited them. Let us
give him the benefit of the doubt. I am thinking of another episode in
his life. By what Circe did, and by his disregard of what she had
done, a searching light is cast on the laxity of Homeric Greek notions
as to what was due to guests. Odysseus was a clever, but not a bad
man, and his standard of general conduct was high enough. Yet, having
foiled Circe in her purpose to turn him into a swine, and having
forced her to restore his comrades to human shape, he did not let pass
the barrier of his teeth any such winged words as `Now will I bide no
more under thy roof, Circe, but fare across the sea with my dear
comrades, even unto mine own home, for that which thou didst was an
evil thing, and one not meet to be done unto strangers by the daughter
of a god.' He seems to have said nothing in particular, to have
accepted with alacrity the invitation that he and his dear comrades
should prolong their visit, and to have prolonged it with them for a
whole year, in the course of which Circe bore him a son, named
Telegonus. As Matthew Arnold would have said, `What a set!'

My eye roves, for relief, to those shelves where the later annals are.
I take down a tome at random. Rome in the fifteenth century:
civilisation never was more brilliant than there and then, I imagine;
and yet--no, I replace that tome. I saw enough in it to remind me that
the Borgias selected and laid down rare poisons in their cellars with
as much thought as they gave to their vintage wines. Extraordinary!--
but the Romans do not seem to have thought so. An invitation to dine
at the Palazzo Borghese was accounted the highest social honour. I am
aware that in recent books of Italian history there has been a
tendency to whiten the Borgias' characters. But I myself hold to the
old romantic black way of looking at the Borgias. I maintain that
though you would often in the fifteenth century have heard the
snobbish Roman say, in a would-be off-hand tone `I am dining with the
Borgias to-night,' no Roman ever was able to say `I dined last night
with the Borgias.'

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the
supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be. Hence the
marked coolness of Scotsmen towards Shakespeare, hence the untiring
efforts of that proud and sensitive race to set up Burns in his stead.
It is a risky thing to offer sympathy to the proud and sensitive, yet
I must say that I think the Scots have a real grievance. The two
actual, historic Macbeths were no worse than innumerable other couples
in other lands that had not yet fully struggled out of barbarism. It
is hard that Shakespeare happened on the story of that particular
pair, and so made it immortal. But he meant no harm, and, let Scotsmen
believe me, did positive good. Scotch hospitality is proverbial. As
much in Scotland as in America does the English visitor blush when he
thinks how perfunctory and niggard, in comparison, English hospitality
is. It was Scotland that first formalised hospitality, made of it an
exacting code of honour, with the basic principle that the guest must
in all circumstances be respected and at all costs protected. Jacobite
history bristles with examples of the heroic sacrifices made by hosts
for their guests, sacrifices of their own safety and even of their own
political convictions, for fear of infringing, however slightly, that
sacred code of theirs. And what was the origin of all this noble
pedantry? Shakespeare's `Macbeth.'

Perhaps if England were a bleak and rugged country, like Scotland, or
a new country, like America, the foreign visitor would be more
overwhelmed with kindness here than he is. The landscapes of our
country-side are so charming, London abounds in public monuments so
redolent of history, so romantic and engrossing, that we are perhaps
too apt to think the foreign visitor would have neither time nor
inclination to sit dawdling in private dining-rooms. Assuredly there
is no lack of hospitable impulse among the English. In what may be
called mutual hospitality they touch a high level. The French, also
the Italians, entertain one another far less frequently. In England
the native guest has a very good time indeed--though of course he pays
for it, in some measure, by acting as host too, from time to time.

In practice, no, there cannot be any absolute division of mankind into
my two categories, hosts and guests. But psychologically a guest does
not cease to be a guest when he gives a dinner, nor is a host not a
host when he accepts one. The amount of entertaining that a guest need
do is a matter wholly for his own conscience. He will soon find that
he does not receive less hospitality for offering little; and he would
not receive less if he offered none. The amount received by him
depends wholly on the degree of his agreeableness. Pride makes an
occasional host of him; but he does not shine in that capacity. Nor do
hosts want him to assay it. If they accept an invitation from him,
they do so only because they wish not to hurt his feelings. As guests
they are fish out of water.

Circumstances do, of course, react on character. It is conventional
for the rich to give, and for the poor to receive. Riches do tend to
foster in you the instincts of a host, and poverty does create an
atmosphere favourable to the growth of guestish instincts. But strong
bents make their own way. Not all guests are to be found among the
needy, nor all hosts among the affluent. For sixteen years after my
education was, by courtesy, finished-- from the age, that is, of
twenty-two to the age of thirty-eight, I lived in London, seeing all
sorts of people all the while; and I came across many a rich man who,
like the master of the shepherd Corin, was `of churlish disposition'
and little recked `to find the way to heaven by doing deeds of
hospitality.' On the other hand, I knew quite poor men who were
incorrigibly hospitable.

To such men, all honour. The most I dare claim for myself is that if I
had been rich I should have been better than Corin's master. Even as
it was, I did my best. But I had no authentic joy in doing it. Without
the spur of pride I might conceivably have not done it at all. There
recurs to me from among memories of my boyhood an episode that is
rather significant. In my school, as in most others, we received now
and again `hampers' from home. At the mid-day dinner, in every house,
we all ate together; but at breakfast and supper we ate in four or
five separate `messes.' It was customary for the receiver of a hamper
to share the contents with his mess-mates. On one occasion I received,
instead of the usual variegated hamper, a box containing twelve
sausage-rolls. It happened that when this box arrived and was opened
by me there was no one around. Of sausage-rolls I was particularly
fond. I am sorry to say that I carried the box up to my cubicle, and,
having eaten two of the sausage-rolls, said nothing to my friends,
that day, about the other ten, nor anything about them when, three
days later, I had eaten them all--all, up there, alone.

Thirty years have elapsed, my school-fellows are scattered far and
wide, the chance that this page may meet the eyes of some of them does
not much dismay me; but I am glad there was no collective and
contemporary judgment by them on my strange exploit. What defence
could I have offered? Suppose I had said `You see, I am so essentially
a guest,' the plea would have carried little weight. And yet it would
not have been a worthless plea. On receipt of a hamper, a boy did
rise, always, in the esteem of his mess-mates. His sardines, his
marmalade, his potted meat, at any rate while they lasted, did make us
think that his parents `must be awfully decent' and that he was a not
unworthy son. He had become our central figure, we expected him to
lead the conversation, we liked listening to him, his jokes were good.
With those twelve sausage-rolls I could have dominated my fellows for
a while. But I had not a dominant nature. I never trusted myself as a
leader. Leading abashed me. I was happiest in the comity of the crowd.
Having received a hamper, I was always glad when it was finished, glad
to fall back into the ranks. Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue
innate in guests.

Boys (as will have been surmised from my record of the effect of
hampers) are all of them potential guests. It is only as they grow up
that some of them harden into hosts. It is likely enough that if I,
when I grew up, had been rich, my natural bent to guestship would have
been diverted, and I too have become a (sort of) host. And perhaps I
should have passed muster. I suppose I did pass muster whenever, in
the course of my long residence in London, I did entertain friends.
But the memory of those occasions is not dear to me--especially not
the memory of those that were in the more distinguished restaurants.
Somewhere in the back of my brain, while I tried to lead the
conversation brightly, was always the haunting fear that I had not
brought enough money in my pocket. I never let this fear master me. I
never said to any one `Will you have a liqueur?'--always `What liqueur
will you have?' But I postponed as far as possible the evil moment of
asking for the bill. When I had, in the proper casual tone (I hope and
believe), at length asked for it, I wished always it were not brought
to me folded on a plate, as though the amount were so hideously high
that I alone must be privy to it. So soon as it was laid beside me, I
wanted to know the worst at once. But I pretended to be so occupied in
talk that I was unaware of the bill's presence; and I was careful to
be always in the middle of a sentence when I raised the upper fold and
took my not (I hope) frozen glance. In point of fact, the amount was
always much less than I had feared. Pessimism does win us great happy
moments.

Meals in the restaurants of Soho tested less severely the pauper guest
masquerading as host. But to them one could not ask rich persons--nor
even poor persons unless one knew them very well. Soho is so uncertain
that the fare is often not good enough to be palmed off on even one's
poorest and oldest friends. A very magnetic host, with a great gift
for bluffing, might, no doubt, even in Soho's worst moments, diffuse
among his guests a conviction that all was of the best. But I never
was good at bluffing. I had always to let food speak for itself. `It's
cheap' was the only paean that in Soho's bad moments ever occurred to
me, and this of course I did not utter. And was it so cheap, after
all? Soho induces a certain optimism. A bill there was always larger
than I had thought it would be.

Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by
cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie. In
restaurants I should have liked always to give cheques. But in any
restaurant I was so much more often seen as guest than as host that I
never felt sure the proprietor would trust me. Only in my club did I
know the luxury, or rather the painlessness, of entertaining by
cheque. A cheque--especially if it is a club cheque, as supplied for
the use of members, not a leaf torn out of his own book--makes so
little mark on any man' s imagination. He dashes off some words and
figures, he signs his name (with that vague momentary pleasure which
the sight of his own signature anywhere gives him), he walks away and
forgets. Offering hospitality in my club, I was inwardly calm. But
even there I did not glow (though my face and manner, I hoped,
glowed). If my guest was by nature a guest, I managed to forget
somewhat that I myself was a guest by nature. But if, as now and then
happened, my guest was a true and habitual host, I did feel that we
were in an absurdly false relation; and it was not without difficulty
that I could restrain myself from saying to him `This is all very
well, you know, but--frankly: your place is at the head of your own
table.'

The host as guest is far, far worse than the guest as host. He never
even passes muster. The guest, in virtue of a certain hability that is
part of his natural equipment, can more or less ape the ways of a
host. But the host, with his more positive temperament, does not even
attempt the graces of a guest. By `graces' I do not mean to imply
anything artificial. The guest's manners are, rather, as wild flowers
springing from good rich soil--the soil of genuine modesty and
gratitude. He honourably wishes to please in return for the pleasure
he is receiving. He wonders that people should be so kind to him, and,
without knowing it, is very kind to them. But the host, as I said
earlier in this essay, is a guest against his own will. That is the
root of the mischief. He feels that it is more blessed, etc., and that
he is conferring rather than accepting a favour. He does not adjust
himself. He forgets his place. He leads the conversation. He tries
genially to draw you out. He never comments on the goodness of the
food or wine. He looks at his watch abruptly and says he must be off.
He doesn't say he has had a delightful time. In fact, his place is at
the head of his own table.

His own table, over his own cellar, under his own roof--it is only
there that you see him at his best. To a club or restaurant he may
sometimes invite you, but not there, not there, my child, do you get
the full savour of his quality. In life or literature there has been
no better host than Old Wardle. Appalling though he would have been as
a guest in club or restaurant, it is hardly less painful to think of
him as a host there. At Dingley Dell, with an ample gesture, he made
you free of all that was his. He could not have given you a club or a
restaurant. Nor, when you come to think of it, did he give you Dingley
Dell. The place remained his. None knew better than Old Wardle that
this was so. Hospitality, as we have agreed, is not one of the most
deep-rooted instincts in man, whereas the sense of possession
certainly is. Not even Old Wardle was a communist. `This,' you may be
sure he said to himself, `is my roof, these are my horses, that's a
picture of my dear old grandfather.' And `This,' he would say to us,
`is my roof: sleep soundly under it. These are my horses: ride them.
That's a portrait of my dear old grandfather: have a good look at it.'
But he did not ask us to walk off with any of these things. Not even
what he actually did give us would he regard as having passed out of
his possession. `That,' he would muse if we were torpid after dinner,
`is my roast beef,' and `That,' if we staggered on the way to bed, `is
my cold milk punch.' `But surely,' you interrupt me, `to give and then
not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.' I
agree. I hope you didn't think I was trying to disparage Old Wardle. I
was merely keeping my promise to point out that from among the motives
of even the best hosts pride and egoism are not absent.

Every virtue, as we were taught in youth, is a mean between two
extremes; and I think any virtue is the better understood by us if we
glance at the vice on either side of it. I take it that the virtue of
hospitality stands midway between churlishness and mere ostentation.
Far to the left of the good host stands he who doesn't want to see
anything of any one; far to the right, he who wants a horde of people
to be always seeing something of him. I conjecture that the figure on
the left, just discernible through my field-glasses, is that of old
Corin's master. His name was never revealed to us, but Corin's brief
account of his character suffices. `Deeds of hospitality' is a dismal
phrase that could have occurred only to the servant of a very dismal
master. Not less tell-tale is Corin's idea that men who do these
`deeds' do them only to save their souls in the next world. It is a
pity Shakespeare did not actually bring Corin's master on to the
stage. One would have liked to see the old man genuinely touched by
the charming eloquence of Rosalind's appeal for a crust of bread, and
conscious that he would probably go to heaven if he granted it, and
yet not quite able to grant it. Far away though he stands to the left
of the good host, he has yet something in common with that third
person discernible on the right--that speck yonder, which I believe to
be Lucullus. Nothing that we know of Lucullus suggests that he was
less inhuman than the churl of Arden. It does not appear that he had a
single friend, nor that he wished for one. His lavishness was
indiscriminate except in that he entertained only the rich. One would
have liked to dine with him, but not even in the act of digestion
could one have felt that he had a heart. One would have acknowledged
that in all the material resources of his art he was a master, and
also that he practised his art for sheer love of it, wishing to be
admired for nothing but his mastery, and cocking no eye on any of
those ulterior objects but for which some of the most prominent hosts
would not entertain at all. But the very fact that he was an artist is
repulsive. When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.
With this reflection I look away from Lucullus and, fixing my gaze on
the middle ground, am the better able to appreciate the excellence of
the figure that stands before me--the figure of Old Wardle. Some pride
and egoism in that capacious breast, yes, but a great heart full of
kindness, and ever a warm spontaneous welcome to the stranger in need,
and to all old friends and young. Hark! he is shouting something. He
is asking us both down to Dingley Dell. And you have shouted back that
you will be delighted. Ah, did I not suspect from the first that you
too were perhaps a guest?

But--I constrain you in the act of rushing off to pack your things--
one moment: this essay has yet to be finished. We have yet to glance
at those two extremes between which the mean is good guestship. Far to
the right of the good guest, we descry the parasite; far to the left,
the churl again. Not the same churl, perhaps. We do not know that
Corin's master was ever sampled as a guest. I am inclined to call
yonder speck Dante--Dante Alighieri, of whom we do know that he
received during his exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid
them by writing how bitter was the bread in their houses, and how
steep the stairs were. To think of dour Dante as a guest is less
dispiriting only than to think what he would have been as a host had
it ever occurred to him to entertain any one or anything except a deep
regard for Beatrice; and one turns with positive relief to have a
glimpse of the parasite--Mr. Smurge, I presume, `whose gratitude was
as boundless as his appetite, and his presence as unsought as it
appeared to be inevitable.' But now, how gracious and admirable is the
central figure--radiating gratitude, but not too much of it; never
intrusive, ever within call; full of dignity, yet all amenable; quiet,
yet lively; never echoing, ever amplifying; never contradicting, but
often lighting the way to truth; an ornament, an inspiration,
anywhere.

Such is he. But who is he? It is easier to confess a defect than to
claim a quality. I have told you that when I lived in London I was
nothing as a host; but I will not claim to have been a perfect guest.
Nor indeed was I. I was a good one, but, looking back, I see myself
not quite in the centre--slightly to the left, slightly to the
churlish side. I was rather too quiet, and I did sometimes contradict.
And, though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often
preferred to stay at home. If any one hereafter shall form a
collection of the notes written by me in reply to invitations, I am
afraid he will gradually suppose me to have been more in request than
ever I really was, and to have been also a great invalid, and a great
traveller.

A POINT TO BE REMEMBERED BY VERY EMINENT MEN
1918.

One of the things a man best remembers in later years is the first
time he set eyes on some illustrious elder whose achievements had
already inflamed him to special reverence. In almost every
autobiography you will find recorded the thrill of that first sight.
With the thrill, perhaps, there was a slight shock. Great men are but
life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short. No matter to hero-
worshipping youth. The shock did but swell the thrill. It did but
enlarge the wonder that this was the man himself, the man who--

I was about to say `who had written those inspired books.' You see,
the autobiographists are usually people with an innate twist towards
writing, people whose heroes, therefore, were men of letters; and thus
(especially as I myself have that twist) I am apt to think of literary
hero-worship as flourishing more than could any other kind. I must try
to be less narrow. At first sight of the Lord Chancellor, doubtless,
unforgettable emotions rise in the breast of a young man who has felt
from his earliest years the passionate desire to be a lawyer. One
whose dream it is to excel in trade will have been profoundly stirred
at finding himself face to face with Sir Thomas Lipton. At least, I
suppose so. I speak without conviction. I am inclined, after all, to
think that there is in the literary temperament a special sensibility,
whereby these great first envisagements mean more to it than to
natures of a more practical kind. So it is primarily to men very
eminent in literature that I venture to offer a hint for making those
envisagements as great as possible.

The hint will serve only in certain cases. There are various ways in
which a young man may chance to see his hero for the first time. `One
wintry afternoon, not long after I came to London,' the
autobiographist will tell you, `I happened to be in Cheyne Walk, bent
on I know not what errand, when I saw coming slowly along the pavement
an old grey-bearded man. He wore a hat of the kind that was called in
those days a "wide-awake," and he leaned heavily on a stick which he
carried in his right hand. I stood reverently aside to let him pass--
the man who had first taught me to see, to feel, to think. Yes, it was
Thomas Carlyle; and as he went by, looking neither to the right nor to
the left, my heart stood still within me. What struck me most in that
thought-furrowed face was the eyes. I had never, I have never since,
seen a pair of eyes which,' etc., etc. This is well enough, and I
don't say that the writer has exaggerated the force of the impression
he received. I say merely that the impression would have been stronger
still if he had seen Carlyle in a room. The open air is not really a
good setting for a hero. It is too diffuse. It is too impersonal. Four
walls, a ceiling, and a floor--these things are needed to concentrate
for the worshipper the vision vouchsafed. Even if the room be a public
one--a waiting-room, say, at Clapham Junction--it is very helpful. Far
more so if it be a room in a private house, where, besides the vision
itself, is thrust on the worshipper the dizzy sense of a personal
relationship.

