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Without Prejudice

by Israel Zangwill · English · Gutenberg #6304 · 791,575 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Without Prejudice

Author: Israel Zangwill


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6304]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6304

Credits: William Fishburne, Charles Aldarondo, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITHOUT PREJUDICE ***




William Fishburne, Charles Aldarondo, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.


WITHOUT PREJUDICE

BY I. ZANGWILL

Author Of "The Master," "Children Of The Ghetto" Etc., Etc.

       *       *       *       *       *

TO YOU

       *       *       *       *       *

_NOTE_

_This book is a selection, slightly revised, from my miscellaneous work
during the last four or five years, and the title is that under which the
bulk of it has appeared, month by month, in the "Pall Mall Magazine." In
selecting, I have omitted those pieces which hang upon other people's
books, plays, or pictures--a process of exclusion which, while giving
unity to a possible collection of my critical writings in another volume,
leaves the first selection exclusively egoistic._

_I.Z._

       *       *       *       *       *

CONTENTS


I

GOSSIPS AND FANTASIES


I. A VISION OF THE BURDEN OF MAN: WHICH MAY SERVE TO INTRODUCE THE
     INTRODUCTION
II. TUNING UP
III. ART IN ENGLAND
IV. BOHEMIA AND VERLAINE
V. THE INDESTRUCTIBLES
VI. CONCERNING GENERAL ELECTIONS
VII. THE REALISTIC NOVEL
VIII. IN DEFENCE OF GAMBLING
IX. TRULY RURAL
X. OPINIONS OF THE YOUNG FOGEY
XI. CRITICS AND PEOPLE
XII. TABLE-TALK
XIII. THE ABOLITION OF MONEY
XIV. MODERN MYTH-MAKING
XV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOPSY-TURVYDOM
XVI. GHOST-STORIES
XVII. A THEORY OF TABLE-TURNING
XVIII. SOCIETIES TO FOUND
XIX. INDECENCY ON THE ENGLISH STAGE
XX. LOVE IN LIFE AND LITERATURE
XXI. DEATH AND MARRIAGE
XXII. THE CHOICE OF PARENTS
XXIII. PATER AND PROSE
XXIV. THE INFLUENCE OF NAMES
XXV. AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS
XXVI. THE PENALTIES OF FAME
XXVII. ON FINISHING A BOOK



II

HERE, THERE, AND SOMEWHERE ELSE: Philosophic Excursions


I. ABERDEEN
II. ANTWERP
III. BROADSTAIRS AND RAMSGATE
IV. BUDAPEST
V. CHICAGO
VI. EDINBURGH
VII. FIESOLE AND FLORENCE
VIII. GLASGOW
IX. HASLEMERE
X. PARIS
XL SLAPTON SANDS
XII. VENICE
XIII. VENTNOR
XIV. SOMEWHERE ELSE



III

AFTERTHOUGHTS: A Bundle of Brevities


MOONSHINE
CAPITAL
CREDIT
THE SMALL BOY
A DAY IN TOWN
THE PROFESSION OF CHARITY
THE PRIVILEGES OF POVERTY
SALVATION FOR THE SERAPHIM
TRUTH--LOCAL AND TEMPORAL
THE CREED OF DESPAIR
SOCIAL BUGBEARS
MARTYRS
THE LONDON SEASON
THE ACADEMY
PORTRAITS OF GENTLEMEN
PHOTOGRAPHY AND REALISM
THE GREAT UNHUNG
THE ABOLITION OF CATALOGUES
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
LAY CONFESSORS
Q. E. D. NOVELS
THE MOUSE WHO DIED
THEOLOGIC NOVELS
MUDIE MEASURE
THE PROP OF LETTERS
THE LATTER-DAY POET
AN ATTACK OF ALLITERATION
THE HUMOROUS
THE DISCOUNT FARCE
THE FRANCHISE FARCE
THE MODERN WAR FARCE
FIREWORKS
TIME'S FORELOCK
DIARIES
"LOOKING BACKWARD"
LONG LIVES
VIVE LA MORT!
MEN AND BOOKMEN
JAMES I. ON TOBACCO
A COUNTERBLAST TO JAMES I.
VALEDICTORY

       *       *       *       *       *

PART I

GOSSIPS AND FANTASIES




I

A VISION OF THE BURDEN OF MAN

And it came to pass that my soul was vexed with the problems of life, so
that I could not sleep. So I opened a book by a lady novelist, and fell
to reading therein. And of a sudden I looked up, and lo! a great host of
women filled the chamber, which had become as the Albert Hall for
magnitude--women of all complexions, countries, times, ages, and sexes.
Some were bewitching and beautiful, some wan and flat-breasted, some
elegant and stately, some ugly and squat, some plain and whitewashed, and
some painted and decorated; women in silk gowns, and women in divided
skirts, and women in widows' weeds, and women in knickerbockers, and
women in ulsters, and women in furs, and women in crinolines, and women
in tights, and women in rags; but every woman of them all in tears. The
great chamber was full of a mighty babel; shouts and ululations, groans
and moans, weeping and wailing and gnashing of false and genuine teeth,
and tearing of hair both artificial and natural; and therewith the
flutter of a myriad fans, and the rustle of a million powder-puffs. And
the air reeked with a thousand indescribable scents--patchouli and attar
of roses and cherry blossom, and the heavy odours of hair-oil and dyes
and cosmetics and patent medicines innumerable.

Now when the women perceived me on my reading-chair in their midst, the
shrill babel swelled to a savage thunder of menace, so that I deemed they
were wroth with me for intruding upon them in mine own house; but as mine
ear grew accustomed to the babel of tongues, I became aware of the true
import of their ejaculations.

"O son of man!" they cried, in various voices: "thy cruel reign is over,
thy long tyranny is done; thou hast glutted thyself with victims, thou
hast got drunken on our hearts' blood, we have made sport for thee in our
blindness. But the Light is come at last, the slow night has budded into
the rose of dawn, the masculine monster is in his death-throes, the
kingdom of justice is at hand, the Doll's House has been condemned by the
sanitary inspector."

I strove to deprecate their wrath, but my voice was as the twitter of a
sparrow in a hurricane. At length I ruffled my long hair to a leonine
mane, and seated myself at the piano. And lo! straightway there fell a
deep silence--you could have heard a hairpin drop.

"What would you have me do, O daughters of Eve?" I cried. "What is my
sin? what my iniquity?" Then the clamour recommenced with tenfold
violence, disappointment at the loss of a free performance augmenting
their anger.

"Give me a husband," shrieked one.

"Give me a profession," shrieked another.

"Give me a divorce," shrieked a third.

"Give me free union," shrieked a fourth.

"Give me an income," shrieked a fifth.

"Give me my deceased sister's husband," shrieked a sixth.

"Give me my divorced husband's children," shrieked a seventh.

"Give me the right to paint from the nude in the Academy schools,"
shrieked an eighth.

"Give me an Oxford degree," shrieked a ninth.

"Give me a cigar," shrieked a tenth.

"Give me a vote," shrieked an eleventh.

"Give me a pair of trousers," shrieked a twelfth.

"Give me a seat in the House," shrieked a thirteenth.

"Daughters of the horse-leech," I made answer, taking advantage of a
momentary lull, "I am not in a position to give away any of these things.
You had better ask at the Stores." But the tempest out-thundered me.

"I want to ride bareback in the Row in tights and spangles at 1 p. m. on
Sundays," shrieked a soberly clad suburban lady, who sported a
wedding-ring. "I want to move the world with my pen or the point of my
toe; I want to write, dance, sing, act, paint, sculpt, fence, row, ride,
swim, hunt, shoot, fish, love all men from young rustic farmers to old
town _roués_, lead the Commons, keep a salon, a restaurant, and a
zoological garden, row a boat in boy's costume, with a tenor by moonlight
alone, and deluge Europe and Asia with blood shed for my intoxicating
beauty. I am primeval, savage, unlicensed, unchartered, unfathomable,
unpetticoated, tumultuous, inexpressible, irrepressible, overpowering,
crude, mordant, pugnacious, polyandrous, sensual, fiery, chaste, modest,
married, and misunderstood."

"But, madam," I remarked--for in her excitement she approached within
earshot of me--"I understand thee quite well, and I really am not
responsible for thy emotions." Her literary style beguiled me into the
responsive archaicism of the second person singular.

"Coward!" she snapped. "Coward and satyr! For centuries thou hast
trampled upon my sisters, and desecrated womanhood."

"I beg thy pardon," I rejoined mildly.

"Thou dost not deserve it," she interrupted.

"Thou art substituting hysteria for history," I went on. "I was not born
yesterday, but I have only scored a few years more than a quarter of one
century, and seeing that my own mother was a woman, I must refuse to be
held accountable for the position of the sex."

"Sophist!" she shrieked. "It is thy apathy and selfishness that
perpetuate the evil."

Then I bethought me of my long vigils of work and thought, the slow,
bitter years in which I "ate my bread with tears, and sat weeping on my
bed," and I remembered that some of those tears were for the sorrows of
that very sex which was now accusing me of organised injustice. But I
replied gently: "I am no tyrant; I am a simple, peaceful citizen, and it
is as much as I can do to earn my bread and the bread of some of thy sex.
Life is hard enough for both sexes, without setting one against the
other. We are both the outcome of the same great forces, and both of us
have our special selfishnesses, advantages, and drawbacks. If there is
any cruelty, it is Nature's handiwork, not man's. So far from trampling
on womanhood, we have let a woman reign over us for more than half a
century. We worship womanhood, we have celebrated woman in song, picture,
and poem, and half civilisation has adored the Madonna. Let us have
woman's point of view and the truth about her psychology, by all means.
But beware lest she provoke us too far. The _Ewigweibliche_ has become
too literal a fact, and in our reaction against this everlasting woman
question we shall develop in unexpected directions. Her cry for equal
purity will but end in the formal institution of the polygamy of the
Orient--"

As I spoke the figure before me appeared to be undergoing a
transformation, and, ere I had finished, I perceived I was talking to an
angry, seedy man in a red muffler.

"Thee keeps down the proletariat," he interrupted venomously. "Thee lives
on the sweat of his brow, while thee fattens at ease. Thee plants thy
foot on his neck."

"Do I?" I exclaimed, lifting up my foot involuntarily.

Mistaking the motion, he disappeared, and in his stead I saw a withered
old pauper with the Victoria Cross on his breast. "I went to the mouth of
hell for thee," he said, with large reproachful eyes; "and thou leavest
me to rot in the workhouse."

"I am awfully sorry!" I said. "I never heard of thee. It is the nation--"

"The nation!" he cried scornfully. "_Thou_ art the nation; the nation is
only a collection of individuals. Thou art responsible. Thou art the
man."

"Thou art the man," echoed a thousand voices: "Society is only an
abstraction." And, looking round, I saw, to my horror, that the women had
quite disappeared, and their places were filled by men of all
complexions, countries, times, ages, and sexes.

"I died in the streets," shouted an old cripple in the background--"round
the corner from thy house, in thy wealthy parish--I died of starvation in
this nineteenth century of the Christian era, and a generation after
Dickens's 'Christmas Carol.'"

"If I had only known!" I murmured, while my eyes grew moist. "Why didst
thou not come to me?"

"I was too proud to beg," he answered. "The really poor never beg."

"Then how am I responsible?" I retorted.

"How art thou responsible?" cried the voices indignantly; and one
dominating the rest added: "I want work and can't get it. Dost thou call
thyself civilised?"

"Civilised?" echoed a weedy young man scornfully.  "I am a genius, yet I
have had nothing to eat all day. Thy congeners killed Keats and
Chatterton, and when I am dead thou wilt be sorry for what thou hast not
done."

"But hast thou published anything?" I asked.

"How could I publish?" he replied, indignantly.

"Then how could I be aware of thee?" I inquired.

"But my great-grandfather _did_ publish," said another.  "Thou goest into
ecstacies over him, and his books have sold by tens of thousands; but me
thou leavest pensionless, to earn my living as a cooper. Bah!"

"And thou didst put _my_ father in prison," said another, "for publishing
the works of a Continental novelist; but when the novelist himself comes
here, thou puttest him in the place of honour."

I was fast growing overwhelmed with shame.

"Where is thy patriotism! Thou art letting some of the most unique
British birds become extinct!" "Yes, and thou lettest Christmas cards be
made in Germany, and thou deridest Whistler, and refusest to read Dod
Grile, and thou lettest books be published with the sheets pinned instead
of sewn. And the way thou neglectest Coleridge's grave----"

"Coleridge's grave?" interrupted a sad-eyed enthusiast. "Why, thou hast
put no stone at all to mark where James Thomson lies!"

"Thou Hun, thou Vandal!" shrieked a fresh contingent of voices in
defiance of the late Professor Freeman. "Thou hast allowed the Emanuel
Hospital to be knocked down, thou hast whitewashed the oaken ceiling of
King Charles's room at Dartmouth, and threatened to destroy the view from
Richmond Hill. Thou hast smashed cathedral windows, or scratched thy name
on them, hast pulled down Roman walls, and allowed commons to be
inclosed. Thou coverest the Lake District with advertisements of pills,
and the blue heaven itself with sky-signs; and in thy passion for cheap
and nasty pictorial journalism thou art allowing the art of
wood-engraving to die out, even as thou acceptest photogravures instead
of etchings."

I cowered before their wrath, while renewed cries of "Thou art
responsible! Thou! Thou!" resounded from all sides.

"A pretty Christian _thou_ art!" exclaimed another voice in unthinking
vituperation. "Thou decimatest savage tribes with rum and Maxim guns,
thou makest money by corrupting the East with opium. Thou allowest the
Armenians to be done to death, and thou wilt not put a stop to
child-marriages in India."

"But for thee I should have been alive to-day," broke in a venerable
spirit hovering near the ceiling. "If thou hadst refused to sell poison
except in specially shaped bottles----"

"What canst thou expect of a man who allows anybody to carry firearms?"
interrupted another voice.

"Or who fills his newspaper with divorce cases?"

"Is it any wonder the rising generation is cynical, and the young maiden
of fifteen has ceased to be bashful?"

"Shame on thee!" hissed the chorus, and advanced upon me so threateningly
that I seized my hat and rushed from the room. But a burly being with a
Blue Book blocked my way.

"Where didst thou get that hat?" he cried. "Doubtless from some sweating
establishment. And those clothes; didst thou investigate where they were
made?  didst thou inquire how much thy tailor paid his hands?  didst thou
engage an accountant to examine his books?"

"I--I am so busy," I stammered feebly.

"Shuffler! How knowest thou thou art not spreading to the world the germs
of scarlet fever and typhoid picked up in the sweaters' dens?"

"What cares _he_?" cried a tall, thin man, with a slight stoop and gold
spectacles. "Does he not poison the air every day with the smoke of his
coal fires?"

"Pison the air!" repeated a battered, blear-eyed reprobate. "He pisoned
my soul. He ruined me with promiskus charity. Whenever I was stoney-broke
'e give me doles in aid, 'e did. 'E wos werry bad to me, 'e wos. 'E
destroyed my self-respeck, druv me to drink, broke up my home, and druv
my darters on the streets."

"This is what comes of undisciplined compassion," observed the
gold-spectacled gentleman, glowering at me. "The integrity and virtue of
a whole family sacrificed to the gratification of thy altruistic
emotions!"

"Stand out of the way!" I cried to the burly man; "I wish to leave my own
house."

"And carry thy rudeness abroad?" he retorted indignantly. "Perchance thou
wouldst like to go to the Continent, and swagger through Europe clad in
thy loud-patterned checks and thine insular self-sufficiency."

I tried to move him out of the way by brute force, and we wrestled, and
he threw me. I heard myself strike the floor with a thud.

Rubbing my eyes, instead of my back, I discovered that I was safe in my
reading-chair, and that it was the lady novelist's novel that had made
the noise. I picked it up, but I still seemed to see the reproachful eyes
of a thousand tormentors, and hear their objurgations. Yet I had none of
the emotions of Scrooge, no prickings of conscience, no ferment of good
resolutions. Instead, I felt a wave of bitterness and indignation
flooding my soul.

"I will _not_ be responsible for the universe!" I cried to the ceiling.
"I am sick of the woman question, and the problem of man makes my gorge
rise. Is there one question in the world that can really be settled? No,
not one, except by superficial thinkers. Just as the comprehensive
explanation of 'the flower in the crannied wall' is the explanation of
the whole universe, so every question is but a thin layer of ice over
infinite depths. You may touch it lightly, you may skate over it; but
press it at all, and you sink into bottomless abysses. The simplest
interrogation is a doorway to chaos, to endless perspectives of winding
paths perpetually turning upon themselves in a blind maze. Suppose one is
besought to sign a petition against capital punishment. A really
conscientious and logical person, pursuing truth after the manner
recommended by Descartes, and professed by Huxley, could not settle this
question for himself without going into the endless question of Free-will
_versus_ Necessity, and studying the various systems of philosophy and
ethics. Murder may be due to insane impulse: Insanity must therefore be
studied. Moreover, ought not hanging to be abolished in cases of murder
and reserved for more noxious crimes, such as those of fraudulent
directors? This opens up new perspectives and new lines of study. The
whole theory of Punishment would also have to be gone into: should it be
restrictive, or revengeful, or reformative? (See Aristotle, Bentham,
Owen, etc.) Incidentally great tracts of the science of Psychology are
involved. And what right have we to interfere with our fellow-creatures
at all? This opens up the vast domains of Law and Government, and
requires the perusal of Montesquieu, Bodin, Rousseau, Mill, etc., etc.
Sociology would also be called in to determine the beneficent or
maleficent influence of the death-punishment upon the popular mind; and
statistics would be required to trace the operation of the systems of
punishment in various countries. History would be consulted to the same
effect. The sanctity of human life being a religious dogma, the religions
of the world would have to be studied, to see under what conditions it
has been thought permissible to destroy life. One ought not to rely on
translations: Confucius should be read in Chinese, the Koran in Arabic,
and the few years spent in the acquisition of Persian would be rewarded
by a first-hand familiarity with the Zend Avesta. The Old Testament
enjoins capital punishment. On what grounds, then, if one is leaning the
other way, may a text be set aside that seems to settle the matter
positively?  Here comes in the vast army of Bible commentators and
theologians. But perhaps the text is of late origin, interpolated. The
Dutch and German savants rise in their might, with their ingenious
theories and microscopic scholarship. But there are other scientists who
bid us not heed the Bible at all, because it contradicts the latest
editions of their primers. Is, then, science strictly accurate? To answer
this you must have a thorough acquaintance with biology, geology,
astronomy, besides deciding for yourself between the conflicting views at
nearly every point. By the time you have made up your mind as to whether
capital punishment should be abolished, it has passed out of the
statute-book, and you are dead, or mad, or murdered.

"But were this the only question a man has to settle in his short span of
years, he might cheerfully engage in its solution. But life bristles with
a hundred questions equally capital, and with a thousand-and-one minor
problems on which he is expected to have an opinion, and about which he
is asked at one time or other, if only at dinner."

At this moment the Poet who shares my chambers came in--later than he
should have done--and interrupted my soliloquy. But I was still hot, and
enlisted his interest in my vision and my apologia, and began drawing up
a list of the questions, in which after a while he became so interested
that he started adding to it. Hours flew like minutes, and only the
splitting headache we both brought upon ourselves drove us to desist.
Here is our first rough list of the questions that confront the modern
man--a disorderly, deficient, and tautological list, no doubt, to which
any reader can add many hundred more.


