'-i«;">-f.%i '''t*;- CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Liorary PR 6037.T785P4 People and questions. 3 1924 013 227 461 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS BY THE SAME AUTBOR THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY THE TRIALS OF THE BANTOCKS THE GHOSTS OF PICCADILLY ETC. ETC. PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS BY G. S. STREET NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMX Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013227461 NOTE IT has been my custom, since I went into the trade of writing, from time to time to make a book of essays, sketches and so forth which I had contributed to various reviews and journals. Perhaps a more fastidious taste has prevented my doing so for the last five years, since such a book is necessarily a medley. The stuff, however, even the stuff I thought worth keeping by me, has been growing and growing, and it is more agreeable to see a book on one's shelves than an awkward mass of cuttings in a drawer. Since the egotism is so obvious it would be futile to dissimulate it : the appeal of such a collection must be largely to one's vanity and a certain fatherly affection. Some appeal, however, there may be to those who have liked one's more coherent books, and some readers have been kind enough to tell me it was a pity not to give a chance of a little longer life to some of the papers I have the honour now to place before you. There is a medley of subjects, and since some of the essays are serious, and some fanciful, and some — what you please : I would not anticipate the 5 NOTE critics too much — ^there is much difference of manner also. I can only hope there is no change sudden and startling enough seriously to upset the reader. A large number of the things appeared in the Outlook, and I have also to make my acknow- ledgments to the Quarterly Review, the Fort- nightly Review, the English Review, the Morning Leader, the Illustrated London News, the Pall Mall Magazine, and (for one little thing) to Mr. Punch. G. S. S. September 1910 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. The Early Victorians and Ourselves 9 II. The New House and the Old 29 III. Flags in the Rain S3 IV. A Day in Sussex 37 V. Fog 43 VI. Some Reflections of an Acted Author 49 VII. My Education 55 VIII. A Martyr to Health 6] IX. My Cockneys 67 X. Of Superior People 77 XI. Of Inferior People 83 XII. Of Enthusiasts . 89 XIII. Of The Level-Headed 95 XIV. Other People's Manners 99 XV. Rules for the Middle Aged 105 XVI. Lord Randolph Churchill 111 XVII. A Question of Happiness 131 XVIII. The Gospel of Sorrow 137 XIX. Sentiment and Feeling 143 XX. In a Police Court 149 XXI. The Art of Moderation 163 XXII. The Plague of Newspapers 169 XXIII. A False Charge 175 XXIV. A Word to be Dropped 179 XXV. Society 185 XXVI. The Discomforts of the Law 193 XXVII. On Being Patronised 199 XXVIII. On Waiting for Dinner 207 7 CONTENTS CHAP. PACE XXIX. Concerning Size 213 XXX. The Lack of Plots 217 XXXI. A Plea for Smiles 223 XXXII. The Late Mr. Alfred Chudder 227 XXXIII. Mrs. Watt Parkinson 235 XXXIV. My Friend Tom Bingley 241 XXXV. Tom on the Rich and the Poor 249 XXXVI. Tom at Home 255 XXXVII. On Pigs and Science 26 1 XXXVIII. On Heroes and Palaces 267 XXXIX. A Visit to Bohemia 275 I THE EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES THERE is an irony with which it is human to be pleased in the circumstance that a period so satisfied with itself as that which we call the " early Victorian " should be fallen into so general a disrepute as the mere phrase suggests. Our fathers or grandfathers deemed themselves in an especial sense the heirs of all the ages ; with a smile of pity they beheld the past, with a broader smile of complacency the present ; they surmised the future with an easy confidence in their eternal fame. And now their age is a common synonym for all that is unenlightened, narrowly conventional, Philistine. As I said, it is human to be pleased with this. But in my case the pleasure is the slightest possible, and transitory as slight. My belief is that in the respects in which this period is usually despised it is thoughtlessly despised, and that in certain vital respects it had a strong ad- vantage over times we live in. Such a belief is sad, and I fear it may cast a gloom over my article. 9 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS I put it in the forefront, to expose at once a not too obvious reason for writing. Yet, after all, it is well to fix from time to time the limitations of elastic phrases, and not of necessity superfluous to draw upon very common knowledge in doing so. The differences between the early Victorian period and our own are numerous and easy to remember, but they are not always remembered when the phrase is used. I shall endeavour to describe the contrast simply, for its own sake, and then to support my thesis. We speak of " early Victorian " years rather loosely, merely distinguishing them from the last twenty years or so of the reign. We do not mean the very beginning, as a rule, and perhaps more usually think of what is actually the middle period. To speak roughly, I mean the forties and fifties and early sixties of the last century. There is another proviso which should always be made, however weakening the effect, when we are treating of periods and the mental and moral changes in communities. If no great convulsion or upheaval happens, a people changes very slowly in the bulk. Moreover, we have to judge of the whole from a small part, and often we may judge from what mere accident has thrown into promi- nence, and what, therefore, is not really repre- sentative. The comparative and relative are apt to be stated as positive and absolute. To express with perfect accuracy, however, all the modifica- 10 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES tions and qualifications which rigid thought suggests would exceed the capacity of the subtlest writer and exhaust the leisure of the most patient reader. I can but deal with what is prominent, and in all probability representative, drawing, for the past, on books and witnesses encountered, too numerous to quote or name, and, for the present, on books and journals and a fairly wide personal experience. And I hope to be reasonably faithful. The most characteristic note in the mental at- titude of the forties and fifties in England, and that in which they contrast most sharply with our own times, was confidence. Misgiving, dubiety, seemed to be unknown. Perhaps we should except the sphere of religious dogma, but even there the doubts seem to have been soon solved one way or the other, and we find a militant zeal which indicates unquestioning assurance on either side. In party politics this confidence was almost without limit. There was a section of Conservatism which really believed in things as they were, and thought it undesirable to attempt any change for the better. It had little or nothing to do with the historic Toryism it professed to represent. It was simply — I speak of a section, not the party as a whole — the articulate emotion of privileged and contented people and their parasites, and its denomination of " stupid " was an accurate description, though hardly the brilliant epigram for which, in our poverty of political wit, it has been taken. On 11 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS the other hand, there was a confident Liberalism which inspired a whole party. Some wished to go faster, some slower, but all believed sincerely in a broad scheme of domestic policy. They were to reform this and that at home ; they were to assist, or at least applaud, the reforming of this and that abroad. So believing and intending, they naturally conceived themselves made very little indeed lower than the angels. The contrast with our own day hardly needs pointing. You might now search long and in vain for a Conservative in public life who would not admit that reforms are desirable or even urgent, though few might be prepared with precise state- ments about particulars. In one respect, indeed, the Liberals may be said to be confident. There is one important matter of national policy in which they seem to have adopted the confident Conservatism of their old opposites. But their confidence in reform, in their ability to improve the body politic by certain definite measures, is gone. The old Liberal spirit animating a whole party is dead. It may seem an odd remark to make after the last election, but the evidence is abundant and the explanation simple. Domestic reform on a large scale and on individualist lines has reached its limit ; but to many Liberals, to many eminent and authoritative Liberals, reform on socialist lines is abhorrent. Labour members have already suc- ceeded in gaining privileges for their Unions, but 12 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES know they have little chance at present of carrying any essential measure of socialism. Consequently there is a large party called Liberal, which, through the faults of its opponents and the accidents of time, is successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than it has been for twenty years a party of homogeneous confidence in domestic reform, while on the world outside these islands it looks with passivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of assisting oppressed peoples. This last contrast is melancholy. As a matter of intelligent politics, one may rejoice that no rash adventures in behalf of other people are likely to be launched ; but it cannot but sadden us that the altruistic and freedom-loving spirit, which was the finest quality of old Liberalism, should have so utterly vanished. For example, the internal state of Russia was believed by us, some while ago, possibly on exaggerated evidence, to show one of the cruellest tyrannies in history, and we believed that those who rebelled against it and were ruthlessly destroyed were true and noble martyrs ; yet the Liberals here who cheered Greeks and Italians and thundered at Austrians and Turks were dumb, and to all appearances callous. Since then this country has formed an alliance with the Government of the Czar, an alliance necessary to our position in Europe and one which we cannot afford to risk by any interference with its 13 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS internal difficulties. Nevertheless, it was surprising that when a few detached extremists expressed the view which would once have been that of their whole party they were so sharply treated by the rest of it. The broad contrast of past fervour and present indifference, which may be easier to under- stand, must for the moment be merely stated. Theoretical Socialism of a logical and thoughtful kind, not entangled with Radicahsm, has made much progress of late years, more especially, so far as my own experience goes, in the educated and professional classes ; but in practice it bides its time, with confidence perhaps, but with a con- sciousness that the time will be long coming. That is a different spirit from the buoyant ex- pectancy of old Liberalism. So, too, with our mercantile classes. The practical monopoly of manufacturing, which accident gave us for a while, was to last for ever, and its sphere was to expand indefinitely. The re-opening, some years ago, of the fiscal discussion found an eminent statesman under the impression that England was still " the workshop of the world " ; but even he must have learned otherwise by now. Universal peace was to come speedily, and war was already an anach- ronism. Alas and alas ! Joined to this overwhelming confidence in the present and future was naturally a contempt of the past. It seemed ridiculous to the forties and fifties that people ever lived without gas and 14 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES railways. Those people were so odd and quaint in all sorts of ways. Pity for them was tender or rough according to the nature of the person who pitied, but pity of a kind was universal. The confusion of material discoveries and improvements with civilisation is still common enough, but the habit of looking remotely back with a wistful envy rather than with contempt has for some time been growing among us. Partly a nervous irritation with the present, partly an increased concern with the art of past ages, may account for this feeling ; it is often based on most imperfect information ; but it is sharply contrasted with the older habit of mind, evident even in some whose study of the past was careful and earnest. Joined again to the belief that the wealth and prosperity of England were illimitable and eternal, but also as part of an aristocratic heritage, there was an attitude towards our kinsmen abroad, to Americans and colonists, which contrasts quite comically with our present treatment of them, do not mean the notorious difference in our policy, but, what was of course another aspect of that policy, our attitude to them socially and personally. Englishmen travelling in America brought home ludicrous accounts of strange manners and customs. Australians in London were the least considered of country cousins. We have changed all that with a vengeance. It is Americans now who come and point out how strange and irrational are our 15 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS customs, while we listen meekly, glad if a crumb of comfort be thrown to us. And we look up to the Australians eagerly, hoping that, antiquated as we are, they may think us worth protecting after all. This is a change indeed. Confident and hard and fast was the theoretical morality of those days. (As for the practised morality, I decline altogether to believe in the swift change of which we are accused.) About the virtues of women there was no hesitation. A line was drawn, on one side of which was a company so pure and holy that men must be abashed when they entered it, and on the other, poor creatures from whom everybody but clergymen recoiled in horror, and even a clergyman " blushes and looks awkward on passing her in the village if he should be walking with his wife or one of his children." It was a simple distinction. A morality for women in which kindness, serviceableness, intelligence, count for nothing and conventional chastity counts for everything is inevitable in a society where the home is still the important unit. With us the individual man or woman is, or is becoming, the important unit, and a broader scheme of feminine virtue is possible. The odd thing about the forties and fifties was that, whereas the leisured and (so-called and more or less) aristocratic society of Europe had long abandoned the absolute and exclusive judgment of women as faithful wives and no more, this class of society in England had this 16 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES habit of judgment reimposed on it. But when women can move about as beings with independent interests and tastes, either in an economically artificial society like the leisured and aristocratic classes, or in a society economically based on the individual, then sooner or later they are estimated as are men, by their characters as a whole, and not by one phase of their characters. An accident of authority intensified the socially narrow judgment of women for one section of society in the forties and fifties, and pointed the contrast with our day, not more " lax," except, if at all, for an unimportant set, but wider and more reasonable in its view. I am well aware that in making these general J distinctions I have run a risk of being intolerably superfluous. That risk would become a certainty were I to pursue the subject into illustrations and details. We might linger, for example, on the greater rigidity of classes, which made the difference between Thackeray's snobs and ours, and partly explains the more overt stamp of his Bohemians. But it would all be " crambe repetita," and I wish to arrive at my thesis. As the foregoing sketch indicates, and as it is unnecessary to prove comprehensively, we have " advanced " on the early Victorian period. We are " broader " in our views, in the main, re- ligiously, ethically, politically. ^stheticaUy we are nicer, though here one very solid exception is to be made : for, granted that our painting has B 17 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS gone back to a sounder tradition, that our stage plays are beginning to have a closer relation to life, that our house furniture is prettier — ^if one sets their vulgar use of gilt against our gimcrack overcrowding — yet a generation which gav? so quickly popular a welcome to Tennyson and Thackeray need not fear comparison with ours in appreciation of literary art. We are more ad- vanced and broader in many ways, and, at first sight, we may seem justified in our complacency, though assuredly not in our contempt. It is my painful task to suggest a doubt. When we consider an advance in thought, habits, or institutions, and argue from that to the qualities of the generation which exhibits it, we must endeavour to distinguish between what is the necessary, or almost necessary, result of momentum, and what is due to present energy and vitality of mind. The distinction is not easy to formulate with accuracy, and is most difficult to apply decisively, but that it is a needful distinction, if we are to form any useful judgment on the subject of this article, I think few who reflect upon it will deny. I shall attempt to throw some light upon the field for its application. A comparatively simple illustration of my meaning may be found in the sphere of religious dogma. The rationalism of the eighteenth cen- tury left the orthodox dogmatism practically untouched, and the beginning of Victoria's reign 18 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES found a belief in a personal devil, a literal accept- ance of the scriptural miracles, and so forth, professed by the most highly educated persons, save for a few denounced as infidels. A priori reasoning had made no impression on the general attitude of mind. One here and there rejected the orthodox view, but these formed a small minority even of the highly educated. Discoveries in physical science, and especially the theory and proof of the physical evolution of man, gradually changed this fact. Not so much the definite inference — though that was, of coiu-se, destruc- tive of much literal acceptance of biblical teach- ing — ^as the different poise of mind produced by these developments in regard to religious dogmatism, made it more and more difficult for the thoughtful and educated to accept this dog- matism ; until now we have, on the one hand, eminent divines adopting a breadth of interpre- tation which would have seemed absolute in- fidelity to their predecessors, and, on the other hand, the fact that the ministry obtains hardly any recruits from the intellectual element in the universities. Very well ; but it would be rash indeed to infer from these facts that divines and undergraduates are endowed with more of mental energy now than they were fifty years ago. As a man grows older, his mental processes are apt to harden, and in all but a few cases fresh argument and fresh knowledge are impotent in later life to 19 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS change the intellectual atmosphere of early man- hood. So we see that, long after the publication of the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, men of great learning and culture still believed in the Mosaic cosmogony, or at least in the literal happening of biblical miracles. Men of little learning and culture and intellectual power are more " advanced " now, and the lesson should be one of humility. Mental energy must be inferred in the few innovating spirits of fifty years ago, not necessarily in the many ordinary intelligences who now profit by their achievements. So in politics. The march of events has forced a wider outlook abroad upon us. At home also an inevitable development in economics has impelled a great many of us to question the expediency of some existing institutions more widely than it was questioned by all but a very few of our fathers and grandfathers. Industrial capitalism is not, in the history of England, a very ancient affair, and the omnipresent potency of what is called " pure finance," its accompaniment, is a thing of yesterday. Consequently such evils as there are in our capitalist system have not had time, until recent years, though gradually extending in fact, vividly to impress our consciousness. It is not necessarily because we have keener eyes that so many of us now see these evils clearly, but because our eyes are longer practised and have a broader mark. The coarser and more obvious 20 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES evils in industrial capitalism were seen by our fathers, and they remedied them as best they could. I will not dwell on matters of taste. For my part I should be disposed to claim as one distinct advance a partial disappearance of the prudery or false refinement which marked the conversation of early Victorian adults in mixed society, and to some extent was a more serious limitation than with us to the full play of thought and observation in their literature. Its genesis among us is baffling, for its attribution to Puritanism is unhistorical. A reaction from public licence in act, such as occurred with the end of the Regency period and spirit, by no means implies a strained reticence of speech, which, indeed, is more often associated with a decadent profligacy. Whatever its genesis, it seems to be passing, and that at least is a gain. In aesthetic concerns, however, most of us follow a fashion, and are lucky if the fashion set for us be comparatively good. We doubt the reality of good taste in an acquaintance when his general conformity to our reading of it is disturbed by one instance of striking heterodoxy ; then we decide that he merely follows a fashion, and so decide not infrequently. I wonder if simple and profound effects of beauty, like that of a bare tree against a winter sky, stir the senses of an average Englishman now more surely than fifty years ago. I am not sure. Such trains of thought suggest care in deter- 21 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS mining that our advance in this or that respect betokens more energy or power of mind among us. I proceed to considerations which suggest that there is less. Too much is not to be made of a comparative lack of names instantly recognisable for great in our generation. It is quite possible that in- tellectual work is now being accomplished which the next generation will hail as wonderful. It is possible also that in certain of the great Victorians, in Ruskin, for instance, and Carlyle, their con- temporaries, and we ourselves, have taken (to some extent) for greatness of thought what was merely energetic eloquence. Yet it is disquieting to ponder on our eminent living men and to speculate how far they are really great. Our philosophers ? our historians ? our poets ? our judges ? our statesmen ? Authoritative wisdom on the bench, constructive capacity in the senate, do not occur to our minds in overwhelming force. Of physical science I know only, as an uninstructed layman, that work of much importance is being done ; how much of it here, how much in Germany and France, I know not. In intellectual work of lighter appearance we can point to several at- tractively writing seniors and to a few young men of forceful originality. One of the very greatest of English novelists is but lately dead, and after Mr. Meredith, we can challenge all but the greatest of the earlier period with Mr. Henry James (whom 22 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES we may surely claim by now) and Mr. Hardy. And no doubt other names, if only the scope of my article admitted it, could be added in other fields of writing. I notice only that, with one or two exceptions, greatness of the first order is not indisputable : but, as I have said, I would not make too much of the apparent deficiency. If, however, there be great men working among us, they certainly do not receive a popular welcome. I have spoken of the high level of taste which made Tennyson and Thackeray so rapidly acclaimed. It is now more germane to observe that a higher level of intelligence than now seems to exist among us was needed to make such writers as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning the popular men they were, and to make them so while they were in the prime of manhood. This is not a question of philosophical ■ value or of poetical and literary accomplishment ; it is a question of sheer intelli- gence. These writers, whatever their ultimate merit, reqiiired more constant and active intelli- gence of their readers than any writers who have quickly become popular in the present day. Mr. Meredith makes a sterner appeal to the intelligence than any of them, but his popularity came to him late in life, and I doubt if it be so extensive. Other writers we have who also make a sterner appeal to intelligence, but they write for the few. Writers quickly popular with us, on a large scale, 23 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS make an appeal altogether slighter. Of course, the matter is complicated by the existence of a huge and but lately created reading public ; and, if it could be shown that while Messrs. X. and Y. have their enormous popularity, still writers of a similar intellectual appeal to that of Carlyle or Browning have a vogue no less than Browning or Carlyle had in their own day, then there need be no misgiving. I fear it cannot be shown. I fear that the writers for whom the new public has produced a demand have captured a large part of the old public too, and that a man who puts any pressure on his reader's power of thought writes for the few. Closely allied to this observation is one that, so far as one may judge from the newspapers and the general conversation of society, there is strangely little interest at present in any abstract or in- tellectual subject whatever. I do not think I need modify that statement on account of popular lectures given to fashionable ladies. Some vague desire for culture, some willingness to attend to general statements, merit one's approval ; but, alas, how the sort of culture achieved merits one's regret ! In the forties and fifties and early sixties there was a great deal of interest in things of genuinely intellecual import. So, of course, there was later still, but I am concerned with the earlier period. Much of this was, no doubt, devoted to subjects about which it now seems superfluous to argue. The propositions in Essays and Reviews 24, EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES seem to us nothing to make a coil about, and any question there is now about evolution is not one which the person of ordinary education can be reasonably expected to discuss with profit. But what has taken the place of such questions in serious conversation ? And how much serious conversation goes on ? It is nothing to our credit that certain questions have been settled for us. It is something to our discredit if we have ceased in a measure to care for what cannot be touched or seen. It is very well to discuss travel and sport and the personalia of life ; it is not well to ignore the meaning of life and the things of the spirit. Conversations recorded or described for us are, I admit, generally those of exceptionally gifted people. But it is the testimony of survivors from the end of the early Victorian times that conversa- tion then had generally more meaning than now, and I think those must be exceptionally fortunate who find about them anything at all resembling the play of reason and imagination which the letters of that period reveal. Indifference and apathy seem to mark our generation. We are tired of the old themes, and discover no fresh ones strongly to interest us. If intelligence be not wanting to us, certainly zeal and energy are. It is significant, for example, that the most brilliant of our playwrights, Mr. Shaw, has a mind which seems altogether analytical and destructive. He startles and disturbs the 25 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS conventional and unthinking man with a fine effect, but he has little instruction to give the wise man. Grant the futility of various commonplaces in ethics and politics, and Mr. Shaw must be silent. Much the same may be said of a younger writer who shines with a thousand candles of clever ideas — Mr. Chesterton. He also is merely analytical. He, too, has noticed the prevailing indifference, and, being gifted with more emotional power than If has heartily denounced it. But he gives us no hint of an object worthy our zeal. I spoke of our apathy in regard to the tragic struggle for freedom in Russia. One explanation of that is that, whereas we felt pre-eminently happy and secure, we now feel the stress of national competition, and know that our energies must guard our own house ; as it were, we feel we have nothing to spare in charity. But the explanation may be partly that our imagination is less lively than our fathers'. Happy forties and fifties and early sixties when great questions were in the air and were discussed with fervour ! Men are happier when their souls are lifted above the little things of life, and talk about the eternal verities " opens the heart and lungs " almost as effectually as laughter. It may be that we live in an ebbing of the spirit now in England, and that the flow will come again in our time. It may be that some fresh conception of life is about so to concentrate and uplift us that we shall 36 EARLY VICTORIANS AND OURSELVES talk and write with the zeal and self-forgetful- ness of fifty years ago. Meanwhile, apathetic, analytical creatures that we are, we invite the humour of the gods if we look down on the early Victorians. 