Dip with me, for an example, into some other autobiography... Here:
`Shortly after I came to London'--it is odd that autobiographists
never are born or bred there--`one of the houses I found open to me
was that of Mrs. T--, a woman whom (so it seemed to me when in later
years I studied Italian) the word simpatica described exactly, and
who, as the phrase is, "knew everybody." Calling on her one Sunday
afternoon, I noticed among the guests, as I came in, a short, stalwart
man with a grey beard. "I particularly," my hostess whispered to me,
" want you to know Mr. Robert Browning." Everything in the room seemed
to swim round me, and I had the sensation of literally sinking through
the carpet when presently I found my hand held for a moment--it was
only a moment, but it seemed to me an eternity--by the hand that had
written "Paracelsus." I had a confused impression of something godlike
about the man. His brow was magnificent. But the eyes were what stood
out. Not that they were prominent eyes, but they seemed to look you
through and through, and had a lustre--there is no other word for it--
which,' I maintain, would have been far less dazzling out in the
street, just as the world-sadness of Carlyle's eyes would have been
twice as harrowing in Mrs. T--'s drawing-room.

But even there neither of those pairs of eyes could have made its
fullest effect. The most terrifically gratifying way of seeing one's
hero and his eyes for the first time is to see them in his own home.
Anywhere else, believe me, something of his essence is forfeit. `The
rose of roses' loses more or less of its beauty in any vase, and
rather more than less there in a nosegay of ordinary little blossoms
(to which I rather rudely liken Mrs. T--'s other friends). The supreme
flower should be first seen growing from its own Sharonian soil.

The worshipper should have, therefore, a letter of introduction.
Failing that, he should write a letter introducing himself--a fervid,
an idolatrous letter, not without some excuse for the writing of it:
the hero's seventieth birthday, for instance, or a desire for light on
some obscure point in one of his earlier works. Heroes are very human,
most of them; very easily touched by praise. Some of them, however,
are bad at answering letters. The worshipper must not scruple to write
repeatedly, if need be. Sooner or later he will be summoned to the
presence. This, perhaps, will entail a railway journey. Heroes tend to
live a little way out of London. So much the better. The adventure
should smack of pilgrimage. Consider also that a house in a London
street cannot seem so signally its owner's own as can a house in a
village or among fields. The one kind contains him, the other
enshrines him, breathes of him. The sight of it, after a walk (there
should be a longish walk) from the railway station, strikes great
initial chords in the worshipper; and the smaller the house, the
greater the chords. The worshipper pauses at the gate of the little
front-garden, and when he writes his autobiography those chords will
be reverberating yet. `Here it was that the greatest of modern spirits
had lived and wrought. Here in the fullness of years he abode. With I
know not what tumult of thoughts I passed up the path and rang the
bell. A bright-faced parlourmaid showed me into a room on the ground-
floor, and said she would tell the master I was here. It was a
wonderfully simple room; and something, perhaps the writing-table,
told me it was his work-room, the very room from which, in the teeth
of the world's neglect and misunderstanding, he had cast his spell
over the minds of all thinking men and women. When I had waited a few
minutes, the door opened and' after that the deluge of what was felt
when the very eminent man came in.

Came in, mark you. That is a vastly important point. Had the very
eminent man been there at the outset, the worshipper's first sight of
him would have been a very great moment, certainly; but not nearly so
great as in fact it was. Very eminent men should always, on these
occasions, come in. That is the point I ask them to remember.

Honourably concerned with large high issues, they are not students of
personal effect. I must therefore explain to them why it is more
impressive to come into a room than to be found there.

Let those of them who have been playgoers cast their minds back to
their experience of theatres. Can they recall a single play in which
the principal actor was `discovered' sitting or standing on the stage
when the curtain rose? No. The actor, by the very nature of his
calling, does, must, study personal effect. No playwright would dare
to dump down his principal actor at the outset of a play. No sensible
playwright would wish to do so. That actor's personality is a part of
the playwright's material. Playwriting, it has been well said, is an
art of preparing. The principal actor is one of the things for which
we must be artfully prepared. Note Shakespeare's carefulness in this
matter. In his day, the stage had no curtain, so that even the obscure
actor who spoke the first lines (Shakespeare himself sometimes, maybe)
was not ignominiously `discovered.' But an unprepared entry is no
good. The audience must first be wrought on, wrought up. Had
Shakespeare been also Burbage, it is possible that he would have been
even more painstaking than he was in leading up to the leading man.
Assuredly, by far the most tremendous stage entries I ever saw were
those of Mr. Wilson Barrett in his later days, the days when he had
become his own dramatist. I remember particularly a first night of his
at which I happened to be sitting next to a clever but not very
successful and rather sardonic old actor. I forget just what great
historic or mythic personage Mr. Barrett was to represent, but I know
that the earlier scenes of the play resounded with rumours of him--
accounts of the great deeds he had done, and of the yet greater deeds
that were expected of him. And at length there was a procession:
white-bearded priests bearing wands; maidens playing upon the sackbut;
guards in full armour; a pell-mell of unofficial citizens ever
prancing along the edge of the pageant, huzza-ing and hosanna-ing,
mostly looking back over their shoulders and shading their eyes;
maidens strewing rose-leaves; and at last the orchestra crashing to a
climax in the nick of which my neighbour turned to me and, with an
assumption of innocent enthusiasm, whispered, I shouldn't wonder if
this were Barrett.' I suppose (Mr. Barrett at that instant amply
appearing) I gave way to laughter; but this didn't matter; the
applause would have drowned a thunderstorm, and lasted for several
minutes.

My very eminent reader begins to look uncomfortable. Let him take
heart. I do not want him to tamper with the simplicity of his
household arrangements. Not even the one bright-faced parlourmaid need
precede him with strewn petals. All the necessary preparation will
have been done by the bare fact that this is his room, and that he
will presently appear. `But,' he may say, with a toss of his grey
beard, `I am not going to practise any device whatsoever. I am above
devices. I shall be in the room when the young man arrives.' I assure
him that I am not appealing to his vanity, merely to his good-nature.
Let him remember that he too was young once, he too thrilled in
harmless hero-worship. Let him not grudge the young man an utmost
emotion.

Coming into a room that contains a stranger is a definite performance,
a deed of which one is conscious--if one be young, and if that
stranger be august. Not to come in awkwardly, not to make a bad
impression, is here the paramount concern. The mind of the young man
as he comes in is clogged with thoughts of self. It is free of these
impediments if he shall have been waiting alone in the room. To be
come in to is a thing that needs no art and induces no embarrassment.
One's whole attention is focussed on the comer-in. One is the mere
spectator, the passive and receptive receiver. And even supposing that
the young man could come in under his hero's gaze without a thought of
self, his first vision would yet lack the right intensity. A person
found in a room, if it be a room strange to the arriver, does not
instantly detach himself from his surroundings. He is but a feature of
the scene. He does not stand out as against a background, in the grand
manner of portraiture, but is fused as in an elaborately rendered
`interior.' It is all the more essential, therefore, that the
worshipper shall not have his first sight of hero and room
simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon
converted into a presence-chamber by the hero's entry. And let not the
hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make
it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in. I
would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty,
bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had
come to Mahomet, it would, we may be sure, have come slowly, that the
prophet should have time to realise the grandeur of the miracle. Let
the hero remember that his coming, too, will seem supernatural to the
young man. Let him be framed for an instant or so in the doorway--time
for his eyes to produce their peculiar effect. And by the way: if he
be a wearer of glasses, he should certainly remove these before coming
in. He can put them on again almost immediately. It is the first
moment that matters.

As to how long an interval the hero should let elapse between the
young man's arrival and his own entry, I cannot offer any very exact
advice. I should say, roughly, that in ten minutes the young man would
be strung up to the right pitch, and that more than twenty minutes
would be too much. It is important that expectancy shall have worked
on him to the full, but it is still more important that his mood shall
not have been chafed to impatience. The danger of over-long delay is
well exemplified in the sad case of young Coventry Patmore. In his old
age Patmore wrote to Mr. Gosse a description of a visit he had paid,
at the age of eighteen, to Leigh Hunt; and you will find the letter on
page 32, vol. I, of Mr. Basil Champneys' biography of him. The
circumstances had been most propitious. The eager and sensitive spirit
of the young man, his intense admiration for `The Story of Rimini,'
the letter of introduction from his father to the venerable poet and
friend of greater bygone poets, the long walk to Hammersmith, the
small house in a square there--all was classically in order. The poet
was at home. The visitor as shown in.... `I had,' he was destined to
tell Mr. Gosse, `waited in the little parlour at least two hours, when
the door was opened and a most picturesque gentleman, with hair
flowing nearly or quite to his shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat and
a Vandyck collar of lace about a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his
hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or
notice of my having waited so long, "This is a beautiful world, Mr.
Patmore!"' The young man was so taken aback by these words that they
`eclipsed all memory of what occurred during the remainder of the
visit.'

Yet there was nothing wrong about the words themselves. Indeed, to any
one with any sense of character and any knowledge of Leigh Hunt, they
must seem to have been exactly, exquisitely, inevitably the right
words. But they should have been said sooner.

SERVANTS
1918.

It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship, so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not
rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless,
they must have been shocked.

The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in
human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example,
ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and
gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as
in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-
witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without
powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish
from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, `'Tis a matter
easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall
powder their hair henceforth.' Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath,
`Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of
Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!'
Whereat Sir John exclaimed `Zounds!' and hotly demonstrated that since
his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption
by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked
how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in
powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper)
went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this
they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, `Let
powder be taxed.' And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was
still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam
Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for
custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end of those things which the
Nobility and Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as,
laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without
these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a
great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the
French one. And it may be that everything will be changed,
fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to
his Lady, `My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear
powder, and not wear livery, any more,' and that his Lady will say
`Oh, all right.' Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish
altogether from the face of the earth.

Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is
deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from
the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining te^te-a`-
te^te with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty
footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than
in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I
refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among
footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by
their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent
fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution
on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better
be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall
of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I
conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and
at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and
discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I
believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years
later, he said to his heir, `Discharge two more.' Such enlightenment
and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As
time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers
was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all
publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-
furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done
nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing
just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming
less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform
Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of
footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman
not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler
and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.

Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have
taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets,
whether of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at
all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the
Russian Revolution, will have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that
they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may
be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their
livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more
parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will be
forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on
just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose
that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants
particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual
evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition
must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic
service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity
of past days.

You have to look rather far behind you for the time when `the servant
question,' as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find
servants collectively `knowing their place,' as the phrase (not is,
but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's
reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards
still stood in the London parks to announce that `Ladies and Gentlemen
are requested, and Servants are commanded' not to do this and that.
But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants
received commands, not requests, and were not `obliging' but obedient.
As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses
had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively
few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-
increasing middle class, were very much for use, having to do an
immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal.
And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for
little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse
of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to preserve
their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not
in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their
devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found
one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long
and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not
be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were
very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in
life. By the rules of all households, `followers' were fended
ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not
technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time,
after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at
all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and
elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of
money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no
genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a
tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and
gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her
restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour
from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome
and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good
feeling on either side. `Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all
her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to
seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own.' Thus wrote
Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his
father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word.
But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old
when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover,
others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were
over.

Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulose clouds. It was
believed, however, that these would pass. `Punch,' our ever-quick
interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should
imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the
piano! `Punch' and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes,
were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his
exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the
malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the
face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others
obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and
others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters
aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under
the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their
slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in the 'sixties.
Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the `some' a measure
of the gulf between themselves and the `others.' Those others had now
begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.

Anthony Trollope was not, like `Punch,' a mere interpreter of what was
upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and
subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon
forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers;
quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries.
For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know
him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been
given `Orley Farm'? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after
confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? `As she
slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of
punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of
some of us--I trust but of few--when with the silent inner voice of
suffering'--and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by
saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason
which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word--`we call on the
mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take
us in--when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been
barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to
us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady
Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass
down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all,
all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no
change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor
the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must,' etc., etc.

You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any
bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when `Orley
Farm' was published. Servants really were `most desolate' in those
days, and `their sufferings' were less acute only than those of
gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it
was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust
Trollope.

Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be
crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant
girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words,
how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they
were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this
melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that
it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till
long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly
aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to
make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be
up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience
at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am
afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I
am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try
to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment,
or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise,
it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not
groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of
mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday,
thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's `History of Trade
Unionism' the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It
would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One
would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The
mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked
wonders. There has been no servants' campaign, no strategy, nothing
but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in
isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are
not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they
glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other
forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic
service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing
itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to
read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had
the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in
1872-- But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone.
On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework,
for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes,
will be big enough hereafter to get that done?

Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more
governing classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little
overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of
human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum
of human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under
any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of
the conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family
in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member
of the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished
her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years
would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her
diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be
standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict
accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in
work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so,
she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on
the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she
would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by
suspension of their license to employ. There would always be chances
of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great
as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain
tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all
their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not
knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while
they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere.
Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock
to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their
demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems
almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said `Sarah,
your master wishes--' or Mr. Smith said `Sarah, go up and ask your
mistress whether--' I am well aware that the very title of this essay
jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more
explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the
survival of domestic service, in its old form, depends more and more
on our agreement not to mention it.

Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all,
worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly
so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of
yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the
corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he
noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander
to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good.
But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle
cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well
enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three
servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them
there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never
wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long
years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine
mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes
only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing
the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from
deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing
under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no,
personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much
indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin now.
For a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public
worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to
stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout
old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the
hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or
perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say
that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form,
topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of
the summit of Hampstead. He was as richly local as the pond there--
that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by
cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable
dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the
flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to
Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were
looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I
think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred,
and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had `bin
down to London a matter o' three or four times,' he would tell me,
`an' slep' there once.' He knew me to be a native of that city, and,
for he was the most respectful of men, did not make any adverse
criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--
horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more
retentive of horses than of men. But he did--and this was a great
thrill for me--did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to
have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, `a gen'leman with summut
long hair, settin' in a small cart, takin' a pictur'.' To me Ford
Madox Brown's `Work' is of all modern pictur's the most delightful in
composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most
worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw
it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything
that had befallen him in days before he was `took on as stable-lad at
the Castle.' His pride was in the Castle, wholly.

Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at
finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to
districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there
an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to
butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them
that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it
is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing
younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without
exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had
gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in
the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of
life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of
past decades was undone butlers: were suddenly as old and stout as
ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, is only a
temporary setback. At the restoration of peace butlers will reappear
among us as they were in 1915, and anon will be losing height and
weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with
pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less gracious kind
than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had
shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a
manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit
of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household
strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring
out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have
seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another
whom, positively, I heard humming--a faint sound indeed, but menacing
as the roll of tumbrils.

These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers
observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as
their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern
though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was `a
flame of old-world fealty all bright.' Were these but the finer
comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost
dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch
in a merely aesthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his
movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control.
Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth
face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a
long period I saw him often, both in town and in country. Against the
background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be
that. Brett's supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was,
after all, human--that he had a heart, in which he had taken the
liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and
mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer
formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country,
when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of
some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading
a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett
appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in
a low voice, `I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that
there's a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know,
sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow
hopping about on the lawn.' I thanked him effusively as I darted to
the window, and simulated an intense interest in `the little fellow.'
I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.

What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so
much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was
the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the
pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories
of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over
himself--but did he really lose it? There were only four people at
dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for
drollery), and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had
turned on early marriages. `I,' said the young man presently, `shall
not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of
seventeen.' His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, `Oh, Tom, what a
perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn't born yet!' `No,' said the
young man, `but I have my eye on her mother.' At this, Brett, who was
holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively,
with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His
breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a
genuine lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an
equilibrist so secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?

If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be
in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he
was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one
glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out
late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and
sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time.
Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the
populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than
others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw
the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from
an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent
out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great
tensity--even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate
evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve
his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry
in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette--little had he
dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon
her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of
cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from
their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical
and ear-piercing had become heartrending and human when I saw from
whom it proceeded--a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But was it a
heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett more than a mere virtuoso?

He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who
wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the
way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I
ever so able to pay his wages, should never covet him--no, nor
anything like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we look
out at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later
years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I
am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they
also--except the two or three ancients aforesaid--have always struck
some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic service
has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for
enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of
the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of
one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly
disliked being a monitor's fag. Other fags there were who took pride
in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers
of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it
myself, and that if I mightn't eat it myself I would rather it were
not very good. Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by
morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a
plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly
propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were
good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten
with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why
that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even
so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for
she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me
by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least
mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only
be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy--dear Italy,
where I have lived much--servants do still regard service somewhat in
the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I
am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon
of some local festa there is no servant at all in the little house!
Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive
quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to be
anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that
island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and
Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been
Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I
promptly freed you.

Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather
lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go
about doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to
which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those
things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.

GOING OUT FOR A WALK
1918.