    VEXED QUESTIONS

    Queen Mary and Bothwell. Shakespeare and Bacon. Correct
    transliteration of Greek; pronunciation of Latin. Sunday opening of
    museums; of theatres. The English Sunday; Bank Holiday. Darwinism. Is
    there spontaneous creation? or spontaneous combustion? The germ
    theory; Pasteur's cures; Mattei's cures; Virchow's cell theory. Unity
    of Homer; of the Bible. Dickens v. Thackeray. Shall we ever fly? or
    steer balloons? The credit system; the discount system.
    Impressionism, decadence, Japanese art, the _plein air_ school.
    Realism _v._ romance; Gothic _v._ Greek art. Russian fiction, Dutch,
    Bulgarian, Norwegian, American, etc., etc.: opinion of every novel
    ever written, of every school, in every language (you must read them
    in the original); ditto of every opera and piece of music, with
    supplementary opinions about every vocalist and performer; ditto of
    every play, with supplementary opinions about every actor, dancer,
    etc.; ditto of every poem; ditto of every picture ever painted, with
    estimates of every artist in every one of his manners at every stage
    of his development and decisions as to which pictures are not
    genuine; also of every critic of literature, drama, art, and music
    (in all of which departments certain names are equal to an appalling
    plexus of questions--Wagner, Ibsen, Meredith, Browning, Comte,
    Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante, Degas, Rousseau, Tolstoï, Maeterlinck,
    Strindberg, Zola, Whistler, Leopardi, Emerson, Carlyle, Swedenborg,
    Rabelais). Socialism, its various schools, its past and its future;
    Anarchism: bombs. Labour questions: the Eight Hours' Day, the
    Unemployed, the Living Wage, etc., etc. Mr. Gladstone's career. Shall
    members of Parliament be paid? Chamberlain's position; ditto for
    every statesman in every country, to-day and in all past ages. South
    Africa, Rhodes, Captain Jim. The English girl _v._ the French or the
    American. Invidious comparisons of every people from every point of
    view, physical, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic. Vizetelly.
    Vivisection. First love _v._ later love; French marriage system _v._
    the English. The corrupt choruses in the Greek dramas (also in modern
    burlesque--with the question of the Church and Stage Guild, Zaeo's
    back, the County Council, etc.). How to make London beautiful. Fogs.
    Bi-metallism. Secondary Education. Volunteer or conscript? Anonymity
    in journalism. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism:
    their mutual superiorities, their past and their future. Plato,
    Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and all philosophers and philosophies. The
    Independent Theatre. The origin of language, Where do the Aryans come
    from? Was Mrs. Maybrick guilty? Same question for every great
    murderer. The Tichborne case, and every other _cause célèbre_,
    including divorce cases. Crime and punishment. Music-hall songs.
    Heredity: are acquired qualities inherited? Is tobacco a mistake? Is
    drink? Is marriage? Is the high hat? Polygamy; the social evil. Are
    the planets inhabited? Is the English concert pitch too high? The
    divided skirt. The antiquity of man. Geology: is the story of the
    rocks short, or long, or true? Geology _v._ Genesis; Genesis _v._
    Kuenen. Was Pope a poet? Was Whitman? Was Poe a drunkard, or Griswold
    a liar? Was Hamlet mad? Was Blake? Is waltzing immoral? Is humour
    declining? Is there a modern British drama? Corporal punishment in
    schools. Compulsory vaccination. What shall we do with our daughters?
    or our sons?  or our criminals? or our paupers? or ourselves? Female
    franchise. Republicanism. Which is the best soap? or tooth-powder? Is
    Morris's printing really good? Is the race progressing? Is our navy
    fit? Should dynamite be used in war? or in peace? What persons should
    be buried in Westminster Abbey? Origin of every fairy-tale. Who made
    our proverbs and ballads? Cold baths _v._ hot or Turkish. Home Rule.
    Should the Royal Academy be abolished? and who should be the next
    R.A.? Should there be an Academy of Literature? or a Channel Tunnel?
    Was De Lesseps to blame? Should we not patronise English
    watering-places? Should there be pianos in board schools? or
    theology? Authors and publishers; artists and authors. Is literature
    a trade? Should pauper aliens be admitted? or pauper couples
    separated? Bank Holiday. Irving _v._ Tree. The world's politics,
    present, future, and even past--retrospective questions being
    constantly re-agitated: as, Should the American slaves have been
    emancipated? or Was the French Revolution a Folly? _Apropos_, which
    is the best history of it? Who is the rightful Queen of England? Is
    cycling injurious to the cyclist? or the public? Who was the Man in
    the Iron Mask? Is the Stock Exchange immoral? What is influenza?
    Ought we to give cabmen more than their fare? Tips generally. Should
    dogs be muzzled? Have we a right to extend our empire? or to keep it?
    Should we federate it? Are there ghosts? Is spiritualism a fraud? Is
    theosophy? Was Madame Blavatsky? Was Jezebel a wretch, or a
    Hellenist? The abuse of the quarantine. Should ladies ride astride?
    Amateurs _v_. professionals in sports. Is prize-fighting beneficial?
    Is trial by jury played out? The cost of law: Chancery. Abuses of the
    Universities. The Cambridge Spinning House. Compulsory Greek. The
    endowment of research. A teaching university in London. Is there a
    sea-serpent? Servants _v._ mistresses. Shall the Jews have Palestine?
    Classical _v._ modern side in schools. Should we abolish the
    censorship of plays? or fees? or found a dramatic academy? or a State
    theatre? Should gambling be legal? Should potatoes be boiled in their
    skins? should dynamiters? Should newspapers publish racing tips? or
    divorce cases? or comment? The New Journalism. What is the best ninth
    move in the Evans gambit? Would Morphy have been a first-class
    chess-player to-day? Is the Steinitz gambit sound? Do plants dream?
    Ought we to fill up income-tax papers accurately? Shelley and Harriet
    and Mary. Swift and Vanessa and Stella. Lord and Lady Byron. Did Mrs.
    Carlyle deserve it? The limits of biography; of photography in
    painting; of the spot-stroke in billiards. Did Shakespeare hold
    horses? Should girls be brought up like boys, or boys like girls, or
    both like one another? Are animals automata? Have they reason? or do
    they live without reason? Will Brighton A's fall? or Peruvians rise?
    Is it cruel to cage birds and animals? What is the best breed of
    horses? Did Wellington say "Up, Guards, and at 'em"? Cremation _v._
    Burial. Should immoral men be allowed to retain office? Is suicide
    immoral? Opinion of the character of Elizabeth, Parnell, Catherine,
    Cleopatra, Rousseau, Jack the Ripper, Semiramis, Lucrezia Borgia,
    etc., etc. The present state of the Libel Law; and of the Game Laws.
    Is vegetarianism higher? or healthier? Do actors feel their parts?
    Should German type be abolished? or book-edges cut? or editions
    artificially limited? or organ-grinders? How about
    church-and-muffin-bells? Peasant proprietorship. Deer or Highlanders?
    Were our ancestors taller than we? Is fruit or market-gardening or
    cattle-farming more profitable? Dutch _v._ Italian gardening. What is
    an etching? Do dreams come true? Is freemasonry a fraud? or
    champagne? are Havanas? Best brand of whiskey? Ought Building and
    Friendly Societies to be supervised? Smoking in theatres. Should
    gentlemen pay ladies' cab-fares? Genius and insanity. Are cigarettes
    poisonous? Is luxury a boon? Thirteen at table, and all other
    superstitions--are they foolish? Why young men don't marry. Shall we
    ever reach the Pole? How soon will England and the States be at war?
    The real sites and people in Thackeray's novels. A universal penny
    post? Cheap telegrams and telephones? Is the Bank of England safe?
    Are the planets inhabited? Should girls have more liberty? Should
    they propose? or wear crinolines? Why not have an unlimited paper
    currency? or a decimal system and coinage? or a one-pound note?
    Should we abolish the Lords? or preserve the Commons? Why not
    euthanasia? Should dramatic critics write plays? Who built the
    Pyramids? Are the English the Lost Ten Tribes? Should we send
    missions to the heathen? How long will our coal hold out? Who
    executed Charles I.? Are the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna trustworthy?
    are hieroglyphic readers? Will war ever die? or people live to a
    hundred? The best moustache-forcer, bicycle, typewriter, and system
    of shorthand or of teaching the blind? Was Sam Weller possible? Who
    was the original of Becky Sharp? Of Dodo? Does tea hurt? Do
    gutta-percha shoes? or cork soles? Shall we disestablish the church?
    or tolerate a reredos in St. Paul's? Is Euclid played out? Is there a
    fourth dimension of space? Which is the real old Curiosity Shop? Is
    the Continental man better educated than the Briton? Why can't we
    square the circle? or solve equations to the _n_th degree? or
    colour-print in England? What is the use of South Kensington? Is
    paraffin good for baldness? or eucalyptus for influenza? How many
    elements are there? Should cousins marry? or the House be adjourned
    on Derby Day? Do water-colours fade? Will the ether theory live? or
    Stanley's reputation? Is Free Trade fair? Is a Free Press? Is
    fox-hunting cruel? or pigeon-shooting? How about the Queen's
    staghounds? Should not each railway station bear its name in big
    letters? and have better refreshments? Should we permit sky-signs?
    Limits of advertisement. Preservation of historic buildings and
    beautiful views _v_. utilitarianism. Is the coinage ugly? Should we
    not get letters on Sunday? Who really wrote the "Marseillaise"? Are
    examinations any real test? Promotion in the Army or the Civil
    Service. Is logic or mathematics the primal science? and what is the
    best system of symbolic logic? Should curates be paid more and
    archbishops less? Should postmen knock? or combine? Are they under
    military régime? or underpaid? Should Board School children be taught
    religion? The future of China and Japan. Is Anglo-Indian society
    immoral? Style or matter? Have we one personality or many?--with a
    hundred other questions of psychology and ethics. A graduated income
    tax--with a hundred other questions of political economy. Asphalt for
    horses. Will the French republic endure? Will America have an
    aristocracy? Shall Welsh perish? Is Platonic love possible? Did
    Shakespeare write "Coriolanus"? Is there a skull in Holbein's
    "Ambassadors"? What is the meaning of Dryden's line, "He was and is
    the Captain of the Test"? or of the horny projection under the left
    wing of the sub-parasite of the third leg of a black-beetle? Was Orme
    poisoned? Are there fresh-water jelly-fishes? Is physiognomy true? or
    phrenology? or graphology? or cheiromancy? If so, what are their
    laws? Opinions on Guelphs and Ghibellines, fasting displays,
    infanticide, the genealogy of the peerage, the origin of public-house
    signs, Siberia, the author of Junius, of the Sibylline Books,
    werewolves, dyeing one's hair, coffin-ships, standing armies, the
    mediaeval monasteries, Church Brotherhoods, state insurance of the
    poor, promiscuous almsgiving, the rights of animals, the C. D. Acts,
    the Kernoozer Club, emigration, book-plates, the Psychical Society,
    Kindergarten, Henry George, Positivism, Chevalier's Coster,
    colour-blindness, Total Abstinence, Arbitration, the best hundred
    books, Local Option, Women's Rights, the Wandering Jew, the Flying
    Dutchman, the Neanderthal skull, the Early Closing movement, the
    Prince of Wales, and the Tonic Sol-fa notation. Is there an English
    hexameter? Is a perfect translation impossible? Will the coloured
    races conquer? Is consumption curable? Is celibacy possible? Can
    novels be really dramatised? Is the French school of acting superior
    to ours? Should literary men be offered peerages? or refuse them?
    Should quack-doctors be prosecuted? Should critics practise without a
    license? Are the poor happier or unhappier than the rich? or is Paley
    right? Did Paley steal his celebrated watch? Did Milton steal from
    Vondel? Is the Salon dead in England? Should duelling be revived?
    What is the right thing in dados, hall-lamps, dressing-gowns, etc.?
    Should ladies smoke? Is there a Ghetto in England? Anti-Semitism. Why
    should London wait? or German waiters? Mr. Stead's revival of
    pilgrimages. Is Grimm's Law universal? The abuses of the Civil
    Service; of the Pension List. Dr. Barnardo. Grievances of
    match-girls; of elementary teachers. Are our police reliable? Is
    Stevenson's Scotch accurate? Is our lifeboat service efficient? The
    Eastern Question. What is an English fairy-tale? What are the spots
    on the sun? Have they anything to do with commercial crises? Should
    we spoil the Court if we spared the Black Rod? or the City if we
    spared the Lord Mayor? Is chloroforming dangerous? Should armorial
    bearings be taxed? or a tradesman's holiday use of his cart? Should
    classical texts be Bowdlerised for school-boys? Is the confessional
    of value? Is red the best colour for a soldier's uniform or for a
    target? Will it rain to-morrow? Ought any one to carry firearms? Do
    we permit the cancan on the English stage? or aërial flights without
    nets? Where are the lost Tales of Miletus? Should lawyers wear their
    own hair? Was the Silent System so bad? Should a novel have a
    purpose? Was the _Victoria_ Fund rightly distributed? What is the
    origin of Egyptian civilisation? Is it allowable to say, "It's me"?
    Every other doubtful point of grammar and--worse still--of
    pronunciation; also of etymology. May we say "Give an ovation"? Is
    the German Emperor a genius, or a fool? Should bachelors be taxed?
    Will the family be abolished? Ensilage. Why was Ovid banished from
    Rome? Is the soul immortal? Is our art-pottery bad? Is the Revised
    Version of the Bible superior to the Old? Who stole Gainsborough's
    picture? Which are the rarest coins and stamps? Is there any sugar in
    the blood? Blondes or brunettes? Do monkeys talk? What should you
    lead at whist? Should directors of insolvent companies be prosecuted?
    Or classics be annotated? Was Boswell a fool? Do I exist? Does
    anybody else exist? Is England declining? Shall the costers stand in
    Farringdon Street? Do green wall-papers contain arsenic? Shall we
    adopt phonetic spelling? Is life worth living?


The last question at least I thought I could answer, as I bore to bed
with me that headache which you have doubtless acquired if you have been
foolish enough to read the list. If only one were a journalist, one would
have definite opinions on all these points.

And to these questions every day brings a fresh quota. You are expected
to have read the latest paragraph in the latest paper, and the newest
novel, and not to have missed such and such an article in such and such a
quarterly. And all the while you are fulfilling the duties of, and
solving the problems of, son, brother, cousin, husband, father, friend,
parishioner, citizen, patriot, all complicated by specific religious and
social relations, and earning your living by some business that has its
own hosts of special problems, and you are answering letters from
everybody about everything, and deciding as to the genuineness of begging
appeals, and wrestling with some form or forms of disease, pain, and
sorrow.

"Truly, we are imperfect instruments for determining truth," I said to
the Poet. "The sane person acts from impulse, and only pretends to give a
reason. Reason is only called in to justify the verdict of prejudice.
Sometimes the impulse is sentiment--which is prejudice touched with
emotion. We cannot judge anything on pure, abstract grounds, because the
balance is biassed. A human being is born a bundle of prejudices, a group
of instincts and intuitions and emotions that precede judgment.
Patriotism is prejudice touched with pride, and politics is prejudice
touched with spite. Philosophy is prejudice put into propositions, and
art is prejudice put into paint or sound, and religion is a pious
opinion. Every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Romanticist,
or a Realist, or an Impressionist, and usually erects his own limitations
into a creed. Every country, town, district, family, individual, has a
special set of prejudices along the lines of which it moves, and which it
mistakes for exclusive truths or reasoned conclusions. Touch human
society anywhere, it is rotten, it crumbles into a myriad notes of
interrogation; the acid of analysis dissolves every ideal. Humanity only
keeps alive and sound by going on in faith and hope,--_solvitur
ambulando_,--if it sat down to ask questions, it would freeze like the
traveller in the Polar regions. The world is saved by bad logic."

"And by good feeling," added my friend the Poet.

"And in the face of all these questions," I cried, surveying the list
ruefully again, "we go on accumulating researches and multiplying books
without end, vituperating the benefactors who destroyed the library of
Alexandria, and exhuming the civilisations that the earthquakes of Time
have swallowed under. The Hamlet of centuries, 'sicklied o'er with the
pale cast of thought,' the nineteenth of that ilk mouches along,
soliloquising about more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of
in any of its predecessors' philosophies. Ah me! Analysis is paralysis
and introspection is vivisection and culture drives one mad. What will be
the end of it all?"

"The end will be," answered the Poet, "that the overstrung nerves of the
century will give way, and that we shall fall into the simple old faith
of Omar Khayyám:

  "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
   A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou
   Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
   O Wilderness were Paradise enow."

"Yes," said I, "the only wisdom is to live. Action is substance and
thought shadow." And so--paradoxically enough--I began to think out

  A WORKING PHILOSOPHY

  The solar system turns without thine aid.
  Live, die! The universe is not afraid.
  What is is right! If aught seems wrong below,
  Then wrong it is--of thee to leave it so.
  Then wrong it first becomes for human thought,
  Which else would die of dieting on naught.
  Tied down by race and sex and creed and station,
  Go, learn to find thy strength in limitation,
  To do the little good that comes to hand,
  Content to love and not to understand;
  Faithful to friends and country, work and dreams,
  Knowing the Real is the thing that seems.
  While reverencing every nobleness,
  In whatsoever tongue or shape or dress,
  Speak out the word that to _thy_ soul seems right,
  Strike out thy path by individual light:
  'Tis contradictory rays that give the White.

"The ideas are good. But what a pity you are not a poet!" said my friend
the Poet.

But, though I recognise that prejudice in the deepest sense supplies the
matter of judgment, while logic is only regulative of the form, yet in
the more work-a-day sense of the word in which prejudice is taken to mean
an opinion formed without reasoning and maintained in despite of it, I
claim to write absolutely without prejudice. The syllogism is my lord and
king. A kind-hearted lady said I had a cruel face. It is true. I am
absolutely remorseless in tracking down a _non sequitur_, pitiless in
forcing data to yield up their implicit conclusions. "Logic! Logic!"
snorted my friend the Poet. "Life is not logical. We cannot be logical."
"Of course not," said I; "I should not dream of asking men to live
logically: all I ask is that they should argue logically."

But to be unprejudiced does not mean to have no convictions. The
superficial confuse definiteness with prejudice, forgetting that definite
opinions may be the result of careful judgment. Post-judiced I trust I
am. But prejudiced? Heaven forfend! Why, 'tis because I do not wish to
bind myself to anything that I may say in them that I mark these personal
communications "Without Prejudice"! For I do not at all mind
contradicting myself. If it were some one of reverend years or superior
talents I might hesitate, but between equals----! Contradiction is the
privilege of _camaraderie_ and the essence of _causerie_. We agree to
differ--I and myself. I am none of your dogmatic fellows with
pigeon-holes for minds, and whatever I say I do not stick to. And I will
tell you why. There is hardly a pretty woman of my acquaintance who has
not asked for my hand. Owing to this passion for palmistry in polite
circles, I have discovered that I possess as many characters as there are
palmists. Do you wonder, therefore, if, with such a posse of
personalities to pick from, I am never alike two days running? With so
varied a psychological wardrobe at command, it would be mere self-denial
to be faithful to one's self. I leave that to the one-I'd who can see
only one side of a question. Said Tennyson to a friend (who printed it):
"'In Memoriam' is more optimistic than I am"; and there is more of the
real man in that little remark than in all the biographies. The published
prophet has to live up to his public halo. So have I seen an actress on
tour slip from a third-class railway carriage into a brougham. Tennyson
was not mealy-mouthed, but then he did not bargain for an audience of
phonographs. Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish your friends from
your biographers. The worst of it is that the land is thick with fools
who think nothing of a great man the moment they discover he was a man.
Tennyson was all the greater for his honest doubt. The cocksure centuries
are passed for ever. In these hard times we have to work for our
opinions; we cannot rely on inheriting them from our fathers.

I write with a capital I at the risk of being accused of egotism.
Apparently it is more modest to be conceited in the third person, like
the child who says "Tommy is a good boy," or in the first person plural,
like the leader-writer of "The Times," who bids the Continent tremble at
his frown. By a singular fallacy, which ought scarcely to deceive
children, it is forgotten that everything that has ever been written
since the world began has been written by some one person, by an "I,"
though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or replaced
by the journalistic "we." To some extent the journalist does sink his
personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a personality
built up, like the human personality, by its past; and the result is a
pompous, colourless, lifeless simulacrum. But in every other department
of letters the trail of the "I" is over every page and every sentence.
The most impersonal essays and poems are all in a sense egoistic.
Everything should really be between inverted commas with an introductory
_Thus say I_. But as these are omitted, as being understood, they come at
last to be _mis_understood.