27 II THE NEW HOUSE AND THE OLD IT is a pity we should have a neuter pronoun at all. The distinction between animate and inanimate is crude and superficial. For the value of everything is subjective, and if a tree or an armchair be kinder and richer in response to us than a bigoted man or a pompous woman, then for us it is more alive. A man must be very fortunate or of an abnormal sympathy if he has no acquaintance who is so much dead matter to him, and he is much to be pitied who has no living friends in stocks and stones. But this simple truth is obscured by the stupid neuter pronoun. A ship is so obviously alive that nobody who has ever been on one thinks of making her neuter, and so there is no obstacle in speech to the liveliness of our affection. We may be familiar with a house for years, however, and because we verbally deny its life, its personality and our responsive emotions will only be revealed to us by a catastrophe. I agreed with my friend that his old house was not ideal. It had no distinction of architecture 29 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS or age, and it lacked some of those conveniences which a man of means may look for in his country home. A pity to miss the ennobling influences of indoor space if you can afford them, or not to invite as many of your friends at once as you like to see together ; the old house was too small. Yes, my digestion would benefit by a billiard-table, and a long gallery to pace on wet days. A larger library to contain the many books I intend to write some day ? By all means. My friend is an enthusiast for architecture, and has among his friends an architect whose ideas and aspirations are congenial to him, and here was a beautiful site wasted. Everything considered, it was reasonable that my friend should demolish the old house and build a better where it was, and if I hesitated in giving my consent it was only because I should be un- housed while the process was going on. I never thought of any personal claim the old house had on me. I supposed that I went to see my friend and his family alone ; that the welcome of rooms and staircases was but a reflection of theirs and would be easily transferred. No thought of remorse, hardly one of regret, was mine. I merely looked forward to the beauties and pleasures of the new house. I went over to the place while the work was proceeding. The old house was utterly gone then and the new not begun. It is odd that even then my regret was vague and slight. I felt chiefly for 30 THE NEW HOUSE AND THE OLD the lawns and gardens and green-houses, which had a pitifully naked and useless air with no dwelling- house to serve. My friend said little or nothing of his grief for the loss. I believe that at the time the ways of building-contractors and their workmen were affording him an interesting object of study and some emotion as well. Yet he can hardly have been absorbed in that to the exclusion of regret. I have been told by another friend whose house was burnt before his eyes that it was like seeing a friend killed — ^but when one's friend is being slowly and systematically murdered by one's own direction ... no wonder my friend said little or nothing. Finally the new house was finished, and I went down to stay in it. I was all curiosity as I drove through the pleasant Sussex woods, and no melan- choly oppressed me. When it came into view I perceived it was a fine and beautiful house, and congratulations rose readily to my lips. So when I went over it on my arrival ; I was interested and pleased ; it was a fine house, but there was happily no reason to wonder " where d'ye sleep and where d'ye dine ? " Everything was dehghtful. Some slight fanciful contrast may have crossed one's mind between the new house and the old friend ; some feeling, as it were, that the mud of one's boots and the ashes of one's pipe should be watched with unusual care. Still, I did not seriously fear that the new house would place the old friend in 31 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS too searching a light : my faithful boots and pipe would be at home. I had no pang of regret until after dinner. It happened that the new dining- room looked into the same part of the gardens as the old and its furniture was the same ; in the interest of talk I had forgotten the change, and when we left the room I expected the familiar hall. There was a pang then, slight and passing in a moment. But in the watches of the night the ghost of the old house came crying outside my window. It whispered that it had been my good friend, not worthy to be so easily forgotten. Was a billiard- room or a gallery worth the death of an affection ? Was not I a wretch who could admire the beauty and strength of the new love without one thought of the old ? The old house, as I had been told, was the foundation of the new : our fresh joys rested on its strong support. There was an allegory, which I doubt might be painful to follow out. ..." Ring out the old, ring in the new ! " But there are moments when one seems to belong to the past more faithfully than to the future, and while I salute the new house with admiration and wish myself a long acquaintance with it, I dedicate this tribute of sentiment to the memory of the old. 32 Ill FLAGS IN THE RAIN A MEMORY OF A KOYAL VISIT I HAD sat in a garden or walked on the Wiltshire Downs all Saturday and Sunday under a hot sun, and on Monday morning woke to a curtain of rain over all things. I greeted it with the smile of a philosopher. The hot days had been delightful in the country, and I am not, I own, countryman enough to love walking or fishing in the rain. But then I was going to London, and London is an indoor place, embarrassed by prolonged fine weather. We feel, especially if we are at some sedentary work, that we ought to be out in the open air, enjoying the sunshine, and our means for enjoying it are so limited. Our rooms and theatres and throats grow stufiier and stufiier. Glorious weather in London is really a mistake. Rain, on the other hand, matters very little unless one has to go about, and the art of living in London is the art of not going about. c 33 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Unreproached we lead our natural indoor life, and no pedant of exercise can rebuke our Turkish baths. The country needed rain, and I was charmed it should get it. With these pleasant thoughts and my philosopher's smile still unaffected, I left Waterloo Station and mingled with the mud and umbrellas. . . . And then, presently, at the bottom of St. James's Street, I was aware of something inappropriate, and rousing nayself from my re- flections perceived that it was flags. All up St. James's Street and adown Piccadilly, flags. Festooned across the street, of all colours and sizes, but for the most part mean and small, swaying miserably, dripping pitifully in the rain, flags. The mode of writing is distinctive of some- body else, or I would repeat the word several times. I detest it in any case. " Rag " I do not mind. " The blooming old rag overhead," is jolly and affectionate. But " flag "—the look and sound of it are foolish and stupid and vapid. Let us not refine, however ; the thing in the wrong place is enough for our dislike. On Monday I had hardly the unkindness to reproach the flags, so pathetic were they, and so pathetic in the rain the good intention which had placed them there. But since they have remained in the sun, I may dis- course against them not unprofitably now. They suit the aspect and atmosphere of London in no part of it, but in Piccadilly they are an outrage. With the dignity of its houses, and the tender 84 FLAGS IN THE RAIN green of its trees, Piccadilly is a fine and beautiful sight. To hang flags between the trees and the houses is to take a serene and comely matron and trick her out like a chorus girl. Why should it be done ? It is right to welcome the sovereign of a friendly country ; but surely a courteous welcome is sufficiently signified by crowds of cheering Londoners, deserting their avocations for the purpose. One might assume, too, that he wishes to see our city as it is and at its best. You do not compliment a guest by painting your house purple and putting on a false nose. I would not say a word against pageantry. Amid some changes in our people, not wholly to be praised, their increasing love of pageants is altogether good. Dull and sad-coloured are the lives of most of us ; there is some little relief in seeing from time to time splendid and stately processions, and we must all admire the wisdom of a king who readily and genially lends himself to them. Let us hope that with increasing love may come improving taste. Our processions themselves, with their soldiers and state carriages and outriders, are very well, but the streets through which they pass are disfigured. The true note of London is in its strength and dignity and age ; skimpy little flags and tawdry drapings are a discord. On Monday, however, the unseemliness was all merged in pathos. It was like an absurdly decorated child crying forlorn. To a true citizen 35 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS of London its moods should be as those of a long- acquainted mistress, whose smiles do not feverishly elate, but who weeps quam familiariter. On Monday the tears were grotesquely pathetic. We had wished so much to show ourselves gay and genial and had made ourselves so gaudy and absurd for the purpose, and all was spoiled. I had not the heart to go away, but stayed to see the pro- cession. Under cover, I grant you. I have an immense respect for patriotic citizens who can stand in the rain and mud to do honour to their country's guest and catch a glimpse of red uniforms in a closed carriage, almost something of the respect I have for those who fight their country's battles. There they stood about, disconsolate under their umbrellas, behind the bearskins of the Irish Guards, patriots all. It must have seemed an eternity of waiting to them till the procession whisked by with clattering escort and red uniforms in the closed carriages. The cheers did not quite rend the rain, but were as hearty as they could make them. And then miserably the crowd walked away. Above it still the saturated flags, pitifully leering down. But by this time their pathos was on my nerves and I shook my fist at them as I turned out of Piccadilly. 36 IV A DAY IN SUSSEX I WENT to bed before twelve as the doctor bade me, but by ill fortune the mice did not go to bed at all, and I lay awake all night in my humble lodging, meditating on the glory of writing books for a rigorously selected public ; so that to-day I am bitter and irritable. It is cold and sodden, and a weeping mist blankets the valley. I will be a philosopher and pasture my thoughts on last Thursday, when the sun shone, and the woods and fields and lanes of my dear Sussex were blithe and comforting, and there was peace between the world and me. Tranquillity remembered in emotion, as one might say. The day began prosperously. There was no obstreperous milkman. Milk comes to the cottage from a cow in the next field, with no clattering fuss. Surely it is an unlovely paradox that milk, the most innocent of foods, the only food, according to one apostle of our modern religion, which con- tains no uric acid — ^the modern Enemy of Man- kind — should be given us in London with so much 87 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS ferocious uproar. Every house in my street goes to a different shop for milk, and every milkman, yelling defiance, flings a hundred cans on the pavement and kicks them about, and the fury lasts from six to eight. There must be more in this than the mere love of noise for its own sake which the nervous Londoner observes all day long. I believe that milkmen are really brewers and wine merchants in disguise, and seek to disgust us with our innocent drink. " Ugh ! you milk-swilling swine ! " — so their banging and shouting seem to cry — " Take your filthy poison. No uric acid ? \'Sniy, it's full of typhoid fever. Lap it, you dogs ! " Nothing of that uproar here. Then the morning papers did not reach me till eleven. I read a novel instead on Thursday until at eleven the papers came, and by lasting me till luncheon saved me the strain of deciding which great work I should begin. And then I went for a long walk. The sophisticated reader is soothed by this simple statement, but the sporting reader shows open scorn. A simple walk ? No gun, no rod, no golf-clubs, no horse, no motor? Nothing but my walking-stick and such legs as heaven has granted me. Thus I was going to break a record ? Four miles an hour content me. I had indeed a pretty village in my eye, but I cared not if I reached it, proposing to turn wherever a bypath pleased me. (The landowners, like the peasants, of this part of Sussex are a kindly folk and do not 38 A DAY IN SUSSEX threaten one with savage notices.) Some of my brilliant friends say they would be driven mad by the monotony of putting one foot in front of the other for any distance, but for the excitement of hitting a ball or firing a gun. It is a civilised quality, I think, to enjoy simple and easy pleasures, and to enjoy stretching one's legs and looking about one — ^that and no more — has the distinction of rarity and cheapness in these sporting, expensive days, and I think I have the advantage of my brilliant friends. It is likely that some other writer, however, has discoursed on the pleasures of walking. But it would be interesting to compare the mental experiences of walkers. Does the action quicken your thoughts, for example ? Mine it does, if I have a companion and am talking, but the reverse happens if I am alone. Then I am apt to stare at one thought, so to speak, and if I add a mile or so an hour to my usual pace I cease to think at all. A tune will run in my head, repeating itself until I change it consciously. In a solitary walk my brain is at rest far more cer- tainly than in sleep. I note the fact because I am often told by others that they think out problems, compose ballades and villanels, and the like, while they walk. It is a useful economy, but I hope one is more in tune with the grass and the trees and the scurrying rabbit, and the pheasants one puts up — poor things, so pathetically tame — when one thinks not at all. 39 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Some one before me, no doubt, has discovered the pleasures of walking, but no one to my know- ledge has told, as I would wish them told, the pleasures of walking in this district of Sussex. Most of Sussex I know and love ; the county has all that I desire, cornfields and pasture and woods and bleak downs and the sea ; but the stretch of it midway or nearly between Tunbridge Wells and Lewes is the fairest and kindest of all. Five- Ashes, Framfield, Cross-in-Hand — the sweet names match the wandering green lanes one walks to reach them, with here a peaceful old homestead and there a beautiful old mill, and ever, as one gains the higher ground, a noble view over sloping fields and woods and the dark line of the South Downs. Pleasant in the sun on a cool autumn day ; pleasant too, if one be the least bit of a countryman, in the gentle rain at evening, when the stately patient pines give one grave company. Even Mr. Lucas, in his sympathetic By-ways of Sussex, has not dwelt on this part as it deserved. But then he took such a large theme : he could hardly give one spot the lingering love it asks. " Pursuing the right bank of the river we come to the village of Buttermilk, where is a fine speci- men of the Tudor," &c. &c., something of that manner there must be in a work of so large a scope. Mr. Kipling's Sussex poem is chiefly of the South Downs. He should write another now that he has come to live further inland. Had 40 A DAY IN SUSSEX I his gift, I would write a hundred poems on Sussex. On Sussex and its kindly people, about whom, I remember, Mr. Belloc has written understand- ing verses. In a sense they are something of a failure, these Sussex folk. Since England chose to have a few rich men rather than many strong men, and let the countryside go hang, the stronger and the harder have gone from it, and there is something parasitical and unreal in the life which is left. But there is also left humanity and kindness and natural courtesy. There are places in Great Britain — I name them not — ^where children scowl at a stranger and jeer behind his back. Here they run to a cottage gate to tell you your way and speed you with smiles and nods. Their elders stop in their work leisurely to discuss your route and your chance of weather. I admire with enthusiasm the hard workers, the shrewd pro- spectors, the fearless pioneers of Empire, but I doubt my sympathies are quicker with the leisurely kind folk who linger in our unprosperous places. Nature and man in Sussex are my friends. 41 FOG AN acquaintance has kindly informed me that there is in these scribblings of mine - too much introspection, meditation, re- flection. " Go out," quoth he, " into the beautiful world, and write down what you see there." I think he is wrong. There is far too much de- scription done as it is. It is easy to go to a place and easy to write a sort of cataloguing description when one goes. Fitly to describe any visible thing whatever is the work of an artist, I question not. But artists are few and easy work is tempting : it seems well to me that some of us scribblers should sit at home and think. The result may not be magnificent, but there is sufiicient rarity in the exercise to give it a sort of an odd flavour which may not be so dull to everybody as to my acquaint- ance. I always follow advice, however, and so, having received this, I took my hat and went out into the beautiful world, with the intention — ^but it really is a base intention — of writing down what I saw there, 43 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Unfortunately there was a thick fog. Now the cultivated reader is assured, of course, that a London fog is a beautiful thing. But the only writing Londoner who has never described one may as well cling to this negative distinction. Besides, I doubt my aesthetic quality is old- fashioned. Curious, weird, interesting, I perceive a London fog to be : its beauty something eludes my gross vision. A mist, or a light fog, when one can see some forty yards about one, has a fugitive fantastic charm, but so has not a dense and isolating vapour. I could write, with feeling and gratitude at least, of the beauty I saw at dusk all last week in the trees and distances of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. The lonely grace of the winter trees, their bare tracery, unspeakably delicate, clear against a purple or violet haze in the sky, and the pretty fairyland where the yellow lamps made spots of colour — all this was beauty wonderful and magical, and I blessed my lot for once that I could go and gaze on it day by day. Immediately thereafter to perceive that masses of dirty vapour had their beauty also was too swift a turn for my senses. So I will let the description alone. After all, it has been claimed for a fog that it is a blessing to men of letters, because it forces them in upon themselves, and this fog drove me once more to reflection, since it is fated I should disappoint my acquaintance. Beauty or none, there is much to be said for a 44 FOG London fog. It gives us all that " change " which we are always needing. When our world is all but invisible, and growing visible bit by bit looks utterly different from its accustomed self, the stupidest of us can hardly fail to observe a change for our eyes at least as great as there would have been in going to Glasgow. When arriving a% one's house or one's club, that monotonous diurnal incident, seems an almost incredible feat, accom- plished with profound relief and gratitude for a safe deliverance, one has at least an unaccustomed sensation. One is not a man going into his club, but a mariner saved from shipwreck at the last gasp, to be greeted with emotion by erst indifferent waiters. Yes, a fog gives Londoners a more thorough change than going to the Riviera to avoid it. Then it brings out the kindness and cheerfulness, which are their prime claim to honour, into strong relief. True, it also throws into relief the incomparable egoism of the pros- perous among them. People with no serious cares or worries in the world of course bemoan and upbraid this trifling inconvenience. But the working, struggling Londoners, cabmen and 'bus- men, you and I, display our indomitable good- humour to advantage. I stayed on top of a 'bus for half an hour in the block on Monday at Hyde Park Corner and talked with the driver. People are often disappointed in a 'bus driver because they expect a wit and a pretty swearer. They 45 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS find neither, but they find an overworked man of extraordinary cheerfulness, responsive, ready to laugh. He is master of his business — a fact emphasised by the fog — ^to a degree refreshing to one whose experience of men professing some practical calling is that the great majority, some from mere stupidity, some from over-hasty en- thusiasm, are quite incompetent. When finally I left him, his mate piloted me through wheels and horses to the pavement, and I felt I had been among folk who deserve to live. On Sunday night I walked a mile to my abode, and made a point of asking my whereabouts of every one I met. Not one churlish or even hurried answer : politeness jokes, reminiscences, laughter. We are a kindly people, and it is worth a fog to know it. Another pleasure of a fog is a mild but extended form of the pleasure we feel when we hear that a millionaire has broken his leg. The too fortunate are suffering a discontent wealth cannot remove. There was in that block a fat brougham containing an important- looking old man who foamed at the mouth, and one reflected that there was a temporary equality of fortunes. Such are the pleasures we may take in a London fog. It has also a chastening lesson for us, being a regularly recurring proof that we are not yet civilised enough in the main to make any sacrifice for the public good uncompelled. We shall not provide the right kind of grate until there is a 46 FOG penalty for not doing so. Each citizen will argue that the cost is certain and the benefit, unless the others do the same, as he is sure they will not, insignificant. It is an allegory of more vital matters. The cave-man is strong in us yet. Let us humble ourselves. But if we are not intelligent enough to abolish fogs, let us be at least sophisti- cated enough to enjoy them. 47 VI SOME REFLECTIONS OF AN ACTED AUTHOR I HAVE had an ounce of experience, and I believe that the ideas it has suggested to me may be of interest to my readers. Of old, to be sure, I had tons of theories about the stage, and expressed them with the facile pen of comparative youth. Strong views had I about the state of the theatre in London, invincible prejudices, vehement comparisons. These I still retain, more or less, as comparisons and views : it is the nature of my interest which experience has enlarged and shifted. Long ago, when first I tried to write plays, I ceased to comment on the work of others, finding something invidious in the proceeding, and being more alive to their difficulties. Now, at last, when a play of mine has been pro- duced, with myself as an assistant — to some slight extent — or at least a constant and anxious spec- tator at its preparation, I find that I have some- thing to say from a new personal equation. A sometime professed critic (for a few months), and D 49 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS a pretty frequent playgoer, I am now an acted playwright — ^the glory of it ! — and have, as it were, used the tools whose effects I was wont confidently to appraise. I must premise that nothing amusing on the personal note is to be expected of me, no " humours of rehearsals." I regard all that as much a private matter as the humours of the last dinner-party I was at, and will pause on the point only to say, as I think I may say without impertinence, that I wish in every business