It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk.
I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even
while I trotted prattling by my nurse's side I regretted the good old
days when I had, and wasn't, a perambulator. When I grew up it seemed
to me that the one advantage of living in London was that nobody ever
wanted me to come out for a walk. London's very drawbacks--its endless
noise and hustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in
it--assured this one immunity. Whenever I was with friends in the
country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling,
some man might suddenly say `Come out for a walk!' in that sharp
imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other
connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble
and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk. Any one thus desirous
feels that he has a right to impose his will on whomever he sees
comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading. It is easy to say simply
`No' to an old friend. In the case of a mere acquaintance one wants
some excuse. `I wish I could, but'--nothing ever occurs to me except
`I have some letters to write.' This formula is unsatisfactory in
three ways. (1) It isn't believed. (2) It compels you to rise from
your chair, go to the writing-table, and sit improvising a letter to
somebody until the walkmonger (just not daring to call you liar and
hypocrite) shall have lumbered out of the room. (3) It won't operate
on Sunday mornings. `There's no post out till this evening' clinches
the matter; and you may as well go quietly.

Walking for walking's sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a
thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it
is that it stops the brain. Many a man has professed to me that his
brain never works so well as when he is swinging along the high road
or over hill and dale. This boast is not confirmed by my memory of
anybody who on a Sunday morning has forced me to partake of his
adventure. Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have
of power to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting on a chair, or
standing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for
a walk. The ideas that came so thick and fast to him in any room,
where are they now? where that encyclopiedic knowledge which he bore
so lightly? where the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning
over any topic that was started? The man's face that was so mobile is
set now; gone is the light from his fine eyes. He says that A. (our
host) is a thoroughly good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds
that A. is one of the best fellows he has ever met. We tramp another
furlong or so, and he says that Mrs. A. is a charming woman. Presently
he adds that she is one of the most charming women he has ever known.
We pass an inn. He reads vapidly aloud to me: `The King's Arms.
Licensed to sell Ales and Spirits.' I foresee that during the rest of
the walk he will read aloud any inscription that occurs. We pass a
milestone. He points at it with his stick, and says `Uxminster. 11
Miles.' We turn a sharp corner at the foot of a hill. He points at the
wall, and says `Drive Slowly.' I see far ahead, on the other side of
the hedge bordering the high road, a small notice-board. He sees it
too. He keeps his eye on it. And in due course `Trespassers,' he says,
`Will Be Prosecuted.' Poor man!--mentally a wreck.

Luncheon at the A.s, however, salves him and floats him in full sail.
Behold him once more the life and soul of the party. Surely he will
never, after the bitter lesson of this morning, go out for another
walk. An hour later, I see him striding forth, with a new companion. I
watch him out of sight. I know what he is saying. He is saying that I
am rather a dull man to go a walk with. He will presently add that I
am one of the dullest men he ever went a walk with. Then he will
devote himself to reading out the inscriptions.

How comes it, this immediate deterioration in those who go walking for
walking's sake? Just what happens? I take it that not by his reasoning
faculties is a man urged to this enterprise. He is urged, evidently,
by something in him that transcends reason; by his soul, I presume.
Yes, it must be the soul that raps out the `Quick march!' to the
body.--`Halt! Stand at ease!' interposes the brain, and `To what
destination,' it suavely asks the soul, `and on what errand, are you
sending the body?'--`On no errand whatsoever,' the soul makes answer,
`and to no destination at all. It is just like you to be always on the
look-out for some subtle ulterior motive. The body is going out
because the mere fact of its doing so is a sure indication of
nobility, probity, and rugged grandeur of character.'--`Very well,
Vagula, have your own wayula! But I,' says the brain, `flatly refuse
to be mixed up in this tomfoolery. I shall go to sleep till it is
over.' The brain then wraps itself up in its own convolutions, and
falls into a dreamless slumber from which nothing can rouse it till
the body has been safely deposited indoors again.

Even if you go to some definite place, for some definite purpose, the
brain would rather you took a vehicle; but it does not make a point of
this; it will serve you well enough unless you are going for a walk.
It won't, while your legs are vying with each other, do any deep
thinking for you, nor even any close thinking; but it will do any
number of small odd jobs for you willingly--provided that your legs,
also, are making themselves useful, not merely bandying you about to
gratify the pride of the soul. Such as it is, this essay was composed
in the course of a walk, this morning. I am not one of those
extremists who must have a vehicle to every destination. I never go
out of my way, as it were, to avoid exercise. I take it as it comes,
and take it in good part. That valetudinarians are always chattering
about it, and indulging in it to excess, is no reason for despising
it. I am inclined to think that in moderation it is rather good for
one, physically. But, pending a time when no people wish me to go and
see them, and I have no wish to go and see any one, and there is
nothing whatever for me to do off my own premises, I never will go out
for a walk.

QUIA IMPERFECTUM
1918.

I have often wondered that no one has set himself to collect
unfinished works of art. There is a peculiar charm for all of us in
that which was still in the making when its maker died, or in that
which he laid aside because he was tired of it, or didn't see his way
to the end of it, or wanted to go on to something else. Mr. Pickwick
and the Ancient Mariner are valued friends of ours, but they do not
preoccupy us like Edwin Drood or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair
at Gad's Hill become empty but a few weeks later than it actually did,
or had Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the act of setting down his dream
about the Eastern potentate not been interrupted by `a person on
business from Porlock' and so lost the thread of the thing for ever,
from two what delightful glades for roaming in would our fancy be
excluded! The very globe we live on is a far more fascinating sphere
than it can have been when men supposed that men like themselves would
be on it to the end of time. It is only since we heard what Darwin had
to say, only since we have had to accept as improvisible what lies far
ahead, that the Book of Life has taken so strong a hold on us and
`once taken up, cannot,' as the reviewers say, `readily be laid down.'
The work doesn't strike us as a masterpiece yet, certainly; but who
knows that it isn't--that it won't be, judged as a whole?

For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher
repute than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But
what if Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those
years he spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius'
tomb, and again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare
pedestals for his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we
to regret them quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to
think him an impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there
may have been a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere
lovable fault of temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a
thing off, the result was not always more than magnificent. His David
is magnificent, but it isn't David. One is duly awed, but, to see the
master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that
marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the
mind's eye, just that very best.

It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel
of the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum
of incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my
own account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with
such a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting
for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep
itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and
perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original
designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a
reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime
German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of
Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary `Iphige'nie'
which Racine laid aside so meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Tre`ves--
`quoique cela fu^t de mon mieux'; and there an early score of that one
unfinished Symphony of Beethoven's--I forget the number of it, but
anyhow it is my favourite. Among the pictures, Rossetti's oil-painting
of `Found' must be ruled out, because we know by more than one drawing
just what it would have been, and how much less good than those
drawings. But Leonardo's St. Sebastian (even if it isn't Leonardo's)
shall be there, and Whistler's Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous
other pictures that I would mention if my mind were not so full of one
picture to which, if I can find it and acquire it, a special place of
honour shall be given: a certain huge picture in which a life-sized
gentleman, draped in a white mantle, sits on a fallen obelisk and
surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna Romana.

The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading
Goethe's `Travels in Italy.' I have. Or rather, I have just been
reading a translation of it, published in 1885 by George Bell & Sons.
I daresay it isn't a very good translation (for one has always
understood that Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well--an
accomplishment which this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And
I daresay the painting I so want to see and have isn't a very good
painting. Wilhelm Tischbein is hardly a name to conjure with, though
in his day, as a practitioner in the `historical' style, and as a
rapturous resident in Rome, Tischbein did great things; big things, at
any rate. He did crowds of heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on
clouds; he did centaurs leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of Troy.
And he did this portrait of Goethe. At least he began it. Why didn't
he finish it? That is a problem as to which one can but hazard
guesses, reading between the lines of Goethe's letters. The great
point is that it never was finished. By that point, as you read
between those lines, you will be amused if you are unkind, and worried
if you are humane.

Worried, yet also pleased. Goethe has more than once been described as
`the perfect man.' He was assuredly a personage on the great scale, in
the grand manner, gloriously balanced, rounded. And it is a fact that
he was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of
flesh and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as
he went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn't
sublime. Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a
moderately successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if it
befall some thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was
glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try
our patience. He, we know, cannot have been a thoroughly good fellow.
Of Goethe we are shy for such reasons as that he was never
injudicious, never lazy, always in his best form--and always in love
with some lady or another just so much as was good for the development
of his soul and his art, but never more than that by a tittle. Fate
decreed that Sir Willoughby Patterne should cut a ridiculous figure
and so earn our forgiveness. Fate may have had a similar plan for
Goethe; if so, it went all agley. Yet, in the course of that pageant,
his career, there did happen just one humiliation--one thing that
needed to be hushed up. There Tischbein's defalcation was; a chip in
the marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in the great
grand tapestry.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and
high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size
people up. Had you and I been at Goethe's elbow when, in the October
of 1786, he entered Rome and was received by the excited Tischbein, no
doubt we should have whispered in his ear, `Beware of that man! He
will one day fail you.' Unassisted Goethe had no misgivings. For some
years he had been receiving letters from this Herr Tischbein. They
were the letters of a man steeped in the Sorrows of Werther and in all
else that Goethe had written. This was a matter of course. But also
they were the letters of a man familiar with all the treasures of
Rome. All Italy was desirable; but it was especially towards great
Rome that the soul of the illustrious poet, the confined State
Councillor of Weimar, had been ever yearning. So that when came the
longed-for day, and the Duke gave leave of absence, and Goethe,
closing his official portfolio with a snap and imprinting a fervent
but hasty kiss on the hand of Frau von Stein, fared forth on his
pilgrimage, Tischbein was a prospect inseparably bound up for him with
that of the Seven Hills. Baedeker had not been born. Tischbein would
be a great saviour of time and trouble. Nor was this hope unfulfilled.
Tischbein was assiduous, enthusiastic, indefatigable. In the early
letters to Frau von Stein, to Herder and others, his name is always
cropping up for commendation. `Of Tischbein I have much to say and
much to boast'--`A thorough and original German'--`He has always been
thinking of me, ever providing for my wants'--`In his society all my
enjoyments are more than doubled.' He was thirty-five years old (two
years younger than Goethe), and one guesses him to have been a stocky
little man, with those short thick legs which denote indefatigability.
One guesses him blond and rosy, very voluble, very guttural, with a
wealth of forceful but not graceful gesture.

One is on safer ground in guessing him vastly proud of trotting Goethe
round. Such fame throughout Europe had Goethe won by his works that it
was necessary for him to travel incognito. Not that his identity
wasn't an open secret, nor that he himself would have wished it hid.
Great artists are always vain. To say that a man is vain means merely
that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A
conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. Any
great artist is far too perceptive and too exigent to be satisfied
with that effect, and hence in vanity he seeks solace. Goethe, you may
be sure, enjoyed the hero-worshipful gaze focussed on him from all the
tables of the Caffe` Greco. But not for adulation had he come to Rome.
Rome was what he had come for; and the fussers of the coteries must
not pester him in his golden preoccupation with the antique world.
Tischbein was very useful in warding off the profane throng--fanning
away the flies. Let us hope he was actuated solely by zeal in Goethe's
interest, not by the desire to swagger as a monopolist.

Clear it is, though, that he scented fine opportunities in Goethe's
relation to him. Suppose he could rope his illustrious friend in as a
collaborator! He had begun a series of paintings on the theme of
primaeval man. Goethe was much impressed by these. Tischbein suggested
a great poem on the theme of primaeval man--a volume of engravings
after Tischbein, with running poetic commentary by Goethe. `Indeed,
the frontispiece for such a joint work,' writes Goethe in one of his
letters, `is already designed.' Pushful Tischbein! But Goethe, though
he was the most courteous of men, was not of the stuff of which
collaborators are made. `During our walks together'--and can you not
see those two together, pacing up and down the groves of the Villa
Pamphili, or around the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter?--little
Tischbein gesticulating and peering up into Goethe's face, and Goethe
with his hands clasped behind him, ever nodding in a non-committal
manner--`he has talked with me in the hope of gaining me over to his
views, and getting me to enter upon the plan.' Goethe admits in
another letter that `the idea is beautiful; only,' he adds, `the
artist and the poet must be many years together, in order to carry out
and execute such a work'; and one conceives that he felt a certain
lack of beauty in the idea of being with Tischbein for many years.
`Did I not fear to enter upon any new tasks at present, I might
perhaps be tempted.' This I take to be but the repetition of a formula
often used in the course of those walks. In no letter later than
November is the scheme mentioned. Tischbein had evidently ceased to
press it. Anon he fell back on a scheme less glorious but likelier to
bear fruit.

`Latterly,' writes Goethe, `I have observed Tischbein regarding me;
and now'--note the demure pride!--`it appears that he has long
cherished the idea of painting my portrait.' Earnest sight-seer though
he was, and hard at work on various MSS. in the intervals of sight-
seeing, it is evident that to sit for his portrait was a new task
which he did not `fear to enter upon at present.' Nor need we be
surprised. It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has
some obvious physical deformity, e~ver is loth to sit for his
portrait. A man may be old, he may be ugly, he may be burdened with
grave responsibilities to the nation, and that nation be at a crisis
of its history; but none of these considerations, nor all of them
together, will deter him from sitting for his portrait. Depend on him
to arrive at the studio punctually, to surrender himself and sit as
still as a mouse, trying to look his best in whatever posture the
painter shall have selected as characteristic, and talking (if he have
leave to talk) with a touching humility and with a keen sense of his
privilege in being allowed to pick up a few ideas about art. To a
dentist or a hairdresser he surrenders himself without enthusiasm,
even with resentment. But in the atmosphere of a studio there is
something that entrances him. Perhaps it is the smell of turpentine
that goes to his head. Or more likely it is the idea of immortality.
Goethe was one of the handsomest men of his day, and (remember) vain,
and now in the prime of life; so that he was specially susceptible to
the notion of being immortalised. `The design is already settled, and
the canvas stretched'; and I have no doubt that in the original German
these words ring like the opening of a ballad. `The anchor's up and
the sail is spread,' as I (and you, belike) recited in childhood. The
ship in that poem foundered, if I remember rightly; so that the
analogy to Goethe's words is all the more striking.

It is in this same letter that the poet mentions those three great
points which I have already laid before you: the fallen obelisk for
him to sit on, the white mantle to drape him, and the ruined temples
for him to look at. `It will form a beautiful piece, but,' he sadly
calculates, `it will be rather too big for our northern habitations.'
Courage! There will be plenty of room for it in the Baptistery of San
Lorenzo.

Meanwhile, the work progressed. A brief visit to Naples and Sicily was
part of Goethe's well-pondered campaign, and he was to set forth from
Rome (taking Tischbein with him) immediately after the close of the
Carnival--but not a moment before. Needless to say, he had no idea of
flinging himself into the Carnival, after the fashion of lesser and
lighter tourists. But the Carnival was a great phenomenon to be
studied. All-embracing Goethe, remember, was nearly as keen on science
as on art. He had ever been patient in poring over plants botanically,
and fishes ichthyologically, and minerals mineralogically. And now,
day by day, he studied the Carnival from a strictly carnivalogical
standpoint, taking notes on which he founded later a classic treatise.
His presence was not needed in the studio during these days, for the
life-sized portrait `begins already to stand out from the canvas,' and
Tischbein was now painting the folds of the mantle, which were swathed
around a clay figure. `He is working away diligently, for the work
must, he says, be brought to a certain point before we start for
Naples.' Besides the mantle, Tischbein was doing the Campagna. I
remember that some years ago an acquaintance of mine, a painter who
was neither successful nor talented, but always buoyant, told me he
was starting for Italy next day. `I am going,' he said, `to paint the
Campagna. The Campagna WANTS painting.' Tischbein was evidently giving
it a good dose of what it wanted. `It takes no little time,' writes
Goethe to Frau von Stein, `merely to cover so large a field of canvas
with colours.

Ash Wednesday ushered itself in, and ushered the Carnival out. The
curtain falls, rising a few days later on the Bay of Naples. Re-enter
Goethe and Tischbein. Bright blue back-cloth. Incidental music of
barcaroles, etc. For a while, all goes splendidly well. Sane Quixote
and aesthetic Sancho visit the churches, the museums; visit Pompeii;
visit our Ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, that accomplished man.
Vesuvius is visited too; thrice by Goethe, but (here, for the first
time, we feel a vague uneasiness) only once by Tischbein. To Goethe,
as you may well imagine, Vesuvius was strongly attractive. At his
every ascent he was very brave, going as near as possible to the
crater, which he approached very much as he had approached the
Carnival, not with any wish to fling himself into it, but as a
resolute scientific inquirer. Tischbein, on the other hand, merely
disliked and feared Vesuvius. He said it had no aesthetic value, and
at his one ascent did not accompany Goethe to the crater's edge. He
seems to have regarded Goethe's bravery as rashness. Here, you see, is
a rift, ever so slight, but of evil omen; what seismologists call `a
fault.'

Goethe was unconscious of its warning. Throughout his sojourn in
Naples he seems to have thought that Tischbein in Naples was the same
as Tischbein in Rome. Of some persons it is true that change of sky
works no change of soul. Oddly enough, Goethe reckoned himself among
the changeable. In one of his letters he calls himself `quite an
altered man,' and asserts that he is given over to `a sort of
intoxicated self-forgetfulness'--a condition to which his letters
testify not at all. In a later bulletin he is nearer the mark: `Were I
not impelled by the German spirit, and desire to learn and do rather
than to enjoy, I should tarry a little longer in this school of a
light-hearted and happy life, and try to profit by it still more.' A
truly priceless passage, this, with a solemnity transcending logic--as
who should say, `Were I not so thoroughly German, I should be
thoroughly German.' Tischbein was of less stern stuff, and it is clear
that Naples fostered in him a lightness which Rome had repressed.
Goethe says that he himself puzzled the people in Neapolitan society:
`Tischbein pleases them far better. This evening he hastily painted
some heads of the size of life, and about these they disported
themselves as strangely as the New Zealanders at the sight of a ship
of war.' One feels that but for Goethe's presence Tischbein would have
cut New Zealand capers too. A week later he did an utterly astounding
thing. He told Goethe that he would not be accompanying him to Sicily.

He did not, of course, say `The novelty of your greatness has worn
off. Your solemnity oppresses me. Be off, and leave me to enjoy myself
in Naples-on-Sea--Naples, the Queen of Watering Places!' He spoke of
work which he had undertaken, and recommended as travelling companion
for Goethe a young man of the name of Kniep.