In the days ere writing was invented, this elementary error was not
possible. The words were heard issuing from the lips of a single man;
every opinion, every law of conduct, must have been at first formulated
through the lips of some one man. And to this day, in spite of the
wilderness of tradition and authority by which we are overgrown, the
voice of the one man is still our only living source of inspiration and
help. Every new thought must pass through the brain, every moral ideal
through the conscience, of an individual. Voices, voices, we want--not
echoes. Better the mistaken voice of honest individuality than the
soulless bleat of the flock. There are too many of Kipling's Tomlinsons
in the world, whose consciences are wholly compact of _on dits_, on whom
the devil himself, sinned they never so sadly, would refuse to waste his
good pit-coal. "Bad taste"--that opprobrious phrase which, worse than the
accusation of a crime, cannot be refuted, for it is the king of the
question-beggars,--"bad taste" is responsible for half the reticence that
marks current writing, for the failure to prick the bladders of every
species that bloat themselves all around us. "Good taste" is the
staunchest ally of hypocrisy, and corruption is the obverse side of
civilisation. I do not believe in these general truths that rule the
market. What is "true for all" is false for each. It is the business of
every man to speak out, to be himself, to contribute his own thought to
the world's thinking--to be egoistic. To be egoistic is not to be
egotistic. Egoism should be distinguished from egotism. The egoist thinks
for himself, the egotist about himself. Mr. Meredith's Sir Willoughby
should not have been styled the _Egoist_. The egoist offers his thought
to his fellow-men, the egotist thinks it is the only thought worth their
acceptance. These papers of mine joyously plead guilty to egoism, but not
to egotism. If they, for instance, pretend to appraise the powers of my
contemporaries, they do not pretend to be more than an individual
appraisal. Whoever wants another opinion can go somewhere else. There is
no lack of practitioners in criticism, more or less skilful. There must
be a struggle for existence among opinions, as among all other things,
and the egoist is content to send the children of his thought into the
thick of the fray, confident that the fittest will survive. Only he is
not so childish as to make-believe that an impersonal dignified
something-not-himself that makes for the ink-pot is speaking--and not he
himself, he "with his little I." The affectation of modesty is perhaps
the most ludicrous of all human shams. I am reminded of the two Jews who
quarrelled in synagogue, during the procession of palm-branches, because
each wanted to be last, as befitted the humblest man in Israel, which
each claimed to be. This is indeed "the pride that apes humility." There
is a good deal of this sort of pride in the careful and conscientious
suppression of the egoistic in books and speeches. I have nothing of this
modesty to be proud of. I know that I am cleverer than the man in the
street, though I take no credit to myself for it, as it is a mere
accident of birth, and on the whole a regrettable one. It was this
absence of modesty from my composition that recently enabled me to
propose the toast of literature coupled with the name of Mr. Zangwill. I
said that I could wish that some one more competent and distinguished
than myself had been chosen to do justice to such a toast and to such a
distinguished man of letters, but I did my best to pay him the tribute he
deserved ere I sat down amid universal applause. When I rose amid renewed
cheers to reply, I began by saying that I could wish that some one more
competent and distinguished than myself had been chosen to respond to so
important a toast--the last speaker had considerably overrated my humble
achievements in the fields of literature. So that you see I could easily
master the modest manner, if I took any pains or set any store by it. But
in my articles of faith the "I" is just what I would accentuate most, the
"I" through which for each of us the universe flows, by which any truth
must be perceived in order to be true, and which is not to be replaced by
that false abstraction, the communal mind. Here are a laughing
philosopher's definitions of some cardinal things:

    Philosophy--All my I.
    Art--All my Eye.
    Religion--All my Ay.

Also at the outset let it be distinctly understood that I write without
any prejudice in favour of grammar. The fear of the critics is the
beginning of pedantry. I detest your scholiast whose footnotes would take
Thackeray to task for his "and whiches," and your professor who disdains
the voice of the people, which is the voice of the god of grammar. I know
all the scholiast has to say (surely he is the silly [Greek:
scholastikos] of Greek anecdote), and indeed I owe all my own notions of
diction to a work on "Style" written by him. It was from the style of
this work that I learnt what to avoid. The book reminded me of my old
schoolmaster, who grew very angry with me for using the word "ain't," and
vociferated "Ain't! How often am I to tell you ain't ain't a word?" I
suppose one may take it for granted that the greater the writer the worse
the grammar. "Fools follow rules. Wise men precede them." (Query: this
being a quotation from myself, was I bound to put the inverted commas?)
Shakespeare has violated every rule of the schoolroom, and the more
self-conscious stylist of our own day--Stevenson--would be caned for
composition. I find him writing "They are not us," which is almost as
blasphemous as "It's me." His reputation has closed the critics' eyes to
such sentences as these in his essay on "Some Portraits by Raeburn":
"Each of his portraits are not only a piece of history ..."; "Neither of
the portraits of Sir Walter Scott were very agreeable to look upon."
Stevenson is a master, but not a schoolmaster, of English. Of course bad
grammar does not make a genius, any more than bad morals. (Note how much
this sentence would lose in crispness if I made it grammatical by tacking
on "do.") My friend the musician complained to me that when he studied
harmony and form he was told he must not do this, that and the other;
whereas, when he came to look into the works of the great composers he
found they made a practice of all the three. "Am I a genius?" he queried
pathetically. "If so, I could do as I please. I wish I knew." Every
author who can read and write is in the same predicament: on the one hand
his own instinct for a phrase or a sentence, on the other the contempt of
every honest critic. The guardians of the laws of English have a stock of
taboos; but unlike the guardians of the laws of England they credit every
disregard of them to ignorance. They cannot conceive of malice
aforethought. We are forbidden, for example, to use the word "phenomenal"
in the sense of "extraordinary." But, with Mr. Crummles's Infant
Phenomenon in everybody's mind, can we expect the adjective to shake off
the old associations of its parent noun?

Last year I culled an amusing sentence from a "Standard" criticism of a
tale of adventure: "The story is a well-told, and in spite of the word
'unreliable,' a well-written one." Now just as many foolish persons
object to "a ... one" as to "unreliable." As for the first phrase, I am
sure so great a writer as Tom Hood would have pronounced it A1, while
"unreliable" is defended with unusual warmth by Webster's Dictionary. The
contention that "reliable" should be "reli-on-able," is ridiculous, and
Webster's argument is "laughable," which should obviously be
"laugh-at-able." These remarks are made quite without prejudice, for
personally I have little to complain of. (By the way, this sentence is as
open to blame as that of the professor who told his pupils "You must not
use a preposition to end a sentence with.") Though I have sat under an
army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and
then it was only by a lady who wrote that my slipshod style "aggravated"
her.

Finally it will be remarked that by dispensing with illustrations I
preserve intact my egoism and the dignity of a rival art. Nothing can be
more absurd than the conventional illustration which merely attempts to
picture over again what the writer has already pictured in words. Not
only is the effort superfluous, a waste of force, but the artist's
picture is too often in flat contradiction of the text. Whom are you to
believe, the author or the artist? the man who tells you that the heroine
is ethereal, or the man who plainly demonstrates that she is podgy? How
often, too, do the people dress differently in the words and in the
picture, not to speak of the shifting backgrounds! Dickens had so much
difficulty with his illustrations because he saw his characters so much
more clearly than any other novelist; the sight of his inner eye was so
good. And one can understand, too, how Cruikshank came to fancy he had
created Oliver Twist, much as an actor imagines he "creates" a character.
The true collaboration between author and artist requires that the work
should be divided between them, not reduplicated. Those parts of the
story which need the intervention of words should be allotted to the
writer, while to the artist should be entrusted the parts better told by
pencil. Neither need trench on the other's province. Description--which
so many readers skip already--would be abolished. Even incidents--such as
murder--could be caught by the artist in the act. And after the artist
had killed a character, the author could preach over his corpse. Thus
there would be an agreeable reversion to picture-language, the earliest
way of writing, and the latest. The ends of the ages would meet in a
romance written on these lines:--

"Sick at heart we watched till the grey dawn stole in through the
diamond-paned casements of the Grange, and then, at last, when we had
given up all hope, we saw coming up the gravel pathway----"

[_Illustration._[*]]

After which the author proceeds: "Fascinated by the blood that dripped
from the edges of the eight umbrellas, we stood silent; then, throwing
off our coats, we----

[_Illustration._[*]]

"So that was how I won the sweetest little bride I ever wedded. But if I
live to wed a hundred, I shall never forget that terrible night in
Grewsome Grange.

"THE END."

[* Transcriber's note: So in original. These are _not_ placeholders for
actual illustrations in the book.]

My friend the artist once collaborated with me in an experiment of this
sort, but we did not pursue it, discovering how feeble an advance ours
would be after all; for there were points at which both of us felt we
ought to give way to the tone-poet. When the emotions became too
intangible for intellectual expression I asked my friend the musician to
insert paragraphs in a minor key. The love-scenes I was particularly
anxious to have written in musical phrases. But he shrank from so
unconventional a form, not being sure he was a genius. I was also
disheartened by the disappointing behaviour of the diverse scents with
which I had expressed myself on certain blank pages. They would not
remain in their places.




II

TUNING UP

They were "tuning up" in a wooden hall, stupidly built on the pier to
shut off the sea and the night (a penny to pay for the privation), and in
that strange cacophony of desolate violin strings, tuneless trombones,
and doleful double basses, in that homeless wail of forlorn brass and
lost catgut, I found a music sweeter than a Beethoven symphony; for
memory's tricksy finger touched of a sudden the source of tears, and
flashed before the inner eye a rainbow-lit panorama of the early joys of
the theatre--the joys that are no more. Was it even at a theatre--was it
even more than an interlude in a diorama?--that divine singing of "The
Last Rose of Summer" by a lady in evening dress, whose bust is, perhaps
for me alone in all the world, still youthful? Was it from this hall of
the siren, or was it from some later enchantment, that I, an infant
Ulysses, struggled home by night along a sea road, athwart a gale that
well-nigh blew me out to sea? How fierce that salt wind blew, a-yearn to
drive me to the shore's edge and whirl me over! How fresh and tameless it
beats against me yet, blowing the cobwebs from my brain as that real
breeze outside the pier could never do! When my monitory friends gabble
of change of air I inhale that wind and am strong. For the child is of
the elements, elemental, and the man of the complexities, complex. And so
that good salt wind blows across my childhood still, though it cannot
sweep away the mist that hovers thereover.

For who shall say whether 't was I or my sister who was borne shrieking
with fear from the theatre when the black man, "Othello," appeared on the
boards! The first clear memory of things dramatic is of an amateur
performance--alas! I have seen few others. 'T was a farce--when was an
amateur performance other? There was much play of snuff-boxes passed
punctiliously 'twixt irascible old gentlemen with coloured handkerchiefs.
Also there was dinner beforehand--my first experience of chicken and
champagne. And then there is a great break till the real theatre rises
stately and splendid, like Britannia ruling the waves--nay, Britannia
herself, or, as they call it lovingly down Shoreditch way, "the Brit."

When to my fashionable friends I have held forth on the glories and the
humours of "the Brit.," they have taken it for granted, and I have lacked
the courage or the energy to undeceive them, that my visits to this
temple of the people were expeditions of Haroun Al Raschid in the back
streets of Bagdad or adventures of Prince Florizel in Rupert Street; but
of a truth I have climbed the gallery stairs in sober boyish earnestness,
elbowed of the gods, and elbowing, and if I did not yield to the
seductions of "ginger-beer and Banbury" that filled up clamantly the
entr'actes, 't was that I had not the coppers. "Guy Fawkes" was my first
piece, in the days when the drama's "fireworks" were not epigrams, and so
the smell of the sulphur still purifies the air. All the long series of
"London successes," with their array of genius and furniture, have faded
like insubstantial pageants, but the rude vault piled with flour-barrels
for the desperado's torch is fixed as by chemic process. Consider the
preparation of the brain for that memory. What! I should actually go to a
play--that far-off wonder! "The Miller and his Men" cut in cardboard
should no longer stave off my longing for the living passion of the
theatre. 'T was a very elongated young man who took me, a young
cigar-maker fond of reciting, spouting Shakespeare from a sixpenny
edition, playing Hamlet mentally as he rolled the tobacco-leaf. There was
a halo about his head, for he was on speaking terms with the low comedian
of the "Brit.," and, I understood, was permitted upon occasion to pay for
a pint of half-and-half. Alas! all this did not avail to save him from an
early tomb. Poor worshipper of the green room, perchance thy ghost still
walks there. Or is there room in some other world for thy baffled
aspirations?

In such clouds of glory did the drama first come to me, sulphurously
splendid. In the "Brit." I made my first acquaintance with the limelit
humanity that, magnificent in its crimes and in its virtues, sins or
suffers in false eyebrows or white muslin to the sound of soft music.
Here I met that strange creation, the villain--a being as mythic,
meseems, as the centaur, and, like it, more beast than man. The "Brit."
was a hot place for villains, the gallery accepting none but the highest
principles of speech and conduct, and ginger-beer were not too weighty a
form of expressing detestation of the more comprehensive breaches of the
decalogue. Hisses the villain never escaped, and I was puzzled to know
how the poor actor could discriminate betwixt the hiss ethical and the
hiss aesthetic. But perhaps no player ever received the latter; the house
was very loyal to its favourites, all of whom had their well-defined
rôles in every play, which spared the playwrights the task of indicating
character. Before the heroine had come on we knew that she was young and
virtuous--had she not been so for the last five and twenty years?--the
comic man had not to open his mouth for us to begin to laugh; a latent
sibilance foreran the villain. Least mutable of all, the hero swaggered
on, virtuous without mawkishness, pugnacious without brutality. How
sublime a destiny, to stand for morals and muscle to the generations of
Hoxton, to incarnate the copy-book crossed with the "Sporting Times!"
Were they bearable in private life, these monsters of virtue?

J. B. Howe was long this paragon of men--affectionately curtailed to
Jabey. Once, when the villain was about to club him, "Look out, Jabey!"
cried an agonised female voice. It followed from the happy understanding
on both sides of the curtain that--give ear, O envious lessees!--no play
ever failed. How could it? It was always the same play.

Of like kidney was the Grecian Theatre, where one went out between the
acts to dance, or to see the dancing, upon a great illuminated platform.
'T was the drama brought back to its primitive origins in the Bacchic
dances--the Grecian Theatre, in good sooth! How they footed it under the
stars, those regiments of romping couples, giggling, flirting, munching!
Alas! _Fuit Troja!_ The Grecian is "saved." Its dancing days are over, it
is become the Headquarters of Salvation. But it is still gay with music,
virtue triumphs on, and vice grovels at the penitent form. In such quaint
wise hath the "Eagle" renewed its youth, for the Grecian began life as
the Eagle, and was Satan's deadliest lure to the 'prentices of
Clerkenwell and their lasses:

  Up and down the City Road,
    In and out the Eagle;
  That's the way the money goes!
    Pop goes the weasel.

Concerning which immortal lines one of your grammatical pedants has
observed, "There ain't no rhyme to City Road, there ain't no rhyme to
Eagle." Great pantomimes have I seen at the Grecian--a happy gallery boy
at three pence--pantomimes compact of fun and fantasy, far surpassing,
even to the man's eye, the gilded dullnesses of Drury Lane. The
pantomimes of the Pavilion, too, were frolicsome and wondrous, marred
only by the fact that I knew one of the fairies in real life, a
good-natured girl who sewed carpet-slippers for a living. The Pavilion,
by the way, is in the Whitechapel Road, not a mile from the People's
Palace, in the region where, according to the late Mr. Walter Besant,
nobody ever laughs. The Pavilion, like the "Brit.," had its stock
company, and when the leading lady appeared for her Benefit as "Portia,"
she was not the less applauded for being drunk. The quality of mercy is
_not_ strained. And what more natural than that one should celebrate
one's benefit by getting drunk? Sufficient that "Shylock" was sober!

In Music-Halls, the East-End was as rich as the West,--was it not the
same talent that appeared at both, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, winging
its way from one to t' other in cabs? Those were the days of the great
Macdermott, who gave Jingoism to English history, of the great Vance, of
the lion comiques, in impeccable shirt-fronts and crush hats. There was
still a chairman with a hammer, who accepted champagne from favoured
mortals, stout gentlemen with gold chains, who might even aspire to
conversation with the comiques themselves. _Sic itur ad astra_. Now there
is only a chairman of directors who may, perhaps, scorn to be seen in a
music-hall: a grave and potent seignior whose relations with the
footlights may be purely financial. There were still improvisatori who
would turn you topical verses on any subject, and who, on the very
evening of Derby-day, could rhyme the winner when unexpectedly asked by
the audience to do so. A verse of Fred Coyne's--let me recall the name
from the early oblivion which gathers over the graves of those who live
amid the shouts of worshippers--still lingers in my memory, bearing in
itself its own chronology:

  And though we could wish, some beneficent fairy
    Had preserved the life of the Prince so dear,
  Yet we WON'T lay the blame on Lieutenant Carey;
    And these are the latest events of the year.

With what an answering pandemonium we refused to hold the lieutenant
accountable for the death of the victim of the African assegais! And the
ladies! How ravishingly they flashed upon the boards, in frocks that,
like Charles Lamb at the India Office, made up for beginning late by
finishing early! How I used to agree with the bewitching creature who
sang that lovely lyric strangely omitted from the Anthologies:

  What a nice place to be in!
  What a nice place, I 'm sure!
  Such a very jolly place,
  I've never seen before.
  It gives me, oh! such pleasure,
  And it fills my heart with bliss,
  I could stay here for ever:
  What a nice place is this!

Such eyes she made at me--at whom else?--aloft in the balcony; and oh,
what arch smiles, what a play of white teeth! If we could only have met!
Yester-year at a provincial town some one offered to introduce her to me.
She was still playing principal boy in the pantomime--a gay, gallant
Prince, in plumed cap and tights. But I declined. Another of the great
comic singers of my childhood--a man--I met on a Margate steamboat. He
told me of the lost glories of the ancient days _quorum pars magna fuit_,
and of the after-histories of his great rivals. One, I recollect, had
retired with a fortune, opened a magnificent Temperance Hotel at the
seaside, and then broken his neck by falling down his own splendid
staircase, drunk. "Ah," said the veteran, sighing at an overcrowded
profession, "there were only two or three comic singers in those days."
"There are only two or three now," quoth I. And the old man beamed.
Another ancient hero of the halls, long since translated to the theatres,
whom I first saw at a music-hall in St. Giles', buttonholed me the other
night in St. James', in the halls of a Duchess: a curious meeting. That I
should have ever reverenced him seemed as strange as that there should be
still people to reverence the coronet of the Duchess. Yes, it is very far
off, that magic time when the world was full of splendid things and
splendid men and women, a great Fair, and I, like the child in Henley's
poem, wandered about, enjoying, desiring, possessing. Now I know there is
nothing worth wanting, and nothing but poor flesh and blood, despite all
the costumes and accessories. For there is no sense in which I have not
been "behind the scenes." And as for the literal theatric sense, I have
flirted with the goddesses at the wings till they have missed their cues,
I have supped at the Garrick Club of a Saturday night, when all the stars
come out, I have toured with a travelling company, I have had words of my
own spoken by dainty lips,--nay, I have even played myself, _en amateur_,
the irascible old gentleman with the snuff-box and the coloured
handkerchief. And what is there to say of the human spectacle, but that
perhaps the pains and the crimes are necessary to the show, and that
without a blood-and-thunder plot human life would not run, drying up of
its own dullness? "All the world's a stage," and we are all cast for
stock rôles. Some of us have the luck to be heroes, the complacent centre
of eternal plaudits, some are born for villainy and the brickbat. And
while others have had to play goodness knows what--mediaeval Italian
princesses, Cockney cabmen, old Greek hetairae, German cuirassiers,
American presidents, burglars, South Sea Islanders--I find myself--for
the first time on any stage--in the applauded rôle of man of letters, if
with little option of throwing up the part. They have an optimistic
phrase, those happy-go-lucky creatures of the footlights, when, on the
very day of production, nobody knows his words or his business, the scene
will not shape itself, and chaos is lord. "It will be all right at
night," they say. And we, who play our parts gropingly on this confused
and noisy scene, wondering what is the plot, and where is the manager,
and straining our ears for the prompter's whisper, can but echo with
another significance their cheery hope: "It will be all right at night."
Perhaps, when the long day's work has drawn to its end, and the curtain,
has fallen upon the plaudits and the hisses, we shall all sit down to
supper after the play, complimented by the Author, smiling at the
seriousness with which we took our rôles of hero or villain, and glad to
be done with, the make-up and the paint. And in the music that shall
hover about our table, we may perhaps find a celestial restfulness,
compared to which the most exquisite orchestras of this earth shall sound
but as "tuning up."




