← catalogue

Yet Again

by Sir Max Beerbohm · English · Gutenberg #2292 · 369,282 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Yet Again
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Yet Again

Author: Sir Max Beerbohm


        
Release date: August 1, 2000 [eBook #2292]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2292

Credits: Produced by Tom Weiss.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YET AGAIN ***




Produced by Tom Weiss.  HTML version by Al Haines.









Yet Again


by

Max Beerbohm




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

M. B.



CONTENTS

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


WORDS FOR PICTURES

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



THE FIRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



SEEING PEOPLE OFF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do not now remember many details of this man's story; I remember
merely that he was 'travelling in lace,' that he had been born at
Boulogne (this was the one strange feature of the narrative), that
somebody had once left him L100 in a will, and that he had a little
daughter who was 'as pretty as a pink.' But at the time I was
enthralled. Besides, I liked the man immensely. He was a kind and
simple soul, utterly belying his appearance. I wondered how I ever
could have feared him and hated him. Doubtless, the reaction from my
previous state intensified the kindliness of my feelings. Anyhow, my
heart went out to him. I felt that we had known each other for many
years. While he poured out his recollections I felt that he was an old
crony, talking over old days which were mine as well as his. Little by
little, however, the slumber which he had scared from me came hovering
back. My eyelids drooped; my comments on his stories became few and
muffled. 'There!' he said, 'you're sleepy. I ought to have thought of
that.' I protested feebly. He insisted kindly. 'You go to sleep,' he
said, rising and drawing the hood over the lamp. It was dawn when I
awoke. Some one in a top-hat was standing over me and saying 'Euston.'
'Euston?' I repeated. 'Yes, this is Euston. Good day to you.' 'Good day
to you,' I repeated mechanically, in the grey dawn.

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

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

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



PORRO UNUM...

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

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

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

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

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

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



A CLUB IN RUINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



'273'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



A STUDY IN DEJECTION

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time, in a far-off fashionable toy-shop, his price had been
prohibitive; and he, the central attraction behind the gleaming
shop-window, had plumed himself on his expensiveness. He had been in no
hurry to be bought. It had seemed to him a good thing to stand there
motionless, majestic, day after day, far beyond the reach of average
purses, and having in his mien something of the frigid nobility of the
horses on the Parthenon frieze, with nothing at all of their unreality.
A coat of real chestnut hair, glossy, glorious! From end to end of the
Parthenon frieze not one of the horses had that.

From end to end of the toy-shop that exhibited him not one of the
horses was thus graced. Their flanks were mere wood, painted white,
with arbitrary blotches of grey here and there. Miserable creatures! It
was difficult to believe that they had souls. No wonder they were
cheap, and 'went off,' as the shopman said, so quickly, whilst he
stayed grandly on, cynosure of eyes that dared not hope for him. Into
bondage they went off, those others, and would be worked to death,
doubtless, by brutal little boys.

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

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

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

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



A PATHETIC IMPOSTURE

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

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

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

Lord Rosebery has made a paradox.

He would say:--

Lord Rosebery

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

has

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

which,

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

is

  nearly akin to
  or, not very far removed from

the paradoxical.

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

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

And here are some favourite methods of conclusion:--

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

or (lighter style)

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

Not less inevitable are such parallelisms as:--

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

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

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



THE DECLINE OF THE GRACES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



WHISTLER'S WRITING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



ICHABOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



GENERAL ELECTIONS

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

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

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

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

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



A PARALLEL

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

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

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



A MORRIS FOR MAY-DAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And long may it linger!



THE HOUSE OF COMMONS MANNER

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

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

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

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

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

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2292