Goethe, we may be sure, was restrained by pride from any show of
wrath. Pride compelled him to make light of the matter in his epistles
to the Weimarians. Even Kniep he accepted with a good grace, though
not without misgivings. He needed a man who would execute for him
sketches and paintings of all that in the districts passed through was
worthy of record. He had already `heard Kniep highly spoken of as a
clever draughtsman--only his industry was not much commended.' Our
hearts sink. `I have tolerably studied his character, and think the
ground of this censure arises rather from a want of decision, which
may certainly be overcome, if we are long together.' Our hearts sink
lower. Kniep will never do. Kniep will play the deuce, we are sure of
it. And yet (such is life) Kniep turns out very well. Throughout the
Sicilian tour Goethe gives the rosiest reports of the young man's
cheerful ways and strict attention to the business of sketching. It
may be that these reports were coloured partly by a desire to set
Tischbein down. But there seems to be no doubt that Goethe liked Kniep
greatly and rejoiced in the quantity and quality of his work. At
Palermo, one evening, Goethe sat reading Homer and `making an
impromptu translation for the benefit of Kniep, who had well deserved
by his diligent exertions this day some agreeable refreshment over a
glass of wine.' This is a pleasing little scene, and is typical of the
whole tour.

In the middle of May, Goethe returned Naples. And lo!--Tischbein was
not there to receive him. Tischbein, if you please, had skipped back
to Rome, bidding his Neapolitan friends look to his great compatriot.
Pride again forbade Goethe to show displeasure, and again our reading
has to be done between the lines. In the first week of June he was
once more in Rome. I can imagine with what high courtesy, as though
there were nothing to rebuke, he treated Tischbein. But it is possible
that his manner would have been less perfect had the portrait not been
unfinished.

His sittings were resumed. It seems that Signora Zucchi, better known
to the world as Angelica Kauffmann, had also begun to paint him. But,
great as was Goethe's esteem for the mind of that nice woman, he set
no store on this fluttering attempt of hers: `her picture is a pretty
fellow, to be sure, but not a trace of me.' It was by the large and
firm `historic' mode of Tischbein that he, not exactly in his habit as
he lived, but in the white mantle that so well became him, and on the
worthy throne of that fallen obelisk, was to be handed down to the
gaze of future ages. Was to be, yes. On June 27th he reports that
Tischbein's work `is succeeding happily; the likeness is striking, and
the conception pleases everybody.' Three days later: `Tischbein goes
to Naples.'

Incredible! We stare aghast, as in the presence of some great
dignitary from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn
when he is in the act of sitting down. Tischbein had, as it were,
withdrawn the obelisk. What was Goethe to do? What can a dignitary, in
such case, do? He cannot turn and recriminate. That would but lower
him the more. Can he behave as though nothing has happened? Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe tried to do so. And it must have been in support
of this attempt that he consented to leave his own quarters and reside
awhile in the studio of the outgoing Tischbein. That slippery man
does, it is true, seem to have given out that he would not be away
very long; and the prospect of his return may well have been reckoned
in mitigation of his going. Goethe had leave from the Duke of Weimar
to prolong his Italian holiday till the spring of next year. It is
possible that Tischbein really did mean to come back and finish the
picture. Goethe had, at any rate, no reason for not hoping.

`When you think of me, think of me as happy,' he directs. And had he
not indeed reasons for happiness? He had the most perfect health, he
was writing masterpieces, he was in Rome--Rome which no pilgrim had
loved with a rapture deeper than his; the wonderful old Rome that
lingered on almost to our own day, under the conserving shadow of the
Temporal Power; a Rome in which the Emperors kept unquestionably their
fallen day about them. No pilgrim had wandered with a richer
enthusiasm along those highways and those great storied spaces. It is
pleasing to watch in what deep draughts Goethe drank Rome in. But--
but--I fancy that now in his second year of sojourn he tended to
remain within the city walls, caring less than of yore for the
Campagna; and I suspect that if ever he did stray out there he averted
his eyes from anything in the nature of a ruined temple. Of one thing
I am sure. The huge canvas in the studio had its face to the wall.
There is never a reference to it by Goethe in any letter after that of
June 27th. But I surmise that its nearness continually worked on him,
and that sometimes, when no one was by, he all unwillingly approached
it, he moved it out into a good light and, stepping back, gazed at it
for a long time. And I wonder that Tischbein was not shamed,
telepathically, to return.

What was it that had made Tischbein--not once, but thrice--abandon
Goethe? We have no right to suppose he had plotted to avenge himself
for the poet's refusal to collaborate with him on the theme of
primaeval man. A likelier explanation is merely that Goethe, as I have
suggested, irked him. Forty years elapsed before Goethe collected his
letters from Italy and made a book of them; and in this book he
included--how magnanimous old men are!--several letters written to him
from Naples by his deserter. These are shallow but vivid documents--
the effusions of one for whom the visible world suffices. I take it
that Tischbein was an `historic' painter because no ambitious painter
in those days wasn't. In Goethe the historic sense was as innate as
the aesthetic; so was the ethical sense; so was the scientific sense;
and the three of them, forever cropping up in his discourse, may well
be understood to have been too much for the simple Tischbein. But, you
ask, can mere boredom make a man act so cruelly as this man acted?
Well, there may have been another cause, and a more interesting one. I
have mentioned that Goethe and Tischbein visited our Ambassador in
Naples. His Excellency was at that time a widower, but his
establishment was already graced by his future wife, Miss Emma Harte,
whose beauty is so well known to us all. `Tischbein,' wrote Goethe a
few days afterwards, `is engaged in painting her.' Later in the year,
Tischbein, soon after his return to Naples, sent to Goethe a sketch
for a painting he had now done of Miss Harte as Iphigenia at the
Sacrificial Altar. Perhaps he had wondered that she should sacrifice
herself to Sir William Hamilton.... `I like Hamilton uncommonly' is a
phrase culled from one of his letters; and when a man is very hearty
about the protector of a very beautiful woman one begins to be
suspicious. I do not mean to suggest that Miss Harte--though it is
true she had not yet met Nelson--was fascinated by Tischbein. But we
have no reason to suppose that Tischbein was less susceptible than
Romney.

Altogether, it seems likely enough that the future Lady Hamilton's
fine eyes were Tischbein's main reason for not going to Sicily, and
afterwards for his sudden exodus from Rome. But why, in this case, did
he leave Naples, why go back to Rome, when Goethe was in Sicily? I
hope he went for the purpose of shaking off his infatuation for Miss
Harte. I am loth to think he went merely to wind up his affairs in
Rome. I will assume that only after a sharp conflict, in which he
fought hard on the side of duty against love, did he relapse to
Naples. But I won't pretend to wish he had finished that portrait.

If you know where that portrait is, tell me. I want it. I have tried
to trace it--vainly. What became of it? I thought I might find this
out in George Henry Lewes' `Life of Goethe.' But Lewes had a hero-
worship for Goethe: he thought him greater than George Eliot, and in
the whole book there is but one cold mention of Tischbein's name. Mr.
Oscar Browning, in the `Encyclopaedia Britannica,' names Tischbein as
Goethe's `constant companion' in the early days at Rome--and says
nothing else about him! In fact, the hero-worshippers have evidently
conspired to hush up the affront to their hero. Even the `Penny
Cyclopaedia' (1842), which devotes a column to little Tischbein
himself, and goes into various details of his career, is silent about
the portrait of Goethe. I learn from that column that Tischbein became
director of the Neapolitan Academy, at a salary of 600 ducats, and
resided in Naples until the Revolution of '99, when he returned in
haste to Germany. Suppose he passed through Rome on his way. A homing
fugitive would not pause to burden himself with a vast unfinished
canvas. We may be sure the canvas remained in that Roman studio--an
object of mild interest to successive occupants. Is it there still?
Does the studio itself still exist? Belike it has been demolished,
with so much else. What became of the expropriated canvas? It wouldn't
have been buried in the new foundations. Some one must have staggered
away with it. Whither? Somewhere, I am sure, in some dark vault or
cellar, it languishes.

Seek it, fetch it out, bring it to me in triumph. You will always find
me in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo. But I have formed so clear and
sharp a preconception of the portrait that I am likely to be
disappointed at sight of what you bring me. I see in my mind's eye
every falling fold of the white mantle; the nobly-rounded calf of the
leg on which rests the forearm; the high-light on the black silk
stocking. The shoes, the hands, are rather sketchy, the sky is a mere
slab; the ruined temples are no more than adumbrated. But the
expression of the face is perfectly, epitomically, that of a great man
surveying a great alien scene and gauging its import not without a
keen sense of its dramatic conjunction with himself--Marius in
Carthage and Napoleon before the Sphinx, Wordsworth on London Bridge
and Cortes on the peak in Darien, but most of all, certainly, Goethe
in the Campagna. So, you see, I cannot promise not to be horribly let
down by Tischbein's actual handiwork. I may even have to take back my
promise that it shall have a place of honour. But I shall not utterly
reject it--unless on the plea that a collection of unfinished works
should itself have some great touch of incompletion.

SOMETHING DEFEASIBLE
July, 1919.

The cottage had a good trim garden in front of it, and another behind
it. I might not have noticed it at all but for them and their emerald
greenness. Yet itself (I saw when I studied it) was worthy of them.
Sussex is rich in fine Jacobean cottages; and their example, clearly,
had not been lost on the builder of this one. Its proportions had a
homely grandeur. It was long and wide and low. It was quite a yard
long. It had three admirable gables. It had a substantial and shapely
chimney-stack. I liked the look that it had of honest solidity all
over, nothing anywhere scamped in the workmanship of it. It looked as
though it had been built for all time. But this was not so. For it was
built on sand, and of sand; and the tide was coming in.

Here and there in its vicinity stood other buildings. None of these
possessed any points of interest. They were just old-fashioned
`castles,' of the bald and hasty kind which I myself used to make in
childhood and could make even now--conic affairs, with or without
untidily-dug moats, the nullities of convention and of unskilled
labour. When I was a child the charm of a castle was not in the
building of it, but in jumping over it when it was built. Nor was this
an enduring charm. After a few jumps one abandoned one's castle and
asked one's nurse for a bun, or picked a quarrel with some child even
smaller than oneself, or went paddling. As it was, so it is. My survey
of the sands this morning showed me that forty years had made no
difference. Here was plenty of animation, plenty of scurrying and
gambolling, of laughter and tears. But the actual spadework was a mere
empty form. For all but the builder of that cottage. For him,
manifestly, a passion, a rite.

He stood, spade in hand, contemplating, from one angle and another,
what he had done. He was perhaps nine years old; if so, small for his
age. He had very thin legs in very short grey knickerbockers, a pale
freckled face, and hair that matched the sand. He was not remarkable.
But with a little good-will one can always find something impressive
in anybody. When Mr. Mallaby-Deeley won a wide and very sudden fame in
connexion with Covent Garden, an awe-stricken reporter wrote of him
for The Daily Mail, `he has the eyes of a dreamer.' I believe that Mr.
Cecil Rhodes really had. So, it seemed to me, had this little boy.
They were pale grey eyes, rather prominent, with an unwavering light
in them. I guessed that they were regarding the cottage rather as what
it should be than as what it had become. To me it appeared quite
perfect. But I surmised that to him, artist that he was, it seemed a
poor thing beside his first flushed conception.

He knelt down and, partly with the flat of his spade, partly with the
palm of one hand, redressed some (to me obscure) fault in one of the
gables. He rose, stood back, his eyes slowly endorsed the amendment. A
few moments later, very suddenly, he scudded away to the adjacent
breakwater and gave himself to the task of scraping off it some of the
short green sea-weed wherewith he had made the cottage's two gardens
so pleasantly realistic, oases so refreshing in the sandy desert. Were
the lawns somehow imperfect? Anon, when he darted back, I saw what it
was that his taste had required: lichen, moss, for the roof. Sundry
morsels and patches of green he deftly disposed in the angles of roof
and gables. His stock exhausted, off to the breakwater he darted, and
back again, to and fro with the lightning directness of a hermit-bee
making its nest of pollen. The low walls that enclosed the two gardens
were in need of creepers. Little by little, this grace was added to
them. I stood silently watching.

I kept silent for fear of discommoding him. All artists--by which I
mean, of course, all good artists--are shy. They are trustees of
something not entrusted to us others; they bear fragile treasure, not
safe in a jostling crowd; they must ever be wary. And especially shy
are those artists whose work is apart from words. A man of letters can
mitigate his embarrassment among us by a certain glibness. Not so can
the man who works through the medium of visual form and colour. Not
so, I was sure, could the young architect and landscape-gardener here
creating. I would have moved away had I thought my mere presence was a
bother to him; but I decided that it was not: being a grown-up person,
I did not matter; he had no fear that I should offer violence to his
work. It was his coevals that made him uneasy. Groups of these would
pause in their wild career to stand over him and watch him in a
fidgety manner that hinted mischief. Suppose one of them suddenly
jumped--on to the cottage!

Fragile treasure, this, in a quite literal sense; and how awfully
exposed! It was spared, however. There was even legible on the faces
of the stolid little boys who viewed it a sort of reluctant approval.
Some of the little girls seemed to be forming with their lips the word
`pretty,' but then they exchanged glances with one another, signifying
`silly.' No one of either sex uttered any word of praise. And so,
because artists, be they never so agoraphobious, do want praise, I did
at length break my silence to this one. `I think it splendid,' I said
to him.

He looked up at me, and down at the cottage. `Do you?' he asked,
looking up again. I assured him that I did; and to test my opinion of
him I asked whether he didn't think so too. He stood the test well. `I
wanted it rather diff'rent,' he answered.

`In what way different?'

He searched his vocabulary. More comf'table,' he found.

I knew now that he was not merely the architect and builder of the
cottage, but also, by courtesy of imagination, its tenant; but I was
tactful enough not to let him see that I had guessed this deep and
delicate secret. I did but ask him, in a quite general way, how the
cottage could be better. He said that it ought to have a porch--`but
porches tumble in.' He was too young an artist to accept quite meekly
the limits imposed by his material. He pointed along the lower edge of
the roof: `It ought to stick out,' he said, meaning that it wanted
eaves. I told him not to worry about that: it was the sand's fault,
not his. `What really is a pity,' I said, `is that your house can't
last for ever.' He was tracing now on the roof, with the edge of his
spade, a criss-cross pattern, to represent tiles, and he seemed to
have forgotten my presence and my kindness. `Aren't you sorry,' I
asked, raising my voice rather sharply, `that the sea is coming in?'

He glanced at the sea. `Yes.' He said this with a lack of emphasis
that seemed to me noble though insincere.

The strain of talking in words of not more than three syllables had
begun to tell on me. I bade the artist good-bye, wandered away up the
half-dozen steps to the Parade, sat down on a bench, and opened the
morning paper that I had brought out unread. During the War one felt
it a duty to know the worst before breakfast; now that the English
polity is threatened merely from within, one is apt to dally....
Merely from within? Is that a right phrase when the nerves of
unrestful Labour in any one land are interplicated with its nerves in
any other, so vibrantly? News of the dismissal of an erring workman in
Timbuctoo is enough nowadays to make us apprehensive of vast and
dreadful effects on our own immediate future. How pleasant if we had
lived our lives in the nineteenth century and no other, with the
ground all firm under our feet! True, the people who flourished then
had recurring alarms. But their alarms were quite needless; whereas
ours--! Ours, as I glanced at this morning' s news from Timbuctoo and
elsewhere, seemed odiously needful. Withal, our Old Nobility in its
pleasaunces was treading once more the old graceful measure which the
War arrested; Bohemia had resumed its motley; even the middle class
was capering, very noticeably... To gad about smiling as though he
were quite well, thank you, or to sit down, pull a long face, and make
his soul,--which, I wondered, is the better procedure for a man
knowing that very soon he will have to undergo a vital operation at
the hands of a wholly unqualified surgeon who dislikes him personally?
I inclined to think the gloomier way the less ghastly. But then, I
asked myself, was my analogy a sound one? We are at the mercy of
Labour, certainly; and Labour does not love us; and Labour is not
deeply versed in statecraft. But would an unskilled surgeon, however
ill-wishing, care to perform a drastic operation on a patient by whose
death he himself would forthwith perish? Labour is wise enough--
surely?--not to will us destruction. Russia has been an awful example.
Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think the example so awful as
I do. Queer, this; queer and disquieting. I rose from my bench,
strolled to the railing, and gazed forth.

The unrestful, the well-organised and minatory sea had been advancing
quickly. It was not very far now from the cottage. I thought of all
the civilisations that had been, that were not, that were as though
they had never been. Must it always be thus?--always the same old tale
of growth and greatness and overthrow, nothingness? I gazed at the
cottage, all so solid and seemly, so full of endearing character, so
like to the `comf'table' polity of England as we have known it. I
gazed away from it to a large-ish castle that the sea was just
reaching. A little, then quickly much, the waters swirled into the
moat. Many children stood by, all a-dance with excitement. The castle
was shedding its sides, lapsing, dwindling, landslipping--gone. O
Nineveh! And now another--O Memphis? Rome?--yielded to the cataclysm.
I listened to the jubilant screams of the children. What rapture, what
wantoning! Motionless beside his work stood the builder of the
cottage, gazing seaward, a pathetic little figure. I hoped the other
children would have the decency not to exult over the unmaking of what
he had made so well. This hope was not fulfilled. I had not supposed
it would be. What did surprise me, when anon the sea rolled close up
to the cottage, was the comportment of the young artist himself. His
sobriety gave place to an intense animation. He leapt, he waved his
spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures and gleeful cries. His
face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden walls crumbled, and
the paths and lawns were mingled by the waters' influence and
confluence, and the walls of the cottage itself began to totter, and
the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps were so high in
air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange religious sect
which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was less
indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.