III

ART IN ENGLAND

My friend the Apostle was in hot haste, and would not stay to be
contradicted. "Not going to-night!" he cried, in horror-struck accents.
"Why, to-night is the turning-point in the history of the British drama!
To-night is the test-battle of the old and the new; it is the shock of
schools, the clash of nature against convention. This play will decide
the fate of our drama for the rest of the century. Here you have a play
by a leader of the old school produced at a leading theatre. If it
succeeds, the old drama may linger on for a year or two more; but if it
fails, it will be the death-blow of the old gang. They may pack up!" The
Apostle was at the other end of the street ere I had taken in the full
import of these brave words. What! there was a crisis in the drama, and
I, living in the heart of art, had heard nothing about it! Fortunately it
was not too late. I could still make amends for my ignorance. It was
still open to me to assist at this historic contest, for the arena was to
be the Haymarket, where I am a _persona gratis_. Visions of the great
first night of "Hernani" thronged tumultuously before me; my blood pulsed
with something of its ancient youthful ardour as I girded my loins with
black trousers for the fray, and adjusted my white tie with faltering
fingers. I had half a mind to don a _gilet rouge_, but the reflection
that my wardrobe did not boast of coloured waistcoats gave the victory to
the other half. I dashed up to the theatre. All was placid. The stalls
were packed with a brilliant audience in correct and unemotional costume.
There were classic faces, and romantic faces, and faces that were
realistic, but each and all blank of the consciousness of a crisis. The
talk was of everything save art and literature. The critics did not even
sharpen their pencils. They looked bored to a man. In vain my eye roved
the arm-chairs in search of a fighting figure. I could not even see the
musical iconoclast who had carried his pepper-and-salt suit into the holy
of holies of the Italian opera. My heart sank within me. When the
orchestra ceased I gave one last despairing glance all round the theatre
in search of my friend the Apostle. _He was not there!_

The play was "The Charlatan,"--the work of that other apostle, whose
outspoken Epistles to the English chronically relieve the dull decorum of
London journalism; the man of whom Tennyson came near writing--

  Buchanan to right of him,
  Buchanan to left of him,
  Buchanan in front of him,
         Volleyed and thundered.

But that night it was the audience that volleyed and thundered, in
unanimous applause. Hisses or party-cries were not. During the intense
episodes, when the house was wrapt in silence, and you could have heard a
programme drop, no opposition partisan as much as laughed. The author was
called at curtain-fall, and retired uninjured. Next morning the critics
were scrupulously suave, with no sign of the battle they had been
through. Most wonderful to relate, Mr. William Archer, the risen hope of
the stern and unbending Radicals, launched into unwonted praise, and gave
an airing to some of the eulogistic adjectives that had been mouldering
in his dictionary; nor did he even appear to be aware that he had gone
over to the enemy!

For one thing, Bard Buchanan had given us neither old school nor new, but
a blend of both--nay, a blend of all forms of both--a structure at once
modern and mediaeval, with a Norwegian wing. It combined the common-sense
of England with the glamour of the East, the physiology of the hypnotist
with the psychology of Ibsen. More! It was an epitome of all the
Haymarket plays, a _résumé_ of all Mr. Tree's successes. The heroine was
a mixture of Ophelia and hysteria, the hero was a combination of Captain
Swift, Hamlet, and the Tempter; the paradoxical pessimist was a reminder
of Mr. Wilde's comedies, the bishop and scientist were in the manner of
Mr. Jones. How clever! Social satire _à la Savoy_, séance _à la salle
Egyptienne_, sleep-walking _à la Bellini_, moonlight poetry _à la
Christabel_, a touch of spice _à la Française_, and copious confession _à
la Norvégienne_, all baked into one pie. How characteristic! And
characteristic, mark you, not only of Mr. Buchanan's chaotic cleverness,
but of Mr. Tree's experimental eclecticism. Did I say an epitome of the
Haymarket plays? This is but another way of saying an abstract and brief
chronicle of the time, to whose age and body Mr. Tree so shrewdly holds
up the mirror. For this dying century of ours is all things to all men.
We are living in the most picturesque confusion of the old and new known
to history--in a cross-road of chronology where all the ages meet. 'T is
a confusion of tongues outbabbling Babel, a simultaneous chattering of
the centuries. And, more troubled than the Tower-builders, we understand,
one another better than we understand ourselves; again, like "The
Charlatan," half odic force, half fraud, who is never so honest as when
he confesses himself charlatan.

But this is not what I set out to say. There was a moral to the tale of
my friend the absentee Apostle who was so cocksure about the crisis. This
moral is that he has Continental blood in his veins. To these foreign
corpuscles he owes the floridness of his outlook, his conception of the
excited Englishman. The Englishman takes his authors placidly; he is
never in a ferment or a frenzy about anything save politics, religion, or
sport: these are the poles and the axis of his life's pivot; he is not an
artistic person. Art has never yet taken the centre of the stage in his
consciousness; it has never even been accepted as a serious factor of
life. All the pother about plays, poems and pictures is made by small
circles. Our art has never been national art: I cannot imagine our making
the fuss about a great writer that is made about a second-rate journalist
in Paris. It is Grace the cricketer for whom the hundred thousand
subscribe their shilling: fancy a writer thus rewarded, even after
scoring his century of popular novels. The winning of the Derby gives a
new fillip to the monarchy itself. A Victor Hugo in London is a thought
_à faire rire_. A Goethe at the court of Victoria, or directing Drury
Lane Theatre, is of a comic-opera incongruity. Our neighbours across the
border have a national celebration of Burns' birthday--they think as much
of him as of the Battle of Bannockburn. We English, who have produced the
man whom the whole world acknowledges its greatest poet, have not even a
Shakespeare Day. Surely Shakespeare Sunday would do as much good to the
nation as Hospital Saturday or Shrove Tuesday! Charles Lamb wanted to say
grace before reading Shakespeare, but the Puritans who make England so
great and so dull are only thankful for stomachic mercies.

I cannot easily conceive our working ourselves up to such enthusiasm as
the Hungarians lately displayed over the jubilee of Jokaï, an enthusiasm
that resounded even unto this country, and shook the _lacunar aureum_ of
the Holborn Restaurant with shouts of "Eljen."

The peculiarity of the Hungarian temperament does not, however, entirely
explain their joy in Jokaï. He is so much more than a mere novelist, poet
and dramatist, with three or four hundred volumes (one need not be
particular to a hundred with this modern Lope de Vega) to his credit. He
is also a soldier and a politician, skilful with the sword as well as the
pen, and with the tongue as well as the sword. He has drawn blood with
each and all of these weapons, and though nowadays he often votes in the
House without inquiring what he is voting for till he has recorded his
vote, this does not diminish his claims to practical wisdom. He married
the leading actress of Hungary, who, without waiting for an introduction,
rushed forward from the audience to present him with a bunch of flowers
when a play of his made a hit. Fancy Ellen Terry rushing forward to
present Pinero with a bunch of flowers at the conclusion of "The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray"! No, the thing is as impossible in England as the
combination of rôles in Jokaï himself. The idea of letting a man be at
once man of letters and man of action! Why, we scarcely allow that a man
of letters may occupy more than one pigeonhole! If he is a poet, we will
not admit he can write prose--forgetting that is just what most poets do.
If he is a novelist, he cannot write plays,--the truth being, of course,
that it is the playwrights who cannot write plays. If he is a humourist
he can never be taken seriously, and if he is accepted seriously he must
be careful to conceal his sense of the humour of the position. Not only
so, but we insist on the sub-sub-specialisation which Adam Smith showed
to be so profitable in the making of pins, and which, passing from the
factory to the laboratory, now threatens to pass from science into
literature. Having analysed away the infinitely great, we are now
devoting ourselves to the apotheosis of the infinitely little.

_A priori_, one would think action the salvation of the literary man, the
corrective of "the fallacies of the den," the provider of that experience
which is the raw material of literature, and prevents it from being spun
out of the emptiness of one's own entrails. But the practical Briton
knows better. He has never forgiven John Morley for going into politics
(though I doubt not "honest John" would now find much to revise in his
essay on "Compromise"); and he finds Socialism ever so much more Utopian
since William Morris went into it. Can you imagine a true-born Briton
following the flag of Swinburne, or throwing up a barricade with George
Meredith? To the last Beaconsfield was suspected of persiflage because he
wrote novels and was witty. America makes her authors ministers and
envoys, but England insists that brains are a disqualification for
practical life. "Authors are so unpractical: we don't want them to
act--we only want them to teach us how to act." A chemist or an
astronomer must needs isolate himself from the world to supply the pure
theory on which the practical arts are founded, and so the _littérateur_,
too, is expected to live out of the world in order to teach it how to
live. But the analogy is false.

You can work out your mathematical calculations by the week, and hand
over the results to the navigator. But the navigation of the stream of
time is another matter. There is no abstract theory of life that can be
studied without living oneself. Life is always concrete; it is built up
of emotions, and you cannot have the emotions brought into your study, as
you can order in your hydrochloric acid or your frog's leg. As well
expect anchorites to set the tune for men in the thick of the fight! They
will chant Masses when they should be shouting Marseillaises. In despair
our men of letters leave the country, and become politicians in little
savage islands; or they leave the town and become invisible behind their
haloes; or they take to golf in small Scotch cities, and pretend that
this satisfies their thirst for activity. Sometimes they turn
market-gardeners and fob off the interviewer with remarks about
caterpillars. Browning was reduced to dining out. It may be contended
that the writer must sequester himself to cultivate the Beautiful. But
the Beautiful that has not its roots in the True is not the Good. Or it
maybe urged that active life would limit the writer's output. Exactly:
that is one of the reasons that make active life so advisable. Every
writer would write less and feel more. The crop of literature should only
be grown in alternate years. As it is, a writer is a barrel-organ who
comes to the end of his tunes, clicks, and starts afresh, just as a
scholar is a revolving bookcase. Consider, too, how a holiday of action
would disenthral the writer from the pettiness of cliques and coteries,
with their pedantic atmosphere and false perspectives. I would have every
University don work in the docks six months a year (six months' idleness
is surely quite enough for any man); every platonic essayist should
attend a course of music-halls; and if I could afford it I would set up
all the superfine critics in nice little grocers' shops, with the cosiest
of back parlours. Why, bless my soul! it is your man of culture, your
author, your leader of thought, who is parochial, suburban, _borné_, and
the rest of it! It is a commonplace that the Londoner is the most
provincial of all Englishmen, living in sublime ignorance of what is
thought and done in the rest of the kingdom; and in similar wise, when a
man sneers at the _bourgeoisie_, I never think of looking up his pedigree
in Debrett. It is, no doubt, extremely exasperating that the world was
not created for the convenience and to the taste of artistic persons, but
unfortunately the thing had to be turned out before their advice could be
obtained.

That young England--bless its stupid healthy soul--is more interested in
life and football than in literature and art, was amply proved by the
lethargy about the Laureateship. On the Continent the claims of the
rivals would have set the students brawling and the journalists duelling;
here it barely caused a ripple in the five o'clock teacup. My friend the
Apostle was not wholly wrong; there is a development of native drama
ahead of us; only it will come about peaceably,--we shall not hear the
noise of the captains and the shouting. And the old conventions have a
long run yet before them. They cling even to the skirts of "The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray." Indeed, the new school can scarcely be said to have
appeared. The literary quality of our plays has improved, thanks to Jones
and Pinero, and not forgetting Grundy. And that is all. The old school is
as vigorous as ever. In the person of "Charley's Aunt" it is alive and
kicking up its petticoats, and the audience rolls in helpless laughter at
Mr. Penley's slightest movement. Talk of literature, indeed! Why, the
fortunate comedian assured me that if he chose he could spin out
"Charley's Aunt" from a two-hours' play to a four-hours' play, merely by
eking out his own "business." Think of this, aspiring Sheridans, ye who
polish the dialogue with midnight oil; realise the true inwardness of the
drama, and go burn me your epigrams!

In literature, where the clash of new and old is more audible, it is
still the same story. On the conservative side, the real fighting is done
by Messrs. Smith, who refuse to sell the too daring publication. The
radicals are crippled by the timidity of editors, and cajoled by the
fatness of their purses. A gifted young story-teller has been lecturing
on the Revolt of the Authors. But it seems to me our literature has
already as wide a charter as is desirable. The two bulwarks of the
British library are Shakespeare and the Bible, and both treat human life
comprehensively, not with the onesidedness of self-styled Realism. I
would advise my young literary friends to emblazon on their banner
"Shakespeare and the Bible." Real Realism is what English literature
needs. The one undoubted development in recent English literature is the
short story. But this is less due to any advance in artistic aspiration
than to the fact that there is a good serial market for short stories,
and the turnover is quicker for the trader than if he turned out long
novels. Small stories, quick returns! In verity, this much-vaunted
efflorescence of the _conte_ is due to the _compte_. It is quite
characteristic of our nation to arrive at a new art-form through this
practical channel. But if you want a proof of the half-heartedness of our
literary battles, turn to the "Fogey's" article on "The Young Men" in a
recent _Contemporary Review_. What a chance for a much-needed onslaught
on our minor prophets! It might have been "English bards and Scotch
reviewers" over again. But no! the Scotch reviewer's weapon is merely a
rose-water squirt. The only thing that perturbates him (as Mr. Francis
Thompson would say) is my assertion that a ray of hopefulness is stealing
again into English poetry. Since the days of Jeffrey we have only had one
really "first-class fighting man" (Henley); but even with him there is no
real party fighting, for he is catholic in his antipathies, and those
whom he chastises love him, and swear that his is the least jaded Pegasus
of the day. You see, therefore, how well-balanced we are in this "happy
isle, set in a silver sea." The Fogeys are respectful to the young men,
and the young men actually admire the Fogeys. That the young men admire
one another goes without saying. Here surely is "the atmosphere of
praise" of Mr. Pinero's hortation.

And while I do not believe that art is best nourished in this "atmosphere
of praise," preferring to read instead "an atmosphere of appraisal," I
believe that of this appraisal the more important element is "praise."
Criticism with the praise left out savours of the counsel for the
prosecution rather than of the judge,--and indeed some critics assume
that every author is guilty till he is proved good: if he is popular the
presumption of his guilt is almost irresistible. A Henley young man once
explained to me that the function of the critic was to guard the gates of
literature, keeping at bay the bulk of print, for it would surely not be
literature. This last is true enough; yet the watch-dog attitude
generates a delight to bark and bite, and turns critic literally into
cynic. Should not the true critic be an interpreter? For bad work let him
award the damnation of silence. "It is better to fight for the good than
to rail at the ill."

It is a great privilege to praise. It is a great joy to give an artist
the joy of being understood. Not every artist arrives at the divine
standpoint: "And God saw all that He made, and behold it was very good."
The human creator is not always content with the rapture of creation. He
sits lonely amid his worlds. Neglect may be the nurse of strength, but as
often it is the handmaid of idleness. The artist without an audience will
smoke the enchanted cigarettes of Balzac. The rough labour of execution
is largely the labour of conveying to others what the artist already
feels and sees. Why should he toil thanklessly? It is sweeter to dream.
Even the money that art produces may be a valuable incentive. Not, of
course, if the artist aims at the money; but art wrought for love may
bring in money, like a woman married for love. In so far as the lover has
his eye on the dowry, in so far his love is vitiated; and in so far as
the artist has his eye on the profits, in so far is he untrue to a
mistress who demands undivided allegiance. Natheless, the _auri sacra
fames_ may be his salvation. What subtle sympathy connects _fama_ with
_fames_? The butcher's bill may drive him from the dreamland of luxurious
meditation to the practical embodiment of his dreams. Only, while he is
at work, the laws of art alone must be his masters; he must not alter or
abate a jot by way of concession to the great cash question. When he has
completed his work, then indeed he may sell it in the best market. But
the least preliminary paltering with the spirit of commerce is a
degradation. Does this seem an ideal demand? Let us remember, then,
ideals are goads and goals, counsels of perfection. No one expects people
to come quite up to them, but it is better for human nature that they
should be there. For there is something in hero-worship, despite
Carlyle's grandiosities, provided you choose your hero wisely. We do, in
this valley of doubt and confusion, touched with false sparkles, follow
men who speak from their souls sincerely, who work from their hearts.
Instinctively we feel it degrading and disillusionising that inspiration
shall be paid in hard cash, and genius entered on the credit side of a
ledger. Does a man plead that he has to support his wife and children?
Well, in the first place, he need not have got them. In the second, one
may be admirable as a man, but as an artist abominable. Still it is
better that a man should write Adelphi dramas than that his starving
family should qualify for scenes in them. All honour to the artist who
lives on bread and water in a garret rather than prostitute his art! but
less honour to the man who lives on _my_ bread, and adds somebody else's
whisky to his water, rather than earn an honest living by dishonest books
and plays. This was the question that split up the Bohemians of Murger.
While the majority did odd jobs for the Philistines, to have the time for
real art, the very poet consenting to write Alexandrines for a dentist at
fifteen sous a dozen--vastly cheaper than oysters--there was an inner
band of the faithful who preferred starvation to the desecration of their
genius for the unsaleable. Even so among the vegetarians there is a
holier circle that eats only nuts and fruits. The sensible artist will
compromise. There is in political economy a region called "the margin of
subsistence." It is a sort of purgatory. Above it, we enter the heaven of
superfluities; below it, lies the dread Hades of hunger. It is here that
the impecunious artist--with a family (and, alas! the artist is nearly
always impecunious--with a family) should pitch his tent. He may be
allowed to prostitute himself, if need be, sufficiently to pay the
ground-rent. He must not be driven lower down by his devotion to the
Muses: an artist who dies of starvation is simply a dead donkey. Rather
than play a false note, he stops his music for ever. It is sublime--but
silly. He had better black boots. There is no reason on earth why a
shoeblack should not read Schiller, or moralise as he does in Bret
Harte's parody of Bulwer Lytton. A bachelor artist might do worse than
get locked up for some simple offence, and thus throw himself upon the
nation. Remember what Sir Walter Raleigh did in prison. The poet can rise
superior to the sordidness of skilly. Only he must be careful to preserve
his seclusion. Leigh Hunt made his cell the artistic centre of London,
but I doubt if he got through much work; and more recently, when Jokaï
was in gaol, he was compelled to insist on two hours' privacy and
confinement per day. To be a "first-class misdemeanant" seems to me the
height of happiness for a literary man.

Unfortunately there are few honest opportunities for going to gaol. The
most honest way of all would be to write the truth about men and things;
but this editors will not print. So one has to live at one's own expense.
Nevertheless, the Hotel of the Black Maria remains an ideal.




IV

BOHEMIA AND VERLAINE

It is one of the pleasures of my life that I never saw Tennyson. Hence I
am still able to think of him as a poet, for even his photograph is not
disillusionising, and he dressed for the part almost as well as Beerbohm
Tree would have done. Why one's idea of a poet is a fine frenzied being,
I do not quite know. One seems to pick it up in the very nursery, and
even the London _gamin_ knows a poet when he doesn't see one. Probably it
rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the
mouth like champagne bottles. Inspiration meant originally demoniac
possession, and to "modern thought" prophecy and poetry are both
epileptic. "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid order."
A large experience of poets has convinced me as little of this as of the
old view summed up in _genus irritabile vatum_. Poets seem to me the
homeliest and most hardworking of mankind--'t is a man in possession, not
a _daimon_ nor a disease. Of course they have their mad moods, but they
don't write in them. Writing demands serenity, steadiness, patience; and
of all kinds of writing, poetry demands the steadiest pen. Complex metres
and curious rhyme-schemes are not to be achieved without pain and
patience. Prose is a path, but poetry is a tight-rope, and to walk on it
demands the nicest dexterity. You may scribble off prose in the fieriest
frenzy--who so fiery and frenzied as your journalist with the printer's
devil at his elbow?--but if you would aspire to Parnassus, you must go
slow and steady. Fancy inditing a sonnet with the compositors waiting for
"copy"! Pegasus were more truly figured as a drayhorse than a steed with
wings; he jogs along trot-trot, and occasionally he stands at an
obstinate pause. The splendid and passionate lyrics of Swinburne, with
their structural involutions and complicacies, must have been "a dem'd
grind." The English language does not easily lend itself to so much
"linked sweetness long drawn out." Even the manuscript of Pope's easy
meandering verse is disfigured by ceaseless corrections. As he himself
says:

  True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
  As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.