one had colleagues so zealous and so agreeable. It is not my intention to suggest that no one can fitly criticise plays and acting who has not ex- perienced in a practical way the processes by which plays are brought finally to the footlights. Heaven forbid ! Who am I that in my new-found conceit I should rule out X, and Y, and Z ? It is well that a critic should not be immersed in the theatre, but have a calling, or at least interests, quite distinct from it, and no one can do every- thing. But it is the case that play-writing and acting are commonly criticised with less practical experience of their means and difiiculties than any other art. A writer criticising a writer of books is comparatively near his subject ; a critical artist even is so far near a creative that the common tools of the trade are the same. Most reputable critics of painting and music are themselves in some way painters and workers in music ; ask 50 REFLECTIONS OF AN AUTHOR painters and musicians what they think of the others. Critics of play-writing or acting seldom have tried their hands at the art. I do not complain of the fact ; I observe merely that it is so, and that my experience has reminded me of it sharply. To take play-writing by itself. A little play of mine the Stage Society produced was a comedy of manners, such as it was : that at least was obvious. Yet one critic complained of its " lack of earnestness," and another that it contained no " thrills of passion." That is to say, on the merely literary side of play-writing two critics were ignorant of its elementary principles, since earnestness and thrills of passion would knock a comedy of manners to pieces. When one comes to the side where the man of letters and a playwright part company, the arrangement of human bodies in a given environment to express contrasting character, one may expect more naturally to find them differing on points of technical skill. I am more interested for the moment, however, in acting, and here, again, my experience has taught me that in all probability I said foolish things about it when I criticised from the outside only. This not of supreme art : Duse at her best is clear to a man who had never seen a play before. But of art not supreme and not perfected by study it is very easy to make mis- takes. For example, again : it happened that my little play had been rehearsed only twice 51 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS on a stage. Every actor knows that in such a case nothing but keen and skilful acting could have carried it through at all, and I wonder how many spectators knew that any faults they saw (in the playing, not the play !) were not in the main the faults of players not clever enough, but of clever players at a disadvantage for want of practice. I have learned, or think that I have learned, many things about acting and its values — faintly suggested before, when I have acted for fun, and confirmed now that I have watched it in its stages as a business. Intelligence and not sympathetic emotion must be its basis in the first instance. Watch a scene done over and over again till it is done right, and then believe that emotional sympathy can carry a player through. Almost comical it is to note the abrupt turn from an assumed personality to the player's natural tone, asking if this or that was the intonation required. The fine player can and must put on a personality as it were a garment, with the same swiftness : he may have to don and doff it six times in ten minutes : can a fire of emotion be kindled and extinguished every time ? . . . The merit and fault of an actor by no means end with his own personal delivery and gesture. A company of I'players is like a football team, only far more sensitive to interaction; each must depend on each for the helpful tone, the accustomed 52 REFLECTIONS OF AN AUTHOR manner which prepare for the cue before it comes, the fidelity to arrangement. A gifted artist who puts the others out would hardly be worth his place, and he is a jewel, though mediocre his powers of personal expression, who is always in the picture, always pat to his moment. ... In our custom of theatrical realism in small things details on the stage have a value vastly beyond what they have in life — a curious result. " What is it that gives a wrong note in his make-up ? " " It is his trousers." It was his trousers — Charmless, meaning nothing off the stage, meaning much in the world of selection. A paradoxical result of the demand for nature in small things : that the casual irrelevant nature of real life will not do. , . . One might discuss such discoveries — ^they are so to me — for ever. But already you see the general effect of my experience. The tools and method of his work, these are the things of first importance and unceasing interest to an artist, not his ultimate effects. We writers talk sometimes of style — it is rather a tedious subject — ^but style is too vague and abstract for a perpetual interest to any but a virtuoso. The material, tangible, visible tools and means of the painter and the musician never fail to take his interest, though they may not absorb it. When a writer's plays are played, his tools are the players and their art. (The simile sounds rough, but I remember they are also the 53 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS disposers of his fate. ) So his true perpetual interest must he in acting, not in theories and projects. But, dear me ! I am talking hke an old play- wright, who have only just begun, and, for aught I know, may not continue. 54 VII MY EDUCATION IN the general process of probing, sifting, overhauling, rummaging, prodding and kick- ing our national concerns which is going on so vigorously and prosperously in this for- tunate period of our history, the education of our upper or well-to-do classes is suffering its full share of stripping and slaps. I should like to add an unconsidered murmur to the discussion, since my youth was submitted to this education, though I should not like to call myself upper and heaven knows was never well-to-do. I am not provided, however, with a perfect scheme of my own. The preliminary difficulty faces me that I do not know if the average boy is capable of learning anjrthing, or if, in that case, there is anybody capable of teaching him. The evidence seems to be negative. The average product of our public schools and universities knows nothing at all. It is not the case that he has been taught useless things, or has but a smattering of this or that — ^he knows nothing. 55 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Nothing, mark you, nothing at all. I do not say that this fact is necessarily bad. It may be one of those things which has made our country what it is. There is a fine simplicity about it, the sort of perfection which belongs to all plain and absolute things. A danger may lurk in disturbing it. I will leave this danger to the clear-headed and sensible men who have no doubts and content myself with a few reflections suggested by my experiences, in my humble way. From the schoolmaster's point of view I was not — I make the present of this admission to my enemies — an average boy. I was a boy of ex- ceptional ability. That is to say, I arrived at the sixth form and gained a scholarship and so forth. From this standpoint I believe in all sincerity that in intention and in its main pro- visions m.y education — on its intellectual side — was very good. It is still my opinion — ^after discussing the matter often with some of the ablest and most distinguished advocates of an opposite one — ^that for a youth with brains the Greats school at Oxford, for which one's school work was a preparation, is by far the best education to be had in England, and might easily be made an ideal one. It may not give him riches, but it gives him a sense of perspective, and taste, and above all the habit of considering the meaning of words. I am a firm friend to " composition." In so far as my mind differs from a parrot's I believe it owes an 56 MY EDUCATION incalculable debt to the turning of modern thoughts into thoughts — so near as one could get — possible to ancient Romans and Greeks. No contemporary language — ^unless it be Chinese or that of some people as remote in habits of mind — can replace that exercise. Of course I do not mean to say — one has to be careful in a dearth of logic — that every one who has missed " my advantages " has a parrot's mind. But I do say that to me and thousands of others they have been a safeguard against the tyranny of phrases, the pretensions of mere verbiage and the slothful refusal to follow an argument which are far more hurtful than ignorance to intellectual honesty and efficiency. There were deficiencies no doubt. One ought to have been taught French at school. That is, one ought to have been stimulated and induced to profit by the excellent French teachers on the premises. But my chief complaint is that on the main lines of our education we were not taught enough. There were horrid gaps in our classical reading. We read our authors at an absurdly slow pace ; the clever and indolent had far too easy a time. From my sixth-form and scholarship standpoint, however, I believe my education was very good, and only regret that there was not more of it. As for the average boy — ^hang him, my sufferings from his superior physique are still lively in my memory — ^if it is found impossible to give him the essence of education, which I take 57 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS to be the desire of knowledge and the habit of thinking, I would suggest that he might at least be taught — unintelligently and by force if not intelligently — a few elementary facts about his own country. I have read so much about Trafalgar of late that I confess I am slightly fatigued, but it is a pity the average public schoolboy should never have heard of it. That, or a like ignorance, is quite common with him. Yet I would not for worlds say a word to trouble the peace of schoolmasters, with whom my sympathy is intense and intimate. It must be hard enough to be a schoolmaster without being reminded of that fact every time he reads a news- paper and tries to believe himself an ordinary citizen. I think his lot is far worse now than it was. Of old he was the boys' natural enemy, the butt of opprobrious nicknames, a person to be avoided and outwitted — ^but he remained a man. Now he is the boy's natural friend — and he has to remain a boy. That cannot be wholesome, and I strongly question if it can be pleasant. It may be easy at first, no doubt. We grow up with such incredible slowness nowadays that a man of twenty-five is often not so old as a boy of fifteen was two centuries ago. But even now it must be abnormal not to be grown up by forty. And then to go on with the implicit pretence that playing cricket or football is the most important activity in life and the coming match with another school 58 MY EDUCATION the most vital issue on the public horizon ! Always to be keenly interested in the respective athletic prowess of boys, always to discuss with them the state of their houses in regafd to games, always to denounce the scoundrel boys who shirk games, always this athletic pedantry and priggishness, always games, and games, and more games — what a life for the grown man is that of the con- temporary schoolmaster ! It is, indeed, to be " boy-rid," in Charles Lamb's phrase, to a degree of which Lamb's generation never dreamed. This incubus of games must surely fret the adult souls even of those whom such circumstances as the implicit assumption of perfect virtue and profession of an artificial code very well for boys but preposterous for men — circumstances which some of us could not endure — do not mortify. I would not trouble the infrequent rational in- tervals of such a life by a criticism of our public school system in an aspect which is more import- ant than its intellectual value. It is claimed, and generally allowed, that, granted intellectual failure, still the work in forming character done by our public schools is vast and good. It is said to be helpful to a boy's character to take him from the natural influences and affections of his home for three-quarters of many years. The result is self-reliance, manliness and many other virtues. It is never unnatural selfishness and obtuseness of feeling. The way to form a boy with a sane 59 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS outlook on life and immune against its dangers of emotions is to keep him like a novice in a monastery, save for a quarter of the year, till he is nearly twenty. To question all this might disturb the peace of a much-tried body of men. And why should one make oneself more unpopular than one is ? 60 VIII A MARTYR TO HEALTH We mayn't eat that — we mayn't drink this — The doctor says it's quite amiss. SOME such dismal parody of a song popular in my youth might serve for a contemporary Chorus of Diners. The pursuit of health is a passion, an engrossing study, a fashionable and complicated game with everybody nowadays, and health is pursued chiefly by giving things up. Health — it is all that many of us have for morality or religion, the practice of its alleged necessities all that conscience demands. It is the creed and gospel and eternal occupation of our times. Very good. I like to go with the times, and would not for the world affect a vulgar singularity. Blessed with a fair constitution and a good di- gestion, I had very tolerable health in the days when I was not required to bother about it. But were I disposed to plead this fact as an excuse from examination and discussion and denials, I should stand corrected before so many young men and maidens, patently healthier and stronger than 61 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS I am, who examine and discuss and deny all the time. Not only Uncle Hippias does it nowadays, but Richard Feverel as well. You may ask an athletic youth fresh from the university to dinner, and think to please him with champagne, but not he ! A little lithla water, with a tabloid from his waistcoat pocket thoughtfully dropped into it, is all his desire. I admit, then, that comparatively good health does not exempt me from the fashion. And so far as conversation goes I have no great objection. There are vainer topics. Ten years or so since we were all occupied with Woman, not in the old-fashioned way of making love to her, but in discussing her qualities and defects, her deficiencies and her claims in regard to Man. That was less sensible than the conversational exposition of our stomachs, which at least implies individual existences. It is the practice that perplexes me. I am more than ready to admit that the old, comfortable fleshly ideas were wrong. The idea, for example, that our wise ancestors were able to drink as they drank because they ate as they ate — in other words that a man might drink too much provided that he ate too much as well — ^has been very properly exploded. Reduced to reasonable limits I liked the idea, because I approve of a glass of wine with a hearty meal and abominate " drinks " at other times — but it is vain to sigh over ib. I agree that we perhaps eat too much flesh. I detest 62 A MARTYR TO HEALTH the selfish indulgence of the rich, though I am bound to add that I have not personally noticed them eating and drinking more than the com- paratively poor. I approve warmly of sufficient exercise, and, if I doubt that severe mental work is commonly compatible with perfect physical health, I am willing to sacrifice the former. Only, once more, the practice is so difficult. To give up articles of diet is simple enough. Sometimes my mind reverts wistfully to the advice of a philosopher who told me that life would do all the giving up necessary for me and that I need not trouble myself ; but responsive to the more fashionable opinion I have given up alcohol, meat, bread, uncooked fruit, salt, tea, coffee, fish, cooked vegetables, game of all sorts and butter. Now I am told that rice and tapioca pudding, on which I proposed to support life, are fatal to it, and I find that a diet of varalettes and lemonade leaves me feeble for my work and — ^what is so much more important — my exercise. All, all are gone, the old familiar pleasures of the table> and something is needed to replace them. All that is simple, however, and I assume that we all have taken this preliminary step. But then comes the proper disposal of one's time. We are all for the simple life, but on examination it proves to be a little less simple than one would have hoped. In a daily paper a lady has expounded it for us. I will not mention her name, as I fear to 63 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS misquote her dicta, but so far as I can remember they were as follows. On a summer day you should rise at half -past three and lie on the grass listening to the birds till eight. Then you should breakfast on a banana and an apple — ^but Smith denounces fruit — washed down with milk. (Jones says milk is poison.) More open-air amusement till seven, when you should have another hotly debatable meal like the first and go to bed. I have always envied the life of domestic animals not made to work, and this is very like it. But it is undoubtedly difficult when you have to earn your bread — or a more hygienic substitute — in London. In fact, the reflection crosses my mind that this simple life rather resembles in essentials the unfair luxury denounced by the other prophet. It is an awkward train of thought. It is not possible for me to rise at half-past three, but it is possible, and extremely pleasant, to go out at eight and walk and run for an hour on the pathetic turf of a London park. Thereafter one's bath is in- effably delightful ; one has a glow of Men Hre, and one's conscience preens itself and purrs. Only — only — such a pleasure, leaving one agree- ably tired, makes work a most distasteful thing, therefore to be done with the less efficiency, and again comes the question if this asceticism be not rather like self-indulgence. Oh dear ! oh dear ! It is a hard problem. Is one to die from lack of food which Smith and 64 A MARTYR TO HEALTH Jones agree in holding innocuous, and is one's poor work to dwindle and cease ? Or — ^the unfashion- able thought will intrude — should a man go about his business and let exercise take the chance of time and inclination, and — and — I stop my ears for the certain howl of execration: — and eat and drink what pleasant things he can get, while their harmfulness remains a theory for him ? A base thought, perhaps, but not actively noxious, for of course he will not dare. E 65 IX MY COCKNEYS THERE are, I suppose, people who prefer other animals to men. Certainly I have known one or two sportsmen who showed with dogs and horses an interest and animation, at least, that no merely human society was capable of evoking from them. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt has written a poem inveighing against the destruction of other animal life by man, in terms suggesting a conviction that of the two the other animals would better have survived. For myself, while I am fond of all animals except those which may injure me, annoy, startle, or keep me awake at night, I find my own species, on the whole, more interesting and attractive than any other. I prefer my own countrymen to foreigners. Of course I abuse them from time to time, as we are all accustomed to do, and complain of their manners, want of intelligence, want of public spirit and so on, with an implication that certain other nations are less subject to these faults ; and no doubt, as we excel in some qualities we fall 67 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS short in others ; but in practice, however much one may admire this or that advantage in Frenchman or Itahan, it is with one's own people that one lives easiest. As we grow older, too, novelty, still attractive at the outset, fatigues us earlier. For a similar reason, perhaps, of my country- men I like the south more than the north. Sturdy independence, grit, precision of mind — these are qualities I respect. But I am more at home with the south-countrymen. To me they seem softer and kindlier, less fit to battle with a rough world, of a mellower social habit — generally more sympa- thetic to one who never learned how to push. My " imperfect sympathies," I should add in this connection, are not, as were Charles Lamb's, with Scotsmen so much as with north-countrymen in general : as an accident, I suppose, of a very partial experience, I have found Scotsmen nearer my heart than men of Yorkshire and Lancashire. But there are parts of Sussex, for example, where I know that strangers will return my smile or my greeting, will answer my questions kindly and with an unhurried interest, and that I never know when I fare north. But dear to me as the dwellers in south-country villages are, they have not with me that fellowship in small things which makes the ease of daily life. For, alas ! I am but an amateur countryman at best. So I come, by a regular process and with 68 MY COCKNEYS the circumstance befitting a great subject, to my beloved cockneys. They are the people with whom I am most at home. Their attitude to life, their approach to persons, their tastes and the bulk of their interests — all these are familiar and intelligible to me. I shall not deign to defend them against any evil connotation which may exist for some readers in the word. It is one of the uglier characteristics of humanity that any word descriptive of a class or section — cockney, suburban, rustic, middle- class, what you will — is most frequently pro- nounced with a sniff by those who do not, or think they do not, come into the category. I have before me a rather spirited defence I once made of cockney humour. I shall not repeat it. No candid ob- server believes that the forced jocosity too often meant by the expression is distinctively cockney ; every candid observer knows that the real thing — whether good in quality or, like most common human efforts, poor — is at least spontaneous, lively and quick to the occasion. It is unscrupu- lous, sometimes coarse and brutal, but with a brutality free from malice and unkindness. For cockneys are the best-natured people under the sun. It is notorious that a big London crowd is of all crowds in the world the most harmless and the easiest to manage. But see them also in their ordinary collections, outside the gallery door of a popular theatre, or crowding in the carriages of an 69 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS excursion train — what fun and kindness and wholesome give-and-take ! A dehberately rude or offensive cockney is hardly to be met. They are quick to resent a tone of patronage or unjusti- fied authority, it is true, and people who think that their own superior incomes or clothes give them the right to speak de haul en has may com- plain of incivility in return, but you and I know whose is the real bad breeding in those cases. Observe the conductor of a 'bus, how civilly he answers the questions of some stupid old woman ; how pleasantly he helps little children in and out. . . . They are patient to an extraordinary degree. Curses may fly freely in some fog-obscured stoppage of traffic, but they are cheerful curses ; a really lost temper is at once the sport of such a crowd ; chaff and comic resignation are the rule. And your genuine cockney is gay. The evils of his climate, the fog and dirt and bleakness, make it impossible that he should show a cheerful countenance when there is no counter excitement to mirth : he cannot wear the pleased and happy look of the sun's children ; solitary people in our streets look glum, I confess. But the cockney responds at once to a comrade's joke or some broadly humorous incident. He is not given to hearty peals of laughter, but his laughter, for all that, is near the surface. Good-humour, kindness, patience and essential cheerfulness, those are his most excellent virtues, 70 MY COCKNEYS One merit is generally allowed to the cockney which I do not think he possesses, and I wish to be just. It is an old fallacy that the townsman is more intelligent than the countryman. The townsman, being later in the evolution of society, naturally gave himself airs over the countryman, and despised him for not knowing town know- ledge, indifferent to his own ignorance of the country. Hence the tradition that the country- man comparatively lacked intelligence. It is one of the many conceits of mere knowledge, one of the many instances in which knowledge and wit have been confused. Also I am unable to contradict the opinion often expressed to me that the cockney young man is not physically courageous — is unapt for single combat. I myself am not allowed to fight, because I have a weak heart, but I quite agree that it is right to break a man's jaw if he insults you, and it is a pity if the young cockney is slow to perform such a feat. But given full force to these demerits, how far do the virtues I have named outweigh them ! They are the virtues of civilised people, the virtues which make life tolerable. They would outweigh graver faults. If the cockney needed the defence, I would maintain to the death that they outweighed faults in " morality," in the common sense in which that good word is so hatefully and narrowly misused. But I believe he needs no defence in this matter ; his " morality " is at least as 71 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS sound as that of his class in any part of Great Britain. I was in Brighton during the first half of last August, a time when the place is crowded with cockneys on their holidays, and I consorted with them on the piers and tramcars, listening to bands, watching the man who dives into the sea on a bicycle, and enjoying other such recreations. Crowds, as crowds, never please me for long, in drawing-rooms or elsewhere. But this crowd of cockneys at Brighton was as pleasant a crowd as you could hope for, civil, debonair and inoffensively gay. What little rowdiness there was was the work of young men, of course — ^young men of all classes are occasionally objectionable — ^but of a very small fraction even of these, and I am sure that their suppression by a more energetic police would have given universal satisfaction. But the quiet fathers and good-natured mothers and hilarious but unaggressive young women were all delightful. The young women's finery pleased me intensely. It was easy to sneer at its occa- sional bad taste ; but when one remembers what a part of hard-earned wages goes to proctire it, and what a part of ill-spared time to keep it neat, surely the finery is touching to see ? And I saw but little bad taste : fresh white dresses were the rule, and hats not more overdraped than I see in Bond Street. One hears rich women censure these girls for spending on their dress money they 72 MY COCKNEYS should spend on food. It may not be heartless, that censure, but stupid and unimaginative it is. To think of appearances before your stomach is imwise, but surely it is pathetic — that striving after what you think beauty, that eagerness to make a fair show and be a credit to your sweet- heart ? For rich women, who have ever3i;hing they want to eat and wear, to sneer at such endeavours. . . . Well, imagination is a rare quality, or they would not bemoan the starving poor and feed their pet dogs on chicken. I will not write of the children, because the delightfulness of all children is to be taken for granted, except of those little unfortunates who are spoilt by too much attention. Of the youths and girls I admired the ease of social intercourse, the facility of acquaintance. It is so much the contrary with the class — I detest these expressions, but one is driven to them — ^the class immediately above the one I was with, that the facility was doubly pleasing to see. I was sorry I was too shy to take advantage of it. In this respect the professed exponents of cockney life give a faithful picture. The other occasion it pleases me to comme- morate is an evening I spent some time ago in an East End music-hall, to attend a " beauty show." It was one of the treats of my hfe. On the stage a collection of young women carrying numbers on their chests, some embarrassed men who were to 73 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS judge their attractions, and a densely packed audience which was one incessant yell. Of course, refined reader, it was not a very poetical or spiritual occasion. But there was simply nothing to jar your feehngs. One assumes that a young woman who goes in for a beauty competition is a person of fairly strong nerves, not very sensitive to direct comment, prepared to stand some chafi. And there was nothing more than chaff — no single note of the really offensive. It soxmded unchivalrous to hiss a winner, but it was understood that a part of the audience merely took that method of championing a rival. Many of the beauties and a large part of their " friends in front " were Semitic — ^the winner of the first prize was a very beautiful Jewess — but Jews and Anglo-Saxons were in- distinguishable in their genial enthusiasm. . . . I made a mental note or two, after my fashion. Many of the beauties were comely, with that robust comeliness which doctors love, and which un- happily seems to be out of fashion in our intellectual circles, and — strangely or not — in our professedly athletic. They were, of course, picked specimens, but they did but emphasise the general fact that the physique of our women seems more and more favourably to compare with that of our men. Some of the best-looking women in England you may see any weekday evening between seven and eight o'clock, going down Bond Street or St. James's Street from the shops where they are 74 MY COCKNEYS employed to the trains and omnibuses, but I doubt you could not say a like thing of their brothers. Another note I made was, that whatever the physical condition of the destitute alien Jew, they very soon. " pick up " whenever decent food is within their reach. These were genuine East End work-girls — ^their hands showed it — and those of them who were Jewesses were probably not far removed from the alien stage, since Jews have a way of working up, and their contribution to the physique of the country was not bad. That by no means shows that destitute aliens should be welcomed, but we may take it for a shred of comfort. But last I noted once more the good- humour and friendliness of the cockney. It was an occasion on which chaff and excitement might have been supposed likely to go out of bounds. But it never went. The smiling girls on the stage, the shouting young men in the audience, all were a happy family frankly enjoying themselves and meaning no harm. Dear cockneys — I don't mean to be patronising. 