I myself was conscious of a certain wild enthusiasm within me. But
this was less surprising for that I had not built the cottage, and my
fancy had not enabled me to dwell in it. It was the boy's own
enthusiasm that made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the
human breast the love of destruction, of mere destruction, is. And I
began to ask myself: `Even if England as we know it, the English
polity of which that cottage was a symbol to me, were the work of
(say) Mr. Robert Smillie's own unaided hands'--but I waived the
question coming from that hypothesis, and other questions that would
have followed; for I wished to be happy while I might.

`A CLERGYMAN'
1918.

Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath
the rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits
my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly,
he asked a question, and received an answer.

This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that
day, had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited
him to dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It
seems that Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson `what
were the best English sermons for style.' In the interval before
dinner, accordingly, Boswell reeled off the names of several divines
whose prose might or might not win commendation. `Atterbury?' he
suggested. `JOHNSON: Yes, Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson?
JOHNSON: Why, not now. I should not advise any one to imitate
Tillotson's style; though I don't know; I should be cautious of
censuring anything that has been applauded by so many suffrages.--
South is one of the best, if you except his peculiarities, and his
violence, and sometimes coarseness of language.--Seed has a very fine
style; but he is not very theological. Jortin's sermons are very
elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is very elegant, though he has not
made it his principal study.--And you may add Smalridge. BOSWELL: I
like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both for neatness of style
and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like to read all that
Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is, what sermons
afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence. JOHNSON: We have
no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for anything; if
you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name I do not
recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions? JOHNSON:
They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.'

The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
burrow was no more.

I know not which is the more startling--the de'but of the unfortunate
clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn't Boswell
told us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so
careful and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the
clergyman was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the
company. Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that
sooner or later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a
place in our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company
around Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that
his self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it
startles us. In Johnson's massive and magnetic presence only some very
remarkable man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from
the rest. Others might, if they had something in them, stand out
slightly. This unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him,
but I judge that he lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That
deficiency, however, does not account for the horrid fate that befell
him. One of Johnson's strongest and most inveterate feelings was his
veneration for the Cloth. To any one in Holy Orders he habitually
listened with a grave and charming deference. To-day moreover, he was
in excellent good humour. He was at the Thrales', where he so loved to
be; the day was fine; a fine dinner was in close prospect; and he had
had what he always declared to be the sum of human felicity--a ride in
a coach. Nor was there in the question put by the clergyman anything
likely to enrage him. Dodd was one whom Johnson had befriended in
adversity; and it had always been agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was
very emotional. What drew the blasting flash must have been not the
question itself, but the manner in which it was asked. And I think we
can guess what that manner was.

Say the words aloud: `Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the
passions?' They are words which, if you have any dramatic and
histrionic sense, cannot be said except in a high, thin voice.

You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
you must pipe them.

Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew
well, the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him
very loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy
clergyman, when at length he suddenly mustered courage to `cut in,'
let his high, thin voice soar too high, insomuch that it was a kind of
scream. On no other hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with
which Johnson turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we may be sure,
mean to be cruel. The old lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But
the force of paw and claws was not the less lethal. We have endless
testimony to the strength of Johnson's voice; and the very cadence of
those words, `They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they
may,' convinces me that the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder
roar. Boswell does not record that there was any further conversation
before the announcement of dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been
temporarily deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My heart goes
out to the poor dear clergyman exclusively.

I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what
I omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress
any one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that
even the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that
question. He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of
the neighbouring church? I think so. It would account for his having
been invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great
Doctor's pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the
edge of a chair in the background. He has colourless eyes, fixed
earnestly, and a face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his
somewhat receding chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair
mouse-coloured. His hands are clasped tight before him, the knuckles
standing out sharply. This constriction does not mean that he is
steeling himself to speak. He has no positive intention of speaking.
Very much, nevertheless, is he wishing in the back of his mind that he
could say something--something whereat the great Doctor would turn on
him and say, after a pause for thought, `Why yes, Sir. That is most
justly observed' or `Sir, this has never occurred to me. I thank you'-
-thereby fixing the observer for ever high in the esteem of all. And
now in a flash the chance presents itself. `We have,' shouts Johnson,
`no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for anything.' I
see the curate's frame quiver with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly
open, and--no, I can't bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible,
even so, is something shrill, followed by something thunderous.

Presently I re-open my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening
tear. Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the
Established Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what
Seed and South? And, by the way, who were they, these worthies? It is
a solemn thought that so little is conveyed to us by names which to
the palaeo-Georgians conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite
picture of a big man in a big wig and a billowing black gown, with a
big congregation beneath him. But we are not anxious to hear what he
is saying. We know it is all very elegant. We know it will be printed
and be bound in finely-tooled full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian
gentleman's library will be complete without it. Literate people in
those days were comparatively few; but, bating that, one may say that
sermons were as much in request as novels are to-day. I wonder, will
mankind continue to be capricious? It is a very solemn thought indeed
that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years hence the novelists of our
time, with all their moral and political and sociological outlook and
influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly as do those old
preachers, with all their elegance, now. `Yes, Sir,' some great pundit
may be telling a disciple at this moment, `Wells is one of the best.
Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his concern for delicacy
of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not very
creational.--Caine's books are very edifying. I should like to read
all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is very edifying.--And
you may add Upton Sinclair.' `What I want to know,' says the disciple,
`is, what English novels may be selected as specially enthralling.'
The pundit answers: `We have no novels addressed to the passions that
are good for anything, if you mean that kind of enthralment.' And here
some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will not remember) inquires:
`Are not Mrs. Glyn's novels addressed to the passions?' and is in due
form annihilated. Can it be that a time will come when readers of this
passage in our pundit's Life will take more interest in the poor
nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those great names put
together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate between (say)
Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above Sherlock, or
Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must remember that
things are not always what they seem.

Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of
past favours, and would even live the remainder of his life in
obscurity if by so doing he could insure that future generations would
preserve a correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural
and human, but, like so many very natural and human things, very
silly. Tillotson and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our
neglect of them. They either know nothing about it, or are above such
terrene trifles. Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines
who were not elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they
lasted. And let us keep a specially large portion for one whose lot
was so much worse than merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate
had not been at the Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the
silence that so well became him, his life would have been drab enough,
in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising career would not
have been nipped in the bud. And that is what in fact happened, I'm
sure of it. A robust man might have rallied under the blow. Not so our
friend. Those who knew him in infancy had not expected that he would
be reared. Better for him had they been right. It is well to grow up
and be ordained, but not if you are delicate and very sensitive, and
shall happen to annoy the greatest, the most stentorian and roughest
of contemporary personages. `A Clergyman' never held up his head or
smiled again after the brief encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He
sank into a rapid decline. Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall's
almond trees he was no more. I like to think that he died forgiving
Dr. Johnson.

THE CRIME
1920.

On a bleak wet stormy afternoon at the outset of last year's Spring, I
was in a cottage, all alone, and knowing that I must be all alone till
evening. It was a remote cottage, in a remote county, and had been
`let furnished' by its owner. My spirits are easily affected by
weather, and I hate solitude. And I dislike to be master of things
that are not mine. `Be careful not to break us,' say the glass and
china. `You'd better not spill ink on me,' growls the carpet. `None of
your dog's-earing, thumb-marking, back-breaking tricks here!' snarl
the books.

The books in this cottage looked particularly disagreeable--horrid
little upstarts of this and that scarlet or cerulean `series' of
`standard' authors. Having gloomily surveyed them, I turned my back on
them, and watched the rain streaming down the latticed window, whose
panes seemed likely to be shattered at any moment by the wind. I have
known men who constantly visit the Central Criminal Court, visit also
the scenes where famous crimes were committed, form their own theories
of those crimes, collect souvenirs of those crimes, and call
themselves Criminologists. As for me, my interest in crime is, alas,
merely morbid. I did not know, as those others would doubtless have
known, that the situation in which I found myself was precisely of the
kind most conducive to the darkest deeds. I did but bemoan it, and
think of Lear in the hovel on the heath. The wind howled in the
chimney, and the rain had begun to sputter right down it, so that the
fire was beginning to hiss in a very sinister manner. Suppose the fire
went out! It looked as if it meant to. I snatched the pair of bellows
that hung beside it. I plied them vigorously. `Now mind!--not too
vigorously. We aren't yours!' they wheezed. I handled them more
gently. But I did not release them till they had secured me a steady
blaze.

I sat down before that blaze. Despair had been warded off. Gloom,
however, remained; and gloom grew. I felt that I should prefer any
one's thoughts to mine. I rose, I returned to the books. A dozen or so
of those which were on the lowest of the three shelves were full-
sized, were octavo, looked as though they had been bought to be read.
I would exercise my undoubted right to read one of them. Which of
them? I gradually decided on a novel by a well-known writer whose
works, though I had several times had the honour of meeting her, were
known to me only by repute.

I knew nothing of them that was not good. The lady's `output' had not
been at all huge, and it was agreed that her `level' was high. I had
always gathered that the chief characteristic of her work was its
great `vitality.' The book in my hand was a third edition of her
latest novel, and at the end of it were numerous press-notices, at
which I glanced for confirmation. `Immense vitality,' yes, said one
critic. `Full,' said another, `of an intense vitality.' `A book that
will live,' said a third. How on earth did he know that? I was,
however, very willing to believe in the vitality of this writer for
all present purposes. Vitality was a thing in which she herself, her
talk, her glance, her gestures, abounded. She and they had been, I
remembered, rather too much for me. The first time I met her, she said
something that I lightly and mildly disputed. On no future occasion
did I stem any opinion of hers. Not that she had been rude. Far from
it. She had but in a sisterly, brotherly way, and yet in a way that
was filially eager too, asked me to explain my point. I did my best.
She was all attention. But I was conscious that my best, under her
eye, was not good. She was quick to help me: she said for me just what
I had tried to say, and proceeded to show me just why it was wrong. I
smiled the gallant smile of a man who regards women as all the more
adorable because logic is not their strong point, bless them! She
asked--not aggressively, but strenuously, as one who dearly loves a
joke--what I was smiling at. Altogether, a chastening encounter; and
my memory of it was tinged with a feeble resentment. How she had
scored! No man likes to be worsted in argument by a woman. And I fancy
that to be vanquished by a feminine writer is the kind of defeat least
of all agreeable to a man who writes. A `sex war,' we are often told
is to be one of the features of the world's future--women demanding
the right to do men's work, and men refusing, resisting, counter-
attacking. It seems likely enough. One can believe anything of the
world's future. Yet one conceives that not all men, if this particular
evil come to pass, will stand packed shoulder to shoulder against all
women. One does not feel that the dockers will be very bitter against
such women as want to be miners, or the plumbers frown much upon the
would-be steeple-jills. I myself have never had my sense of fitness
jarred, nor a spark of animosity roused in me, by a woman practising
any of the fine arts--except the art of writing. That she should write
a few little poems or pense'es, or some impressions of a trip in a
dahabieh as far as (say) Biskra, or even a short story or two, seems
to me not wholly amiss, even though she do such things for
publication. But that she should be an habitual, professional author,
with a passion for her art, and a fountain-pen and an agent, and sums
down in advance of royalties on sales in Canada and Australia, and a
profound knowledge of human character, and an essentially sane
outlook, is somehow incongruous with my notions--my mistaken notions,
if you will--of what she ought to be.

`Has a profound knowledge of human character, and an essentially sane
outlook' said one of the critics quoted at the end of the book that I
had chosen. The wind and the rain in the chimney had not abated, but
the fire was bearing up bravely. So would I. I would read cheerfully
and without prejudice. I poked the fire and, pushing my chair slightly
back, lest the heat should warp the book's covers, began Chapter I. A
woman sat writing in a summer-house at the end of a small garden that
overlooked a great valley in Surrey. The description of her was
calculated to make her very admirable--a thorough woman, not strictly
beautiful, but likely to be thought beautiful by those who knew her
well; not dressed as though she gave much heed to her clothes, but
dressed in a fashion that exactly harmonised with her special type.
Her pen `travelled' rapidly across the foolscap, and while it did so
she was described in more and more detail. But at length she came to a
`knotty point' in what she was writing. She paused, she pushed back
the hair from her temples, she looked forth at the valley; and now the
landscape was described, but not at all exhaustively, it, for the
writer soon overcame her difficulty, and her pen travelled faster than
ever, till suddenly there was a cry of `Mammy!' and in rushed a seven-
year-old child, in conjunction with whom she was more than ever
admirable; after which the narrative skipped back across eight years,
and the woman became a girl, giving as yet no token of future eminence
in literature but--I had an impulse which I obeyed almost before I
was, conscious of it.

Nobody could have been more surprised than I was at what I had done--
done so neatly, so quietly and gently. The book stood closed, upright,
with its back to me, just as on a book-shelf, behind the bars of the
grate. There it was. And it gave forth, as the flames crept up the
blue cloth sides of it, a pleasant though acrid smell. My astonishment
had passed, giving place to an exquisite satisfaction. How pottering
and fumbling a thing was even the best kind of written criticism! I
understood the contempt felt by the man of action for the man of
words. But what pleased me most was that at last, actually, I, at my
age, I of all people, had committed a crime--was guilty of a crime. I
had power to revoke it. I might write to my bookseller for an unburnt
copy, and place it on the shelf where this one had stood--this
gloriously glowing one. I would do nothing of the sort. What I had
done I had done. I would wear forever on my conscience the white rose
of theft and the red rose of arson. If hereafter the owner of this
cottage happened to miss that volume--let him! If he were fool enough
to write to me about it, would I share my grand secret with him? No.
Gently, with his poker, I prodded that volume further among the coals.
The all-but-consumed binding shot forth little tongues of bright
colour--flamelets of sapphire, amethyst, emerald. Charming! Could even
the author herself not admire them? Perhaps. Poor woman!--I had scored
now, scored so perfectly that I felt myself to be almost a brute while
I poked off the loosened black outer pages and led the fire on to
pages that were but pale brown.

These were quickly devoured. But it seemed to me that whenever I left
the fire to forage for itself it made little headway. I pushed the
book over on its side. The flames closed on it, but presently, licking
their lips, fell back, as though they had had enough. I took the tongs
and put the book upright again, and raked it fore and aft. It seemed
almost as thick as ever. With poker and tongs I carved it into two,
three sections--the inner pages flashing white as when they were sent
to the binders. Strange! Aforetime, a book was burnt now and again in
the market-place by the common hangman. Was he, I wondered, paid by
the hour? I had always supposed the thing quite easy for him--a bright
little, brisk little conflagration, and so home. Perhaps other books
were less resistant than this one? I began to feel that the critics
were more right than they knew. Here was a book that had indeed an
intense vitality, and an immense vitality. It was a book that would
live--do what one might. I vowed it should not. I subdivided it,
spread it, redistributed it. Ever and anon my eye would be caught by
some sentence or fragment of a sentence in the midst of a charred page
before the flames crept over it. `lways loathed you, bu', I remember;
and `ning. Tolstoi was right.' Who had always loathed whom? And what,
what, had Tolstoi been right about? I had an absurd but genuine desire
to know. Too late! Confound the woman!--she was scoring again. I
furiously drove her pages into the yawning crimson jaws of the coals.
Those jaws had lately been golden. Soon, to my horror, they seemed to
be growing grey. They seemed to be closing--on nothing. Flakes of
black paper, full-sized layers of paper brown and white, began to hide
them from me altogether. I sprinkled a boxful of wax matches. I
resumed the bellows. I lunged with the poker. I held a newspaper over
the whole grate. I did all that inspiration could suggest, or skill
accomplish. Vainly. The fire went out--darkly, dismally, gradually,
quite out.

How she had scored again! But she did not know it. I felt no
bitterness against her as I lay back in my chair, inert, listening to
the storm that was still raging. I blamed only myself. I had done
wrong. The small room became very cold. Whose fault was that but my
own? I had done wrong hastily, but had done it and been glad of it. I
had not remembered the words a wise king wrote long ago, that the lamp
of the wicked shall be put out, and that the way of trangressors is
hard.

IN HOMES UNBLEST
1919.

Nothing is more pleasant than to see suddenly endowed with motion a
thing stagnant by nature. The hat that on the head of the man in the
street is nothing to us, how much it is if it be animated by a gust of
wind! There is no churl that does not rejoice with it in its strength,
and in the swiftness and cunning that baffle its pursuer, who, he too,
when the chase is over, bears it no ill will at all for its escapade.
I know families that have sat for hours, for hours after bedtime,
mute, in a dim light, pressing a table with their finger-tips, and
ever bringing to bear the full force of their minds on it, in the
unconquerable hope that it would move. Conversely, nothing is more
dismal than to see set in permanent rigidness a thing whose aspect is
linked for us with the idea of great mobility. Even the blithest of us
and least easily depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed
squirrel or a case of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagine
with what a sinking of the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road
near the coast of Norfolk, a railway-car without wheels.

Without wheels though it was, it had motion--of a kind; of a kind
worse than actual stagnation. Mounted on a very long steam-lorry that
groaned and panted, it very slowly passed me. I noted that two of its
compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I
noted, you might smoke. But of this opportunity you were not availing
yourself. All the compartments, the cheap and the dear alike, were
vacant. They were transporting air only--and this (I conceived)
abominable. The sun slanted fiercely down on the old iron roof, the
old wooden walls, the dingy shut windows. The fume and grime of a
thousand familiar tunnels, of year after year of journeys by night,
journeys by day, from time immemorial, seemed to have invested the
whole structure with a character that shrank from the sun's scrutiny
and from the nearness of sea and fields. Fuliginous, monstrous,
slowly, shamefully, the thing went by--to what final goal?--in the
lovely weather.

There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling
retinue of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very
dusty. I should have liked to question one or another of these as to
their mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking
acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one's
own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is
to forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so
wildly cordial for fear of seeming to `condescend,' nor be more than a
trifle saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The
whole thing is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked
those mechanics what they were doing with that railway car they would
have seemed to suspect me of meaning that it was my property and that
they had stolen it. Or perhaps they would have seemed merely to resent
my idle curiosity. If so, why not? When I walk abroad with a sheaf of
manuscript in my hand, mechanics do not stop me to ask `What's that?
What's it about? Who's going to publish it?' Nor is this because,
times having changed so, they are afraid of seeming to condescend.
They always did mind their own business. And now that their own
business is so much more lucrative than mine they still follow that
golden rule.