Probably these very lines run in the original manuscript somewhat as
follows:

[Illustration: Handwriting sample]

Shelley is the ideal of a poet, a soul of white fire, fed by bread and
raisins; yet Shelley's last manuscripts are full of lacunae and erasures,
some of which have had to be reproduced perforce in the printed editions.

  Clothed with the ... as with light,
  And the shadows of the night,
  Like ... next, Hypocrisy,
  On a crocodile rode by.

It reads like a puzzle set by a Competition Editor. Here is another one,
which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in
blankness.

  Within the surface of the fleeting river
  The wrinkled image of the city lay,
  Immovably unquiet, and for ever
  It trembles, but it never fades away;
  Go to the [                        ]
  You, being changed, will find it then as now.

The fact is, of course, that inspiration is no guarantee of perfection.
The limitations of inspiration vary with the limitations of the writer--a
proposition that may be commended to the theologians. Genius can no more
safeguard a man against his own ignorance than it can find a rhyme to
"silver." Inspiration could not save Keats from his Cockney rhymes nor
Mrs. Browning from her rhymeless rhymes. I met a poet in a London
suburb--it seemed odd to see one out of Fleet Street--but after a few
bewildered instants I recognised him. There was on his brow the burden of
a brooding sorrow. I sought delicately to probe the cause of his grief,
and he confessed at last that in a much-praised poem just published he
had made a monosyllable dissyllabic. He had never got over a youthful
mispronunciation, and in an unguarded moment of inspiration it had
slipped in.

This prosaic view of poetry is distasteful to many, who like to think
that "Paradise Lost" came out in a jet. But all these grandiose
conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is
popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "to think clear
and see straight." People fancy that the dignity of human life demands
that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the
artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest
art--be it literature, music, or painting--is, after all that inspiration
can do has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest
artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without
pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the
little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular
conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and
looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical
scandal-mongers to tell us what "the real Lord Byron" was like. He was
like "Don Juan," his own poem; shrewd, cynical, worldly, with flashes of
exquisite feeling. The poem which is cut out of young ladies' editions of
Byron is the one that represents him most truly in his blend of
sensualism and idealism, whereas the Brocken figure is but Byron as he
appeared to himself in his stormiest and gloomiest moments, and even that
phantasm artistically draped and limelit by a poet's imagination. If
people realised how much Byron wrote in his pitiable span of thirty-six
years, how much hard labour went to make those cleverly-rhymed stanzas of
"Childe Harold" or "Don Juan," despite Swinburne's accusation of
botchery, they would see that he really had very little time to be
wicked. They would understand that art--even the most decadent--is based
on strenuous labour.

                     Young, gay,
  Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
  Of thought and of austerity within.

Even in poetically declaring himself a decadent, the artist must take as
many pains as fall to the prosiest bourgeois. This is the paradox of the
position. Just as the pyrrhonist in maintaining that there is no truth
asserts one, so the literary pessimist partly contradicts his contention
of the futility of existence by his anxiety to express himself elegantly.
Leopardi's Italian and Schopenhauer's German are far superior to those of
the optimistic philosophers; and one of the most polished poems of our
day is poor Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night." So, too, the poet who
declares himself an idler and a vagabond gives the lie to his pretensions
by the labour he takes to clothe them in unimpeachable verse. The other
morning I looked out of my study window after breakfast and discovered
that the weather was heavenly. I had lingered over the meal, reading the
beautiful political speeches, from which I gathered there was a Crisis at
hand. I knew that Crisis. I had heard about it ever since I learnt to
hear. Nevertheless, the newspapers were still devoting as much space to
it as if it were brand-new, and beguiling me to take interest in it. I
felt quite annoyed when I looked at the blue sky after breakfast and took
deep breaths of ambrosial air, and thought how I had wasted my time.
Thrilled by the sunshine, a cosmic rapture seized me, and I wondered that
men should fritter away their time in politics and other serious
occupations. The inspiration grew and grew, and I felt that my lips had
been touched by the sacred fire, and that I had been called to preach a
great moral lesson to mankind. So I took up my pen and wrote:

  Bright the sun this lovely May-day;
  Youth and love should have their heyday;
  Every day should be a play-day.

  Yet mankind will work and worry,
  Over trifles fuss and flurry,
  Getting hot as Indian curry.

  Orators, in such a season,
  How unreasonable is reason!
  'Gainst the sunshine't is a treason.

  What care I for Gladstone's glories?
  Hang the Radicals and Tories!
  Give me hammocks, pipes and stories!

  What's the use of all this wrangling,
  Grammar and emotions mangling?
  Up the river let's go angling.

  Sweet are walks and swimming nice is,
  Bring me lemon-squash and ices,
  Bother that eternal Crisis!

I was called away to lunch in the middle of the attack of inspiration.
Inspiration is of course very useful, but it has a way of suggesting
words that won't rhyme, and luring you off into all sorts of false
tracks. Moreover, it affords no help whatever in polishing. After lunch I
set to work with renewed zeal, licking the lines into their present
perfection. At last they were finished, and as I lit the gas to enable me
to see to make a fair copy, I realised that the beautiful blue day was
gone.

Yes, the busy bee is a fraud by the side of the irresponsible artistic
butterfly.

Sims Reeves tells an amusing anecdote of Mario the singer. Being brought
one Thursday night by an eminent composer to sing at a big fashionable
party, he found so great a line of carriages in front of his own that it
was past midnight ere he arrived at the door. The thought that it was
already Friday, and that he was about to sing in a new house, whose
hostess he did not even know, had already dismayed the superstitious
singer. But when he saw the number on the door was 13, no power on earth
and no amount of argument could induce him to enter. "Ah, yes," said the
hostess, smiling pleasantly, when the composer explained, "a very
ingenious excuse, for which Mario ought to be grateful to you. Of course
he was intoxicated, and after a long argumentation you at last persuaded
him to go home."

Poe was doubtless occasionally drunk; but think of the years of sober
labour, of stooping over desks, that must have gone to make those
wonderful tales! Which is the true Poe, the hard drinker or the hard
worker? That the artist must get drunk is, indeed, the belief of certain
schools of young men even to-day; but is it not based on the old eternal
false-logic, that because some artists have got drunk, therefore to get
drunk is to be artistic? It was Murger who invented the Bohemian artist,
poor and gay and of an easy morality. "Musette and Mimi!" says Sarcey.
"The image of those ideal beings shone on every man who was twenty-one
about 1848. 'La Vie de Bohème' was youth's breviary--fifty years ago."
The great dramatic critic goes on to complain of the onslaught made upon
him because he wrote against this "idleness of disposition, this
heedlessness for the morrow, this inclination to look for the day's
tobacco and the quarter's rent from loans and debts rather than from
honest work, this witty contempt for current morality." But this is
scarcely the teaching of the ever delightful book, which catches the
spirit of youth and gaiety and irresponsibility wedded to artistic ardour
as no other book has done before or since, and for which one might put in
the plea that Charles Lamb made for the dramatists of the Restoration.
Its world is only a pleasing fiction, and the ordinary rules of morality
do not carry over into it. It is the East of Suez of literature, "where
there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst." The real
Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in "Réfractaires," is a world of misery
and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohemia expounded by Mr.
Gissing in "New Grub Street." Mr. Robert Buchanan indeed writes as if
there had been a Murgerian Bohemia in England in his young days. "_Et ego
fui in Bohemiâ_. There were inky fellows and bouncing girls, _then_;
_now_ there are only fine ladies, and respectable God-fearing men of
letters." Really! Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky
fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters
and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever
so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls
were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth,
what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast
between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success
and middle age. As Jeffery Prowse sang:

  I dwelt in a city enchanted,
    And lonely, indeed, was my lot;
  Two guineas a week, all I wanted,
    Was certainly all that I got.
  Well, somehow I found it was plenty,
    Perhaps you may find it the same,
  If--_if_ you are just five-and-twenty,
    With industry, hope, and an aim;
  Though the latitude's rather uncertain,
    And the longitude also is vague,
  The persons I pity who know not the City,
    The beautiful City of Prague!

This Bohemia will never disappear, because every generation of youth
reconstructs it afresh, to migrate from it into the world of
respectability above or the world of shame below. "Qu'on est bien à vingt
ans!" will always be a cry to fill the breast of portly respectability
with tender regret. As Thackeray put it in that delightful poem, which is
almost an improvement on Béranger:

  With pensive eyes the little room I view,
    Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long;
  With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two,
    And a light heart still breaking into song;
  Making a mock of life and all its cares,
    Rich in the glory of my rising sun,
  Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs
    In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality
of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with
youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great
matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who
would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds.
And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a
treachery. Yet will the _grisette_ be ever a gracious memory, and
literature will always embalm the "Mimi Pinson" of De Musset.

She is dead now, _la grisette_, even in Paris, and "hic jacet" may be
written over the bonnet she threw _pardessus les moulins_.

  Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last
    Trip down the rue de Seine,
  And turning, when thy form had pass'd,
    I said, "We meet again,"
  I dreamed not in that idle glance
    Thy latest image came,
  And only left to Memory's trance
    A shadow and a name.

That is how she affected even the Puritan Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes,
there is something in the Bohemian tradition that touches the sternest of
us--not the roystering, dissolute, dishonourable, shady Bohemia that is
always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the racecourse, the gambling
club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as
Shakespeare's "desert country near the sea," the land of light purses and
light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on
pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger
than a single virtue, and Charles Surface is always more agreeable than
Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper
as he pretends. And if Tom or Charles is a poet to boot, what can we not
forgive him? The poet must have his experiences--be sure that nine tenths
of them are purely of the imagination. For the other tenth--well, if
Burns had been strictly temperate, "the world had wanted many an idle
song," and we should not have celebrated his centenary so
enthusiastically. The poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose
silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should
have a full and varied life, from which "nihil humanum" is alien. Mr.
Barry Pain once wrote a subtle story, which only three persons
understood, to show that a great poet might be an elegant egotist, of
unruffled life and linen. If so, I should say that such a poet's genius
would largely consist of hereditary experience; he would, in language
that is not so unscientific as it sounds, be a reincarnation of a soul
that had "sinned and suffered." But as a rule the poet does his own
sinning and suffering, and catches for himself that haunting sense of the
glory and futility of life which is the undertone of the modern poet's
song, and which finds such magical expression in Heine's verses:

  I have loved, oh, many a maiden kind,
    And many a right good fellow,--
  Where are they all? So pipes the wind,
    So foams and wanders the billow.

But the poet's morals are maligned. The fierce light which beats upon the
throne of song reveals the nooks and crannies of the singers' lives,
which for the rest they themselves expose rather than conceal. I should
say that the average morality of the poet is much superior to the average
morality of the man of the world who sins in well-bred silence. The poet
gloats over his sins--is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he
hints or exaggerates or invents. That is where the poet's imagination
comes in--to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The
poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the
"poet's licence" is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To
have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability: the
energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme.  _Qui
ose tout dire arrive à tout faire_, say the French. Arrives _at_,
perhaps, though even this is doubtful, but certainly does not start from
that platform. Much less questionable were it to say: _Qui ose tout faire
arrive à ne rien dire._

The late M. Verlaine will be cited as a substantiation of the popular
idea of the vagabond poet. The Verlaine legend has now been consecrated
by his death; and for all time, I suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon
as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is
hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him. "I once saw
Verlaine. I shall not forget the bald prominent forehead (_une tête
glabre_), the cavernous eyes, the macabre expression of burnt-out lust
smouldering upon his face."

But there is another side to him, and it is perhaps because I do not go
about the world with Mr. Moore's "macabresque" eye, which to-day happily
sees things in a soberer colouring, that I saw this other side of
Verlaine when, like Mr. George Moore, I hunted him up on his native
heath. For one thing, I was not prepared to see anything very lurid and
_diabolique_: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew
besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine
anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the "French master," the
poor, despised, "frog-eating Mounseer Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt
of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make
a man _diabolique_! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this
depressing drudgery to our "vagabond's" credit. Think of it! The first
poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions
conjugating the verb _aimer_ in its hideous grammatical reality!

  Fumons philosophiquement,
      Promenons-nous
        Paisiblement:
    Rien faire est doux.

So might Verlaine write, though contradicting himself by doing something
in so doing; but in the absurd actual he had to earn his bread and
butter, and man cannot live by poetry alone, unless one sings the joys
and sorrows of the middle classes. It was rather late at night before,
having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the
narrow, poverty-stricken _rue_ in which Verlaine was living a year or so
ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone
stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness.
At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice
called out, "I've gone to bed." I explained my lateness and said I would
call to-morrow.

"No, no! _Attendez!_" I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope
about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened,
and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped _bourgeois_ pulling
on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our
English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded
by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the
vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He
greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse though his face
was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was
bandaged, but not repulsively. No, "homely" is the only impression I
shall ever have of Verlaine, the man. Even in that much maligned
"macabresque" head of his, there was more of the _bonhomme_ than of the
poet or the satyr. The little garret was his all in all; a bed took up
half the space. On the table stood the remains of supper. A few shelves
of books, a sketch or two, and a bird-cage with a canary were the only
attempts at ornament.

Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure
immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child's unshamed acceptance
of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have
made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having
probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud
of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson.
He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own
fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a "crystal goblet." "_Ce
verre-là!_" he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap
glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also
an allusion to a "blue-bird," a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I
fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The "_plumage bleutê de
l'orgueil_" figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at
this "blue-bird" he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle:
"_Cet oiseau-ci._" When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy
stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton
nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah, well!
after the English school-rooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets
and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. _Rien faire est doux_.

In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English
clergyman found immortality by writing one poem,--"The Burial of Sir John
Moore,"--and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole,
he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French
language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of
the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. Much of his
verse--especially his later verse--is to me, at least, as obscure as
Mallarmé. But

  Il pleut dans mon coeur
  Comme il pleut dans la rue

can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless
drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric:

  Les sanglots longs
  Des violons
    De l'automne
  Blessent mon coeur
  D'une langueur
    Monotone.

He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French
poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical--in a
word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold
marble urn. It has always lacked "soul," the haunting, elusive magic of
wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the "finer light in
light," that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo
of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual
poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French
literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and
the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. But did not our own
artistic prisoner once sing:

  Surely there was a time I might have trod
  The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
  Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?

Was ever more devout Catholic than Benvenuto Cellini, who murdered his
enemies and counted his beads equal gusto?




V

THE INDESTRUCTIBLES

I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity--not to say the
self-contradictoriness--of the constant correspondent. The creature will
enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it,
and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled
from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career I have
followed with interest, will indicate the delicious inconsequence that
has made them for me such grateful reading:

1888.

    SIR,--There is nothing in life worth purchasing by pulsations and
    respirations. The world is a dank, malarious marsh, with fitful
    Will-o'-the-Wisp flashes of false radiance--a vast cemetery waiting
    for our corpses. There is no such thing as happiness.

      Nature, red in tooth and claw
      With ravin, shrieks against

    the idea. Youth is an illusion, maturity a regret, and old age an
    apprehension. Fortunately Providence has sent us a panacea--Universal
    Suicide.

    I am, Sir,
    Yours obediently,
    AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1889.

    SIR,--Surely "A Mad Englishman" and "Dorothy X.," who maintain so
    glibly that country life is more enjoyable than town life, fail to
    realise how much of our pleasure depends on human intercourse. It is
    given only to poets to talk with trees. Nor can ordinary mortals find

      Sermons in stones,
      Books in the running brooks.

    We need the cathedrals and the libraries that are to be found only in
    the great centres of national life--yes, and also the art galleries
    and the theatres. Of course, if people will martyr themselves to keep
    up appearances, and want to live in a fashionable neighbourhood, they
    will not find town life either cheap or pleasant. But if they are
    content to live outside the aristocratic radius, they can find many a
    comfortable villa, with baths (hot and cold), and back gardens which
    may easily be converted into rustic retreats (I would especially
    recommend rhododendrons). If you are also not above omnibuses (taking
    a cab only when it rains, and selecting a driver who does not look as
    if he would swear), and are satisfied to go to the pit, then I feel
    sure London is not only as cheap as the obscurest village, but gives
    you a far greater return for your money. Newly-married couples in
    especial often make a great mistake in settling in the country for
    the sake of economy. It is only in the town that they can really lead
    a tranquil, happy life, enriched with all the resources of culture
    and civilisation.

    I am, Sir,
    Yours obediently,
    AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1890.

    SIR,--The failure of marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any
    longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of
    every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this
    mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home"
    conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is
    misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together
    like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we know of human nature.

      Love, free as air, at sight of human ties
      Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.

    Away with this effete Pharisaism! Let us realise the infinite
    possibilities of happiness latent in the blessing of existence. The
    world is longing for freedom to love truly, nobly, wisely, many.

    I am, Sir,
    Yours obediently,
    AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1891.

    SIR,--I can testify by personal experience to the fact that the
    manners of our children are deteriorating. Coming up to the
    Metropolis for a day's excursion last Bank Holiday, I could not walk
    anywhere without overhearing ribald remarks--and, what was worse, at
    my own expense--even from respectably dressed children. Let those
    look to it who

      Teach the young idea how to shoot.

    I thank Heaven my lot has always been cast in a sweet Devonshire
    village, where the contagion of ill-conduct has not yet spread among
    the juvenile population.

    I am, Sir,
    Yours obediently,
    AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1892.

    SIR,--Have your flippant correspondents, "Polygamist" and "Illegal
    Brother-in-Law," any conception of the thousands (ay, tens of
    thousands) of hearts that are, languishing in misery because they
    cannot marry their deceased sisters' husbands? And all because of a
    text which is not to be found in the Bible! Fie upon you, ye
    so-called Bishops,

      Dressed in a little brief authority.

    Abolish this unrighteous law, I say, and let floods of sunshine and
    happiness into a million darkened homes.

    I am, Sir,
    Yours obediently,
    AGATHA P. ROBINS.

But, after all, is it fair to juxtaposit Agatha's letters? What if one
were to collect the leaders of any newspaper on any given subject, before
or after any event? I have met Agatha P. Robins in many other places at
many other times. Sometimes she is interested in the best substitute for
shirt-buttons or for Christianity, sometimes in the problem of living on
a thousand a year, sometimes in the abolition of stag-hunting.

  SIGNS OF THE SILLY SEASON.

  A gooseberry that groweth green and great,
    A serpent round the sea serenely curled,
  A lonely soul that fails to find a mate,
    A boy redundant in a teeming world,

  A sister yearning for dead sisters' shoes,
    A life that longs for death, or after-life,
  A ghost, a mistress whom her maids abuse,
    An erring judge, a French or German wife,

  A child's long ear or holiday, a slum,
    A man gone bald, or drunk, a coin's design--
  Should things like these across your paper come,
    Conclude the Silly Season will be fine.

It is difficult to trace exactly when "The Season" ends and "The Silly
Season" begins. It needs the finest discrimination to know when the
adjective comes in--without a worldly training, indeed, you cannot tell
the one from the other. But the past masters of the social art proclaim
that "The Season" is dead, and we bow our heads in reverence. Yes, it is
vanished, that focus of futilities, that wonderful Season, that
phantasmagoria of absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which a
hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and
jubilations and processions--dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's
street. Often have I debated the potency of satire, again and again have
I suggested to learned friends a scientific and historical investigation
of the popular belief that satire moves mountains or even molehills. But
they agree only in shrinking from the task. To take only the last
half-century: we have had one supreme satirist who harped eternally on
the failings of fashion and the vanity of things. In his novels society
saw itself reflected in all its attitudes and postures and posings. Not
one meanness or folly escaped. What Professor Huxley has done for the
crayfish, that Thackeray did for the Snob. He studied him lovingly, he
dissected him, he classified every variety of him. A thousand disciples,
less gifted but equally remorseless, followed in the Master's footsteps.
"Punch" took up the tale, and week by week repeated the joke. It was
heard in drawing-room recitations to the accompaniment of pianos; it even
went on the stage. Ladies rushed into print to expose foibles men never
guessed, and to say of the sex at large what less gifted women say only
of their personal friends. For years we have never ceased for a moment to
hear the lash of the whip, the swish of the birch, the whizz of the
arrow, the ping of the bullet, the thwack of the flail, the thud of the
hammer, the buzzing of the hornet. And what does it all amount to? How
much execution has been done? Is society purer or nobler? Have less
daughters been sold at Vanity Fair, or more invitations been sent to poor
relatives? Has Jones got better manners or champagne? Is Mrs. Ponsonby de
Tomkins more distant to duchesses? Did my Lady Clara Vere de Vere
consider whether Hood's seamstress was at work on her court gown? Is any
one wiser or kinder or honester for all the literary pother? Are the
diplomatic corps less maculate than in the days of Grenville Murray? Have
we not, on the contrary, cast on our own imperfections the complaisance
of an eye educated in the superior imperfections of our neighbours?