75 X OF SUPERIOR PEOPLE I AM glad this is not a long essay for a serious review. If it were I should have to begin by defining exactly what I mean by superior people, and to do this I should have to worry my brains until my head ached, to walk up and down my room until I was tired, to bite through my penholder several times, and to waste half a quire of paper before I found the right logical sequence in the idea and the absolutely truthful expression, with all its proper exceptions and qualifications and the deuce knows what. It is so much simpler to say, " You know what I mean," which is all there is space to say here — and it comes to much the same thing in the end. That is the charm of short articles. They are not economical. They use up one's little ideas with fatal rapidity. But they are much more amusing to write than your long exegeses, and I fancy are quite as profitable to read, at least by the judicious. For what a man really has to say, what has im- pelled him to speak, can get itself said shortly, 77 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS and all the distinctions and deductions and the rest can be left to the sagacious and imaginative reader. Prolegomena chill one's interest ; while it braces one to start immediately on one's theme. And, by the way, I have not yet started on mine. Just one word, one little word, of preface. I use the phrase superior people in a bad sense, of course : it would be dull to use it in a good sense. So used, the phrase, like most phrases, is comparative. Your bad superiority is a matter of time and place and company. It generally means saying superior things (in a good sense) to the wrong person, or in the wrong connection. To quote Greek in an Oxford common-room is not superior : it is superior to quote it in a public house. That is, if you are addressing the com- pany at large ; there is no harm in mere incon- gruity of place if you do not annoy your neigh- bours ; a music-hall, for instance, gives a fillip to a discussion of metaphysics, and I have heard with pleasure profound truths of sociology spoken (in a whisper) in a gallery of the House of Commons. But do let us abandon these refine- ments and get to the main subject. Superior people are of two kinds. The first kind inflicts superior knowledge or experiences on one in an inappropriate way. I have no objection to learning things. On the contrary, as I grow older I find in myself an almost morbid appetite for facts. But they must 78 OF SUPERIOR PEOPLE be facts which mean something to me. I don't want to hear dates, or unimportant names, or the altitude of uninteresting places. We all have our limitations. I confess with regret to an extreme ignorance of machinery and to a con- sequent inability to understand explanations of machinery, and I seem to be always listening to intricate descriptions of the internal construction of motors. The experts know my ignorance perfectly well, and simply give their knowledge a superfluous airing. That is being superior. So with places. I am singularly untravelled, and what is the good of telling me that various towns in Southern Italy — which I never heard of and can't possibly remember — have various ordinary merits and demerits ? Why the good is that the teller asserts his superiority, confound him, and that is all. Tell me some strange or horrible or amusing fact about them, and it is quite another matter. Sometimes this kind of superior person, not content with asserting his superiority, insists on rubbing in one's inferiority with questions. Thus the machinery expert may ask me if I know what a dynamo is. " No." " Good heavens ! At any rate, you know what a volt is?"— I think he said volt. "No." Then he becomes frankly offensive, and asks me if I have ever seen a common lucifer match, or some such rude question. My travelled superior may preface 79 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS each of his uninteresting accounts with the ques- tion if I have been to this, that, or the other town or village, and say at intervals, " Ah, I forgot. You've never been to Sicily " — or India, or America, as the case may be, and smile his superior smile. It is a poor kind of superiority, to be sure, since it requires no particular cleverness — except leisure and money, which are clever qualities, no doubt ; only it is not pretty to boast of them — to go to places in these days, but one dislikes to see it paraded. One travelled person I know joins this superiority to an alleged exten- sive acquaintance with important people. It is curious that he seems never to have met them in England, but the method certainly gives you a right and left, so to say. " I saw a great deal of Kitchener in Beluchistan some years ago. Do you know Kitchener ? " And a little later : " Have you ever been in Beluchistan ? " Doubly ignorant and inferior I retire. The first kind is bad, but the second kind is far worse. These are the superior people who take a superior view or line of thought at the wrong times. We are all willing to admit limitations of knowledge or experience, except in regard to vice and the customs of the aristocracy. But none of us likes it to be supposed or detected that his point of view or plane of thought is not all that there is of the most intellectual and spiritual and refined 80 OF SUPERIOR PEOPLE and elevated. This is why the second kind of superior person is worse than the first. It is really- most annoying when a point of view obviously superior to the one you have taken, ignoring the earthy considerations you have mentioned, fixed steadily on higher things, is trotted out to dis- comfort you. And it is more annoying still when your point of view has been taken merely as appropriate to a trivial occasion, and you hold the superior view really all the time. I remember such a thing happening to me in connection with the theatre. It was many years ago, when I was a very young man, and perhaps the least bit of a superior person myself. In any case, I was quite ready to admit that as an in- tellectual person I found nothing on the English stage except Ibsen's plays — it was before the advent of Mr. Shaw's — ^nearly good enough for me. In fact, even in regard to Ibsen I rather liked to go one better than other people and complain that though his construction was clever his philosophy was superficial. I sat next to a very young lady at dinner one evening, and asked her if she had been to any plays lately — asked it simply, as though there were nothing odd in going to plays. And she : " Plays ? Oh, really, there's such a gulf nowadays between the m.any and the few that one can't be expected to share their amusements." She meant the intellectual few, of course, and there was I, with all my F 81 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS intellect and superiority even to Ibsen, calmly placed among " the many," all because I had con- formed to the atmosphere of general society. That is really the maddening trick of superior people. Either you have to be superior yourself, and possibly incur the dislike and contempt of a third person, and bore yourself by rehearsing your whole mental equipment on inappropriate occasions, or you let the superior fool patronise you and triumph over you in his heart — and it is not human to like that. I know a " musical comedy " makes no appeal to my intellect and knowledge of life, but I don't want to say so every minute while I watch one. The superior person does, and that is why he is one of our minor discomforts. 82 XI OF INFERIOR PEOPLE IT is all very well to denounce superior people, but I am inclined to think that inferior people are, on the whole, a more serious inconvenience. By the way, I am not denouncing the whole human race. I may look as though I am at first sight, because no one is really quite the average ; we are all superior or inferior in one sense. But that is a foolish quibble, not worth explaining : we must keep strictly to business. Some inferior people are always inferior and always a discomfort. These are the people whose inferiority is some moral or intellectual meanness — ^pretentious people, low-minded people, snobs, and so forth. Others are a discomfort only by accident of time and place, such as merely ignorant people, and their inferiority is not to be thrown in their teeth ; still, they can be a deadly nuisance, to be quite frank about them, can they not ? As a general rule, however, it is the really and 88 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS truly and always inferior people, they who take a low point of view, who are our daily discomfort. And it is to them I refer when I say that inferior people are a more serious trouble than the superior. Superior people irritate the mind, but these hurt the soul, or, at least, tend to have that effect, and a damaged soul is rather a dreadful thing to carry about with one. Bad superiority — ^that is, superiority in the wrong place — is merely an impertinence, which good superiority (yours and mine) resents, but forgets. The inferiority which is always bad tends to degrade us and leave a mark. I hope I make this clear ? What I am trying to say is that inferiority is catching. It is no use denying it, indignant reader. Take your snob. He says of Brown, who is worth a million of him, a really splendid fellow, a rough diamond withal, that, of coiirse. Brown is a capital chap, but it's a pity he drops his h's. There is no harm in saying this if it is merely a trivial piece of information he is giving you, but if Brown is a common acquaintance, then your snob is simply inciting you and himself meanly to con- gratulate yourselves on a slight accidental advan- tage you have over Brown. You say " Tut ! " in effect, and point out how small the point is, but you have (you know it) a mild, contemptible glow of self-satisfaction (I am sure you have), and you have been made for the moment unworthy 84 OF INFERIOR PEOPLE of yourself. There is a certain sort of writing the success of which is based entirely on this meanly insinuated flattery. Or take an ill-tempered, nagging fellow. If you cannot escape him, you soon find yourself nagging back. If it happens at dinner, you will have indigestion, and if that does not hurt the soul, I should like to know what does. Or take the man who is always suggesting base and sordid motives for people's actions. He not only ruins any real interest there may be in a conversa- tion — outside a solicitor's office — ^but he compels you incessantly to contemplate vileness, and there is a proverb about the dyer's hand. Yes, in a thousand ways, the truly inferior are degrading, and being degraded is — or ought to be — a dis- comfort to us. I must not preach too solemnly all the same. Your base-minded fellow — ^the true inferior, the worst that is made — will calmly assume baseness in you, as a matter of course. Suppose you have said that, as an ideal polity, you bel.eve in Socialism. Says he with a grin : " Ah, wait till somebody leaves you ten thousand a year." There can be few more flagrant insults than to suggest to a man that he would change his pro- fessed convictions for a personal and material reason, but you might talk for an hour to this creature and fail to make him understand that he has insulted you at all. He simply cannot imagine 85 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS any one professing a view inimical to his personal interests. And if you tell him, what is the obvious truth, that there is nothing inconsistent in believing in Socialism as an ideal and having (in the present preposterous state of society) ten thousand a year, he laughs sympathetically — ^with you, not at you — as though you were a cunning knave. What is one to do with him ? Observe again, that meanness, added to an inferiority, makes all the difference to our dis- comfort. It is inferior to be dishonest. But if you forge the name of a multi-millionaire for a hundred pounds, though I shall do nothing to save you from penal servitude, I shall not feel uncomfortable when I see you on your emergence. Should you, however, be tempted to steal a crossing-sweeper's broom, I would rather you did not make me your confidant. Bad temper is inferior. But when, in a burst of temper, a man commits a murder, we suffer no discomfort — if he does not murder us — from his crime. On the contrary, it is exciting, and any excitement which does not injure us personally has a pleasurable quality for us. I am sure the late Mr. Lecky or the happily living Lord Avebury must have pointed out this profound truth. Many a dull hour in a newspaper office has been cheered by a murder. While mean ill-temper gives pleasure to none of us : I refer you to the same authorities. Inferiority which is not mean, and is generally OF INFERIOR PEOPLE harmless and excusable, is sometimes a discom- fort nevertheless. There is nothing mean about ignorance. Indeed, there is often something fine, something elemental, about really unfathomable ignorance, which it may ennoble us to contemplate. But ignorance at the wrong time ? When one is a person who has been writing for years — alas, how many ! — on literary themes, it is a little chilling to be asked . . . but I won't complain. . . . I might appear to give myself airs . . . only we literary gents sometimes wish that people would not talk about literature. Mais 6 ! ne parlous de literature, as Verlaine said. It is so easy not to. Stupidity, again, even the densest, may be an excellent thing. A world of people, " all think- ing for themselves," would be a terrible place ; you and I need a background, and some assurance that the world will not be turned upside down while we are away on a holiday. One is especially grateful for the stupidity so often apparent in successful people, which gives one the illusion that he, too, might have succeeded had he but tried : perhaps they assume it in kindness to us, though I hope not. But arrogant stupidity ? The stupidity which tells you that the beautiful lyric, the ingenious paradox, the thoughtful essay is " dam rot " ? Has not many a fine thing been half spoiled for you, because you cannot think of it without 87 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS reviving the memory of some fool whose clumsy hands have mauled it ? ^ The other evening at Major Barbara a woman near me remarked audibly at intervals — ^usually when Mr. Shaw's pathos and wit were at their best — that she wondered " how such a play got put upon the stage at all." The only thing in it which amused her was the rufi&an. Bill Walker, knocking down the old woman. She almost spoiled my evening. But my compliment to her, all the same : she suggested an article. 88 XII OF ENTHUSIASTS I BEG you not to mistake me. I am none of your cold-blooded, sneering, smug fellows who suspect all enthusiasm of insincerity, or condemn it as bad manners. Far from it. I admire and in a way respect enthusiasm — almost every enthusiasm. It may imply, it often does imply, a limitation of intellect or emotion or knowledge. But it is nearly always a fine thing to contemplate in imagination, a thing whereat, so to speak, one may warm one's hands, chilled in the cold of age, or failure, or ill-health. I admire zeal and determination and forgetfulness of self. Yes, morally, enthusiasm is most often beautiful to muse upon. Only I find that in practice its presence is apt to be uncomfortable. It is delightful to think of earnest, single-hearted souls, rushing about the world, indifferent to circumstance or consequences, their mind's eye fixed on the all-mastering theme. It is not delightful to get in their way and to be knocked over. 89 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS One finds it extremely difficult to avoid this. You cannot refuse to meet a man on the ground that he is an enthusiast. As a rule, that is to say. Some enthusiasts there are, enthusiastic drunkards, for example, or homicides, whose friends do not expect them to appeal to average tastes ; but as a rule, the enthusiasm is credit- able, or, at least, harmless — in intention, anyhow — and commands universal praise. " He's tre- mendously keen about " this, that, or the other, is always meant as a compliment. I join in it heartily. " Is he ? " say I, " how splendid 1 " Indeed, I mean it, but when I am asked to meet him I have a misgiving. I should like to hear that his enthusiasm is under control. Of course, enthusiasm is sometimes delightful, even in social intercourse. If you do not wish to talk yourself, and the enthusiast has an agreeable or interesting presence and a good voice, it is pleasant enough to listen to him. You remember the story of Disraeli and the lady who held forth to him on the rights of women or some such subject. She was a beautiful woman, and grew doubly beautiful in her excitement, with flashing eyes and eloquent gestures. Disraeli sat attentive until she finished and looked on him expectantly hoping for a convert, and then, " You darling ! " said he. It was insulting to the lady, as an in- tellectual force — I don't know if she ever forgave 90 OF ENTHUSIASTS him — ^but an evidence of the aesthetic pleasure enthusiasm can give one. Beautiful enthusiasts with fine voices are to be encouraged, even socially. Again, the enthusiasm may be interesting. It may be your own enthusiasm, though, since potter is foe to potter, your enjoyment in that case is not certain. Or it may be the opposite enthusiasm to yours. Of old, the more your opponent — in politics or religion, say — ^was enthusiastic, the more you had him assassinated or burnt. But nowadays, the more enthusiastic he is the more you praise him, and like to meet him. Perhaps in an indifferent and apathetic age one is grateful to any one who is interested in one's cause, even if he wants to demolish it. Or there may be some curiosity or novelty about the enthusiasm. A zealous Mormon or collector of dishonoured cheques may while away an odd half-hour quite agreeably with his arguments or instances. But most enthusiasts, being men and women like ourselves, are neither beautiful nor melodious, and the average enthusiasm is for something dull and stupid. And the richest eloquence cannot make much of a poem out of tees and bunkers. Let us consider a few enthusiasts who are apt to try their polite listeners. The theatrical en- thusiast is one. Personally, I am rather interested than otherwise in his subject, but I can imagine 91 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS what stricken hours must be passed with him by those who are not. He excludes every other subject under heaven from his purview — and yours also : he sweeps it away. He was talking to me once on his theme when there came up to us a friend newly come from Paris, where he had been much in diplomatic circles. It was a time when we were all (except the theatrical enthusiast) excited about the North Sea difficulty and the friend had heard extremely interesting news which he tried to tell me. But not a bit of it : the theatrical enthusiast swept him away. " Charlie Fitzhoward," quoth he at the first pause, " told me once that when he was playing in The Be- haviour of Polly at Manchester, his dresser for- got — " and so on : he nailed us firmly to the boards. He takes you through all the plays of the extremely prolific Mr. X., apropos of some disputed quality in that distinguished author, detailing plots and comparing scenes, and re- iterating at frequent intervals his conviction that X. is the only living man who could have written the third act of The Triumph of Cant. He takes you through all the parts of dear old Z., whom we remember since we were boys, with extremely inaccurate imitations of his famous moments. He is an irresistible torrent of trivial reminiscences. Irresistible ; for we must distinguish the en- thusiast from the mere bore, who can be circum- 92 OF ENTHUSIASTS vented or headed off. The real enthusiast — on whatever twaddling theme — ^holds you by the force of the fire within him ; you are for the moment the lesser man, the man of uncertain purpose, and you know it : not mere politeness, but elemental decency keeps you prisoner to that glowing eye and emphatic forefinger. Poor you ! As I said, personally I rather like this particular enthusiast. The one I cannot bear, he who fills me with loathing and terror, is the enthusiastic egoist. Many enthusiasms coincide with the interests of the enthusiasts, of course, but they imply some- thing more, some broader outlook than self. The fixe of the enthusiastic egoist burns only for himself, his money, his reputation, his " getting on," and it is a lurid, intolerable flame. I do not mean the ordinary selfish man, who dismisses your troubles with perfunctory sympathy, and talks brightly of his joys. Nor even the perfect, unswerving egoism of a Sir Willoughby Patterne, for that, save in extremity, is decently concealed. I mean him who, with all the energy and appealing force with which other enthusiasts speak of their causes and sports and missions and hobbies, calls on you to exult with him in the lucky speculation he has made, in the copies of his book that have been sold, in the post that with any luck he will gain. He — but if you know him, no comment of 93 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS mine is necessary. It is all very well to be friendly and sympathetic, but he asks too much of us, does he not ? We cannot make a cause of his success and prospects, and it is nothing less that his enthusiasm asks of us. 94 XIII OF THE LEVEL-HEADED MOST words (it is common knowledge) in addition to the obvious meaning they bear on the face of them, have a flavour which is perceptible but a little more diflicult of analysis. Different minds, of different forms or cultivation, appreciate this flavour more weakly or strongly ; but as a rule something at least of the flavour is present to speaker and auditor. With some words however, the case is otherwise. These are used in one sense, but may carry with them an alto- gether unintended token of another. People who understand the token, of course, are wary when they use the word, and gradually the significance extends ; but the word may have a long run in this double capacity before it is generally detected. The abstraction, however, grows obscure and awkward, after the fashion of abstractions. Let the concrete example be jumped upon the table. " Level-headed." What does it mean? Of course it is intended to mean that a man is of sane and sound judgment ; but what does it really mean ? 