I stood gazing back at the procession till it disappeared round a bend
of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a
prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their
full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but
that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might
once, might frequently, have travelled) was still upmost in my
brooding mind. To what manner of wretched end was it destined? No end
would have seemed bad enough for it to Ruskin. But I was born late
enough to acquiesce in railways and in all that pertains to them. And
now, since the success of motor-cars (those far greater, because
unrestricted, bores), railways have taken on for me some such charm as
the memory of the posting coaches had for the greybeards of my
boyhood, some such charm as aeroplanes may in the fulness of time
foist down for us on motor-cars. `But I rove,' like Sir Thomas More.
And I seem to think that a cheap literary allusion will make you
excuse that vice. To resume my breathless narrative I decided that I
would slowly follow the tracks of the lorry.

I supposed that these were leading me to some great scrapping-place
filled with the remains of other railway-cars foully scrapped for some
fell industrial purpose. But this was a bad guess. The tracks led me
at last through a lane and thence into sight of a little bay, on whose
waters were perceptible the deck heads of sundry human beings, and on
its sands the full-lengths of sundry other human beings in bath-robes,
reading novels or merely basking. There was nowhere any sign of
industrialism. More than ever was I intrigued as to the fate of the
old railway-car that I had been stalking. It and its lorry had halted
on the flat grassy land that fringed the sands. This land was
dominated by a crescent of queer little garish tenements, the like of
which I had never seen, nor would wish to see again. They did not
stand on the ground, but on stakes of wood and shafts of brick, six
feet or so above the ground's level, and were led up to by flights of
wooden steps that tried not to look like ladders. They displeased me
much. They had little railed platforms round them, and things hanging
out to dry on the railings; and their walls vied unneighbourly with
one another in lawless colour-schemes. One tenement was salmon-pink
with wide bands of scarlet, another sky-blue with a key-pattern in
orange, and so on around the whole little horrid array. And I deduced,
from certain upstanding stakes and shafts at the nearer end of the
crescent, that the horror was not complete yet. A suspicion dawned in
me, and became, while I gazed again at the crescent's facades, a
glaring certainty; in the light of which I saw that I had been wrong
about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not to die. It was to have
a new function.

I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into sea-
side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor protruded
in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished fact, I
was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the crescent,
drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found that the cottages all
had names. One cottage was Mermaid's Rock; another (which had
fluttering window-curtains of Stuart tartan), Spray o' the Sea;
another, The Nest; another, Brinynook; and yet another had been named,
with less fitness, but in an ampler and to me more interesting spirit,
Petworth. I looked from them to the not-yet-converted railway-car. It
had a wonderful dignity. In its austere and monumental way, it was
very beautiful. It was a noble work of man, and Nature smiled on it. I
wondered with what colours it was to be bejezebelled, and what name--
Bolton Abbey?--Glad Eye?--Gay Wee Gehenna?--it would have to bear, and
what manner of man or woman was going to rent it.

It was on this last point that I mused especially. The housing problem
is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the
crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this!
There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there
are people who prefer--this! Yes, `this' is a positive taste, not a
necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on
the surface of water tell nothing to the sociologist, and in bath-
robes even full-lengths on the sand give him no clue. Three or four of
the full-lengths had risen and strolled up to the lorry, around which
the mechanics were engaged in some dispute of a technical nature. I
hoped the full-lengths would have something to say too. But they said
nothing. This I set down to sheer perversity. I was more than three
miles from the place where I am sojourning, and the hour for luncheon
was nearly due. I left the bay without having been able to determine
the character, the kind, of its denizens.

I take it there is a strong tincture of Bohemianism in them. Mr.
Desmond MacCarthy, of whose judgment I am always trustful, has said
that the hallmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for
purposes to which they are not adapted. You are a Bohemian, says Mr.
MacCarthy, if you would gladly use a razor for buttering your toast at
breakfast, and you aren't if you wouldn't. I think he would agree that
the choice of a home is a surer index than any fleeting action,
however strange, and that really the best-certified Bohemians are they
who choose to reside in railway-cars on stilts. But--why particularly
railway-cars? That is a difficult question. A possible answer is that
the Bohemian, as tending always to nomady, feels that the least
uncongenial way of settling down is to stow himself into a thing
fashioned for darting hither and thither. Yet no, this answer won't
do. It is ruled out by the law I laid down in my first paragraph.
There's nothing sadder to eye or heart than a very mobile thing made
immovable.

No house, especially if you are by way of being nomadic, can be so ill
to live in as one that in its heyday went gadding all over the place.
And, on the other hand, what house more eligible than one that can
gad? I myself am not restless, and am fond of comfort: I should not
care to live in a caravan. But I have always liked the idea of a
caravan. And if you, alas, O reader, are a dweller in a railway-car, I
commend the idea to you. Take it, with my apologies for any words of
mine that may have nettled you. Put it into practice. Think of the
white road and the shifting hedgerows, and the counties that you will
soon lose count of. And think what a blessing it will be for you to
know that your house is not the one in which the Merstham Tunnel
murder was committed.

WILLIAM AND MARY
1920.

Memories, like olives, are an acquired taste. William and Mary (I give
them the Christian names that were indeed theirs--the joint title by
which their friends always referred to them) were for some years an
interest in my life, and had a hold on my affection. But a time came
when, though I had known and liked them too well ever to forget them,
I gave them but a few thoughts now and then. How, being dead, could
they keep their place in the mind of a young man surrounded with large
and constantly renewed consignments of the living? As one grows older,
the charm of novelty wears off. One finds that there is no such thing
as novelty--or, at any rate, that one has lost the faculty for
perceiving it. One sees every newcomer not as something strange and
special, but as a ticketed specimen of this or that very familiar
genus. The world has ceased to be remarkable; and one tends to think
more and more often of the days when it was so very remarkable indeed.

I suppose that had I been thirty years older when first I knew him,
William would have seemed to me little worthier of attention than a
twopenny postage-stamp seems to-day. Yet, no: William really had some
oddities that would have caught even an oldster's eye. In himself he
was commonplace enough (as I, coeval though I was with him, soon saw).
But in details of surface he was unusual. In them he happened to be
rather ahead of his time. He was a socialist, for example. In 1890
there was only one other socialist in Oxford, and he not at all an
undergraduate, but a retired chimney-sweep, named Hines, who made
speeches, to which nobody, except perhaps William, listened, near the
Martyrs' Memorial. And William wore a flannel shirt, and rode a
bicycle--very strange habits in those days, and very horrible. He was
said to be (though he was short-sighted and wore glasses) a first-rate
`back' at football; but, as football was a thing frowned on by the
rowing men, and coldly ignored by the bloods, his talent for it did
not help him: he was one of the principal pariahs of our College; and
it was rather in a spirit of bravado, and to show how sure of myself I
was, that I began, in my second year, to cultivate his acquaintance.

We had little in common. I could not think Political Economy `the most
exciting thing in the world,' as he used to call it. Nor could I
without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris'
interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young
socialist that he was, thought `glorious.' He had begun to write an
Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of
verses. None of these pleased him, though to me they seemed very like
his master's. I can see him now, standing on his hearth-rug, holding
his MS. close to his short-sighted eyes, declaiming the verses and
trying, with many angular gestures of his left hand, to animate them--
a tall, broad, raw-boned fellow, with long brown hair flung back from
his forehead, and a very shabby suit of clothes. Because of his
clothes and his socialism, and his habit of offering beer to a guest,
I had at first supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he
told me that he had from his guardian (his parents being dead) an
allowance of ?350, and that when he came of age he would have an
income of ?400. `All out of dividends,' he would groan. I would hint
that Mr. Hines and similar zealots might disembarrass him of this
load, if he asked them nicely. `No,' he would say quite seriously, `I
can't do that,' and would read out passages from `Fabian Essays' to
show that in the present anarchical conditions only mischief could
result from sporadic dispersal of rent. `Ten, twelve years hence--' he
would muse more hopefully. `But by that time,' I would say, `you'll
probably be married, and your wife mightn't quite--', whereat he would
hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry.
Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin
some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed.
Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule
`ten, twelve years hence'; pending which time the lot of any man who
had civic sense must be celibacy, tempered perhaps with free love.

Long before that time was up, nevertheless, William married. One
afternoon in the spring of '95 I happened to meet him at a corner of
Cockspur Street. I wondered at the immense cordiality of his greeting;
for our friendship, such as it was, had waned in our two final years
at Oxford. `You look very flourishing, and,' I said, `you're wearing a
new suit!' `I'm married,' he replied, obviously without a twinge of
conscience. He told me he had been married just a month. He declared
that to be married was the most splendid thing in all the world; but
he weakened the force of this generalisation by adding that there
never was any one like his wife. `You must see her,' he said; and his
impatience to show her proudly off to some one was so evident, and so
touching, that I could but accept his invitation to go and stay with
them for two or three days--`why not next week?' They had taken and
furnished `a sort of cottage' in --shire, and this was their home. He
had `run up for the day, on business--journalism' and was now on his
way to Charing Cross. `I know you'll like my wife,' he said at
parting. She's--well, she's glorious.'

As this was the epithet he had erst applied to `Beowulf' and to
`Sigurd the Volsung' it raised no high hopes. And indeed, as I was
soon to find, he had again misused it. There was nothing glorious
about his bride. Some people might even have not thought her pretty. I
myself did not, in the flash of first sight. Neat, insignificant,
pleasing, was what she appeared to me, rather than pretty, and far
rather than glorious. In an age of fringes, her brow was severely
bare. She looked `practical.' But an instant later, when she smiled, I
saw that she was pretty, too. And presently I thought her delightful.
William had met me in a `governess cart,' and we went to see him
unharness the pony. He did this in a fumbling, experimental way,
confusing the reins with the traces, and profiting so little by his
wife's directions that she began to laugh. And her laugh was a lovely
thing; quite a small sound, but exquisitely clear and gay, coming in a
sequence of notes that neither rose nor fell, that were quite even; a
trill of notes, and then another, and another, as though she were
pulling repeatedly a little silver bell... As I describe it, perhaps
the sound may be imagined irritating. I can only say it was
enchanting.

I wished she would go on laughing; but she ceased, she darted forward
and (William standing obediently aside, and I helping unhelpfully)
unharnessed the pony herself, and led it into its small stable.
Decidedly, she was `practical,' but--I was prepared now to be lenient
to any quality she might have.

Had she been feckless, no doubt I should have forgiven her that, too;
but I might have enjoyed my visit less than I did, and might have been
less pleased to go often again. I had expected to `rough it' under
William's roof. But everything thereunder, within the limits of a
strict Arcadian simplicity, was well-ordered. I was touched, when I
went to my bedroom, by the precision with which the very small maid
had unpacked and disposed my things. And I wondered where my hostess
had got the lore she had so evidently imparted. Certainly not from
William. Perhaps (it only now strikes me) from a handbook. For Mary
was great at handbooks. She had handbooks about gardening, and others
about poultry, and one about `the stable,' and others on cognate
themes. From these she had filled up the gaps left in her education by
her father, who was a widower and either a doctor or a solicitor--I
forget which--in one of the smallest towns of an adjoining county. And
I daresay she may have had, somewhere hidden away, a manual for young
hostesses. If so, it must have been a good one. But to say this is to
belittle Mary's powers of intuition. It was they, sharpened by her
adoration of William, and by her intensity for everything around him,
that made her so efficient a housewife.

If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not
by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed
in. The `sort of cottage' had been vacant for many years--an
unpromising and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and
three miles away from a railway station. The main part of it was an
actual cottage, of seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little
stuccoed wing had been added to each side of it, in 1850 or
thereabouts, by an eccentric old gentleman who at that time chose to
make it his home. He had added also the small stable, a dairy, and
other appanages. For these, and for garden, there was plenty of room,
as he had purchased and enclosed half an acre of the surrounding land
Those two stuccoed, very Victorian wings of his, each with a sash-
window above and a French window below, consorted queerly with the old
red brick and the latticed panes. And the long wooden veranda that he
had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The
wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right--at any
rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I
think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief
of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married
him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a
thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a thing she must coddle to
the utmost in a proper setting. She was a year older than he (though,
being so small and slight, she looked several years younger), and in
her devotion the maternal instinct played a great part. William, as I
have already conveyed to you, was not greatly gifted. Mary's instinct,
in this one matter, was at fault. But endearingly, rightly at fault.
And, as William was outwardly odd, wasn't it well that his home should
be so, too? On the inside, comfort was what Mary always aimed at for
him, and achieved.

The ground floor had all been made one room, into which you stepped
straight from the open air. Quite a long big room (or so it seemed,
from the lowness of the ceiling), and well-freshened in its antiquity,
with rush-mats here and there on the irregular red tiles, and very
white whitewash on the plaster between the rafters. This was the
dining-room, drawing-room, and general focus throughout the day, and
was called simply the Room. William had a `den' on the ground floor of
the left wing; and there, in the mornings, he used to write a great
deal. Mary had no special place of her own: her place was wherever her
duties needed her. William wrote reviews of books for the Daily --. He
did also creative work. The vein of poetry in him had worked itself
out--or rather, it expressed itself for him in Mary. For technical
purposes, the influence of Ibsen had superseded that of Morris. At the
time of my first visit, he was writing an extraordinarily gloomy play
about an extraordinarily unhappy marriage. In subsequent seasons
(Ibsen's disc having been somehow eclipsed for him by George
Gissing's) he was usually writing novels in which every one--or do I
exaggerate?--had made a disastrous match. I think Mary's belief in his
genius had made him less diffident than he was at Oxford. He was
always emerging from his den, with fresh pages of MS., into the Room.
`You don't mind?' he would say, waving his pages, and then would shout
`Mary!' She was always promptly forthcoming--sometimes from the
direction of the kitchen, in a white apron, sometimes from the garden,
in a blue one. She never looked at him while he read. To do so would
have been lacking in respect for his work. It was on this that she
must concentrate her whole mind, privileged auditor that she was. She
sat looking straight before her, with her lips slightly compressed,
and her hands folded on her lap. I used to wonder that there had been
that first moment when I did not think her pretty. Her eyes were of a
very light hazel, seeming all the lighter because her hair was of so
dark a brown; and they were beautifully set in a face of that `pinched
oval' kind which is rather rare in England. Mary as listener would
have atoned to me for any defects there may have been in dear old
William's work. Nevertheless, I sometimes wished this work had some
comic relief in it. Publishers, I believe, shared this wish; hence the
eternal absence of William's name from among their announcements. For
Mary's sake, and his, I should have liked him to be `successful.' But
at any rate he didn't need money. He didn't need, in addition to what
he had, what he made by his journalism. And as for success--well,
didn't Mary think him a genius? And wasn't he Mary's husband? The main
reason why I wished for light passages in what he read to us was that
they would have been cues for Mary's laugh. This was a thing always
new to me. I never tired of that little bell-like euphony; those funny
little lucid and level trills.

There was no stint of that charm when William was not reading to us.
Mary was in no awe of him, apart from his work, and in no awe at all
of me: she used to laugh at us both, for one thing and another--just
the same laugh as I had first heard when William tried to unharness
the pony. I cultivated in myself whatever amused her in me; I drew out
whatever amused her in William; I never let slip any of the things
that amused her in herself. `Chaff' is a great bond; and I should have
enjoyed our bouts of it even without Mary's own special obbligato. She
used to call me (for I was very urban in those days) the Gentleman
from London. I used to call her the Brave Little Woman. Whatever
either of us said or did could be twisted easily into relation to
those two titles; and our bouts, to which William listened with a
puzzled, benevolent smile, used to cease only because Mary regarded me
as a possible purveyor of what William, she was sure, wanted and
needed, down there in the country, alone with her: intellectual
conversation, after his work. She often, I think, invented duties in
garden or kitchen so that he should have this stimulus, or luxury,
without hindrance. But when William was alone with me it was about her
that he liked to talk, and that I myself liked to talk too. He was
very sound on the subject of Mary; and so was I. And if, when I was
alone with Mary, I seemed to be sounder than I was on the subject of
William's wonderfulness, who shall blame me?

Had Mary been a mother, William's wonderfulness would have been less
greatly important. But he was her child as well as her lover. And I
think, though I do not know, she believed herself content that this
should always be, if so it were destined. It was not destined so. On
the first night of a visit I paid them in April, 1899, William, when
we were alone, told me news. I had been vaguely conscious, throughout
the evening, of some change; conscious that Mary had grown gayer, and
less gay--somehow different, somehow remote. William said that her
child would be born in September, if all went well. `She's immensely
happy,' he told me. I realised that she was indeed happier than
ever... `And of course it would be a wonderful thing, for both of us,'
he said presently, `to have a son--or a daughter.' I asked him which
he would rather it were, a son or a daughter. `Oh, either,' he
answered wearily. It was evident that he had misgivings and fears. I
tried to reason him out of them. He did not, I am thankful to say,
ever let Mary suspect them. She had no misgivings. But it was destined
that her child should live only for an hour, and that she should die
in bearing it.

I had stayed again at the cottage in July, for some days. At the end
of that month I had gone to France, as was my custom, and a week later
had written to Mary. It was William that answered this letter, telling
me of Mary's death and burial. I returned to England next day. William
and I wrote to each other several times. He had not left his home. He
stayed there, `trying,' as he said in a grotesque and heart-rending
phrase, `to finish a novel.' I saw him in the following January. He
wrote to me from the Charing Cross Hotel, asking me to lunch with him
there. After our first greetings, there was a silence. He wanted to
talk of--what he could not talk of. We stared helplessly at each
other, and then, in the English way, talked of things at large.
England was engaged in the Boer War. William was the sort of man whom
one would have expected to be violently Pro-Boer. I was surprised at
his fervour for the stronger side. He told me he had tried to enlist,
but had been rejected on account of his eyesight. But there was, he
said, a good chance of his being sent out, almost immediately, as one
of the Daily --'s special correspondents. `And then,' he exclaimed, `I
shall see something of it.' I had a presentiment that he would not
return, and a belief that he did not want to return. He did not
return. Special correspondents were not so carefully shepherded in
that war as they have since been. They were more at liberty to take
risks, on behalf of the journals to which they were accredited.
William was killed a few weeks after he had landed at Cape Town.