Lo, here is a new satirist arisen, Sarah Jeannette Duncan, who, in "The
Simple Adventures of a Memsahib," sketches Anglo-Indian society in a
manner that would not discredit Thackeray--and with something, too, of
Thackeray's haunting sense of the pathos of the dead Past and the flying
Present. But will the memsahib of to-morrow take warning by the fate of
Helen Peachey, who went out to India in all her bridal bravery, in all
her youth and freshness? Will she escape exchanging the placidity of Fra
Angelico's piping cherubim for the petulance and ring-shadowed eyes of
the seasoned matron? Will she be on her guard against shrinking to the
prejudices and flirtations of a coterie, dying to all finer and higher
issues? Will she worship virtue more and viceroys less? Alas, I fear me
not--no more than Pagett, M. P., will leave off talking solar myths, or
foolish things cease to be done under the deodars. Will Hogarth keep
wine-bibbers from the bottle, or can you make men sober by acts of
"L'Assommoir"? Will "Madame Bovary" stay a sister's fall, or "Sapho"
repel an eligible young man? Will "The Dunciad" keep one dunce from
scribbling, or "Le Tartufe" elevate a single ecclesiastic? As well expect
"long firms" to run short, and the moths to avoid the footlights, and the
fool to cease from the land. "How gay they were, and how luxurious, and
how important in their little day! How gorgeous were the attendants of
their circumstances, on the box with a crest upon their turbans!--there
is a firm in Calcutta that supplies beautiful crests. And now, let me
think! some of them in the Circular Road Cemetery--cholera, fever,
heat-apoplexy; some of them under the Christian daisies of
England--probably abscess of the liver." Yes, madam, we know it all, we
recognize the Thackeray touch. "And soon, very soon, our brief day, too,
will have died in a red sunset behind clustering palms, and all its
little doings and graspings and pushings, all its petty scandals and
surmises and sensations, will echo further and further back into the
night." True, most true, and pity 't is 't is true. But meantime we will
go on with our little doings and graspings and pushings--yes, madam, even
you and I who have realised the vanity of all things; for the knowledge
thereof--this, too, is vanity. "And it was all a striving and a striving,
and an ending in nothing, and no one knew what they had lived and worked
for." Yea, so it is, Frau Schreiner. And still we are living on--and oh!
how hard we work (on African farms or otherwhere) to express artistically
our sense of the futility of life!

  VANITAS VANITATUM.

  A rich voluptuous languor of dim pain,
    A dreamy sense of passionate regret,
  Delicious tears and some sweet, sad refrain,
    Some throbbing, vague, and tender canzonet,
  That mourns for life so real and so vain,
    Wherein we glory while our eyes are wet.

I am afraid, if I pursue this investigation, I shall end by believing
that satire is simply an aesthetic satisfaction--the last luxury of the
sinful. Ridicule, we are always told, is a tremendous destructive--an
atmosphere in which nothing can live. But is it? Christianity, Kings, and
War are little the worse for the jets of mockery that have been playing
on them for two centuries. In Swift's day the wits at the coffee-houses
regarded religion as a farce that even the Augurs could not keep up any
longer without public winking; yet Diderot and the Encyclopaedia are
dead, and the bishops we have always with us! It was thought War could
not survive Voltaire's remark that a monarch picks up a parcel of men who
have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard,
and marches away with them to glory--but here is our Henley singing a
song of the sword, while all our novelists are looking to their weapons.
Despite Heine's sarcasm, the collection of English kings is as incomplete
as ever. A passing fad can, perhaps, be made to pass along a little
faster, but it only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the
craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was
merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a
Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them.
Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all
uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum.
"Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there
not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and
Molière, as apt to-day as though fresh from the typewriter? One of the
learned friends to whom I proposed the thesis contended that Perseus and
Juvenal at least are out of date. But this was merely my learned friend's
ignorance. Is it not the truest piety to conclude that those things which
the ridicule of the ages cannot kill deserve their immortality--that
Kings, War, and Christianity play a part in the scheme of creation, and
that even snobbery and jobbery, folly and fraud, rouge and
respectability, and horse-racing, bounders and politicians, the
prize-ring and the marriage market, are all necessary to the fun of
Vanity Fair! They are thrown up by the flux of things for Honesty to set
his heel on. So houp-la! On with the dance! louder, ye fiddlers! faster,
O merry-go-round! Nay, not so glum, ye moralists and satirists,
philanthropists and preachers; link hands all--_ducdame, ducdame!_--and
thank the gods for keeping you in occupation. What should we do without
our fools? The question seems pat for a Silly Season correspondence.
Come, gather, fools all. Ye could not be better employed than in
answering it. For, mark, brother-satirists mine, you cannot kill the
Silly Season correspondence.

And you cannot kill Ghosts. Perhaps because they do not exist. No other
dead thing is so tenacious of life as your ghost. If ridicule were really
fatal, we should have given up the ghost long since. Consider the fires
of burlesque through which he has passed unscathed. What indignity has
been spared him? Now at last he is to encounter the supreme test--he is
to be taken seriously. The Psychical Society has the matter in hand--or
should one say, the spirit? And Mr. Stead, who believes in himself in a
way that is refreshing in these atheistic times, proposes either to
rehabilitate the ghost or to lay him for ever. But this latter is beyond
the might of man or society.

And you cannot kill Grouse. At least I can't. I sometimes suspect there
are others of the population equally incompetent, and perhaps still less
interested in battues; though the Twelfth figures in everybody's calendar
like a Church festival, and the newspapers devote leaders to it, and the
comic papers have pictures, and sometimes even jokes about it, and you
would think the whole population of these islands struck work and went
a-shooting with gillies and dogs and appropriate costume. But that is the
craftiness of the editors, from Mr. Buckle and Mr. Yates down to the
editor of the _Halfpenny Democrat_--they make the humblest of us feel we
are in the best sets, so we all come up to town for the season, and are
seen at three parties a night, and we ride in the Park, and we go to
Henley and Goodwood to a man; and we yacht at Cowes, and pot grouse in
Scotland--still with the same wonderful unanimity; and we hunt with the
hounds, and run with the salmon, and keep our Christmas in country
houses, and come up smiling for the New Year, ready to recommence the
same old Sisyphean round. I suppose the people who really do these things
could be exhibited in the National Gallery, but the space their doings
fill is incalculable.

And you cannot kill Adelphi Melodrama. But I have a piece of advice to
offer to the Italian gentlemen who have done so much for our stage. It
is, that they run their theatre on a principal of duality befitting their
joint management. Let it be the home of Melodrama and Burlesque, the same
play serving for both _genres_. Let, say, Mr. Sims--who is so clever in
either species--write the pieces--each melodrama being its own burlesque.
An extra dash of colour here, an ambiguous line there, with a serious
meaning in the melodrama and a droll in the burlesque, will secure the
brothers two audiences, and after eight o'clock I guarantee standing room
only. The simple will come to weep and thrill, the cynics to laugh and
chuckle. And everybody will be happy.

In sooth, is not the world divided into those who take the great cosmic
drama seriously, and those who treat it as farce? On the one hand the
workers and the fighters, on the other the journalists, politicians, and
men about town. Yet have the workers and the fighters the nobler part. A
genuine emotion, an earnest conviction, vitalises life. The day-dreams of
hungry youth are better than the dinners of prosaic maturity, and a
simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred epigrams. I had rather be
an Adelphi god than a smoking-room satyr.

Who shall blame the melodramatist? He writes for those to whom literature
makes no appeal. Literature is a freemasonry of the highest minds, and
that poetry is Greek to the masses I should scarcely have thought a
"Question at Issue" demanding substantiation from Mr. George Gissing. Mr.
Gosse must know that the eclipse which darkened England at the passing of
Alfred Tennyson was invented by the newspapers and the poets who outraced
one another to weep upon his tomb. Look upon Mr. Booth's map of East
London, with its coloured lines showing the swarms of human beings who
live ignobly and die obscurely, and realise for yourself of what import
the cult of beautiful form is to these human ant-heaps. Walk down the
populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday night, or traverse the long slimy
alleys of Rotherhithe among the timber wharves, and discover how many of
your countrymen and contemporaries are living neither in your country nor
in your century. To Mr. Henry James, the dull undertone of pain and
sorrow is part of the music of London--such harmony is in aesthetic
souls. But the dull and the gross, who only suffer and endure, the muddy
vesture of decay closes them in and they cannot hear it.

What shall literature do for these? In a great smoky Midland town, on
dreary pavements, under sloppy skies, I saw a girl who was a greater
argument for melodrama than all the cheques of all the managers. She was
going to her work in the raw dawn, her lunch in a package under her arm;
the back was bent and the face was pale and pinched, but there was a
slumbering fire of romance in the deep-fringed eyes, and suggestions of
poetry lurked in the shadows of her hair; and at once my breast was full
of stirrings to write for her--only for her--a book full of beauty and
happiness and sunshine, and, oh! such false views of life, such
inaccurate pictures of the pleasures of a society she would never know.
The hero should be handsome and brave and good, with a curling moustache;
and the heroine should be beautiful and true, with an extensive wardrobe;
and the clouds would come only to roll by, and the story should die away
in an odour of orange-blossom, and in a music of marriage-bells. And
there should be lots of money for everybody, and any amount of laughter
and gaiety, and I would give dances twice a volume, and see that all the
girls had partners, delightful waltzers with good conversation. And there
would be garden-parties (weather permitting invariably), and picnics
without green spiders, and sails without sea-sickness. And as for truth
and realism--fie on them! We can create a much nicer world than nature's.
Why be plagiarists, when we can make universes of our own?




VI

CONCERNING GENERAL ELECTIONS

Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a
backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great
bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter
at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks
homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same,
and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in
unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal
flood: stray echoes of speech, odd fragments of newspaper floated down to
me, and at intervals some visitant from the greater deep held, like a
sea-shell, the rumour of its sounding waters.

And, indeed, where shall we find a better metaphor for party-government
than this of the tide, of the ebb and flow of political
power--remorseless, inevitable, regardless of those who, tossed high on
the stream, imagine they direct it? And in this metaphor the People must
play Moon, like the clown in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." But, as Juliet
says:

  O swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon.

The cause of this inconstancy has not escaped even the philosophers. The
Whig and the Tory, rival lovers of Luna,--moonstruck ravers,--woo her
with honeyed words and dulcet promises, and she inclines her coquettish
ear--most of the month she is all ear--to the highest bidder. But when
she comes to her full--and is all eye--then she perceives her swain
faithless and empty-handed, and straightway she plights her troth to his
clamorous and expostulant fellow, who dangles his untried promises before
her disappointed vision. And the days pass, and she rises and sets; but
lo! the bridal gifts linger still, and the horn of plenty is an empty
trumpet, and, forgetful of her first lover's failure, she turns to him
again. And so for ever, in a fickle quest of fidelity, pathetic enough.
Perhaps she--with the two strings to her bow--shares the just fate of
coquettes, happy with neither; perhaps she were wiser to give herself to
a single lover, and be rid for ever of these hesitancies. And yet, would
she profit by the change? Endymion, the one youth whose beauty drew her
from heaven, remained perpetually asleep. Is there not some profound
significance in the ancient myth, some truth that would have pleased
Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (as the pedants will have us call the man
who did not write Shakespeare).

But the philosophers, who have understood the levity of mind that
underlies changes of Cabinets, have not always understood the numerical
pettiness of the voting power by which the change is effected. Just as
every philosopher is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, so, as Mr.
Gilbert sings, is every Englishman born a little Liberal or a little
Conservative: even if his politics be not original sin, it is early
acquired. Thus, then, the nation consists of two great camps--the
Liberals and the Conservatives--which are practically fixed; standing
armies that may be relied upon. A born Liberal may wax fat and kick at
his ancient principles: a born Conservative may change his coat and turn
Whig. But these exceptions are rare. For the most part men stick to their
party and die as foolish as they were born--which is called consistency.
Convinced sometimes against their will, they are of the same opinion
still. Loyalty and obstinacy will look facts in the face and never
blench, and every one remains truer to his social circle than to his
private judgments. People's politics are their prejudices at a masked
ball, and the Conservatives will vote Conservative and the Liberals
Liberal, through a cannonade of unanswerable cartoons. Apart from these
two great standing armies, there is a shifting body of free-lances,
guerrillas, Jacks-o'-both-sides, call them what you will--waverers who
have too much conscience or too little, who are swayed by their reason or
their pocket, or who are gullible enough to believe that the opposition
will do better, or sportsmen enough to desire fair play and a chance for
the other side, and who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that.
The camps themselves are fairly matched: Rads and Tories--the sexes of
politics--are as evenly created as men and women. They are like ten-pound
weights standing on either scale of a balance. What, then, determines the
oscillation this way or that? Evidently the miserable little half-ounce
weight placed sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In
fine,'tisthe tiny squadron of free-lances that wins general elections,
the voters who think or who don't think, or who veer to be with the
majority. The Jacks-o'-both-sides rule England, even as the Parnell
brigade ruled Parliament. To this floating population is it given to make
or unmake Cabinets; theirs is the righteous indignation that sweeps the
country like a new broom, and sweeps Ministries into limbo; to them is
made the magniloquent "appeal to the country!" _L'état, c'est nous!_
might be the motto of this third party, were it but conscious of itself
as a party.

"The majority is never right," cries Dr. Stockmann in "The Enemy of the
People." "Never, I say. That is one of those conventional lies against
which a free, thoughtful man must rebel. Who are they that make up the
majority of a country? Is it the wise men or the foolish? I think we must
agree that the foolish folk are, at present, in a terribly overwhelming
majority all around and about us the wide world over. But, devil take it,
it can surely never be right that the foolish should rule over the
wise.... The majority has might--unhappily--but right it has not. I and a
few others are right." But how if "I and a few others" organised
themselves after the fashion of the Parnellites? how if the wise men made
up their minds that the world should no longer be governed with the
proverbial minimum of wisdom, and, taking advantage of the natural
balance of parties, resolved that they should be the ones to supply the
principle of movement to the equilibrated social machine? Surely the
Millennium could not long resist the Philosophers' party. But, alas!
would the wise men agree? Would not they also split up into two factions?
And even if philosophers were kings and kings philosophers, _would_ the
kingdom of Plato be at hand?

Popular suffrage is much maligned. "Think," says Bouvard, one of the
tragi-comic twain who serve for title to that saddest of all humorous
books, Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pécuchet," "think of all those who buy
pomades and patent medicines. These blockheads form the electorate and we
submit to their will. Why can't one make three thousand a year by
breeding rabbits? Because too much crowding together is fatal to them. In
like manner, by the mere coming together of a crowd the germs of
stupidity which it contains get developed and the consequences are
incalculable." But popular suffrage does not operate like this at all.
One might almost say that half the stupidity contradicts and annihilates
the other half: in practice the franchise carries its own antidote,--the
"germs of stupidity" do not get developed, but destroyed. The metaphor of
germs would be more appropriate if applied to the ideas of the
party-programmes, for these ideas are introduced by a few wise or foolish
men and disseminated epidemically throughout their respective parties.
Democracy never escapes aristocracy, for the people never invents ideas;
its whole power is that of choice between the ideas offered by its
would-be leaders, and even these ideas it accepts less as a philosopher
than as a patient, rather as "germs" than as thoughts. And when once it
has accepted its leaders or its representatives, the beautiful
parliamentary system deprives it of all further rights of interference
for a term of years, and the policy of the country is far more dependent
on the intestine rivalries and manoeuvrings of the representatives than
on the desires and demands of the represented. In a really democratic
system there would be a central bureau of statesmen not necessarily
elected by the voice of the people, and this bureau should have for
object not the wrangling over measures, but the mere proposition of them.
These trained thinkers and diplomatists--accepting advice freely from the
great newspapers and the chiefs of factions--would propose whatever
measures seemed necessary from time to time for the preservation, the
elevation, and the dignity of the commonweal, and these propositions
would be submitted officially to every franchise-holder, just as the
inquisitive census-paper or the parochial voting-paper is to-day. The
"Ayes" or "Noes" of the people would have it, not of those who represent
them, save the mark! The details could be drafted by specialists, as
to-day. That this would be a better or even a feasible system I do not
say; but I do maintain that any other democracy than this is a fraud. To
have the ten-thousandth part of a voice in selecting among the varying
policies of sundry ambitious gentlemen, all of whom have been foisted on
me by committees, and of whom the successful one--whose professed views
may be quite antithetical to mine and can at best only roughly represent
them--will have, when he is not absent or manoeuvred into silence, the
six-hundred-and-seventieth part of a voice in accepting or rejecting the
ideas of half a dozen very ambitious gentlemen, whose measures are
themselves liable to be quashed at the eleventh hour by an Upper House
that sits without my will or consent, and which is in its turn legally
liable to be superseded by the Sovereign, whose government is all the
while being really carried on in silence by permanent officials whose
very names I do not know and who have no connection with me beyond
accepting, in ignorance of my existence, my dole towards their
salaries,--this is not a form of democracy that appeals very attractively
to me as an individual member of Demos.

And, moreover, the position of my Member of Parliament is scarcely less
paradoxical than my own rôle of free and independent elector. He is the
mouthpiece of his constituents, and yet he is expected to have a will and
conscience of his own. Why? Why should he be any more honest than a
lawyer or a journalist? Each of these classes is paid to maintain certain
propositions, and the most successful in these lines are those with the
highest powers of persuasion. The constituency wishes certain opinions
and desires put forward in Parliament,--why should the man who offers to
execute the job be presumed to share those opinions and desires? The
point is, can he represent them more forcibly than the rival candidates?
I do not for a moment imagine that the M. P. invariably agrees with the
politics of his electors; I only inquire why he should have to profess
to,--why should he pay this homage of hypocrisy to an illogical ideal?
Theoretically we do not elect our M. P. because _he_ wants to get on, but
because _we_ want to get on or the country to get on; because _we_ want
certain measures carried, not because _he_ wants certain measures
carried. Therefore it is to our interest to get the most skilled advocate
at our command; his personal opinions are no concern of ours. A fig for
his ambitions and aspirations! This may not be a dignified position for
the M. P., but it is the one logically implicated in the democratic
notion of universal suffrage; and when the gentleman honestly asserts
himself and his private ambitions and his private conscience, he is
deucedly dishonest to his constituents.

To be strictly logical, indeed, M. P.'s should confine themselves to
stating the wishes of the people they represent: they might as well be
mechanical dolls, moved through the lobbies by the respective
wire-pullers and fitted with inarticulate noises. Or, for the matter of
that, they might be superseded altogether by written summaries of the
opinions of the winning majority in each constituency on all the points
at issue in the current session. The chiefs of the party could play the
game with markers. But indeed what is the use of dealing the cards at
all, when the Prime Minister holds all the trumps in advance, not up his
sleeve, but openly on the table? As for the speeches in the House, they
have as much effect upon the issue as the conversations at the
card-table. They are an obsolete survival from the times when members
were liable to come to the House with open minds, instead of having them
closed by their constituencies. Indeed, I can suggest a simple device by
which, without any departure from the ancient forms of the House, most of
the evils of Party Government could be swept away. By the system of
"pairing" a Tory may neutralize a Radical, and both go on together
without interfering with the good of the country. Let therefore the
entire minority pair off with members of the opposite party, leaving the
bare majority in possession of the floor. Being agreed on their policy,
these would not want to make speeches, but would simply spend their time
walking through the "Ayes" lobby. A few afternoons of pleasant
promenading would provide the country with enough legislation for a
lifetime. _Solvitur ambulando._ The party leaders would be enabled to
husband their energies for the hustings, since like all the agreeable
members they would easily find "partners." It is only the bores who would
be left to walk the House. It will be observed that this incalculable
gain of time, temper, money, and Acts of Parliament would be secured
without revolution, on constitutional lines, and by a mere extension of
an existing practice. I am convinced the salvation of the country depends
on the universal adoption of the system of Parliamentary "pairing," or
legislation by walking "wall-flowers."