95 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Reflect a moment : cogitate. What kind of person uses it, and of what kind of person is it used ? Yes ; given the reader's sagacity and delicacy of mind, the answer was inevitable. When you hear the expression " level-headed," it is ignorance crying to ignorance, stupidity applauding stupidity. The token is invariable, so far as my memory goes. I was set thinking of it by reading that a body of people — ^never mind who or on what occasion — ^was anxious that " level-headed " per- sons should replace experts on some board or council or conmiittee — never mind what. There the opposition was clear and emphatic : " level- headed " ignorance was directly opposed to superior knowedge. It set me thinking if I had ever heard the expression used without such a token for the understanding mind, and I found that I never had. If a man speak of the sane judgment, the sound sense, or even the common sense of another, it is possible — ^though in the case of common sense it is not probable — that he is really an intelligent person complimenting another intelligent person. These terms, no doubt, may also be appUed to admired stupidity. It is the complacent belief of the dull that the lively — of the prosaic that the imaginative — lack soundness of judgment. Charles Lamb wrote his essay on " The Sanity of True Genius " to demolish it. As he said, it is impossible to think 96 OF THE LEVEL-HEADED of a mad Shakespeare. Soundness of judgment may exist on a high plane and on a low. On that highest plane it may be argued that it must exist : there the glories of imagination are controlled by it. On the lowest plane it cannot be said to exist, for there appetite and external pressure take the place of judgment. A human being of low intelligence does not exercise judgment ; timidity and sluggishness keep him in the rut of custom. It is precisely such a being who suspects the soundness and sanity of his betters. Some- times he does so with unconscious justice ; fine imaginations, though not the finest, ignoring common considerations, fall into error, and when such an error is detected the dull-witted enjoy the triumph of their lives. More often his vanity cheats him, and, enraged by what he does not understand, he assumes that in some quality at least he himself is the better man : since he has never thought for himself, his judgment has not been suspected, and therefore this quality of judgment is the easiest to claim, and so has to be denied to the superior intelligence. Such, or something like it, is the explanation why the stupid man denies the clever man judgment, and why with relief or even rapture he confers it on his brother fool. Unless, however, you know him or his brother, or the reasons of his appro- bation, you do not know if this compliment of sound judgment he confers may not be deserved. s 97 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS It is when — dear, unsuspecting fellow that he is — he speaks of " level-headedness " that the situa- tion is clear to you in a flash. You know that you are listening to one dullard complimenting another. It means that limited knowledge, a narrow out- look, a dwarf imagination, a slavish obedience to custom, are felt and welcomed. Perhaps it is a mistake to raise any objection. The expression is a great convenience, and it would be sad indeed were it abolished. There is also a kind of picturesque humour about it which indeed may explain the convenient limita- tion of its use, for no one with a sense of humour would use it in praise. As one hears it, one thinks of a low forehead, a flat surface above it, and straight staring eyes — eyes, in fact, which must be always level, which may never look down for memory or upwards for inspiration. It does not suggest a noble nature or even a wise one. And as one thinks of the level-headed collectively one remembers that they of all people, with all their prejudice and caution, are the prey of the char- latan and the swindler, their sentimentality exploited in the theatre and the book-shop, their greed in the City ; and one sees an absolutely level surface of close-packed heads, with the swindler and the charlatan dancing aloft on it. 98 XIV OTHER PEOPLE'S MANNERS IT is best, I think, to look at the matter objectively, not worth while to write about our own manners. They are a discomfort to us sometimes, no doubt. Sensitive creatures that we are, we all remember various lapses from our kindly, vigilant selves into which absence of mind has betrayed us. But these are mere accidents of forgetfulness, which we blush to recall, but which cannot really have annoyed fair-minded persons. We have forgotten to ask about the health of the sick — or have forgotten not to ask about the health of the dead. We have called a remarried woman by the name of the husband she has divorced. We have repeated jokes about Jews in the presence of Mr. FitzBraham. Possibly, too, once or twice in our lives we have allowed the irritation of our nerves, racked by overwork or anxiety, so far to master us that we have avoided some bore a little clumsily, or confessed we had heard some weariful old anecdote 99 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS before. But that has hardly ever happened, and was surely venial. No ; the faults in manners which really are a discomfort are due to positive brutality or excessive stupidity, are committed by those in whom the root of all good manners, con- sideration for their fellow creatures, is not. And these are exclusively the faults of other people. I do not speak, to be sure, of brutality beyond all bounds. Deliberately to " cut " for example some inoffensive person is an action beyond the scope of an essay on manners. I am told that there are people who have done this, in mere indolence, or because the person cut was not sufficiently distinguished or fashionable for their recognition. The quality of intellect which can make this possible is painful to contem- plate ; indeed, it seems to border imbecility in the strict sense of the word. Deliberately to incur enmity for such an idiotic reason is an action of interest to mental pathology, but is ill-mannered only in the sense in which knocking a man down and kicking him in the stomach is ill-mannered. Yet, mark you — and herein is a wonderful thing — ^there are people who lightly and calmly attribute this almost incredible brutality to you and me. That is the brutality I complain of — the brutality of supposing, without proof and when half a dozen other explanations may exist, that 100 OTHER PEOPLE'S MANNERS an omission to salute or speak to an acquaintance can be deliberate. To be egotistical a moment, I confess that I have a bad memory for faces, or, rather, that though I usually remember a face I have seen before I am slow to remember where I saw it, or by what name it goes. I am also extremely short-sighted. In consequence it happens from time to time that I see and do not remember some slight acquaintance. What does he do ? Come up to me, and tactfully recall to me who he is, without insisting on my forgetfulness ? Well, I do not demand that he should. Life is short, and one may be shy of stepping into the foreground. As a rule, I myself am too shy to speak when obviously I am not remembered. But what he must not do is to go away and say I have cut him. The fool ! Why on earth should I commit such an idiocy ? And he does not see that if any cutting was done he was the cutter, not I. I have complained of him before, but he has done it again since. Let him boast of a better memory for faces or a less memorably repulsive appearance than mine but not accuse me of insult- ing him. He is not worth it. There is another sort of man who does not, indeed, accuse me of cutting him, but who, ad- mitting that I have merely forgotten him, resents my forgetfulness to my face. " You don't know who I am." " Oh, my memory's not so bad as 101 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS all that." " Then, who am I ? " The brute ! Not such a brute as the other, but a brute. Once I said, " You are a fishmonger," but he was not to be put off. In your ear, reader : I can explain him. There are people with a grievance against the cosmos, because they are not the most beau- tiful people in it, or the most distinguished to see, and our lapse of memory reminds them. . . . Let us pity their vanity and forgive them. But I am using up my space over a merely personal complaint. The reader may have a perfect memory, and never suffer from the false accusation. What sort of manners does he suffer from ? Well, now I come to think of the matter, direct criticism of manners is rather a delicate business. A pity it should be so. Many excellent men go through life annoying their neighbours' nerves by some little peculiarity which parents or nurses should have corrected. What a dehghtful fellow that friend of yours is when he is not consuming soup ! What a pity you can't tell him ! Yet it would be easier to accuse him of murder or forgery. The reader plays bridge ? Then it is, perhaps an occasional discomfort to him when his partner treats him, not as an acquaintance helping to beguile a little leisure over a trivial game, but as a subordinate officer on active service whose gross ignorance of his profession and neglect of duty have lost a battle. The word reminds one 102 OTHER PEOPLE'S MANNERS of Lamb's immortal whist-player, but she never sinned against good manners, however provoked, as sin some of your bridge maniacs. A painful strain of latent savagery has been revealed by bridge, and makes a fascinating game rather a trial to nervous dispositions. No doubt of it ; new occasions demand new codes of manners, when natural kindness is not sufficient for guidance without them. Motors have shown this distressing fact, and golf and bridge. And, by the way, Turkish baths. A special code should be drawn up for Turkish bathers, and a broken rule should be tattooed on the offender's back. For the perfect benefit and enjoyment of a Turkish bath, complete freedom from any irritation is necessary. Absolute silence in the hottest rooms, please, so that languorous poetry may lightly fan our brains ; how can it when two dullards are arguing about a stupid play ? And kindly kill that gentleman who is scolding an attendant. In the course of a thousand Turkish baths, not a score that have not been partly spoiled for me. We must not be too exigent, however. What shall I say, if I complain so of these trifles, when I am crushed to death getting into a District train ? That will teach me to complain of other people's manners ! Why, so it will, and, indeed; such complaints are themselves the worst of manners, I know. I only make them in public. 103 XV RULES FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED IT has been suggested to me that too little care has been bestowed upon the middle- aged, as such, by social philosophers. One cannot be surprised at this ; social phil- osophers, whatever their range of study, point of view or mental capacity, have one quality in common, the desire to startle, and there is nothing startling to be said about the middle- aged. To the young the joy of paradox, to the old the charm of strange memories ; middle life is commonplace and practical, and who would discourse on it with profit must be practical and commonplace. Turn the page, young reader, many pages, if need be, until you find — I hope you may — something more inspiring ; this is not for you. On this occasion I write " for myself and a few friends in the pit," for other dwellers in this sad land of middle age where now I have lived for some years, in response to an appeal from certain of them that I should frame rules for their guidance. I respond without 105 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS delay, for the appeal is urgent, and would ask therefore that any roughness of statement or abruptness of dogmatism may be pardoned me. Nor would I have the middle-aged reader take what follows too personally ; he must not be angry if I tell him to avoid what he has never dreamed of doing, nor suspicious that I have done it myself. The secret of middle age is acceptance. Other evils one may conquer for a time by ignoring, but not this one. It may be true that a man is as old, as he feels, but in the main his procedure and expectation should conform to his years. You must meet middle age half-way, with a smile. Even exaggerate its limitations. Recognise cheer- fully that your youth is over, and you will be deUghted to find how much of it is left. Say " In short I may not do the things I did do," as Byron said at thirty-three, and you will be found doing them at fifty. I know that there are wonderful people who pass straight from youth to old age. They charm us with their buoyant gaiety, their romance, their fresh good looks, and all of a sudden — ^pouf ! — ^they are delightful old men, benignant, tolerant, with the grace and courtesy of a vanished world. Well, they have a most unfair portion of bliss, and one can only hope they will suffer for it hereafter. But they are very few, and I cannot count on your being one of them. Then it is useless to pretend, useless 106 RULES FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED to assume the signs of age, to give at the knees and protrude the underlip, and my hairdresser tells me you cannot dye your greying hair to a venerable white. Accept your middle age, re- joice in its peculiar virtues, self-control, solidity, a grasp of facts — not fascinating virtues, but there they are — and if any of the gifts of youth are still for you, let them be brought to you : seek them not. This first and chief rule is stated as it applies to your inner self, your inward peace and happiness. Its bearing on exterior seemliness is obvious ; but I would not have it too strict. You may have an impulse of art to recreate your youth. Well, art must out, but wait until you are seventy. An old young man is a genial and stimulating sight, a gallant triumph over brutal fact. A middle-aged young man is merely a discordant arrangement. At this point, however, I had best be more specific. Your address and conversation, qua middle- aged person, will vary in accordance with the age of your companions, and your chief difficulty will be with the young. Remember always that to the young you seem much older than you are. The girl, in Sense and Sensibility who thought that at thirty-five a man needed not a wife but a nurse, was excessive, but something of that is always in the youthful mind. Sport and games may very^ likely be as much your preoccupation as a young man's, but do not give him that 107 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS impression : throw in a dash of politics or finance if you wish for his respect. Above all, do not hint at your love-affairs in his presence. We know that the true romance and the great passions come in middle life, but he does not. Or if he does he confines you to the great passions, of which we do not speak in casual talk, and your trivial amours are offensive to him. On occasion, if his touch be light, a pleasant young fellow may indicate, not ungracefully, that he is a dog. But when one is growing bald, and grey at the temples, and wears spectacles, it pains the young to be forced to infer that one is a dog. Avoid that mistake. If by accident you speak of such follies, refer them to a remote past, with a touch of frank regret that they ever were at all. In general, propitiate the young by insistence on your age and envy of theirs : they will then allow any youthful habits or emotions that remain to you to pass without mockery. Yet, again, you must not be too middle-aged in their society. If the one object of your toil is gross material prosperity and the one concern of your leisure the state of your ailing body, you cannot expect to be an attractive figure in the eyes of youth without some pretence of idealism or altruism. Make that pretence. Avoid it in the society of your average con- temporaries : altruism or idealism makes them uncomfortable, even though they are always con- 108 RULES FOR THE MmDLE-AGED vinced of its insincerity. Be as material and physical as you please. They are not interested in your investments and symptoms, but the recital gives them a fair excuse for reciting their own, and you will all be happy together. You may speak of the follies of youth as though you and they still committed them. It may be true. Sir George Trevelyan censures " Old Q " some- where, because well on in middle life he wrote frank letters to George Selwyn about his opera- dancers and bets, but they are not of necessity excluded from middle life, and he was writing to a contemporary. In our more decorous times you will be less definite, but a vague suggestion of a terrible present will flatter your companions, not shock them, as it would their juniors. Remember that the complete acceptance of middle age which I have enjoined upon you is rare, and therefore do not let your conversation suggest that there are more vehement and romantic lives than yours and theirs. Do not praise the young ; if you mention them at all, compare them unfavourably with your coevals. Do not, so to say, let the fact of tiger-hunting shadow the importance of golf. We live by the trivial, and sometimes ideas are fatiguing. You need no rules for your discourse with the aged. You have merely to accept (with delight if you are truly middle-aged) their pleasant illusion that you are young. With a little energy 109 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS of imagination you may act the part to convince yourself, and lost ideals, and broken faiths, and dead ambitions may be yours still under those dim eyes. . . . But I grow melancholy, a state to be avoided after thirty-five, when it is no more a luxury. The subject makes one so, and perhaps I was wrong after all, and it is best to ignore it. 110 XVI LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AFTER EiSADING TWO BIOGRAPHIES IT is a commonplace of the modern world that it tends to uniformity in habits and characters and careers : that we are less individual, have less of distinct personality, than the older worlds of which we read. Of course, like many another commonplace, this may be an illusion ; and there is the obvious reflection that the interesting personalities survive their death while the others commonly perish. Yet it does seem, as one reviews English politics, at least, in this and the last generation or so, that almost all of our eminences, the men who have risen to great power, or at any rate to high place, have had about them — it is no disparagement to their worth or public services — something mediocre in tone, something pedestrian in attitude, some- thing inevitable in procedure, something drab, in fine, and dull, which must make their record, however satisfying to the earnest student of 111 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS politics as such, appreciably tedious to him whose interest in men and affairs is mainly human and artistic. From such a reflection, at least, the subject of this essay is triumphantly free. Whatever may be thought in future times of Lord Randolph Churchill's significance as a statesman, whatever be the value of his politics or his influence in public events, the memory of his personal career must live while any one has an eye for the dramatic in English history. The story of his rise ex- hilarates one like watching — it is a metaphor he would have liked — some good horse (unthought of by the experts) spring to the front in a race and win with " the rest nowhere " ; the story of his fall is as poignant as a tragedy of Sophocles. He will live with Bolingbroke and Charles Fox and Disraeli as one whom a vivid and forceful personality must always make interesting. For this reason I propose to look rather at his personal course than at the abstract import of his views and arguments, which would bring us into the discussion of matters still practical and important and undecided. Not, of course, that they can be ignored ; far from it. His personal course was intimately and inextricably bound up with them ; first and last, he was a politician. But it will be enough if his attitude is stated as fairly as may be in regard to his career, without arguing round about it to enforce views which may be better 112 L ORD EANDOLPH CHURCHILL urged on some other occasion. The perspective is different. The years since he died have not rescued us from the stress and uncertainty of the politics, but they have left the figure of Randolph Churchill clear-cut for our regard. It is the man with whom we are concerned. But again, it must be remembered, the man is known almost solely as a politician ; and here one is brought to the nature and limitations of the written material about him. No discreet biographer could give us as yet a really intimate and detailed account of Lord Randolph Churchill as he lived and moved and spoke in his private life. It is too soon since his death. We cannot have of him many such lively and illuminating pictures as we have of Charles Fox — by which it is not meant, by any means, that they would cause the moralist to sigh, as he must sigh over poor Charles, but merely that such pictures are rightly held private by those who loved a man and survive him. Least of all biographers can a son so indulge our interest. Affection and dignity alike prevent him. Lord Randolph, again, was remarkably frank and incautious in speech and letters ; and dignified memories and persons had to be guarded. He loved chaff and the ironical method ; and stupid misinterpretations had to be avoided. The little we get of personalities in his letters makes us frankly long for more. How gay and humorous, H 113 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS for example, is this passage from a letter to Sir Henry James, from Egjrpt, about the time of the Parnell divorce case. " In such a frame of mind " (he had been looking at Karnac and Ammon Ra), " embracing a period of 10,000 years, your home politics, your House of Commons interests, the eloquence of Smith, the courage of Balfour, the honesty of Hartington, the financial glories of Goschen, and the adroitness of Joe, all acted upon, stimulated and developed by the lax morals of Parnell, present them- selves to my mental optics much in the same manner as fleas may attract the notice of an elephant." But of such letters we have few, and of talk parallel to them next to nothing. Naturally so, and inevitably. Beside the reasons given, Mr. Winston Churchill's absorbing interest is politics, and to politics he ever hurries. Baring a few Oxford and hunting stories, an anecdote or two of school-days, an account of Lord Randolph's marriage and a charming correspondence which passed concerning it, and some extracts from letters in India and elsewhere, the book is all politics. The limitation was inevitable and apart from that Mr. Churchill's book is an admirable achieve- ment. Seldom have political themes been pre- sented in a way so engaging to one's interest and fancy. The presentment may be lacking some- times in depth of philosophy, but that it should be consistently and unquestionably readable is a 114 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL remarkable feat. Another, and a yet greater merit is the dignity and manly restraint with which Mr, Churchill has written of his father. When a son writes of his father, perfect taste is always difficult ; but in this case the danger was extreme. Lord Randolph was bitter about his treatment by the Tory party. " I expect I have made great mistakes," he wrote to his wife in 1891 ; " but there has been no consideration, no indulgence, no memory or gratitude — nothing but spite, malice, and abuse." It is vain to argue about this bitterness ; it is certain Lord Randolph felt it, and it were not wonderful if his son felt it for him even more intensely. But it has not betrayed him into a single phrase of violence. He states the facts as they appear to him, and he lets his opinion be seen, but he raises his voice against no one, dead or living. The self-control is remarkable, and the more warmly to be praised that it was not, perhaps, altogether expected. Mr. Churchill's outward attitude to life is graver than was his father's ; and there are passages in the biography — ^passages both touching and amusing — where he seems to be protecting, as it were, his father's liveliness. He does not care to dwell much on Lord Randolph's humour, or to quote examples, as he might have in plenty even from the political speeches, of Lord Randolph's sense of fun, enjoyment of burlesque, one might 115 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS almost say a sort of delightful buffoonery. That is a difference of temperament ; he never, we imagine, omits this or that from partiality ; thus, having mentioned his father's charm of courtesy, the fascination of his manner when he chose to exercise it, he adds fairly that sometimes Lord Randolph chose rather to " toss and gore fools with true Johnsonian vigour and zest." One other omission may be mentioned : we have nowhere in the book a clear picture of the outward man. Mr. Churchill might have told his readers that his father was a man of real distinction in aspect and carriage the more remarkably so that his figure was short — ^though not, of course the dwarf of the caricatures — and slight. Such omissions, inevitable or accidental, are to be noted in the book ; but on the graver essentials of character, it is full and, as we said, impartial, and on the issues and details of politics it is full and lucid. It is well written throughout, in places finely written, with, on occasion, a very happy use of literary quotation. The account of Lord Randolph's tragic end is intensely moving in its simple pathos — ^but that it would be worse than impertinent to praise. Of necessity in- complete, the biography is on its own lines a splendid performance. Lord Rosebery's little book is intentionally more personal. A contemporary has, of course, a freer hand than a son. But he too is prevented 116 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL by the nearness of the times from giving us any- thing like a completely intimate portrait. The tone is intimate, almost curiously so, since he speaks throughout of his subject as " Randolph " tout court ; but the matter is in the main con- fined to generalities. There is no reason to complain of this ; no one had any reason to expect anjrthing more ; and we have to recognise that Lord Rosebery's account is the most intimate we are entitled to have. He keeps mainly to generalities, but they are not cold generalities. He seems anxious to put on record, and does so effectually, that in him at least Lord Randolph had an admiring and affectionate friend. It is a glimpse only, but an effective glimpse, of a way- ward, faulty, ardent, lovable soul. Perhaps the best part of his tribute is the following : " Nor had he— what might have been expected in so ardent a nature — any jealousy of others ; none, at least, that I could discover. This is a merit of the rarest water — a real mark of superiority. The ambitious man who can watch without soreness the rise or success of a con- temporary is much rarer than a black swan. But Randolph's was a generous nature in the largest and strictest sense of the word, generous and profuse both with money and praise." His estimate of Lord Randolph as a statesman is cordial and sincere, though it is, I think, vitiated by presumptions. One is grateful to him for 117 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS being more indulgent to Lord Randolph's lighter side in politics than is Mr. Churchill. He reminds us of that inimitable " score " — which had a real poiwt in it withal — over the late Mr.' W. H. Smith, about " the mud-cabin argument," in the treatment of Ireland in regard to reform in 1884. " The difference between the cabin of the Irish peasant and the cottage of the agricultural labourer is not so great as that which exists between the abode of the right honourable member for Westminster and the humble roof which shelters from the storm the individual who now has the honour to address this Committee." And this charming piece of pantaloon humour : " Was it for this that Mr. Gladstone pranced down into Midlothian, blocked up all the railway stations in the north of England, and placed the lives of countless thousands of passengers and tourists in the utmost possible peril ? " Part of the attraction in Lord Randolph's speeches was that the audience might always hope for some such unconventional twist. As Lord Rosebery says, they are much better reading than most speeches. There is a naturalness about them, an absence of hackneyed phrasing, an impression of a real man speaking, that are entirely sympathetic. Some- thing lingers in them of the cool, imperturbable air, which yet harmonised with an insistent vitality, of the seemingly unconscious audacity, the pleasant voice which a slight lisp seemed to 118 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL make somehow familiar but never robbed of its clarity — ^something of all that which made up an interesting and radiant personality. The writer, a,s a very young man, was fascinated as he heard, and is still fascinated as he reads. Lord Randolph Churchill was born in 1849. One is glad to have a glimpse of his early school- days at Cheam, because certainly it is at a " pre- paratory " school, when truly " the heart's in its spring," and before the hardening and regulating influences of the public school, that a boy's character and affections come most readily to the surface. The boundless romances and ambitions and mysteries of one's thoughts in those unreal days ! It is interesting to read that the young Randolph Churchill impressed a contemporary with his " large magnificence," and recited the article on Predestination and Election with en- thusiasm, and tooled a four-in-hand of com- panions round the playground. At Eton Lord Rosebery remembers him as a " Scug," " a small boy in an extremely disreputable hat." He was a pickle there, it seems, and did nothing to con- ciliate the strongest sentiment of his fellow countrymen by proficiency in cricket and football ; from the earliest possible period he loved horses and the hunting-field. At Oxford he took on something of the exquisite, belonged to the BuUingdon, and gained for his private pleasure a minute and intimate acquaintance with the 119 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Bible, Gibbon, and " Jorrocks." He started reading too late for a first in law and modern history, but only narrowly missed it, and was honoured by the friendship and respect of his tutor, the late Dr. Creighton. We have a pleasing account of his sudden and ardent courtship of Miss Jerome, and his spirited but respectful correspondence with his father before the young people were allowed to marry. This was followed by some happy, careless years of social popularity in London and elsewhere, interrupted in 1876 by " the deep displeasiire of a great personage," which Lord Randolph incurred by a reckless partisanship in the late Duke of Marlborough's quarrels, and which entailed the cold shoulder from fashionable society. In 1874 he had been elected for Woodstock ; and in 1876 he went with his father, then appointed viceroy, to Ireland as an unofficial secretary. That time in Ireland was, in regard to genuine and useful statesmanship, some of the best spent in his life, for he used it to study Ireland and the Irish thoroughly ; and on that subject at least, throughout his political career, he spoke with knowledge and consistency. So we come to 1880 and the story of daring and unwearied activity and the success which culminated and crumbled some six years later. It is unnecessary to recall those years in any detail here, or to describe the struggles over Mr. Bradlaugh, Employers' Liability, 120 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL Coercion, Egypt. The fight made by the Fourth Party — which, in the early years, included Mr. Balfour — against an overwhelming majority oppo- site, and the mass of the Conservative party inside Parliament as well, whatever be thought of its merits, was one of the " gamest " ever fought in politics. Two remarks may be made about it here. Lord Randolph incurred great odium among many excellent people for the freedom with which he attacked so old and eminent a man as Mr. Gladstone. Well, fighting the party fight, he hit out as hard as he could ; but it is well to remember that Mr. Gladstone, in the thick of it all, admitted his personal courtesy, and that Lord Randolph — ^though less warmly than in later days — had a quite sincere admiration for the other's moral and mental distinction. The other remark is that the sort of amusement — almost miockery — with which the Fourth Party is generally spoken of now does not at all reflect the facts. So far at least as "practical politics " and politicians are concerned, its achievement was indubitably great. In 1880 Mr. Gladstone was triumphant, and Lord Beaconsfield was exhausted in energy and hope. The Conserva- tive party was feebly led and fitfully inspired. Without Lord Randolph its stay " in the desert " might have been indefinite. It was he, most ably seconded, no doubt, but again, first and foremost, he who made the party acceptable once 121 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS more to the country and its return to office possible. Of course Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule enterprise and the subsequent break-up of his party gave his opponents their twenty years of office. But without the forces against him in the country, mainly marshalled and inspired by Lord Ran- dolph, would Mr. Gladstone ever have thrown himself into the Home Rulers' embrace ? Surely not. Whether or not the Conservative party was as ungrateful to him as he thought, it is certain that the debt of gratitude it owed him was immense ! For the rest, one reads of the Fourth party's tone and atmosphere, its joyous spirits, daring schemes hatched over little dinners, its nicknames and persiflage, with some wonder and contentment that even in English politics such things should be. In 1883 came the capture of the " machine " by the Fourth Party, Lord Randolph's election to the chairmanship of the National Union of Conservative Associations, to be followed by a reconciliation with Lord Salisbury, as representing the official chiefs, and in 1885 the game was won, and Mr. Gladstone was out — Lord Randolph jumping on to his seat after the division and waving his handkerchief. And now we come to the alleged Tory compact with the Parnellites. Much has been said and argued about it ; but the facts, so far as Lord Randolph was con- cerned, are simple. He was quite frank about 122 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL it. "I told Parnell, when he sat on that sofa, that, if the Tories took office, and I was a member of their Government, I would not consent to renew the Crimes Act." That was "good enough " for Mr. Parnell, and that was all. Lord Randolph sincerely hated Crimes Acts. His Irish policy, formed years before by study in Ireland, was that, while Home Rule was im- possible — and on this point Lord Rosebery bears out his consistency — much should be done to meet the just desires of the Irish. He was for conciliating the Church by giving it the educational boons it demanded. In fine, he was for going behind the Home Rule movement and breaking its force — the policy, substantially, of Mr. George Wyndham. It was a possible policy then, whatever it may be now. Lord Carnarvon's famous interview with Mr. Parnell in the empty house, where, according to the latter, an Irish Legislature was promised, was held (it seems) with the cognisance of Lord Salisbury, but was not held with that of Lord Randolph, who wrote to his chief (when the interview became known) that " Carnarvon has played the devil." From the India Office Lord Randolph went to the Treasury when Lord Salisbury formed his Government in 1886, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons at thirty-seven. A few months later, and all had gone. It is unnecessary to go over again all 123 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS the facts of that much-discussed resignation. But a point or two should be made clear. In regard to tactics and his own interests there is no doubt about the mistake. He chose his time badly and his ground badly. But the ground was one of principle ; and the badness of the time proved his sincerity. It is possible, as Lord Rosebery surmises, that the beginnings of his terrible malady were already upon his nerves. But he was pledged to economy up to the hilt ; and his colleagues would not give way. His budget, printed in Mr. Churchill's book for the first time, and admittedly, on its democratic lines, a fine achievement, was impossible unless they did. Resignation, unless they met him somehow, was inevitable sooner or later. It was promptly accepted ; and it is quite clear that his colleagues were glad he should go. The proof is this, that the economies for which he pleaded were substantially made afterwards. In other matters besides, on which he differed from his colleagues, his policy was afterwards carried out in the main. No question but that he was a forceful and per- haps a difficult colleague. His relations with Lord Salisbury were most friendly in the India Ofi&ce period. (They had, by the way, an odd habit, by which the next generation may profit of writing long letters to one another, even when they were to ^meet on the same day.) Friends outwardly they remained ; it was always " my 124 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL dear Randolph." But both were men with an instinct for power and impatient of control. In political importance and — with the exception of Lord Halsbury — in intellectual power they dwarfed their colleagues in that Cabinet, and it is not human to enjoy being dwarfed. Also, of course, his colleagues may have feared his demo- cratic tendencies. In any case they made no effort to retain him, though there can be little doubt that he thought they would. That error was the beginning of the end. No one can suppose that a man of Lord Randolph's political genius would have stayed on the shelf if his life and health had been prolonged ; but it is idle to guess at what his future would have been. From the point we have reached there is little but decline to chronicle. His malady may not have been on him when, by a lapse of political insight, he put his decision to stand for Birming- ham into other hands, and lost a great chance and the friendship of his last political ally, Mr. Jennings. Again, it may not have been on him when he lost all self-control in the debate on the Parnell Commission fiasco, and made that speech with its horrible metaphor and shout of " Pigott ! Pigott ! " In the former case, the mistake was due to over-scrupulosity ; in the latter to resent- ment at what seemed to him a shameful blunder. He did admirable work as chairman on the Army and Navy Committee, and as a member of Lord 125 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Hartington's Commission ; and for his services in the cause of efficiency, at least, the country should be grateful. He visited Mashonaland and the Transvaal, where he made money and was very near making a great fortune ; and he raced at home, in partnership with Lord Dunraven, both with judgment and good luck. (" Let not ambition mock these lowly joys," quotes Lord Rosebery, delightfully, of this activity.) He visited Bismarck and sent home a vivid and interesting account of the interview to his mother. But, as the end drew nearer, England saw the dreadful and pathetic spectacle of a man fighting desperately, in the face of the world, an un- conquerable foe. When death came, it came mercifully. Surely so tragic a fate must have stilled even the animus of mediocrities. " Lord Randolph Churchill," says Mr. Herbert Paul, " had no very deep convictions. He was a demagogue, who happened to have been born an aristocratic Tory." " This, then, was Tory de- mocracy," according to Lord Rosebery ; "it was the wolf of Radicalism in the sheep-skin of Toryism." Both pronouncements come from the same assumption ; all social reform is Radical ; Toryism is opposition to social reform. It would be a strange assumption, if one did not know the power of human fancy to override facts. The most important social reforms in this country — important because they were the first definite 126 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL revolt against the dominant, devastating theory of laisser aller, and because they abolished the worst of England's chief disgrace — were the Factory Acts, passed by Tories in the teeth of Radical opposition ; and it may almost be said that such reforms have been usually carried by Tories. So far is the fancy from the facts. The best of Toryism has been the wise and coherent advancement of the people as a whole ; the worst of Radicalism, as of Whiggism, has been the selfish advancement of an acquisitive class. But unfortunately for Toryism — and here is some excuse for Lord Rosebery and Mr. Herbert Paul — ^there is a worst of Toryism and a best of Radicalism. There are politicians numbered in the Tory party who are Conservatives — Lord Randolph, like Disraeli before him, hated the word — in the pettiest and stupidest sense, who, being unimaginatively content with our present social conditions, resist any change in them as long as they think resistance safe. To such as these Lord Randolph was anathema. But if such as these are to dominate the Tory party, then its future is nil. On the other hand, there are Radicals who are comparatively free from the narrow individualism of their forerunners. This, however, is no real justification for saying that Lord Randolph, desiring social reforms, had no business to call himself a Tory, and ought to have called himself a Radical. No doubt there 127 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS were mistakes in his propaganda. Now and again he seemed hastily to ado'pt an idea which was rather Radical than a true development of Toryism. Latterly, too, when he was excluded from the party, and drew nearer, as his son tells us, to the coUectivist principle, he may have wished to push the Tory party farther than is possible . But his Dartf ord speech, the high- water- mark of his public " Radicalism," contained "not a word that is not sound, good Toryism — aye, and old Toryism too." So said Lord Halsbury, an authority whom Conservative critics may be supposed to respect. So much for the political theorist. As an administrator. Lord Randolph's short spells of office were enough to stamp him as a brilliant and unwearied worker. India Office and Treasury alike bear that testimony and by no means on the ground — as no one with a knowledge of char- acter could have imagined — ^that he was merely a docile pupil. As a party organiser and House of Commons debater he did the work of our politics, on its less edifying side, with a wonderful facility. As a platform speaker, only Mr. Gladstone was his superior in command of a great audience ; and, with all the prestige and, as it were, religious halo of that statesman against him. Lord Randolph ran him close. Lord Rosebery's account of him as a friend and companion — " human, eminently human ; full 128 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL of faults, as he himself well knew, but not base or unpardonable faults ; pugnacious, outrageous, fitful, petulant, but eminently lovable and winning" — ^that account, in its plain sincerity, is one that the best of us might be content should be given of himself. The faults were those of a nervous temperament, of a man who lived on his nerves, as they say ; the virtues of an ardent kindness and affection. It should be added that, if he fought with his equals, he was idolised by those who served him. When Lord Iddesleigh died suddenly in Down- ing Street, Lord Salisbury wrote : " As I looked upon the dead body stretched before me I felt that politics was a cursed profession." Some- thing of that feeling one may well have as one closes Mr. Churchill's life of his father. Jealousies and unkindness and bitterness of spirit are in most human labours ; but our party system, with its insincerities and intellectual meannesses, seems to hold some poison of its own which narrows the vision and blunts the edge of principle. It is not true that Lord Randolph Churchill sacrificed principle to personal ends, as it has been too hastily and sometimes maliciously repeated; it is impossible to read the facts of his career impartially and not to see that the reverse is true. But he was a party politician ; and it cannot be denied that he shared in the crudities and false perspectives of party. It 1 129 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS seems a pity that the world could have no better use for that bright and strong intelligence, that zealous nature. His great gifts would have made him opportunity anywhere ; they had no need of his class advantages, which have passed off so many moderately endowed politicians as wonders. After all, intelligence and nature proved in- effectual in the long run ; and disappointment, though it only helped to kill him, may be said, without great violence of phrase, to have broken his heart. Many will see in his career the old story of genius crushing mediocrity, as he crushed poor Sir Stafford Northcote, and being crushed inevitably by mediocrity in turn. In any case his was a moving fortune, a brilliant and tragic figure, which will live in history. 130 XVII A QUESTION OF HAPPINESS After Reading a Life of Haydon IT might be an interesting question for a debating society if the life of Haydon the painter was a happy life. Either opinion might be urged with much philosophy and many classical illustrations. On the one side constant debt and its humiliations, an ill-supported family, thwarted ambition, unstable repute, ruin, suicide ; on the other, profound belief in his powers, a sanguine temperament, zest in living, fame that was wide as it was fugitive, great joy and enthusiasm in creation. The philosophy of respice finem, which bids us call no man happy until he is dead, is timid and superficial. If a man has had many years of success and enjoyment, a disastrous close may cancel some of this happiness, but not the whole. The villain is nabbed at the end of the melodrama, but he has sat prosperously on the hero for four acts. That Haydon at sixty should have found ruin fairly upon him and taken his own life is not 131 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS so significant as it was dramatic. It seems that his brain was diseased, and likely enough a smaller cause might have had the effect, for he was of too courageous a temper deliberately to give up the game. Say that he was finished as a painter ; still he was a man of various parts, and could have hoped for a livelihood : he was not like one who is afflicted with incurable pain, and who, pace coroners' juries and sentiment, has logic on his side if he ends it. But the lifelong clanking chain of debt is another matter. Comfortable people, with the average human share of imagination, make light of that trouble, treat it humorously, say that the debtor would be quite unhappy without his creditors, and all that. But whatever the man himself may profess to think, it is quite certain that if he be an artist his art will suffer continuously and progressively. The humilia- tion of excusing himself from satisfying just claims on him is not a state of the spirit agreeable to whole-hearted endeavour, and the interviews and letters and expedients and sordid hopes and fears are as a wedge driven into his intellect, piercing and cramping its energies. Haydon's work suffered, of course — suffered grievously — and he knew it. And as a man he endured what the least imaginative may understand to be serious. It is not a joke to be sent to prison and have your dearest belongings seized and sold. There is nothing humorous in pawning your wife's 132 A QUESTION OF HAPPINESS clothes to buy bread. When we consider the balances of Haydon's life we must g^'ant all this to be heavy. The moral is, of course, quite simple : the artist, as George Warrington pointed out, has no claim on the community for exceptional treatment. Yet I cannot help some misgiving as to the wisdom, at least, of Haydon's wealthy admirers who left him to his fate. He may not have been a great artist — that, I suppose, is the present verdict of artists — but they thought him one. They thought him a great artist, but did not think a great artist worth preserving at thfc cost of a thousand pounds or so. Haydon may have been impossible to help, but they did not know that : it was not proved. He was in the hands of money-lenders early in his career, and never got out of them. His wealthy admirers gave him small sums from time to time, but that of course only postponed extremities. They never set him fairly on his legs, to try if he would stay there. It was worth trying. Improvident he was of nature, and unscrupulous he became, but he was not coarsely extravagant or vicious, a gambler or a sot ; he was devoted to his art first, and next to his wife and children. Sheridan, perhaps, was a man on whom help was wasted, because he was incapable of facing his affairs or — except at odd moments when claret and self- pity possessed him — of being interested in them. But Haydon knew too well how they injured the 183 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS art he loved. If Lamb really drew his prince of borrowers from him, it was but the outer man. Yes, I think Haydon's wealthy admirers set too great a value on a thousand pounds. Free from money-lenders and other ruinous expedients, Haydon might have lived by his work — not lived luxuriously but working as he wished. His conviction that historical painting was *' high art " and portraits were rubbish seems absurd to us, but since he held it, it was a hard fate he could not act on it. That side of the balance is heavy. The other side turns upon this question : was Haydon's amazing immeasurable glory in himself a simple emotion, or did he lash himself into it that from those cloud-cleaving heights he might despise his detractors ? Well, I think this self- glory — for vanity is far too tame a word — ^was simple and sincere. One is tempted to think not so, because the expression of it so far transcends one's experience. That is partly because of our conventionally deprecating and modest attitude towards ourselves. Most men of parts think far more highly of themselves than they confess. I do not know how many men living think they have the finest intellects in the world, but I am sure that they are many thousands and that I am acquainted with several of them. If we all said what we thought of ourselves Haydon's belief that he was specially chosen by Providence to 134 A QUESTION OF HAPPINESS succour his country in its artistic extremity — and that Providence had made the wisest possible choice — would not seem so out of the way. But he did not stop there ; everything he did was wonderful. He wrote a couple of letters to the Times about Reform, It is not an unusual thing to write to the Times on a political question, and we who do it generally think well of our efforts. But Haydon said : " When my colours have faded, my canvas decayed and my body mingled with the dust, these glorious letters, the best things I ever wrote, will awaken the enthusiasm of my countrymen. I thank God I lived in such a time, and that He gifted me with talents to serve the great cause." There spoke a man whom no material misfortune except physical pain — and he had admirable health — could make un- happy. Haydon had a true artist's joy — the joy that is of pain and travail — in creation. He had a quick intelligence and gratified it in many directions. He was always warm and zealous about something. When not thinking of himself and his art he had humour. He had many friends. Until the end he believed in his influence on the great men of his country. He married for love and continued loving. All that would weigh heavily against debt and its consequences to Haydon ; it need not have weighed them down. What, I am certain, turned the scale, was his glory in his powers. 