And there came, as I have said, a time when I did not think of William
and Mary often; and then a time when I did more often think of them.
And especially much did my mind hark back to them in the late autumn
of last year; for on the way to the place I was staying at I had
passed the little railway station whose name had always linked itself
for me with the names of those two friends. There were but four
intervening stations. It was not a difficult pilgrimage that I made
some days later--back towards the past, for that past's sake and
honour. I had thought I should not remember the way, the three miles
of way, from the station to the cottage; but I found myself
remembering it perfectly, without a glance at the finger-posts. Rain
had been falling heavily, driving the late leaves off the trees; and
everything looked rather sodden and misty, though the sun was now
shining. I had known this landscape only in spring, summer, early
autumn. Mary had held to a theory that at other seasons I could not be
acclimatised. But there were groups of trees that I knew, even without
their leaves; and farm-houses and small stone bridges that had not at
all changed. Only what mattered was changed. Only what mattered was
gone. Would what I had come to see be there still? In comparison with
what it had held, it was not much. But I wished to see it, melancholy
spectacle though it must be for me if it were extant, and worse than
melancholy if it held something new. I began to be sure it had been
demolished, built over. At the corner of the lane that had led to it,
I was almost minded to explore no further, to turn back. But I went
on, and suddenly I was at the four-barred iron gate, that I
remembered, between the laurels. It was rusty, and was fastened with a
rusty padlock, and beyond it there was grass where a winding `drive'
had been. From the lane the cottage never had been visible, even when
these laurels were lower and sparser than they were now. Was the
cottage still standing? Presently, I climbed over the gate, and walked
through the long grass, and--yes, there was Mary's cottage; still
there; William's and Mary's cottage. Trite enough, I have no doubt,
were the thoughts that possessed me as I stood gazing. There is
nothing new to be thought about the evanescence of human things; but
there is always much to be felt about it by one who encounters in his
maturity some such intimate instance and reminder as confronted me, in
that cold sunshine, across that small wilderness of long rank wet
grass and weeds.

Incredibly woebegone and lonesome the house would have looked even to
one for whom it contained no memories; all the more because in its
utter dereliction it looked so durable. Some of the stucco had fallen
off the walls of the two wings; thick flakes of it lay on the
discoloured roof of the veranda, and thick flakes of it could be seen
lying in the grass below. Otherwise, there were few signs of actual
decay. The sash-window and the French window of each wing were
shuttered, and, from where I was standing, the cream-coloured paint of
those shutters behind the glass looked almost fresh. The latticed
windows between had all been boarded up from within. The house was not
to be let perish soon.

I did not want to go nearer to it; yet I did go nearer, step by step,
across the wilderness, right up to the edge of the veranda itself, and
within a yard of the front-door.

I stood looking at that door. I had never noticed it in the old days,
for then it had always stood open. But it asserted itself now, master
of the threshold.

It was a narrow door--narrow even for its height, which did not exceed
mine by more than two inches or so; a door that even when it was
freshly painted must have looked mean. How much meaner now, with its
paint all faded and mottled, cracked and blistered! It had no knocker,
not even a slit for letters. All that it had was a large-ish key-hole.
On this my eyes rested; and presently I moved to it, stooped down to
it, peered through it. I had a glimpse of--darkness impenetrable.

Strange it seemed to me, as I stood back, that there the Room was, the
remembered Room itself, separated from me by nothing but this
unremembered door...and a quarter of a century, yes. I saw it all, in
my mind's eye, just as it had been: the way the sunlight came into it
through this same doorway and through the lattices of these same four
windows; the way the little bit of a staircase came down into it, so
crookedly yet so confidently; and how uneven the tiled floor was, and
how low the rafters were, and how littered the whole place was with
books brought in from his den by William, and how bright with flowers
brought in by Mary from her garden. The rafters, the stairs, the
tiles, were still existing, changeless in despite of cobwebs and dust
and darkness, all quite changeless on the other side of the door, so
near to me. I wondered how I should feel if by some enchantment the
door slowly turned on its hinges, letting in light. I should not
enter, I felt, not even look, so much must I hate to see those inner
things lasting when all that had given to them a meaning was gone from
them, taken away from them, finally. And yet, why blame them for their
survival? And how know that nothing of the past ever came to them,
revisiting, hovering? Something--sometimes--perhaps? One knew so
little. How not be tender to what, as it seemed to me, perhaps the
dead loved?

So strong in me now was the wish to see again all those things, to
touch them and, as it were, commune with them, and so queerly may the
mind be wrought upon in a solitude among memories, that there were
moments when I almost expected that the door would obey my will. I was
recalled to a clearer sense of reality by something which I had not
before noticed. In the door-post to the right was a small knob of
rusty iron--mocking reminder that to gain admission to a house one
does not `will' the door: one rings the bell--unless it is rusty and
has quite obviously no one to answer it; in which case one goes away.
Yet I did not go away. The movement that I made, in despite of myself,
was towards the knob itself. But, I hesitated, suppose I did what I
half meant to do, and there were no sound. That would be ghastly. And
surely there would be no sound. And if sound there were, wouldn't that
be worse still? My hand drew back, wavered, suddenly closed on the
knob. I heard the scrape of the wire--and then, from somewhere within
the heart of the shut house, a tinkle.

It had been the weakest, the puniest of noises. It had been no more
than is a fledgling's first attempt at a twitter. But I was not
judging it by its volume. Deafening peals from steeples had meant less
to me than that one single note breaking the silence--in there. In
there, in the dark, the bell that had answered me was still quivering,
I supposed, on its wire. But there was no one to answer it, no
footstep to come hither from those recesses, making prints in the
dust. Well, I could answer it; and again my hand closed on the knob,
unhesitatingly this time, pulling further. That was my answer; and the
rejoinder to it was more than I had thought to hear--a whole quick
sequence of notes, faint but clear, playful, yet poignantly sad, like
a trill of laughter echoing out of the past, or even merely out of
this neighbouring darkness. It was so like something I had known, so
recognisable and, oh, recognising, that I was lost in wonder. And long
must I have remained standing at that door, for I heard the sound
often, often. I must have rung again and again, tenaciously,
vehemently, in my folly.

ON SPEAKING FRENCH
1919.

Wherever two Englishmen are speaking French to a Frenchman you may
safely diagnose in the breast of one of the two humiliation, envy,
ill-will, impotent rage, and a dull yearning for vengeance; and you
can take it that the degree of these emotions is in exact ratio to the
superiority of the other man's performance. In the breast of this
other are contempt, malicious amusement, conceit, vanity, pity, and
joy in ostentation; these, also, exactly commensurable with his
advantage. Strange and sad that this should be so; but so it is.
French brings out the worst in all of us--all, I mean, but the few,
the lamentably far too few, who cannot aspire to stammer some
colloquial phrases of it.

Even in Victorian days, when England was more than geographically, was
psychologically an island, French made mischief among us, and was one
of the Devil's favourite ways of setting brother against brother. But
in those days the bitterness of the weaker brother was a little
sweetened with disapproval of the stronger. To speak French fluently
and idiomatically and with a good accent--or with an idiom and accent
which to other rough islanders seemed good--was a rather suspect
accomplishment, being somehow deemed incompatible with civic worth.
Thus the weaker ones had not to drain the last lees of their shame,
and the stronger could not wholly rejoice in their strength. But the
old saving prejudice has now died out (greatly to the delight of the
Devil), and there seems no chance that it will be revived.

Of other languages no harm comes. None of us--none, at any rate,
outside the diplomatic service--has a feeling that he ought to be
master of them. In every recent generation a few men have learned
Italian because of the Divina Commedia; and a very few others have
tried Spanish, with a view to Cervantes; and German has pestered not
always vainly the consciences of young men gravitating to philosophy
or to science. But not for social, not for any oral purposes were
these languages essayed. If an Italian or a Spanish or a German came
among us he was expected to converse in English or spend his time in
visiting the sights silently and alone. No language except French has
ever--but stay! There was, at the outbreak of the War, a great impulse
towards Russian. All sorts of people wanted their children to be
taught Russian without a moment's delay. I do not remember that they
wanted to learn it themselves; but they felt an extreme need that
their offspring should hereafter be able to converse with moujiks
about ikons and the Little Father and anything else--if there were
anything else--that moujiks cared about. This need, however, is not
felt now. When, so soon after his de'but in high politics, M. Kerensky
was superseded by M. Lenin, Russian was forthwith deemed a not quite
nice language, even for children. Russia's alphabet was withdrawn from
the nurseries as abruptly as it had been brought in, and le chapean de
la cousine du jardinier was re-indued with its old importance.

I doubt whether Russian would for more than a little while have seemed
to be a likely rival of French, even if M. Kerensky had been the
strong man we hoped he was. The language that succeeded to Latin as
the official mode of intercourse between nations, and as the usual
means of talk between the well-educated people of any one land and
those of any other, had an initial advantage not quite counterbalanced
by the fact that there are in Russia myriads of people who speak
Russian, and a few who can also read and write it. Russian may, for
aught I know, be a very beautiful language; it may be as lucid and
firm in its constructions as French is, and as musical in sound; I
know nothing at all about it. Nor do I claim for French that it was by
its own virtues predestined to the primacy that it holds in Europe.
Had Italy, not France, been an united and powerful nation when Latin
became desuete, that primacy would of course have been taken by
Italian. And I cannot help wishing that this had happened. Italian,
though less elegant, is, for the purpose of writing, a richer language
than French, and an even subtler; and the sound of it spoken is as
superior to the sound of French as a violin's is to a flute's. Still,
French does, by reason of its exquisite concision and clarity, fill
its post of honour very worthily, and will not in any near future, I
think, be thrust down. Many people, having regard to the very numerous
population of the British Empire and the United States, cherish a
belief that English will presently be cock of the world's walk. But we
have to consider that English is an immensely odd and irregular
language, that it is accounted very difficult by even the best foreign
linguists, and that even among native writers there are few who can so
wield it as to make their meaning clear without prolixity--and among
these few none who has not been well-grounded in Latin. By its very
looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting
rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional
poetry. But foreigners don't much want to say beautiful haunting
things to us; they want to be told what limits there are, if any, to
the power of the Lord Mayor; and our rambling endeavours to explain do
but bemuse and annoy them. They find that the rewards of learning
English are as slight as its difficulties are great, and they warn
their fellows to this effect. Nor does the oral sound of English allay
the prejudice thus created. Soothing and dear and charming that sound
is to English ears. But no nation can judge the sound of its own
language. This can be judged only from without, only by ears to which
it is unfamiliar. And alas, much as we like listening to French or
Italian, for example, Italians and Frenchmen (if we insist on having
their opinion) will confess that English has for them a rather harsh
sound. Altogether, it seems to me unlikely that the world will let
English supplant French for international purposes, and likely that
French will be ousted only when the world shall have been so
internationalised that the children of every land will have to learn,
besides their own traditional language, some kind of horrible
universal lingo begotten on Volapuk by a congress of the world's worst
pedants.

Almost I could wish I had been postponed to that era, so much have I
suffered through speaking French to Frenchmen in the presence of
Englishmen. Left alone with a Frenchman, I can stumble along, slowly
indeed, but still along, and without acute sense of ignominy.
Especially is this so if I am in France. There is in the atmosphere
something that braces one for the language. I don't say I am not
sorry, even so, for my Frenchman. But I am sorrier for him in England.
And if any Englishmen be included in the scene my sympathy with him is
like to be lost in my agony for myself.

Would that I had made some such confession years ago! O folly of
pride! I liked the delusion that I spoke French well, a delusion
common enough among those who had never heard me. Somehow I seemed
likely to possess that accomplishment. I cannot charge myself with
having ever claimed to possess it; but I am afraid that when any one
said to me `I suppose you speak French perfectly?' I allowed the tone
of my denial to carry with it a hint of mock-modesty. `Oh no,' I would
say, `my French is wretched,' rather as though I meant that a member
of the French Academy would detect lapses from pure classicism in it;
or `No, no, mine is French pour rire,' to imply that I was practically
bilingual. Thus, during the years when I lived in London, I very often
received letters from hostesses asking me to dine on the night when
Mme. Chose or M. Tel was coming. And always I excused myself--not on
the plea that I should be useless. This method of mine would have been
well enough, from any but the moral standpoint, had not Nemesis,
taking her stand on that point, sometimes ordained that a Gaul should
be sprung on me. It was not well with me then. It was downfall and
disaster.

Strange, how one will trifle with even the most imminent doom. On
being presented to the Gaul, I always hastened to say that I spoke his
or her language only `un tout petit peu'--knowing well that this poor
spark of slang would kindle within the breast of M. Tel or the bosom
of Mme. Chose hopes that must so quickly be quenched in the puddle of
my incompetence. I offer no excuse for so foolish a proceeding. I do
but say it is characteristic of all who are duffers at speaking a
foreign tongue. Great is the pride they all take in airing some little
bit of idiom. I recall, among many other pathetic exemplifiers of the
foible, an elderly and rather eminent Greek, who, when I was
introduced to him, said `I am jolly glad to meet you, Sir!' and,
having said that, had nothing whatever else to say, and was moreover
unable to grasp the meaning of anything said by me, though I said the
simplest things, and said them very slowly and clearly. It is to my
credit that in speaking English to a foreigner I do always try to be
helpful. I bear witness against Mme. Chose and M. Tel that for me they
have never made a like effort in their French. It is said that French
people do not really speak faster than we, and that their seeming to
do so is merely because of their lighter stress on syllables. If this
is true, I wish that for my sake they would stress their syllables a
little more heavily. By their omission of this kindness I am so often
baffled as to their meaning. To be shamed as a talker is bad enough;
it is even worse to be shamed in the humble refuge of listener. To
listen and from time to time murmur `C'est vrai' may seem safe enough;
yet there is danger even here. I wish I could forget a certain
luncheon in the course of which Mme. Chose (that brilliant woman)
leaned suddenly across the table to me, and, with great animation,
amidst a general hush, launched at me a particularly swift flight of
winged words. With pensively narrowed eyes, I uttered my formula when
she ceased. This formula she repeated, in a tone even more pensive
than mine. `Mais je ne le connais pas,' she then loudly exclaimed. `Je
ne connais pas me^me le nom. Dites-moi de ce jeune homme.' She had, as
it presently turned out, been asking me which of the younger French
novelists was most highly thought of by English critics; so that her
surprise at never having heard of the gifted young Se'vre' was natural
enough.

We all--but no, I must not say that we all have painful memories of
this kind. Some of us can understand every word that flies from the
lips of Mme. Chose or from the mouth of M. Tel. Some of us can also
talk quickly and well to either of these pilgrims; and others can do
the trick passably. But the duffers are in a great grim majority; and
the mischief that French causes among us is mainly manifest, not (I
would say) by weaker brethren hating the stronger, but by weak ones
hating the less weak.

As French is a subject on which we all feel so keenly, a point of
honour on which we are all so sensitive, how comes it that our general
achievement is so slight? There was no lack of hopes, of plans, that
we should excel. In many cases Time was taken for us by the forelock,
and a French nurse installed. But alas! little children are wax to
receive and to retain. They will be charmingly fluent speakers of
French within six weeks of Mariette's arrival, and will have forgotten
every word of it within as brief an interval after her departure.
Later, their minds become more retentive, though less absorbent; and
then, by all means, let French be taught. Taught it is. At the school
where I was reared there were four French masters; four; but to what
purpose? Their class-rooms were scenes of eternal and incredible
pandemonium, filled with whoops and catcalls, with devil's-tattoos on
desks, and shrill inquiries for the exact date of the battle of
Waterloo. Nor was the lot of those four men exceptional in its horror.
> From the accounts given to me by `old boys' of other schools I have
gathered that it was the common lot of French masters on our shores;
and I have often wondered how much of the Anglophobia recurrent among
Frenchmen in the nineteenth century was due to the tragic tales told
by those of them who had returned from our seminaries to die on their
own soil. Since 1914, doubtless, French masters have had a very good
time in England. But, even so, I doubt whether they have been
achieving much in the way of tutelage. With the best will in the
world, a boy will profit but little by three or four lessons a week
(which are the utmost that our system allows him). What he wants, or
at any rate will want, is to be able to cope with Mme. Chose. A
smattering of the irregular verbs will not much avail him in that
emprise. Not in the dark by-ways of conjugation, but on the sunny
field of frank social intercourse, must he prove his knighthood. I
would recommend that every boy, on reaching the age of sixteen, should
be hurled across the Channel into the midst of some French family and
kept there for six months. At the end of that time let him be returned
to his school, there to make up for lost time. Time well lost, though:
for the boy will have become fluent in French, and will ever remain
so.

Fluency is all. If the boy has a good ear, he will speak with a good
accent; but his accent is a point about which really he needn't care a
jot. So is his syntax. Not with these will he win the heart of Mme.
Chose, not with these the esteem of M. Tel, not with these anything
but a more acrid rancour in the silly hostility of his competitors. If
a foreigner speaks English to us easily and quickly, we demand no more
of him; we are satisfied, we are delighted, and any mistakes of
grammar or pronunciation do but increase the charm, investing with
more than its intrinsic quality any good thing said--making us marvel
at it and exchange fatuous glances over it, as we do when a little
child says something sensible. But heaven protect us from the
foreigner who pauses, searches, fumbles, revises, comes to
standstills, has recourse to dumb-show! Away with him, by the first
train to Dover! And this, we may be sure, is the very train M. Tel and
Mme. Chose would like to catch whenever they meet me--or you?