A further advantage of this system deserves to be noted. As it takes
forty members to make a House, should the Governmental majority fall
below this number no business could be transacted. Thus it would become
impossible, when the country was almost equally divided, for one party to
impose its will on the nation by force of a bare majority. Again,
therefore, a very necessary reform would be achieved on strictly
constitutional lines.

In so confused a constitution, or so constitutional a confusion, it ill
becomes one to inquire why pre-eminence in Parliament is attained by
dexterity in the word-duel, and why a John Stuart Mill, who gave his life
to the study of sociological questions, is a failure in the House, while
a Randolph Churchill, who confessedly found politics more exciting than
any other form of sport, including even horse-racing, should be a
success. As in Athens of old, the rhetorician is master of the field.
Does it not seem ridiculous that a man shall be allowed to legislate who
has not passed an examination in political philosophy, political economy,
and universal history? As absurd as that men should be able to set up as
critics merely by purchasing reviews, that they should be permitted to
ply without a license. Still, monstrous as is the mischief wrought by the
quack critic, his sphere of influence is limited. But this question of
government touches us all. No one ought to be allowed in the House who
has not satisfactorily grappled with papers like the following.

1. Explain the use of the following phrases: "Home Rule," "Liberty,"
"Well-being of the Masses," "G. O. M.," "Good of the State," "The
Constitution." What meaning do you attach to them, if any?

2. "The Function of an Opposition Is To Oppose." Criticise this statement
from the point of view of the Party in Power, and trace carefully the
modification in its view produced by a change of government.

3. What is a good electoral address? Is there any relation between it and
its owner's votes in the House?

4. (a) Prove that Female Franchise is demanded not only by the women of
England, but by every consideration of reason and justice.

(b) Disprove the same.

5. The leader of your party suddenly reverses his policy.

(a) What would you think?

(b) What would you say?

(c) How would you vote?

Give no reasons for your answer.

6. If C represents Conscience, and C1 the Constituency, show that C1 will
always be represented by C2[*].

[Transcriber's note: So in original.]

7. What is a working-man? Explain why professional men who work sixteen
hours a day are excluded from this category.

8. Define a political victory, and distinguish between a political
victory and a moral victory.

But perhaps the discrepancy is less than meets the eye. The House of
Commons is a _Representative_ Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers
represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has
the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage
against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or
its problems, nor could have studied any question for themselves; pretty
girls withal, but who at the mention of the veteran statesman took on the
avenging aspect of the Eumenides.

It was a girl of quite another temper who replied to me when, talking
over old times and old discussions, I said I had not yet become a
Socialist: "I don't think you ever knew what you were." I winced as at a
just reproach, yet when I had left her the retort occurred to me (as
retorts will, when too late) that there was no particular merit in being
a "what," that men were not necessarily "'ists" or "'ites," that thoughts
did not fit into pigeonholes, and that if there was any merit in the
matter it consisted rather in preserving free play and elasticity of
mind. Because certain men had put certain ideas into the world it did not
follow that every other man had definitely to accept or reject each and
all of them, and to become an "'ite" or an "anti-'ite" in so doing.
Plague take great men! What right had they to force one into the
jury-box? Still less was it compulsory to return a verdict if, as the
vulgar were apt to think, the acceptance of any one "'ism" precluded the
acceptance of another, so that to be an Ibsenite was synonymous with
detesting the dramas of Sardou, and to be a Wagnerite involved a horror
of Mendelssohn. It was only the uncultured who held their artistic and
political creeds with the narrowness of Little Bethel, importing into
thought and aesthetics the zealotry they had lost in religion. The book
of Experience, thought I, is not an Encyclopaedia, with every possible
topic neatly ranged in alphabetical order; 'tis no A B C Time Table, with
the trains docketed for the enlightenment of the simple,'t is rather an
Encyclopaedia torn into a million million fragments by kittens and pasted
together again by infants, so that all possible things are inextricably
interfused, every one with every other; 't is a Bradshaw edited by a
maniac, where the trains that start but don't arrive are not even
distinguished from the trains that arrive but don't start. Wherever
persons are conscious of the infinite complexities of things, they will
be found cautious of creed and timid of assertion. You have probably
noted that at Waterloo Station, in London, no porter will ever bind
himself to a definite statement concerning any train. It is only the
inartistic who hold that black is black and white is white,
unconditionally, irretrievably; and who have invented the proverb "He'd
say black's white" to express the Sophist _in excelsis_. It must be true,
as Ruskin contends, that not one man in fifteen thousand has ever
observed anything, else how account for this wide-spread fallacy? The
"wit of one," instead of crystallising this "wisdom of the many," should
have flatly contradicted it. For, take two blackboards and place them at
right angles to each other: let a ray of bright sunlight fall upon them,
so that one cast a shadow on the other. The portion of blackboard
overshadowed will indeed be blackish, but the portion illuminated by full
sunlight will be comparatively white, although it is still thought of as
a "_black_-board." So, too, ask the man in the street for the colour of
trees, and he will reply "green." If I may permit myself a vulgar
locution, the green is in his eye. Trees are, of course, all colours of
the rainbow, according to kind and season; and grass, too, is by no means
always so green as people think it. We start in our childhood with
prejudices on these subjects--what is education but the systematic
imparting of prejudice?--and we rarely recover. Even the primitive rhymes
of childhood fix ideas unalterably in our minds:

  The rose is red, the violet's blue,
  Sugar is sweet and so are you.

Tea-roses are not red nor Neapolitan violets blue; sugar is only sweet to
those unversed in metaphysics, and sugar of lead not even to them. As for
the compliment to the juvenile petticoat, let it remain. But the
blackness of black is a superstition that deserves no such courteous
concessions. There is, in fact, no black and no white at all, as any
black-and-white artist will tell you. Black is not a colour: it is merely
the negation of light. By day nothing is ever black--it always contains
reflected light from some surrounding object or objects: if you look at a
"black" thing by day, you see its details, which convincingly proves that
light is not absent. If there were such a thing as a black object, it
could only prove its existence by being seen; but if it is seen it is no
longer black, and if it is black it is no longer seen. The mourners at a
funeral no more wear black than the bridesmaids at a wedding wear white.
To be white, a thing would have to escape all reflected light; and even
if this were possible, the sunlight itself, the source of all light and
colour, would tinge it with yellow, or red, or pink, according to the
time of day. "What!" the injudicious reader will cry, "is not snow white?
Does not the Dictionary boast even a double-barreled epithet
'snow-white'! How about the 'great white sea' that stretches round the
Pole?" I cannot help it: these adjectives, these expressions were
invented before artists had taught men to see: hastily, as by men falling
in love at first sight, who are destined to make many discoveries
concerning their idol later on. Snow is never white, any more than the
beloved is absolutely blameless. For snow to be "snow-white," the sky
would have to be white, whereas in those arctic circles it should be
either blue or grey. Moreover, the snow being only semi-opaque must be
tinctured by the shadow of the darkness of its own depths; as for
icebergs, well, you may see green, brown, and even deep-grey ice, whilst
the whitest have pinnacles and crags that must break the light like
prisms into all the colours of the spectrum, and all these hues, again,
do not fail to tint the snow. Nor will the white bear improve the
situation, for, to judge by the specimen in our London Zoological
Gardens, white bears are dirty yellow, just as black bears are dirty
brown.

But, so far from realising that black may be white, your average voter
seems to imagine that neither is ever even tempered: that his party is
purest white, and the opposition party impurest black. That the other
side reverses this colouring does not trouble him: it is merely due to
the aforesaid sophistical faculty of proving black white. I once knew a
man--no average voter he--who owned two comic papers, the one Radical,
the other Conservative. How he must have chuckled as he planned the
cartoons and settled the chiaroscuro! What blacks for the Tories to be
answered by counter-blacks for the Radicals! Beaconsfield as a sweep,
Gladstone as an Angel of Light; Beaconsfield as Ormuzd, Gladstone as
Ahriman; each in turn Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and Satan, the
discomfited demon. I tremble to think what would have happened if, by one
of those _contretemps_ which sometimes occur even in real life, the
cartoons had got interchanged. And caricatures such as these influence
the elections! The most childish nonsense, written in the
picture-language so dear to children! And on such ineptitudes the
destinies of the nation are supposed to turn! 'T is a comforting
reflection, then, that the whole thing is so largely a farce, that the
real axis of events is elsewhere--by no means a thing to grieve over. If
the British Constitution is a paradox not to be fathomed by human
intellect, why, that is a quality which it shares with Space and Time and
all deep and elemental things. Your deep thinker is invariably a
paradox-monger, because everything when probed to its bottom proves
illusive, and is found to contain its own contradiction. Truth is not a
dead butterfly, to be transfixed with a pin and labelled, but a living,
airy, evasive butterfly. Perhaps that is the inner meaning of the
Whistlerian motto. The Hegelian self-contradictoriness of the British
Constitution will not, therefore, affright us. To Tennyson the fact that
it is a "crowned republic" seemed a source of security. The English have
abolished the Crown, though they are too loyal to inform the Sovereign of
his deposition; in like manner they have evaded Democracy by conceding
universal suffrage. The strength of the British Constitution lies in its
inherent absurdity, its audacious paradoxicalness. It exists by force of
not being carried out. And the reason of this illogicality is clear: our
Constitution, like Topsy, was not made but "growed," and that which grows
is never logically perfect; it is like an old tree, strangely gnarled,
with countless abrasions and mutilations, and sometimes even curious
grafts. Here the lightning struck it, and yonder branch was snapped in
the great gale. Machine-made schemes may be theoretically perfect, but
they will never suit human nature, which is a soil for living growths,
not a concrete foundation for elegant architecture. This is the truth
which trips up Comte, and Fourier, and St. Simon, and all the
system-makers and utopia-builders. Perfect things are dead things: the
law of life is imperfection and movement. Life is never logical, it is
only alive. If man had been made by machinery his body would not have
been erratically hairy; his toes would long since have been improved away
or welded together by an American patentee; nor would there have
remained, for our humiliation, those traces of a caudal appendage which
some osteologists have thought to perceive in our distinguished anatomy;
our brotherhood to the beasts would have been betrayed only by our
behaviour.

So that, though Politics be as absurd as the Constitution, God bless her,
it may yet fulfil as useful a function. Who would deprive the hosts of
working-men of their generous enthusiasms, even though these be to the
profit of the professional politician? Who would narrow their horizon
back to the public-house and the workshop or the clerical desk and the
music-hall, by assuring them that all these great national and
international questions will be no penny the worse or the better for
their interest in them? For it is they, not the State, that will be
benefited. Politics is a great educative force: it teaches history,
geography, and the art of debate, and is not without relation to
Shakespeare and the musical glasses. The flies on the wheel are not
moving the wheel, but they are travelling and seeing the world, whereas
they might otherwise be buzzing around the dust-bin. Politics sets the
humblest at the centre of great cross-roads of history: it promotes clubs
and all manner of fellowship, and enables the poorest--on polling-day at
least--to know himself the equal of the greatest. Even the most
illiterate is spared the mortification of being reminded that he cannot
sign his name. And finally, and most of all, it preserves among us the
lost art of fighting. The long and oft-vaunted immunity of England from
the foot of a foreign foe has its drawbacks: we have forgotten what war
really means, we have delegated our courage and patriotism to an army of
mercenaries, who represent us in the field as a nobleman's carriage
represents him at a funeral; we are valiant vicariously and sublime by
deputy; we take the war-fever in its pleasant heats, and contract out the
chills and the blood-letting. And so the blood-letting fails to purge us
as before: the evil humours are still in the system. All those seething,
restless spirits which generate in the blood of a once warlike race clog
us up and turn to bile and dyspeptic distempers. Our militant instincts,
suppressed by a too-secure civilization, break out in sordid maladies of
the social organism. As a vent-hole for the envy, hatred and
uncharitableness of mankind, politics cannot be overestimated. In the
absence of real battles on our soil these sham fights of the
polling-booth--sham because they determine nothing, because the great
silent forces are working behind all the noises--are the national purge
for "our present discontents"; no more truly efficacious than that
ancient therapeutics of the lancet, a General Election yet comforts the
patient, he takes a lease of fresh hope, the sun leaps out, the clouds
pack, the sky is blue, the grass is dew-pearled, God's in his heaven, and
all's right with the world. Even the beaten party feels that it has won a
moral victory, and confidently looks forward to victory without morality
at the next turn of the wheel. And so all these diseased humours of the
body politic pass harmlessly off.

No one but a confirmed cynic would wish to do away with all this harmless
dissipation, all the innocent fun of electioneering, the speeches,
riotings, mud-throwings, everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a
great day that was--Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial
town--when the Blues and the Reds meant broken heads, and the flowing
tide of beer, and spruce carriages with beribboned horses, and jocund
waggonettes, and bands and banners, and "hoorays," and shuttered shops,
and an outpour of citizens; a day festive, yet solemn, pregnant with
mysterious dooms and destinies, fatal, ineluctable, if victory fell to
the wrong-coloured ribbons. I remember when my father went to poll his
vote--a strange, weird article that had to be carried carefully concealed
on the person, lest the roughs of the opposition should catch a glimpse
of the tip of it and bash in the holder's head--with what awed
imagination we followed his course, as of a hero gone to storm a redoubt
or lead a forlorn hope! with what anxiety we waited at home with the
bandages! For the civil war, which our constitution foments, was less of
a sham then than now, and the polling-booths vied with the playing-fields
of Eton as the nursery of England's heroes. Ah, the brave old times! An
anaemic age languishes for want of you, and finds its solace in "bluggy"
tales. For just as politics supplies the shadow, the simulacrum of
fighting, so art supplies the shadows of life to those who lack the
substance. We herd in towns, and take the country in dashes of
water-colour framed in gilt. We marry for money, and satiate our baulked
sense of romance with concoctions from Mudie's. We lie and haggle and
cheat only the better to apprehend the subtleties of spiritual discourse
in fashionable churches, and our generous appreciation of the consummate
chivalry of the hero of melodrama is the reward we owe ourselves for the
pain it gave us to kick our wives. Practical joking is banished from
reputable circles--even Bob Sawyer is ranging himself; and so this
primitive appetite seeks its satisfaction in farcical comedies. Poetic
tragedies owe their attraction to the dominance in real life of the drab
and the unlovely, and the overstrain of the intellect in modern life
gives a peculiar flavour to the ineptitudes of Gaiety burlesque. All the
primal instincts and passions are still in us, though distorted,
exaggerated, diminished, modified, applied to different objects and
purposes. The man with vagabond instincts becomes an explorer, Ishmael
writes social dramas, the happier son of a defalcating cashier rises to
be a minister of finance, the born liar turns novelist, the man with
murder in his soul hunts big game in foreign lands or settles down at
home as a critic. And so, too, the born warrior becomes a political
leader; and politics, if it does not do any of the things it professes to
do, plays yet an invaluable part in modern life, bridging over,
perchance, the transition from the bellicose ages to those belauded days
when the war-drum shall throb no longer, "and the kindly earth shall
slumber, lapt in universal law."

That this is confusedly and sub-consciously understood, even by
politicians, is shown by their very vocabulary. The Salvation Army itself
boasts no more militant a phraseology than the profession whose business
it is to administer peacefully the affairs of the realm. That which
should be, and sometimes is, expressed by nautical metaphors--the ship of
state, guiding the helm, and the rest of it--is much more frequently
expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils"
of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music
is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning
glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately
regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which
positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old,
and, as in the days of Joshua, victory is achieved by walking round the
town and blowing your own trumpets. Great organs shamelessly lament that
their side has no good grievance to go to the country with,--as if the
absence of grievances were not the very object of government! A stirring
war-cry--that is the indispensable. If good government were really the
object of a General Election, it would all be over and done with in a
day. Election day would everywhere be as simultaneous as Christmas, and
votes would be polled with the punctuality with which puddings are eaten.
But this would be to contract a campaign into a battle--to make a short
story out of a great military serial, peppered with exciting incidents,
to be continued in our next. We want our vicissitudes, our sharpshooting,
our skirmishing, our days of triumph for the Whigs, and our days of
triumph for the Tories. What we like best of all is when the fighting is
so level that the Election progresses as breathlessly as a good
University boat race. Failing that, we like to see one side swamping the
other, like a great flood, the stream rising daily higher and higher,
with a crescendo roar, till the vanquished are swept away in a thunderous
mountain of waters. So for a full moon the waters rage, the noise of
battle roars, till our suppressed fighting instincts have been deluded
into repose and satisfaction, till the champing war-horses have been
quieted by being allowed to snort and cry "Ha! ha!" to see the glitter of
stage spears, and to hear the noise of the supers and the shouting. This
is the real end masked beneath all those interminable phrases. And it is
achieved at any and every cost. For does not everybody complain that a
General Election upsets everything? The publishers groan, the theatrical
managers tear their wigs. Englishmen cannot think of two things at once;
they are like heavy, solid craft, sound of timber but slow of turning.
"One thing at a time" is a national proverb. They cannot even read two
books at once, and if two classics should be published on the same day
one would be a failure. There is the book of the week, and the book of
the season, and the book of the year. This applies even to our
appreciation of past periods, and because Shakespeare is the first of the
Elizabethan dramatists, the rest are nowhere. Wherefore one would suppose
that everybody would make haste to get the Election out of the way; but,
on the contrary, it is allowed to linger on, till sometimes our
overstrained suspense snaps, and the Election dribbles out in unregarded
issues. No, the fight's the thing! War, if not dead, is banished from our
shores; the duello has been laughed to death; cock-fighting and
bull-baiting have ceased to charm: politics alone remains to gratify the
pugnacity and cruelty that civilisation has robbed of their due objects.
How we brighten up again at a bye-election, when duels which passed
unregarded in the big battle, when towns scarcely noted at the fag-end of
the great campaign, become the cynosure of every eye. Through Slocum or
Eatonswill the hub of the universe temporarily passes: to its population
of four thousand, mostly fools, are entrusted the destinies of the
Empire; it is theirs to make or mar. The duel is watched by a breathless
nation. The party leaders on each side cheer on their men; their careers
and claims and countenances fill up the papers, and they cross swords in
a shower of telegrams. Advice to those about to enter Parliament: Elect
for a bye-election. Why be a nonentity, a mere M.P., when by a little
patience you may hold the centre of the stage, if only for a week? Better
almost to be beaten at a bye-election than to be successful at a General.

In case I should ever seek the suffrages of electors myself, I would
venture to remind opposition agents and private secretaries that these
random criticisms of the glorious constitution (hear, hear!) of that
great Empire on which the sun never sets (cheers), over which the Union
Jack waves (loud cheers)--a thousand years the battle and the
breeze--hem!--I--I--ahem!--Lord Salisbury (loud and prolonged cheers)--I
mean that I trust they will not forget that all this is set down without
prejudice.