135 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS It is a heartbreaking life to read, being that of a generous fighter against odds too strong for him. But the man who wrote "those glorious letters " lived happily however he died. 136 XVIII THE GOSPEL OF SORROW TWO simple impressions were left on my mind when I had read the history of his soul in prison, written by Oscar Wilde. One was that it was poignantly touching, the other that it was extraordinarily and profoundly interesting. A man to whom applause was a primary need of life, acutely sensitive to beauty, impatient of any control, had fallen in squalid ruin, amidst common execration, and was con- demned to two years of, perhaps, the most hideous and unlovely life ever devised by man for his fellows. How far he deserved it all is here an irrelevant consideration. It is relevant to re- member that if we can put aside that for which he suffered, he was very far fronx being a man with whom sympathy was impossible. It is the callous, the mean, the vindictive, with whom we find it hard to sympathise. This was a humane man, generous to his friends, placable to his enemies. His books and plays had given thousands delightful moments of thought and fun. Well, such a man 137 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS had to suffer such a punishment. He had to find himself again in it, some sort of tolerable relation he had to find between himself and life, some meaning in it all not utterly unbearable. In- evitably, however, being an artist, one to whom expression was necessary in a degree the average man can never understand, he had to put this meaning into words, for the world or not, at least for himself. Any record of all this must have been touching ; the actual record is pro- foundly interesting. These, as I said, were the two simple impressions on my mind. They seemed to need no qualification. But when I heard the book discussed and read other people's opinions about it, I found that to many its interest was qualified, if not vitiated, by what they thought its insincerity. I think this criticism shallow, and it will help me to express how the book is significant to me if I explain why I think so. It is said that the writing of the book, with its fine phrases and coloured imagery, is not that of a man who truly felt distress of soul, as apart from physical hardship. I am not thinking, of course, of writers to whom all manners of writing but their own slovenly verbiage are hateful, just as there are people who hate all speech that has not a cockney accent. To them Oscar Wilde's style is "affected," and there's an end of the matter. But people who heartily admire his 138 THE GOSPEL OF SORROW style, so limpid and graceful, so brilliant in its unforced elegance and adornment, think that here the use of it is a token of insincerity. Surely, rather, its absence would have been. It had grown into his nature ; he could not write differ- ently without an effort. The humility of spirit he says he had gained was not needful to change his manner, if changed it could have been : his physical sufferings and privations, the reality of which, at least, no one can deny, would have done that. But it was unchangeable, and so far from finding its use insincere, I think it merely another thing to touch one — that to the setting forth of the sad doctrine now dominant in his mind he brought so naturally and instinctively the gift of his poetry and eloquence, sometimes even of his wit. Again, it is said that he lived for three years when he was free and showed no sign that the mood and determination professed in his letter " De Profundis," persisted in him. It may have been so. It was a thousand pities, a grievous waste. Pathologically considered, it was surely inevitable. A life-long indulgence of the senses, followed by a sudden, complete, and prolonged starving of them, must have put a tax on the brain which none but the very greatest could bear. The sentence of two years' hard labour was a sentence of death to his mental energy. But how does that make " De Profundis " insincere ? There is no sign in it even that he foresaw the 139 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS second tragedy of failure which awaited him, or mistrusted his power to live his " new life," still less that he did not mean to do his best. The event was pitiable. The determination was fine and was nobly expressed, and to confuse with it the weakness .of fulfilment which awaited it is shallow and unjust. He did not determine to be a better man ; that, he says characteristically, would have been "a piece of unscientific cant." But "to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become." He wanted to live so that he might explore the " new world " of sorrow in which he had been living. "If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the finger of scorn by the roots." That was a natural human resolve, and this work of art, it is clear, was to be the expression of that fuller and deeper life which sorrow had taught him. It is extraordinarily interesting. The man who all his life had been the prophet of joy, shunning all gloom and distress as a "mode of imperfection," was to preach the gospel of sorrow, how it is " the ultimate type both in life and art." Oscar Wilde had a brilliant imagina- tion and a power of thought both subtle and at times profound, but he was no philosopher with a system impervious to logic and analysis ; it 140 THE GOSPEL OF SORROW was, perhaps, an unlucky vanity that made him think himself one. In the conxplete philosophy of this gospel of sorrow, as he sketches it, there are inconsistencies and exaggerations. It goes back to old, insoluble mysteries. But he had arrived through bitterness and tears at a truth which clearly he realised in all its force ; the truth that as men are, as the world is, only those who have known sorrow, sorrow bitter and in itself hopeless, are complete, that the most amiable natures that always have lived in the sunshine must lack tenderness and the deeper moods of love. For "behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard, and callous ; but behind sorrow there is always sorrow." Oscar Wilde was not a philosopher. In his fashion he was a prophet, and prophets to be of any use in the world must be extreme. The interesting thing is that this one had preached one extreme and was on his way to preach the opposite. Had his intellect and energy endured he might have ended by seeing some way for the hedonist and the mystic to walk together ; then, indeed, he would have been a philosopher at last. There are many fine thoughts in this book, many pieces of charming prose which I might quote. But any one who cares to read what I think of this "De Profundis " will have read the book itself and admired, as I have, the strength of an artistic nature that moved towards beauty 14.1 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS so inevitably, even over the most hideous ob- stacles' — admired the bold statement and the gracious ornament, the unfailing sense of words and cadences, and such a finely sustained study as that, daring, sometimes whimsical, but always justified by feeling, of the human Christ. Nor is it an occasion for any attempt to define Oscar Wilde's place in English literature ; the book before me is too acutely personal for that. Some day, I hope, a critic fit for the task will succeed in clearing his mind from all evil associations and give us a clear and full appreciation of the written achievements. Much there is, again, in the book about which I might argue, or assert opposing opinions. But I think it would be an impertinence at the moment, and am content to have expressed my sense of the book's significance, being, as it is, the work, tragically written, of a genius whose ruin was one of the saddest tragedies in my lifetime. 142 XIX SENTIMENT AND FEELING " ~r T PSTAIRS was a dead woman on a bed with I I what had seemed a smile upon her lips." ^^ This sentence finishes a story which was written some twelve years ago by a young man of twenty-six. The author, looking through the book the other day — with that mingled tenderness and irritation one regards one's early work withal — and coming upon the sentence was sharply struck by the thought that his writing such a one now would be inconceivable. He was inclined at first to take credit for a more finely developed humour, but that really was not in question ; for, given the situation, the solemnity of the phrasing was quite appropriate. The story relates how a man was informed by a telegram that his mistress was suddenly dead, his emotions consequent upon this intelligence, and how on going to the house where she lay he received a dramatic proof that her affections (which he had believed to be his alone) had been shared by a friend. It has a cynical air, but of 143 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS course it is really sentimental, and the reason why I have made it the text of my article is that it seems to me an apt and rather interesting example of what heartlessness there is in the sentimental, and especially in sentimental youth. I suppose one may say that to be sentimental is consciously to cherish, fondle, or play with a feeling, and where the feeling is imaginary the sentimentality is perfectly defined. Now, I am glad to say that the experience of the man in the story had not been mine ; if it had been, I do not think I could have made a story of it, even at twenty-six. But happily it has not been mine since either, and yet if the idea had occurred to me freshly the other day, or if such an occur- rence had been reported to me, I should not have thought of making a story of it. The reason I take to be that having had my share of thought and feeling in the interval I find the probable emotion of the man in the story too painful to describe and dissect. I can realise it more acutely and I turn away from it. Then I had no misgiving. It seemed — rather fatuously perhaps — a good idea, and I set myself quite cheerfully to imagine what the man would have felt, and to describe it in the best phrases at my command. So with other stories in that little book. There is one of selfish oppression, for instance. I could write an essay now on selfishness and oppression, but to imagine a concrete instance and dwell on 144 SENTIMENT AND FEELING its details would be too unpleasant. I could read such a story if it were well written by another, but not for the sake of producing an artistic effect — if I could — ^would I afflict my feelings by writing it now. From one point of view all this is a humble ex- ample of the antagonism between sentiment and feeling. Some one has pointed out, with more truth than is usual in those sweeping statements that the wave of " sensibility " which went over England towards the end of the eighteenth cen- tury ebbed before the stress of the Napoleonic wars. Even so with individual people : as they go on in the rough and tumble of life, taking their portion of futilities and disappointments, their feelings grow somewhat too sore to caress and play with. That is, unless they are to be true sentimentalists, whose happiness is a com- monplace in the art of life. And the same thing may be true of the deliberate imagining and describing of sorrows. But there is another point of view from which this trifling experience of mine — my former readiness and present dislike to dwell on painful things and sad emotions — may have its suggestion. There was a comparative heartlessness about those sad little sentimental stories, I think, but also I had a belief — ridiculous or not : that is irrelevant — ^that I was doing something artistic, and the pleasure of that belief was stronger than any reluctance of feeling. K 145 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Now, when greater writers than I dwell so lovingly on the piteous things of life, put before us in the concrete, sometimes the enthusiasm of creative art, overriding all else, is clear ; sometimes there is a purpose of practical beneficence, as in Dickens and Charles Reade ; sometimes we may argue not unjustly a want of humanity, a want of pity. I put aside undoubted instances of per- verse pleasure in describing what is painful and odious, which are for the student of pathology ; but short of that, does not one often ask : how could a man who really knew what sorrow and suffering are bring himself to describe these painful scenes, to dissect these unhappy people at such length and so minutely ? For my part I ask it constantly, as I read the depressing fiction of the slums and the sick bed, and the like, with which we are familiar. It is polite, but it is not reasonable to assume that all these writers are enthusiasts for art. It is probable, even certain, that in some of them imaginative sympathy is blunt. Or is there a tendency in such work to deaden the feelings of the writer ? We all know of this tendency in the player's art, the tendency to produce a man or woman who in place of feeling an emotion merely sees an opportunity for the expression of one. (I say tendency only, and need not to be told of^great exceptions.) Is it so with our creators of pathetic and sorrowful scenes and people ? One is tempted to go on 146 SENTIMENT AND FEELING and wonder if it is so — this blunting of sympathy — with other imaginative writers, even those whose themes are most often jocular or fantastic. I thought of it when I saw a recent play, in which perhaps the most painful idea I have ever seen worked out on the stage was treated as an uproarious joke, and the play was by a writer whose humanity in more than one of his books has moved no one more than me. And I am left wondering. 147 XX IN A POLICE COURT SOME time ago I spent a morning in a London police court, and I do not hope to forget the impression which it made on me. On the whole, I would forget it if I could. But the philosophy and ethics and aesthetics of the matter may wait until the impression has been recorded. It was probably all the stronger because I went without any particular expectation, and certainly with no idea of finding a subject for my scribbling. Save in so far as my presence might be of service to a friend, a lady who was compelled to give her evidence against a thief, my going was merely a bore to me and I went wholly preoccupied with my private affairs. That was very quickly changed. I had never been in a police court before, and it is likely that most of my readers have not either. They may have got a very lifelike idea of one from Mr. Galsworthy's " Silver Box," to be sure, but no illusion of the theatre could impress them like the reality. The theatre, 149 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS because it can select, may give us a more vivid sense of the great and poignant emotions than (as spectators) we can get from life, where they come our way in a clumsy, irrelevant, and depreciatory setting ; but the dismal, sordid, hopeless things of life need no trimming or colouring for their effect — rather the contrary, indeed — and however thorough the illusion there is at the back of our consciousness the cheerful knowledge that the player led off to gaol goes actually to an agreeable supper ; our thoughts do not follow him as they follow that poor devil from the real dock. Mr. Galsworthy's police court made me miserable enough, but it was nothing to the police court : I suppress thp name, because I wish to write freely of it in sympathy or otherwise, and should not like to seem to particularise what I am told is average and typical. It is likely, again, that others of my readers may have gained their impression of police courts from a picture very different from that of Mr. Galsworthy's — ^that in newspaper paragraphs. There police courts are regarded as facetious and comic places. One evening paper specialises in their humour and is even good enough to turn some of the cases into in- genious verse, at which I fear I shall never laugh very heartily again. One magistrate has his latest joke reported from time to time : knowing him and knowing a police court (though not his) 150 IN A POLICE COURT by now I well understand that he is forced to relieve the squalid routine with a lighter touch of humanity now and then or perish of nausea. But police courts are not funny places, and there will be no fun in this article about one of them. Well . . . our taxi-cab turned down a side street from an outlying thoroughfare and stopped before the police-station. A dismal little crowd was hanging about. We were allowed to wait in a railed-off space outside the court, while distress came and pleaded in vain with authority — while anxious and tearful women appealed to final but not unkindly policemen to be allowed (I gathered) to see their men-folk in custody. After a while I suggested that we should go into the court and wait until our case came on. I may have been thinking of the comic paragraphs rather than of Mr. Galsworthy : certainly I expected to be amused rather than harrowed. So we listened to a succession of "drunks and disorderlies." One seldom sees drinking which in the philosophy of Omar or Horace is drinking to excess, and when one sees it it is more often comic than horrible. Wrecks from drink one knows, but they are much as other invalid people, and one does not see them as a rule in very painful moments. Unpleasantly drunk people in the streets one passes quickly by. There is a long tradition of facetiousness about drunkenness. In a word, I was not prepared to 151 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS be shocked, and I was miserably shocked. But no, dear enthusiast, you who are so keen to leave the world a little better and a little duller than you found it : I saw no lesson whatever for myself. Omar and Horace will continue to express a mood of my own, though I do not take their doctrine for a complete philosophy. My bottle of claret and my glass of port have lost nothing of their appeal. And I do not believe that if I ever became a drunkard I should be in the least like those wretches in the dock : for one thing, rather than drink the abominations with which our useless Governments permit rascals to send them thither, I would drink water even as you or kill myself. The moral is against poverty and dishonesty and incompetence — not against drinking. But that moral, at least, was pretty sharply pressed. One after another — dirty, vacuous, hopeless, wordless — ^they stumbled into the dock, and an alert policeman, with an eye of virtuous indignation on them, a look that said " You know you did : don't dare deny it," very plainly, told the symptoms of their disease or their hapless efforts to cheat misery and despair. I share the customary admiration for the police, on the whole, and should be sorry to offend them. But they are human and cannot escape the defects of their qualities or the re- actions of their occupation. They are for ever in a position of moral superiority, they are always 152 IN A POLICE COURT being good when other people are being bad ; is it not inevitable they should acquire a rather aggressive air of complacent virtue ? It was much in evidence in the police court, and helped to give one the feeling that all the world was against the luckless prisoner, so unequal to the contest. Then the magistrate. Every one praises the patience and kindness of our metropolitan police magistrates, and I am sure the one before me deserved it all. There was nothing hasty or irritable about him, nothing sharp or contemptu- ous. He was later to give a fine example of wise mercifulness. But his very fatherliness, his gentle " this is very wrong conduct, you know," his regretful " you can't expect me to overlook it again " — all that made the inevitable sentence seem a more miserable confession of impotence before evil. Sometimes it was a fine, but there looked to be small chance of its being paid. And so the unfortunates, mumbling, resigned, desolate, shambled out of the dock and were shepherded through a door back to the cells. Let no senti- mental cynic call me maudlin. My natural sympathy was with the magistrate who was evenly considerate, the policeman who had to do this poor sort of duty, but who would and often did perform a difficult and dangerous one. I felt sorry for the wretches in the dock and sick with the civilisation which produced them, but given their production the lethal chamber, I was ready 153 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS to admit, might be the sanest end to them. Only the squalid hopelessness, the unspeakable ugliness of the whole affair blighted one's spirit : it is that I am trying to express. After the drunks the beggars. The part of London in which I live is infested by persons of a virus appearance and fruity voice who are carelessly unconvincing in their tales of endurance, and these have gradually sapped in me the wish to act in the spirit of Elia's essay on beggars. I have no particular quarrel with them. Maxims about the sacred splendour of independence, like those about the nobility of toil, I have always suspected were invented by the rich for the use of the poor, and I happen to be poor. Still, when folk are obviously not in physical distress it seems to me bad taste of them to annoy strangers with their importunities, and I harden my heart in the streets off Piccadilly. In the police court, however, the beggars were in different cases pinched and pale and hollow looking, and one could believe they had really needed the alms they asked for. I believe that these poor feckless things, " unemployable " I dare say, live mys- teriously on the workmen who are employed and who are infinitely more generous than the better- to-do classes, and that when, as at present, these are apt to lack a job their parasites apply to strangers. The policeman in plain clothes who gave evidence against them had a way, curiously 154. IN A POLICE COURT antipathetic to me, of dropping his voice with a sort of clerical solemnity at the end — " and so, your worship, I took him into custody " — as though the sinner had done something really monstrous. To me the offence of asking alms seems a light one, if it be truly an offence at all, and the punishment of prison for it a sort of brutality on the part of property, taking from these poor ones, indeed, the nought that they had — liberty to walk about and show their nothingness. So they, too, shambled from the dock to the cells, and the gloom and ugliness oppressed one more and more. It was lightened a little by the cases of theft, because in them at least there was reason in punishing. To treat a disease or an unfairly poisoned body with prison seems stupid ; so to treat poverty which merely says it is poor seems harsh. But every society not impossibly com- munist must protect property against depredators : all that the soft-hearted can fairly ask is that the excuse of want should temper the punish- ment, and when society is clever enough to punish the big thieves also these little mean ones will be without a grievance. Prisons, it is true, might be wiser places, but that was not the immediate point : these people really seemed to deserve more or less what they got, and so far one was happier. And it was here that the magistrate did his fine action, if it be not 155 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS impertinent to compliment him. A workman was brought up on remand for making off with some fish from a stall. His defence was that he was in fun and had intended to take it back, a jolly defence but not without some twilight of dubiety about it. But he had never been charged before, was a good workman and an excellent family man, and the magistrate accepted his defence with a caution against joking with other folk's property. That incident positively cheered one. And then the next plunged one truly into the depths, not, this time, for the stupidity of our civilisation but for the pity and sorrow of human things. The case was of a sort one often sees in the papers. A young man had courted a ser- vant maid, had possessed himself of her savings, ten pounds, and was afterwards disclosed as married already. The girl gave her evidence with a rather vindictive air, and I was not so sympathetic with her, but that my mind was at leisure to travel, in its literary way, back to Con- greve. For the man's defence was merely that he had spent the ten pounds on the girl, and that — do you remember ? — was precisely what Fainall said to Mrs. Marwood in " The Way of the World." Mrs. Marwood reproached him with having spent her fortune and he, as a complete justification : " Your fortune has been bestowed as the prodi- gality of your love would have it, in pleasures which we both have shared." One of Dumas' Mous- 156 IN A POLICE COURT quetaires would not have thought even so much of excuse necessary. The magistrate, however, was not influenced by those precedents and called the young man bad names, which I, too, think he deserved. In all this there was not much to touch one's heart, but just before the magistrate gave his decision the man's wife — it was obviously she — came and sat by my side, sobbing. She also, poor thing, took the Fainall view : " He spent it on her," she sobbed ; "he spent it on her " — not in anger, but pleading. Clearly she had forgiven him his lapse and was only anxious about his fate. " It is a hard world for women," as somebody says, a truth I felt very keenly, who am apt to deny it of my own little section of the world where women in some ways have so much the best of it. This poor soul would very likely be left with children to feed if she could, waiting for a disgraced man whom she loved ; it is a frequent lot for women, a rare one for men. The other woman I pitied less as a woman, the deceits of interested love-making being pretty equally divided between my sex and hers. But there were the two poor women, and the unmanly man between them : he looked a capable fellow and was, of course, to have his chances of useful- ness to either destroyed in prison. To prison, of course, he was sent ; and then came the pitiful climax. The man had asked, I suppose — I did not catch it — if he might see his wife, and 157 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS the magistrate answered coldly : " I don't sup- pose your wife would wish to see you." But the poor wife did wish to see him ; she started up wailing and made to meet him as he went from the dock ; no doubt the magistrate was not told of her presence. A policeman repulsed her and her man was led away : I was told the custom was human enough to let her see him afterwards. Then came our case, which was quickly over, for the prisoner, who had little excuse, confessed his fault, and so we got thank- fully into the street of more average human chances. More average, yes : the average poor and distressed person is not a drunk and disorderly, or a beggar or a thief. But those cases were not of monstrous and abnormal persons, but merely an end of the social system, so to say, joined continuously to the poor but honest and well- conducted, the respectable, the well-to-do, the enormously rich. They were symptoms of a widespread disease, not freaks of Nature. They were the results partly, no doubt, of weak character, but chiefly of untoward circumstance. That, I suppose, will be granted in the main. Had I been writing to uphold a thesis I should have left out the jocular workman and the love-malcing young man ; since I was merely to ask a question, I thought I might complete the record of my impression. A case or two of stealing also was 158 IN A POLICE COURT irrelevant. But the most of the drunkards and the beggars and even the thieves were simply, as I say, ends of the social chain. Let us forget the others and keep to these and the misery and ugliness which they sufficiently connote. My question is : Ought such a person as myself to keep all that in mind or to forget it as much as possible ? I know the orthodox answer, of course. Taking the cases of the police court as symbols of the distressful part of the community, I shall be told that they are very much my concern, that it is a duty to one's country to do what one can to improve what is bad in it, that it is inhuman to turn away from human misery because it is ugly. There is something to be said on the other side. I left that police court with my nerves quite unstrung — I care not what comment be made on their quality — and with a black de- pression on my mind. I am of those whose con- solation and sustenance in life are much, very much, in the sight of beautiful things — beautiful women, beautiful animals, pictures, trees, flowers, grass, the sea. Nature and artists have done much for us. Commercial man has provided a great mass of the opposite for us to gaze on if we will. Ought we to gaze on it ? I am not suggest- ing that old intolerant idea, a little vulgarly narrow as it seemed to me, that we should turn carelessly and of course from misery|and ugliness 159 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS just because they are what they are. I felt uneasy as I left the police court and feel not at ease even now. I only urge a point or two on our behalf. A social system which produces such villainies as that of contemporary England is proven vicious, and it is an obligation on those who see that to do what they can politically to change it. But when we are asked to suffer what we should suffer by mixing with these villainies, it is fair to ask in turn what we ourselves owe to the social system. Nature and art, on which our common joys depend, are not a product of it, quite the con- trary. And we ourselves — professional writing folk, let us say, with but a slight appeal to popular taste — earn our bread hardly and not nearly so much cheese as we should like to eat : we owe less than nothing to the social system. The miseries would not be a necessary condition of a small leisured aristocracy ; if we had such a thing, and so far as we have it — a real aristocracy, with a useful lead in manners — I should not grudge it a general support, which would involve none of the horrors. These may not be — most Socialists say they are — ^the consequence of our thousands of indifferently attractive leisured folk, by no means aristocratic, by no means appealing in manners or culture, who are on our backs with their motor-cars and golf : but then England might tumble them all off for what we cared. No debt of ours forces us to encounter the squalor 160 IN A POLICE COURT and ugliness. Taste may, sometimes, I truly believe. Cheap and mean to depreciate the merit of those who labour among the poor : it is merely fortunate that many people are not repelled by gloom and distressful appearances. We see that on an occasion of public mourning : while some of us, not less touched and sad than others at the event, rebel in soul against the black-clad street and drawn blinds — so foreign, as we felt them lately, to a joyous and kindly spirit that had passed — others revel in these things and exact the uttermost of them. So to some it may be, at least, much less repulsive than to others to rescue drunks and disorderlies and beggars, if they can. When conscience and humanity alone impel them ... it is needless to proclaim one's respect. And yet — and yet — are not the workers among the very poor bolster- ing a system which they should be helping to demolish ? Well, such thoughts passed through my mind as I went away from the police court, feeling guiltier, I fancy, than many a prisoner. Was I forging cowardly excuses to myself, knowing, as I knew in my bones, that I would never voluntarily go back to it or visit any other such scene of depression ? Perhaps a reader who thinks so may hope I shall go back some day against my will. But not with my will, ever again. My share of the sun is not unfairly large : I will take L 161 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS its beams while I may. But as for those whose portion is over-great, I hope sincerely they may have to make it up to those wretches of the police court in another world. 