LAUGHTER
1920.

M. Bergson, in his well-known essay on this theme, says...well, he
says many things; but none of these, though I have just read them, do
I clearly remember, nor am I sure that in the act of reading I
understood any of them. That is the worst of these fashionable
philosophers--or rather, the worst of me. Somehow I never manage to
read them till they are just going out of fashion, and even then I
don't seem able to cope with them. About twelve years ago, when every
one suddenly talked to me about Pragmatism and William James, I found
myself moved by a dull but irresistible impulse to try Schopenhauer,
of whom, years before that, I had heard that he was the easiest
reading in the world, and the most exciting and amusing. I wrestled
with Schopenhauer for a day or so, in vain. Time passed; M. Bergson
appeared `and for his hour was lord of the ascendant;' I tardily
tackled William James. I bore in mind, as I approached him, the
testimonials that had been lavished on him by all my friends. Alas, I
was insensible to his thrillingness. His gaiety did not make me gay.
His crystal clarity confused me dreadfully. I could make nothing of
William James. And now, in the fullness of time, I have been floored
by M. Bergson.

It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of
thought as they pass into oblivion. It makes me wonder whether I am,
after all, an absolute fool. Yet surely I am not that. Tell me of a
man or a woman, a place or an event, real or fictitious: surely you
will find me a fairly intelligent listener. Any such narrative will
present to me some image, and will stir me to not altogether fatuous
thoughts. Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you
like a father, even like a lawyer. I'll be hanged if I haven't a
certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories as to
the nature of things in general, and if you want to try those theories
on some one who will luminously confirm them or powerfully rend them,
I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer
from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for
through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy,
howsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of
philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit
of being the only one I can make head or tail of. If you try to
expound any other philosophic system to me, you will find not merely
that I can detect no flaw in it (except the one great flaw just
suggested), but also that I haven't, after a minute or two, the
vaguest notion of what you are driving at. `Very well,' you say,
`instead of trying to explain all things all at once, I will explain
some little, simple, single thing.' It was for sake of such shorn
lambs as myself, doubtless, that M. Bergson sat down and wrote about--
Laughter. But I have profited by his kindness no more than if he had
been treating of the Cosmos. I cannot tread even a limited space of
air. I have a gross satisfaction in the crude fact of being on hard
ground again, and I utter a coarse peal of--Laughter.

At least, I say I do so. In point of fact, I have merely smiled.
Twenty years ago, ten years ago, I should have laughed, and have
professed to you that I had merely smiled. A very young man is not
content to be very young, nor even a young man to be young: he wants
to share the dignity of his elders. There is no dignity in laughter,
there is much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender,
smiles give token of mature criticism. It may be that in the early
ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard
now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles
universal--every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is
less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to
observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room that
young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle
age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud
and long among themselves, while we others--the gayest and best of us
in the most favourable circumstances--seldom achieve more than our
habitual act of smiling. Does the sound of that laughter jar on us? Do
we liken it to the crackling of thorns under a pot? Let us do so.
There is no cheerier sound. But let us not assume it to be the
laughter of fools because we sit quiet. It is absurd to disapprove of
what one envies, or to wish a good thing were no more because it has
passed out of our possession.

But (it seems that I must begin every paragraph by questioning the
sincerity of what I have just said) has the gift of laughter been
withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-
seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and
loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays,
of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad
sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course. I realise, even
after reading M. Bergson on it, how good a thing it is. I am qualified
to praise it.

As to what is most precious among the accessories to the world we live
in, different men hold different opinions. There are people whom the
sea depresses, whom mountains exhilarate. Personally, I want the sea
always--some not populous edge of it for choice; and with it sunshine,
and wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of
tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea's laxity and
instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and
regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central
heating in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his
face; crags at a great altitude; and a flask of whisky. Yet I think
that even he, if we were trying to determine from what inner sources
mankind derives the greatest pleasure in life, would agree with me
that only the emotion of love takes higher rank than the emotion of
laughter. Both these emotions are partly mental, partly physical. It
is said that the mental symptoms of love are wholly physical in
origin. They are not the less ethereal for that. The physical
sensations of laughter, on the other hand, are reached by a process
whose starting-point is in the mind. They are not the less `gloriously
of our clay.' There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch
with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is
laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been
granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit
that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus,
may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds
overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

Nor does it seem to me to matter one jot how such laughter is
achieved. Humour may rollick on high planes of fantasy or in depths of
silliness. To many people it appeals only from those depths. If it
appeal to them irresistibly, they are more enviable than those who are
sensitive only to the finer kind of joke and not so sensitive as to be
mastered and dissolved by it. Laughter is a thing to be rated
according to its own intensity.

Many years ago I wrote an essay in which I poured scorn on the fun
purveyed by the music halls, and on the great public for which that
fun was quite good enough. I take that callow scorn back. I fancy that
the fun itself was better than it seemed to me, and might not have
displeased me if it had been wafted to me in private, in presence of a
few friends. A public crowd, because of a lack of broad impersonal
humanity in me, rather insulates than absorbs me. Amidst the guffaws
of a thousand strangers I become unnaturally grave. If these people
were the entertainment, and I the audience, I should be sympathetic
enough. But to be one of them is a position that drives me spiritually
aloof. Also, there is to me something rather dreary in the notion of
going anywhere for the specific purpose of being amused. I prefer that
laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve
me. And in this respect, at any rate, I am not peculiar. In music
halls and such places, you may hear loud laughter, but--not see silent
laughter, not see strong men weak, helpless, suffering, gradually
convalescent, dangerously relapsing. Laughter at its greatest and best
is not there.

To such laughter nothing is more propitious than an occasion that
demands gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the
surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds. If music halls were
schoolrooms for us, and the comedians were our schoolmasters, how much
less talent would be needed for giving us how much more joy! Even in
private and accidental intercourse, few are the men whose humour can
reduce us, be we never so susceptible, to paroxysms of mirth. I will
wager that nine tenths of the world's best laughter is laughter at,
not with. And it is the people set in authority over us that touch
most surely our sense of the ridiculous. Freedom is a good thing, but
we lose through it golden moments. The schoolmaster to his pupils, the
monarch to his courtiers, the editor to his staff--how priceless they
are! Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more
we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him
(and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness. And
herein lies one of the reasons why as we grow older we laugh less. The
men we esteemed so great are gathered to their fathers. Some of our
coevals may, for aught we know, be very great, but good heavens! we
can't esteem them so.

Of extreme laughter I know not in any annals a more satisfying example
than one that is to be found in Moore's Life of Byron. Both Byron and
Moore were already in high spirits when, on an evening in the spring
of 1818, they went `from some early assembly' to Mr. Rogers' house in
St. James's Place and were regaled there with an impromptu meal. But
not high spirits alone would have led the two young poets to such
excess of laughter as made the evening so very memorable. Luckily they
both venerated Rogers (strange as it may seem to us) as the greatest
of living poets. Luckily, too, Mr. Rogers was ever the kind of man,
the coldly and quietly suave kind of man, with whom you don't take
liberties, if you can help it--with whom, if you can't help it, to
take liberties is in itself a most exhilarating act. And he had just
received a presentation copy of Lord Thurloe's latest book, `Poems on
Several Occasions.' The two young poets found in this elder's Muse
much that was so execrable as to be delightful. They were soon, as
they turned the pages, held in throes of laughter, laughter that was
but intensified by the endeavours of their correct and nettled host to
point out the genuine merits of his friend's work. And then suddenly--
oh joy!--`we lighted,' Moore records, `on the discovery that our host,
in addition to his sincere approbation of some of this book's
contents, had also the motive of gratitude for standing by its author,
as one of the poems was a warm and, I need not add, well-deserved
panegyric on himself. We were, however'--the narrative has an added
charm from Tom Moore's demure care not to offend or compromise the
still-surviving Rogers--`too far gone in nonsense for even this
eulogy, in which we both so heartily agreed, to stop us. The opening
line of the poem was, as well as I can recollect, "When Rogers o'er
this labour bent;" and Lord Byron undertook to read it aloud;--but he
found it impossible to get beyond the first two words. Our laughter
had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could restrain it. Two
or three times he began; but no sooner had the words "When Rogers"
passed his lips, than our fit burst out afresh,--till even Mr. Rogers
himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found it impossible
not to join us; and we were, at last, all three in such a state of
inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been of our
party, I question much whether he could have resisted the infection.'
The final fall and dissolution of Rogers, Rogers behaving as badly as
either of them, is all that was needed to give perfection to this
heart-warming scene. I like to think that on a certain night in
spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and
(without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen to
be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared
rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron
and Moore and Rogers the notion that more than a hundred years away
from them was some one joining in their laughter--as I do.

Alas, I cannot join in it more than gently. To imagine a scene,
however vividly, does not give us the sense of being, or even of
having been, present at it. Indeed, the greater the glow of the scene
reflected, the sharper is the pang of our realisation that we were not
there, and of our annoyance that we weren't. Such a pang comes to me
with special force whenever my fancy posts itself outside the Temple's
gate in Fleet Street, and there, at a late hour of the night of May
10th, 1773, observes a gigantic old man laughing wildly, but having no
one with him to share and aggrandise his emotion. Not that he is
alone; but the young man beside him laughs only in politeness and is
inwardly puzzled, even shocked. Boswell has a keen, an exquisitely
keen, scent for comedy, for the fun that is latent in fine shades of
character; but imaginative burlesque, anything that borders on lovely
nonsense, he was not formed to savour. All the more does one revel in
his account of what led up to the moment when Johnson `to support
himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot
pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the
night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.'

No evening ever had an unlikelier ending. The omens were all for
gloom. Johnson had gone to dine at General Paoli's, but was so ill
that he had to leave before the meal was over. Later he managed to go
to Mr. Chambers' rooms in the Temple. `He continued to be very ill'
there, but gradually felt better, and `talked with a noble enthusiasm
of keeping up the representation of respectable families,' and was
great on `the dignity and propriety of male succession.' Among his
listeners, as it happened, was a gentleman for whom Mr. Chambers had
that day drawn up a will devising his estate to his three sisters. The
news of this might have been expected to make Johnson violent in
wrath. But no, for some reason he grew violent only in laughter, and
insisted thenceforth on calling that gentleman The Testator and
chaffing him without mercy. `I daresay he thinks he has done a mighty
thing. He won't stay till he gets home to his seat in the country, to
produce this wonderful deed: he'll call up the landlord of the first
inn on the road; and after a suitable preface upon mortality and the
uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay in making
his will; and Here, Sir, will he say, is my will, which I have just
made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom;
and he will read it to him. He believes he has made this will; but he
did not make it; you, Chambers, made it for him. I hope you have had
more conscience than to make him say "being of sound understanding!"
ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I'd have his will turned
into verse, like a ballad.' These flights annoyed Mr. Chambers, and
are recorded by Boswell with the apology that he wishes his readers to
be `acquainted with the slightest occasional characteristics of so
eminent a man.' Certainly, there is nothing ridiculous in the fact of
a man making a will. But this is the measure of Johnson's achievement.
He had created gloriously much out of nothing at all. There he sat,
old and ailing and unencouraged by the company, but soaring higher and
higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and still soaring and
rejoicing after he had gone out into the night with Boswell, till at
last in Fleet Street his paroxysms were too much for him and he could
no more. Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down the ages. But
is there also perhaps a note of sadness for us in them? Johnson's
endless sociability came of his inherent melancholy: he could not bear
to be alone; and his very mirth was but a mode of escape from the dark
thoughts within him. Of these the thought of death was the most
dreadful to him, and the most insistent. He was for ever wondering how
death would come to him, and how he would acquit himself in the
extreme moment. A later but not less devoted Anglican, meditating on
his own end, wrote in his diary that `to die in church appears to be a
great euthanasia, but not,' he quaintly and touchingly added, `at a
time to disturb worshippers.' Both the sentiment here expressed and
the reservation drawn would have been as characteristic of Johnson as
they were of Gladstone. But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me
a great euthanasia; and I think that for Johnson to have died thus,
that night in Fleet Street, would have been a grand ending to `a life
radically wretched.' Well, he was destined to outlive another decade;
and, selfishly, who can wish such a life as his, or such a Life as
Boswell's, one jot shorter?

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk
who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in
history or in legend as having died of laughter. Strange, too, that
not to one of all the characters in romance has such an end been
allotted. Has it ever struck you what a chance Shakespeare missed when
he was finishing the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth? Falstaff
was not the man to stand cowed and bowed while the new young king
lectured him and cast him off. Little by little, as Hal proceeded in
that portentous allocution, the humour of the situation would have
mastered old Sir John. His face, blank with surprise at first, would
presently have glowed and widened, and his whole bulk have begun to
quiver. Lest he should miss one word, he would have mastered himself.
But the final words would have been the signal for release of all the
roars pent up in him; the welkin would have rung; the roars, belike,
would have gradually subsided in dreadful rumblings of more than
utterable or conquerable mirth. Thus and thus only might his life have
been rounded off with dramatic fitness, secundum ipsius naturam. He
never should have been left to babble of green fields and die `an it
had been any christom child.'

Falstaff is a triumph of comedic creation because we are kept laughing
equally at and with him. Nevertheless, if I had the choice of sitting
with him at the Boar's Head or with Johnson at the Turk's, I shouldn't
hesitate for an instant. The agility of Falstaff's mind gains much of
its effect by contrast with the massiveness of his body; but in
contrast with Johnson's equal agility is Johnson's moral as well as
physical bulk. His sallies `tell' the more startlingly because of the
noble weight of character behind them: they are the better because he
makes them. In Falstaff there isn't this final incongruity and element
of surprise. Falstaff is but a sublimated sample of `the funny man.'
We cannot, therefore, laugh so greatly with him as with Johnson. (Nor
even at him; because we are not tickled so much by the weak points of
a character whose points are all weak ones; also because we have no
reverence trying to impose restraint upon us.) Still, Falstaff has
indubitably the power to convulse us. I don't mean we ever are
convulsed in reading Henry the Fourth. No printed page, alas, can
thrill us to extremities of laughter. These are ours only if the
mirthmaker be a living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from
his own lips. All I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to
convulse us if he were alive and accessible. Few, as I have said, are
the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to
give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a
success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power.
Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no
pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not
enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to
it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all
manner of strange and precious things, one after another, without
pause. He must have invention keeping pace with utterance. He must be
inexhaustible. Only so can he exhaust us.

I have a friend whom I would praise. There are many other of my
friends to whom I am indebted for much laughter; but I do believe that
if all of them sent in their bills to-morrow and all of them
overcharged me not a little, the total of all those totals would be
less appalling than that which looms in my own vague estimate of what
I owe to Comus. Comus I call him here in observance of the line drawn
between public and private virtue, and in full knowledge that he would
of all men be the least glad to be quite personally thanked and
laurelled in the market-place for the hours he has made memorable
among his cronies. No one is so diffident as he, no one so self-
postponing. Many people have met him again and again without faintly
suspecting `anything much' in him. Many of his acquaintances--friends,
too--relatives, even--have lived and died in the belief that he was
quite ordinary. Thus is he the more greatly valued by his cronies.
Thus do we pride ourselves on possessing some curious right quality to
which alone he is responsive. But it would seem that either this asset
of ours or its effect on him is intermittent. He can be dull and null
enough with us sometimes--a mere asker of questions, or drawer of
comparisons between this and that brand of cigarettes, or full
expatiator on the merits of some new patent razor. A whole hour and
more may be wasted in such humdrum and darkness. And then--something
will have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now,
presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of
his equipment. A cast of it might be somewhat akin to the comic mask
of the ancients; but no cast could be worthy of it; mobility is the
essence of it. It flickers and shifts in accord to the matter of his
discourse; it contracts and it expands; is there anything its elastic
can't express? Comus would be eloquent even were he dumb. And he is
mellifluous. His voice, while he develops an idea or conjures up a
scene, takes on a peculiar richness and unction. If he be describing
an actual scene, voice and face are adaptable to those of the actual
persons therein. But it is not in such mimicry that he excels. As a
reporter he has rivals. For the most part, he moves on a higher plane
that of mere fact: he imagines, he creates, giving you not a person,
but a type, a synthesis, and not what anywhere has been, but what
anywhere might be--what, as one feels, for all the absurdity of it,
just would be. He knows his world well, and nothing human is alien to
him, but certain skeins of life have a special hold on him, and he on
them. In his youth he wished to be a clergyman; and over the clergy of
all grades and denominations his genius hovers and swoops and ranges
with a special mastery. Lawyers he loves less; yet the legal mind
seems to lie almost as wide-open to him as the sacerdotal; and the
legal manner in all its phases he can unerringly burlesque. In the
minds of journalists, diverse journalists, he is not less thoroughly
at home, so that of the wild contingencies imagined by him there is
none about which he cannot reel off an oral `leader' or `middle' in
the likeliest style, and with as much ease as he can preach a High
Church or Low Church sermon on it. Nor are his improvisations limited
by prose. If a theme call for nobler treatment, he becomes an
unflagging fountain of ludicrously adequate blank-verse. Or again, he
may deliver himself in rhyme. There is no form of utterance that comes
amiss to him for interpreting the human comedy, or for broadening the
farce into which that comedy is turned by him. Nothing can stop him
when once he is in the vein. No appeals move him. He goes from
strength to strength while his audience is more and more piteously
debilitated.

What a gift to have been endowed with! What a power to wield! And how
often I have envied Comus! But this envy of him has never taken root
in me. His mind laughs, doubtless, at his own conceptions; but not his
body. And if you tell him something that you have been sure will
convulse him you are likely to be rewarded with no more than a smile
betokening that he sees the point. Incomparable laughter-giver, he is
not much a laugher. He is vintner, not toper. I would therefore not
change places with him. I am well content to have been his beneficiary
during thirty years, and to be so for as many more as may be given us.