VII

THE REALISTIC NOVEL

The realistic novel, we know from Zola, that apostle of insufficient
insight, is based on "human documents," and "human documents" are made up
of "facts." _But in human life there are no facts._

This is not a paradox, but a "fact." Life is in the eye of the observer.
The humour or the pity of it belongs entirely to the spectator, and
depends upon the gift of vision he brings. There are no facts, like
bricks, to build stories with. What, pray, in the realm of human life
_is_ a fact? By no means a stubborn thing, as the proverb pretends. On
the contrary, a most pliant, shifting, chameleon-coloured thing, as
flexible as figures in the hands of the statistician. What is commonly
called a fact is merely a one-sided piece of information, a dead thing,
not the series of complex, mutually inter-working relations that
constitutes a fact as it exhibits itself to the literary vivisectionist.
I walked with a friend in a shabby district of central London, a region
that had once been genteel, but was now broken up into apartments.
Squalid babies, with wan, pathetic faces, pullulated on the doorsteps;
they showed from behind dingy windows at the breasts of haggard women.
The fronts of the houses were black, the plaster had crumbled away, the
paint had peeled off. It was the ruins of a minor Carthage, and, like
Marius, I was lost in mournful reverie; my companion remarked, "These
houses are going up; they now pay 7 per cent." He was perfectly
justified. There are a hundred ways of looking at any fact. The
historian, the scientist, the economist, the poet, the philanthropist,
the novelist, the anarchist, the intelligent foreigner,--each would take
away a different impression from the street, and all these impressions
would be facts, all equally valid, all equally true, and all equally
false. Life, I repeat, is in the eye of the observer. What is farce to
you is often tragedy to the actual performer. The man who slips over a
piece of orange peel, or chases his hat along the muddy pavement, is
rarely conscious of the humour of the situation. On the other hand, you
shall see persons involved in heartrending tragedies to whom the thing
shows as farce, like little children playing in churchyards or riding
tombstones astride. To the little imps of comedy, who, according to Mr.
Meredith, sit up aloft, holding their sides at the spectacle of mankind,
to the

         Spirit of the world,
  Beholding the absurdities of men,
  Their vaunts, their feats, ...

human life must be a very different matter from what we poor players on
the scene imagine it; we are cutting a very different figure, not only
from that which faces us from the mirror of vanity, but from that which
is "as ithers see us." Not only, then, may our tragedy be comedy; our
comedy may be tragedy. The play of humour at least suggests these
alternatives. Life is Janus-faced, and the humourist invests his
characters with a double mask; they stand for comedy as well as for
tragedy; Don Quixote wears the buskin as well as the sock. Humour, whose
definition has always eluded analysis, may, perhaps (to attempt a
definition _currente calamo_), be that subtle flashing from one aspect to
another, that turning the coin so rapidly that one seems to see
simultaneously the face and the reverse, the pity and the humour of life,
and knows not whether to laugh or weep. Humour is, then, the simultaneous
revelation of the dual aspects of life; the synthetical fusion of
opposites; the gift of writing with a double pen, of saying two things in
one, of showing shine and shadow together. This is why the humourist has
always the gift of pathos; though the gift of pathos does not equally
imply the gift of humour. The tragic writer must always produce one-sided
work, so must the "funnyman" who were only a "funny man" and not a
humourist (though this is rarer). Each can only show one side of life at
a time; the humourist alone can show both. Great novels of romance and
adventure, great works of imagination, great poems, may be written by
persons without humour; but only the humourist can reproduce life. Milton
is great; but the poet of life is Shakespeare. Thus the whole case of
"realism" falls to the ground. There being no "facts," Zola's laborious
series is futile; it may be true to art, but it is not true to life. His
vision is incomplete, is inexhaustive; it lacks humour, and to the
scientific novelist the lack of humour is fatal. He is the one novelist
who cannot succeed without it. Leave out humour, and you may get art and
many other fine things, but you do not get the lights and shadows or the
"values" of life.

All novels are written from the novelist's point of view. They are his
vision of the world. They are not life, but individual refractions of it.
The ironical pessimism of Thomas Hardy is as false as the sentimental
optimism of Walter Besant or the miso-androus meliorism of Sarah Grand.
What Hall Caine happily calls "the scenic view of life" of Dickens is no
more true than the philosophic view of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Each is
existence viewing itself through a single medium. "Tess of the
D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the
Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a
formula, peeps at itself through the brain of each artist, but eludes
photography. This is the true inwardness of the Proteus myth. The
humourist alone, by presenting life in its own eternal contradictoriness,
by not being tied down to one point of view, like his less gifted
brother, comes nearest to expressing its elusive essence. The great
novelists are Fielding, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thackeray. But all the
novelists supplement one another, and relatively-true single impressions
of life go to make up a true picture of

  Life, like a dome of many coloured glass.

It is because there are all novels and every aspect of existence in
Shakespeare that he sits supreme, the throned sovereign of the literature
of life.

All this is writ to console those who suffer too poignantly from
book-tragedies and "pictures of life." The artist selects, he studies
tone and composition, whereas in real life tragedies are often
accompanied by "extenuating circumstances." The unloved girl temporarily
forgets her sorrow in the last new novel, or a picnic up the river; the
broken-hearted hero betakes himself to billiards and brandy-and-soda, or
toys with a beefsteak. Again, many pathetic tales are the outcome of
imperfect insight. The novelist imagines how he would feel in the shoes
of his characters, and cries out with the pain of hypothetic bunions.
This mistake better deserves the name of "the pathetic fallacy" than the
poetic misreading of Nature to which Buskin has annexed it. A good novel
may be made of bad psychology; indeed, this is what most novels are made
of. Yet the gentle reader, misled by the simulation of life, makes
himself miserable over dabs of black ink on white paper. The failure of
two imaginary beings to unite their lives in wedlock brings unhappiness
into myriad homes. How delicious is that story of the German novelist
who, having failed to unite his leading couple at the conclusion of a
newspaper serial, saw no way of appeasing the grief and indignation of
his vast audience save by inserting in the advertisement columns of a
later issue of the journal an announcement of their union under the usual
head of "Marriages"!




VIII

IN DEFENCE OF GAMBLING

Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The
humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this
creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite
enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon.
Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the
result, the exultation of winning. And the beauty of gambling is that you
cannot lose. Gambling is really a disguised system of purchase. One buys
excitement, a most valuable emotion, for which even the members of the
Anti-Gambling League are prepared to pay heavily in other forms! And the
advantage of gambling over all these other forms is the possibility that
you may not be called upon to pay for your purchase after all--nay, that
_you_ may even be paid instead! You get not only excitement, but a
possible bonus. Is there any earthly transaction that offers such
advantages? Why, 't is always "heads I win, tails you lose." Who speaks
of losing at cards? As well speak of losing at play-going or
novel-reading; what is called loss is simply payment for excitement. You
cannot lose at cards, though you may win; unless it be in games where
skill preponderates, and then loss means penalty for lack of skill. The
mere transfer of money from hand to hand leaves the wealth of the world
what it was before. 'T is redistribution, not destruction. It is scarcely
relevant to look for the evils of gambling in its effects--to point to
ruined reputations and ruined homes. Everything is capable of abuse, from
love to religion. The evil of gambling lies in the fact that it is an
unworthy form of excitement--that it is possible to colour life more
intellectually. The Anti-Gambling League, for all its recent prospectus,
will not put down gambling among the poorer classes, except by widening
their outlook otherwise, by creating other interests outside the dull
daily groove. For the well-to-do classes there is less excuse. With all
the arts and amenities of life at their command, it is degrading to use
up time and nervous energy in so brainless a pursuit. The gambling that
is inherent in the constitution of modern civilization is another affair:
that is pursued for the sake of gain; or for a livelihood. The Stock
Exchange is an unhappy consequence of the joint-stock company; credit in
business is an equally inevitable outcome of the ramified mechanism of
exchange. We are all gamblers to-day, insomuch as there is no stable
relation between work and reward, and the failure of a bank in Calcutta
may impoverish a shopkeeper in Camden Town. Our investments may rise or
fall in value through the obscure machinations of unknown millionaires.
And even the Anti-Gambling League has no word to say against those great
gambling concerns, Life and Fire Assurance Societies, which bet you that
you will not die or be burnt out within a certain number of years, or
those journals which offer you large odds that you won't be smashed up
while reading them. The prudential considerations behind these forms of
gambling seem quite to moralise them: indeed, to refuse to accept the bet
of the Life Assurance Companies is now considered immoral; a man is
expected to amend on his marriage at the very latest.

There is a form of gambling to which I must myself plead guilty. A
forlorn, shabby creature, pathetically spruced up, arrives from a
ten-mile tramp. He has been a journalist or a poet, but owing to this or
that he is on his beam-ends. He has eaten nothing for two days. His wife
is dying, his children are weeping for food. His voice breaks beautifully
as he tells me I am his last hope. What is to be done? According to
Charles Lamb, the solution is to give, to give always. For either the man
is in need and speaks truth, or he is a liar and therefore a consummate
actor. We pay for stage representations: why deny our obolus to the
histrionics of the beggar? So artistic a make up, an elocution with such
moving notes of pathos, surely deserve our tribute. Nay (and this Elia
forgot to note), the beggar-actor is frequently the author of his own
piece; that consistent argument, those tragical episodes, those touches
of nature, that minute detail, all are his. For my part, this view does
not touch me; I scarcely ever pay for the play, so I expect even the
beggar to perform to me as to one of "the press." If I give to beggars,
it is purely from the gambling spirit. What are the odds against the man
being a scamp? If they are short, or if the betting is level, I incline
to the side of mercy. The money is of so much more consequence to him
than to me, if the beggar is genuine, that the speculation is well
warranted. I know how wrong it is from the point of view of the Charity
Organization Society, but I am a man, not a bureau of beneficence. Few of
us, I fancy, escape this godly gambling.

How ill Society is ordered! We pay poor rates and support hospitals and
orphan asylums; but is there any thinking man who can banquet with the
assurance that nobody is starving? It spoils the dinner of Dives to
meditate on the longings of Lazarus, and this is the true skeleton at the
feast. The business of philanthropy seems but a mockery, and Government
takes charitable toll from us without pacifying our consciences. There is
something rotten in the state of Denmark. Cannot the intellect of man
devise a means of guaranteeing the deserving poor against starvation?

Novel-reading is the woman's substitute for gambling--the thing that
takes her outside her narrow circle of interests. Her ravenous appetite
for new novels is amazing; children are not so gluttonous of cream-tarts.
To supply this demand sequestered spinsters in suburban or rustic bowens
sit spinning the woof and warp of life as it never was on sea or land.
Bound goes the wheel, to and fro glides the shuttle, and the long,
endless pattern unwinds itself in all its wealth of imaginative device
and all its glory of fanciful colour. Poor things! What are they to do?
They have not the means to study the life they depict; they cannot mix in
the circles they describe. Fortunately their ignorance is their
salvation; the pretty patterns please the young ladies, the brave notes
of colour set them a-dreaming. And now in the revolt against the
three-volume novel these simple scribblers are to be swept away; the
country parcels will know them no more, and the three-deckers they built
of yore will be dismantled in the dry dock of the fourpenny box. Poor
creatures! Some will take to typewriting and some to drink, some will be
driven to the workhouse and some to literature.




IX

TRULY RURAL

    "ENGINEER AND SURVEYOR'S DEPARTMENT.

    "_5 & 6 Wm. IV., cap. 50, sect. 65._

    "SIR,

    "I am directed to call your attention to the present condition of
    trees within your premises, which now overhang the public footpath
    adjoining, and thereby cause considerable inconvenience to the
    public. I shall be glad if you will kindly give the matter your best
    attention, with a view to lopping or cutting the trees in such a
    manner as to obviate the inconvenience at present complained of.

    "Yours obediently,
    "P. LEONARDO MACREADY,
    "_Engineer to the Board._"

Amid the cosmopolitan medley of letters on my metropolitan
breakfast-table--the long and formal-looking, the fat and foreign, and
the over-scrawled and the underpaid (the last mainly requests for
autographs)--this delightful home-grown epistle came with refreshing
piquancy. It brought a breath of summer into the grey chillness of a
London winter, a suggestion of rustling foliage about the chandelier, and
the scent of the hay over the gaslights. "My dear!" I exclaimed to the
partner of my bosom (a tame white rat that likes to perch there), "_Have
we any trees?_"

My partner gave a little plaintive squeak. That is her idea of
conversation. She screams at everything. She would scream at the sight of
a mouse.

I pushed away my plate. I had sat down hungry as a hunter, and had had
two helpings of everything; but now I could eat no more. Excitement had
taken away my appetite. The prospect of rural discoveries agitated me. I
hastened to the window and looked at the front garden. To my astonishment
and joy there was vegetation in it. There was a dwarf evergreen bush and
a fragment of vine stretching itself sleepily, and a tall thin tree--they
might all have got comfortably into one bed, but they had been planted in
three far apart, and this gave the garden a desolate Ramsgate-in-winter
air of "Beds to let." The tall thin tree was absolutely naked, without an
inch of foliage to cover its wooden limbs; a mere mass of dry sticks. I
looked hard at the tree to see where it offended, determined to pluck it
out. But it returned my gaze with the stolidity of conscious
innocence--it held up its wooden arms in deprecation. I re-read Mr. P.
Leonardo Macready's letter. "Which now overhang the public footpath"! Ah!
that was what was the matter with my trees. It was raining, but I am an
Englishman and the law is sacred, and I went outside into the public
highway and looked at the tall thin tree from the new point of view. Sure
enough--very far up--there _was_ a bough overhanging the public footpath.

I looked up at it and shook my fist menacingly, but it waved its twigs in
response with an irritating amiability. I began to understand what an
annoyance it must be to have a bough up there that you couldn't flick at
with your stick as you passed by, and that even when weighed down by its
summer greenery would bemock you if you made a casual clutch at its
foliage, and laugh at you in its leaves. I went inside and returned with
a step-ladder and an umbrella and a carving-knife, and I stood on the
summit of the ladder and made abortive slashes at space with my right
hand, while the open umbrella in my left made equally abortive efforts to
soar with me skywards. After nearly stabbing the partner of my bosom I
went in, both of us wet like drowned rats, and as I settled myself again
to coffee and correspondence, I could not help wishing that Chang, the
Chinese giant, had remained alive to triumph over my tantalising trees.
Nor could I help wishing that the activity of the local engineers and
surveyors had been directed by His Gracious Majesty King William IV. into
quite a contrary channel.

  William, spare that tree,
  Touch not a single bough;
  If you had planted three,
  They would protect me now.

If, instead of being requested to amputate a beautiful overhanging arm of
foliage, every citizen of London were served with a notice to plant a
tree in front of his demesne, the face of the great stony city would be
transformed. It would become a _rus in urbe_. Why not? Everybody knows
what the late Duke of Devonshire made of Eastbourne; and the beauty of
Bournemouth is mainly an affair of trees. Why should we not walk under
the boughs of Oxford Street? What law of nature or William IV. ordains an
eternal divorce between shops and trees? Why should one not hear the
birds sing in the Strand as well as in the Inns of Court? Let us have
trees instead of lamp-posts--with electric lights twinkling from their
leaves. Already there are London streets quite well-wooded. Even in the
Whitechapel Road it is possible to read--

  A book of verses underneath a bough;

but I shall not be content till Matthew Arnold's exquisite quatrain comes
literally true of London--

  Roses that down the _alleys_ shine afar,
  And open jasmine-muffled lattices,
  And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
  And the full moon and the white evening star.

It might be well if we could transplant to our more prosaic city ways the
beautiful old custom of planting a tree on the birth of a child. It is
true that ladies might object to having their age recorded by the growth
of rings on the trunk; but then they could easily pass the tree on to an
elder sister when they got beyond the average wedding-ring age. Besides,
people would quickly forget whose birth it marked, and the town trees
would soon become anonymous. I would therefore suggest the formation of a
tree-planting party, pledged not to support any candidate for Parliament
who would not vote for the ruralisation of the Metropolis. To the Home
Rule of Mr. Gladstone, with his weakness for cutting down trees, must be
opposed Home Ruralisation. What a fine platform cry--"a truly rural
London!"--with the unique advantage of being unpronounceable by
demagogues in drink. The poor would welcome the policy as a boon. They
are not by any means so unpoetical as Gissing would make out. Only the
other day a baby was found buried in a window flower-box; which is
practically the idea of Keats' "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," an idea
which was itself a graft from the stock of Boccaccio.

If the parish dignitaries became thus associated in our minds with the
Beautiful instead of with bills and blue papers, one might be able to
whip up some enthusiasm for the civic life, and contemplate even
income-tax schedules with a Platonic or Aristotelian rapture. It is not
everybody who can rhapsodise with Mr. Bernard Shaw or the Fabian Society
over sewer rates, and find in the contemplation of communal gas and water
something of the inspiration and ecstasy that the late Professor Tyndall
found in the thought of the conservation of energy.

In firing us to local patriotism by the example of provincial cities, the
enthusiast does not allow sufficiently for the size of London. It
swallows us all up; there are twenty provincial cities in its maw: it is
not a city, but a province. We cannot rouse ourselves to an interest in
Brixton and Camberwell, in Poplar and Highbury. There is no glory in
being a dweller in so amorphous a city, whose motley floating population
is alone sufficient to stock a town; there can be no sense of brotherhood
in meeting a Londoner abroad, still less a Middlesex or Surrey man.
Devonians may feast off junkets and cream, in touching fellowship, and
the hearts of Edinburgh men stir with common memories of Princes Street;
but a Cockney, who has far more to be proud of, is overwhelmed into
apathy. It is only in a compact city that one can develop that sense of
special belonging which George Eliot contends is at the root of so many
virtues. I might just as well be taxed to beautify Dublin as Canonbury,
for all the difference it would make in my grumblings. And if our city is
too large to inspire us, our parish is too small. And so to most of us, I
fear, parochialism is a bore. Theoretically, we know that the parish we
live in is greater than many a provincial town. We know that we ought to
take an interest in its history, and be proud of its great men. But
somehow, despite Mr. Frederic Harrison, our suburb leaves us cold. Our
real life does not centre about our own parish at all. We circle about
the great thoroughfares that radiate from Charing Cross, and the pivot of
our lives is Piccadilly. Born to the Metropolis, we cannot narrow our
minds to a district, nor to parish give up what was meant for London. We
refuse to become provincials. We do not even know that we boast of a Town
Hall, till we are compelled to attend and show cause why we have not paid
the rates, or any part thereof, the same having been lawfully demanded.
If there are any other great men in the neighbourhood, we do not know
their addresses. They are shy and retiring. It is only the retired who
are not shy. That sort of great man comes forth in his tens. He _has_
been a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, and he _is_--a bore.
Once he solicited your patronage, to-day he solicits your vote. Having
given up making profits, he now wishes to make by-laws, and finds a gleam
of his old delight in sending out heavy bills to the neighbourhood. You
get a list of him, which policemen announce their intention of calling
for. You are asked to decide among a column of him, uniformly obscure,
but divided invidiously enough into tradesmen and gentlemen. Who compiled
this list or nominated these gentlemen and tradesmen, you have not the
ghost of a notion. They are sprung upon you as imperiously and
mysteriously as their own demand-notes. You look down the column and make
random crosses by the wayside. You select a sanitary engineer in
preference to an undertaker, forgetting that he is the deadlier of the
two, and you vote for your retired wine-dealer to prevent him going back
into business. But most of the names convey nothing to you, and give you
the sensation of a donkey between two heaps of straw, or of a straw
between two heaps of donkeys. And having thus exercised that high English
privilege, for which you would shed your blood if it were taken away, you
are content for the rest of the year to grumble at the doings of your
representatives. It does not occur to you that public duty calls upon you
to comprehend the parochial mysteries and solicit the parochial
dignities. They seem too petty for a man of any stature--a sort of small
beer for babes and sucklings.

May it not be that the voice of public duty, when it calls upon you to be
a citizen and a parishioner, calls with too piping a voice? There is no
rousing note, nothing of the resonance of a clarion call. A suggestion of
poverty and the workhouse clings to everything parochial, something of
drab and joyless. Is there no way of infusing colour into this depressing
greyness, a martial _timbre_ into this anaemic note? If we are to pay the
piper let us hear him. Let the tax-collector go his rounds at the head of
a brass band, playing patriotic airs. Let brocaded standard-bearers raise
aloft a banner with the soul-stirring insignia, "England expects every
man to pay his duty." Let the hollow roll of the drum thrill the dull
suburban street, and animate the areas of semi-detached villas. No longer
shall the devil and General Booth have all the good tunes, and the ragged
rearguard of urchins keeping time with their bare feet shall follow the
drum to the surer and saner goal of civic salvation. The music of the
streets will become a joy instead of a terror, and English performers
will find a new market. See paterfamilias prick up his ears as the
distant strains of national music impinge upon his tympanum, see his
heart heaving his shirt-front with patriotic ardour, while, with a joyous
cry "The Collectors are coming, hurrah, hurrah!" he rushes to his
cheque-book as the soldier rushes to arms. Is he not serving his country
as much as the soldier, and without pay--or even discount? Nay, why
should the idea of patriotic duty be so emphatically connected with the
shedding of blood, and all the pomp and pageantry reserved for the
profession of Destruction? Why should not the lifeboat be launched, or
the coal dug, or the drain-pipe laid, or the taxes paid, to a musical
accompaniment, and under the shadow of the national flag? Great is the
power of the Symbol: for a few inches of rag at elevenpence
thr

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