162 XXI THE ART OF MODERATION I REMARKED some time ago that the secret of middle age was acceptance, was in meeting it half-way with a smile. A correspondent has objected to me that I have placed before him too negative an ideal for his spirit. It is a weary gospel, he says. He finds in it too strong a suggestion of " hands up " and the white flag, not to say the white feather. The role of good-humoured captive irks him. Something practical and active, something to fire an ambitious soul, is what he demands of me. In answer I have let him into a further secret of middle age which I have discovered, naturally evolved from the other, but so far rather an esoteric affair, known explicitly only to a few of us, a little inner circle of the art and craft. Parallels between the lives of men and the lives of races or nations are generally fallacious, and arguments drawn from them more or less absurd. But there is an illustrative lesson for us in a particular fact of national life. The 163 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS vehemence and passion of one period are succeeded by calmness and studied moderation in the next, as we all know, and the change is recorded in the literature of the two. The vehement thought of Lucretius, the passionate heart of Catullus, were followed by the beautiful verbal games of Virgil and Horace. The fury and force of the seventeenth century in England gave place to the careful sanity and justice of the eighteenth ; the romance and conviction of the nineteenth have fallen into our present incurious dubiety. No one will deny the commonplace that youth is vehement and middle age moderate, and the lesson in the life and literature of a nation is that a fine art may come of both states. Horace and Pope were great artists, whatever you think of them as poets. Your acceptance of middle age and its moderation need not be a tamely negative aSair at all, a forced surrender, a handcuffed pilgrimage. It should be an exquisite arrangement, a beautiful harmony, a triumph of delicate accuracy — in fine an achievement, positive and elaborate, of art. If your youth also was a calculated modera- tion, you have nothing to learn of course. I prefer to think it was generously profuse, as the way has been with most of the world's great spirits. The savage must out in most strong natures still. You plunged headlong into life, an uncalculating, ardent young soul, and made splendid poetry of it, I do not doubt. Now must you learn a new 164 THE ART OF MODERATION art, that of the civilised man. Not a dull art, unworthy of ambitious endeavour ; on the con- trary, one that needs a clear brain and keen eye and sure touch. Your life henceforth is to be as an ode of Horace. I have not been thinking so far of the merely material part of life. Moral indignation, for example, would be a fair illustration of my mean- ing. It may be unrestrained in youth. The sight of a generous youth, with sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks, furiously denouncing a scoundrel, is most agreeable, but when a middle-aged man does this we think him stupidly uncharitable or suspect him of a sinister policy. He has therefore to learn the just mean between moral priggishness and laxity, and that is not an easy task : neatly to isolate your scoundrel's fault from those probably sympathetic to your audience means careful steering. Material illustrations, however, are the easiest. You no longer can drink with the careless freedom of your early manhood (I am addressing my correspondent all this time). Well, do not content yourself with giving it up altogether, like a savage who cannot be trusted with fire-water, or with a sulky consumption of the fitting quantity at a gulp, so to speak, and with regrets that it is no more. Any one but a dipsomaniac can do that. You must make an art of the limitation. Chosen with knowledge, managed with forethought, accompanied by the 165 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS right reflections, your few glasses of light wine may colour your spiritual day. Choose with intimate knowledge of wine and your own tempera- ment and genius, manage the drinking that it may come at the happiest moment for your activities, mingle the beauties of the grape and of abstinence in your mind. So shall a glass give the pleasure that erst you had of a bottle. Stare not stupidly at the port you may not drink after dinner, your imagination fixed on its kindly gifts. Imagine at this time the charms of ab- stinence, of self-control, of being civilised : nay, if they permit it, lecture the drinkers on all this ; so shall not drinking a glass give the pleasure that once came of drinking it. Not drinking that port after dinner will be, to recur to my simile, like the end of an ode of Horace : not a click or a snap or a cheap climax, but calmly and wist- fully leaving off. And your pleasure as an artist will equal your pleasure as a drinker. At least, I hope so. What a pity it is that our lives should be dis- ciplined just at the time when it is least agreeable. In middle life discipline would be a blessing. I mean, of course, external discipline, imposed by force. We are given it in boyhood, when we hate it simply, unable to taste its satisfactions. In middle life self-discipline, founded on reason, takes its place — a miserable substitute. If the orders of a doctor were really authoritative, 166 THE ART OF MODERATION what added delight to the liberty left us and ■what joy in breaking out ! We have far too much liberty of action, and our pleasures as we grow older cannot afford to lose the charm of being forbidden. I always regret that I do not have to go to church on pain of some punishment, at any rate in the country. Well, you must discipline yourself, make a new and positive idea for yourself, fashion a definite art of moderation. That is, if you really think it worth while. 167 XXII THE PLAGUE OF NEWSPAPERS A WRITER by profession has, of course, a personal grievance against newspapers, in that but for their existence he might be engaged in some less fatiguing and more profitable occupation. Even such a fool as he must have been when he chose this way of exist- ence could not have expected to make a living out of magazines and books, I suppose, and so he would have become a Lord Chancellor, or a bishop, or a millionaire stockbroker, or something of the kind. A patriot has his peculiar griev- ance, because no newspaper quite expresses his views on politics. And other specialists have other grievances of their own. But the griev- ances I wish to air are those common to ordinary people who have no extreme views or excessive prejudices, who are reasonably intelligent, who wish in a quiet way to make the best of this vale of tears, and who find in it as a cardinal and unavoidable element stacks and miles of newspapers. 169 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Their monstrous number is, indeed, the first objection. If they were all exactly the same it would not matter, because we could look at one and ignore the rest. If they were quite different the variety might be amusing. But they are neither exactly the same nor really different. They are like a street of houses all built alike, but with differently coloured doors — or at the best of two or three types of architecture only. So you turn from one to another, hoping it will be different, and, essentially, you are sold. How could it be otherwise when they are written in the main by the same sort of people, with the same sort of antecedents, who differ only in opinions, and whose originality is sternly sup- pressed ? Every newspaper man who is not an editor or a proprietor will agree with the last statement. Mark you and mind you, I say nothing ungracious of the quality. I am nothing if not loyal to my fellow artists. The collection of news is marvellously complete. The standard of writing is extraordinarily high. The honesty of purpose may be seen shining a hundred miles off. I only say that there are innumerable newspapers and that they are all much of a muchness. To a thoughtful mind the waste of toil is deplorable. Something stupid or disagreeable happens somewhere — a man is killed in a brawl or a " lady " is caught stealing in a shop. Think of the army of news-editors and compositors who 170 THE PLAGUE OF NEWSPAPERS have to be concerned with this banal event. The thought of their number is, I know, quite agree- able to some people — the people who are im- pressed by anything large. To me it is sad, and I notice that one or two papers would be enough to record these trivialities. But, you say, this is not a discomfort to the average man. It is, when he looks at half a dozen papers in the day and wastes a moment or two five times before he realises that he has read the confounded paragraph already. Then consider the leading articles. A Government introduces a Bill. It has obvious merits from one point of view, obvious faults from another. With very few exceptions, all the articles written about it come under two heads^-essentially, they are only two articles. Superficially and actually, however, they are hundreds. Well, this means that hundreds of writers who might have been doing something useful or agreeable have been writing unnecessary articles, and that thousands of readers read the same article twice or several times. The waste and weariness of it all ! Of course, the man of common sense is ready with his obvious retort. He points out that we are not compelled to look at several newspapers. To his hard, unimaginative temperament it may be easy to avoid them. But we who are sym- pathetic and wish to be of the world we live in cannot avoid them. There is something callous 171 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS and uncivil in ignoring the labours of so many clever and hardworking men and women. I should feel a brute if I looked the other way. Personally, the only newspaper I feel it absolutely necessary to see, to obtain at any cost or trouble when I am away from home, is the Times. Habit, perhaps : at any rate, I feel that either the British Empire or I would crumble in ruins if I missed it. Various interests impel me to take in two other morning papers as well. I look at a few more in my club. Even there, the shut face of the Daily reproaches me. Before I have time to open it the first batch of evening papers is upon me. And so it goes. On Wednesday and Friday the same photograph stares at me from several illustrated papers, and on Saturday, as though I were not far too literary as it is, the weekly reviews strew my path. My devotion does not extend to reading them all exactly, but merely to look at them almost entirely precludes any other reading. And in a degree my case must be that of many. Then, if you live in London, you must begin the day with the newspapers. Think what this means. If one moment be more sacred than another, more certainly to be given to one's better thoughts and higher aspirations, it is that when we begin a fresh day. We have been as good as dead, our active life and conscious thought cut off. Hopefully or with weariness we are reborn 172 THE PLAGUE OF NEWSPAPERS to pain and pleasure. Surely if at such a moment we are to read anything, it should be the finest poetry that has heartened or consoled our race. And on what do our eyes first fall ? Sometimes, no doubt, on the news of something so important or so terrible that at no moment of the day is it free from our thoughts. But usually on this : " We have never attempted to conceal from our readers our opinion that this question involves considerations vital to the prosperity and, we think we may add without undue exaggeration, to the very existence. . . ." Or on this, in big letters : " Amusing Comedy at a Wedding. Dog swallows the Ring." Or on this : " Horrible Tale of Crime. Uncle boiled by his Nephew." Or on such a futile article as this. Alas ! 178 XXIII A FALSE CHARGE "English Dttlnkss. — In England wisdom's passport is dulness; gaiety of manner damns. — Max Bebebohm, in Vanity Fair." THE above was a little paragraph in a daily paper. The remark occurs in an essay by Mr. Beerbohm, which, like all his essays, contains many wise and beautiful remarks, and it was so like a daily paper to pick out the most disputable of them. For once in a way, Mr. Beerbohm has permitted himself to be unoriginal ; this observation about England and dulness has been made before. It has been made so often, indeed, that it has come to be generally accepted as true, and as I am disposed to dispute it, I take this terse and emphatic setting of it as the text to my sermon. (And so the ball is tossed to and fro.) I find it refreshes me in times of depression to attack my fellow countrymen, but I am apt to repel the attacks of others — and with the more heat because when I do so the attackers generally say that I myself am English in a peculiarly con- centrated degree. Have at Mr. Beerbohm, then ; 175 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS we do not reckon dulness and wisdom the same, and gaiety of manner delights us. He must clear his mind of confusion. We are slow to welcome a novelty of thought, of course. That is the sagacity of a practical people, aware that novelty is most often only apparent, and the thought may turn out to have been exploded long ago, so that all the trouble of understanding it will have been wasted. We like a platitude. That is an artistic instinct, our recognition that social life is an art. If every one waited ujitil he had something original to say, what would become of conversation ? I protest that the sight of two weary Englishmen resolutely ex- changing platitudes on the London fogs or the genius of Mr. Churchill is a beautiful sight ; it is a ritual full of meaning, a sacrifice to the social graces. Paradoxes and original remarks are often the most anti-social and impertinent things in life. I admit that this just value of platitudes in society may be wrongly extended to books, but it is not often so. As a rule, when a great reputa- tion has been achieved it is not by platitudes but by a cunning concealment or a fresh and artistic use of them. There, surely, we may compliment the artist : Horace is full of platitudes. The only instance I can remember of a merely naive statement of platitudes achieving a great success is that of the late Mr. Lecky and his " Map of Life." But there, I am convinced, was a 176 A FALSE CHARGE demonic power of mesmerism. I myself, as I read it, seemed to see two graceful hands making strange hypnotic passes before my eyes and compelling me to murmur, " How true, how true ! " It is not a fair example. We go nearest to justifying Mr. Beerbohm in our dislike of versatility, be- cause it is rather dull always to do the same thing. It is a bore, perhaps, when one has induced (for example) a dozen or so of readers to believe in one's wish to be funny, that they should insist ever afterwards, however serious one's intention, that one means to be funny still — and can't be. — (Yes, dear critics, that is a bore.) But what a bore also for the dozen readers to have to change their point of view ! There, again, is our care for the amenities. As for gaiety of manner, so far from damn- ing, it opens our doors and hearts more readily than any other quality. With it the emptiest chatterbox will be reputed a wit. For it even originality and versatility have been forgiven. And, apart from social life, whom has gaiety of manner ever damned ? , Competitors of an older school and their henchmen may have hindered Whistler's recognition : it was never hindered by his gaiety and wit. What harm did brilliancy and gaiety work Sheridan or Canning or Disraeli in political life ? Birth, the not being " one of us," as the older snobs phrased it, was an obstacle to success, and it was just the brilliancy and gaiety M 177 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS that made birth forgotten. To be sure, we de- mand of your gay and brilliant creatures that their solider virtues, their courage and capacity and character generally, shall be beyond suspicion, even more so than with the dullards, just as in the days when people were more interested in other people's beliefs than now an especially austere morality was incumbent on the agnostic. That is because we know our weakness for wit and gaiety, and are on our guard against it. The wit of our judges, anxious men bowed down with their responsibility, is a homage to this national hatred of dulness. Men are remembered for quite mediocre jokes long after their serious work is forgotten. The quality of all this wit is another matter : it cannot always be of the best because we consume so much. But there can be no doubt that we love gaiety of manner and welcome it on almost every occasion. The jokes of doctors and dentists — nay, the funny stories about funerals ! The fashion of jokes changes as much as any other fashion, yet the comic relief in Shakespeare always goes with a roar. No, no ; we never yet damned statesman, philosopher, or artist for a joke. That is, if we saw it. 178 XXIV A WORD TO BE DROPPED EXCEPT for purposes of ceremony, I desire the word gentleman to be abolished. I have weighed with great care its advan- tages and disadvantages, and have found that on the whole it is an inconvenience, a nuisance and the cause of various evils. Of course, amiable people do not go about priding themselves on being gentlemen, or complimenting other people on being gentlemen, or complaining of other people for not being gentlemen. Unfortunately, every one is not amiable, and these ridiculous and objectionable things are done by thousands, and they help to cloud the mental atmosphere of England and waste a shocking amount of hatred and heartburning. No good use of the word can compensate for this, and you and I, reader, who use it with discretion and point, must therefore be content (save when we are strictly by ourselves) to forego it in future. I will take it up and down a column or so for its last airing. In the best sense I suppose a gentleman means 179 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS a man who is generous and truthful, loyal to his friends and fair to his enemies, incapable of mean actions, careful of other people's feelings, and withal of a certain bearing and address. Well, the word is a short way of noting all these fine attributes, to be sure, but do we use it so often in this sense that its loss would seriously embarrass our conversation ? We might predicate these qualities one by one as they come up for notice, or even enumerate them all at once if our gentleman so displays them, without any frequent loss of breath. I grant you, however, that here is a worthy and profitable use, and it is only because of human frailty that I would abohsh this also for the sake of the others. For all the other uses are traps for folly and bad passions. The original sense, in which a gentle- man is a man who is entitled to bear a coat-of- arms, is become an anachronism. A harmless sense, this, even still, and in a way, pretty and romantic ; but the senses derived from it run into sheer insanity. In this country, where blood is so mixed and classes are so shifting, almost any distinctions of birth are rather paltry — are you quite easy about all your greatgrandfathers, dear snob ? — ^but the distinctions of birth over the gentleman are really idiotic. There are thousands and thousands of men, otherwise sane, who be- lieve that because their sires were parsons or doctors they are better than men begotten by 180 A WORD TO BE DROPPED farmers or chemists. The idea that trade and being a gentleman are incompatible is a piece of very modern snobbishness and the stress of economics is destroying it, but meanwhile it is responsible for an infinity of fantastic and anti- social arrogance and unhumorous and anti-social resentment. Another use, and perhaps the most convenient, is to mean by gentleman a man at ease in society, natural without impudence, polite without effusiveness and so on. That is a quality which deserves a name, and the absence of which may deserve another name. But the confounded word gentleman, with all its vague implications, introduces a sort of offensiveness into this other- wise natural distinction, so that shy and awk- ward men, or men who have learned a politeness without dignity, or who suffer from some such demerit, if they are conscious that on other grounds their claim to be gentlemen may not be assured, instead of good-humouredly seeking to correct a fault are rendered trebly nervous and unhappy, and probably are filled with an absurdly dispro- portionate bitterness. For there is the true evil of all this business. There is a rancour in those who are " not quite gentlemen," especially if they have ability, and lack magnanimity — ^which seems to derive from an older social state in England, even, it may not be fantastic to imagine, from Norman oppression and Saxon enforced servility. Ridiculous now ; but emotions linger 181 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS most irrelevantly, and really I believe that by abolishing the word gentleman I shall let a deal of black blood. I grant the good use and know well that the word has often a warm and fine effect. " He knew how to die like a gentleman " — such a phrase has often thrilled us, no doubt. If we could keep the word for such a use. . . . But conceit and un- kindness, and folly and narrowness have almost made it their own, and so it must go. Or if it stay it must be laughed at. A hundred years ago it had become a ridiculous expression to men of an amiable humour. George Selwyn wrote to Lord Carlisle to say he had just met Charles Fox (who was a Maccaroni in his youth, but now was famous for his slovenly apparel) looking, in a new stiit, " as clean and smug as a Gentleman." And when one remembers the " portraits of a Gentleman," that bland and affable personage, and the ubiquitous Gentleman who was always quoted in the news of that day as doing or saying or undertaking this or that, one understands the conception of pomp and smugness. It is a conception which somehow nearly always occurs to me when I hear the word. Something comic seems to hover behind the compliment. If I am told that Brown has charming manners, or has done an act of delicate kindness, or has stuck to a friend in adversity, I credit Brown simply with the merit indicated. But hearing that Brown by reason 182 A WORD TO BE DROPPED of such a merit is a gentleman, a suggestion of pomp or self-complacency or something absurd crosses my mind, and Brown, if I know him not, takes on a slightly ridiculous aspect. I hope no one I have obliged goes about calling me a gentle- man. Still no one will hate me for it, now that I have abolished the serious use of the word, and that is the chief consideration. 188 XXV SOCIETY IT once was spelled with a capital S, to be a target for satirists, but no one, except the more servile paragraphists, spells it so now. It used to be mentioned with a capital S in the voice, so to speak ; that is to say in a distinctive and exclusive sense. Old-fashioned people still so use the word, and the less discreet of parvenus who are proud of social success ; but most of us, fearful to be thought snobs, when convenience tempts us to this quasi-techmcal usage, guard ourselves by a mock-pompous or otherwise comical intonation. Is it only a ghost, then, this poor society ? Has it no meaning any more ? Gone, with all its apparatus of " seasons " and " func- tions " and " great ladies " and the rest ? Well, that is not quite the case with society. But its denotation has become rather elusive, and many confusions and misconceptions beset it. What, for example, is meant now by the old phrase, to be " in society " ? It might mean anything — from the familiar mixing with potentates and 185 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS statesmen down to the natural sense that a man is not altogether avoided by his fellow creatures. Let us take the occasion of the alleged London season to disentangle a few facts. That they are unimportant, perhaps microscopic, need not shame our philosophy overmuch. Conscious of our supe- riority, we may turn a careless eye down on them for a while, to return presently to things more befitting our wisdom. One must be historical for a moment, but may make it a short one. A hundred years ago there was a compact aristocratic caste in England, composed of persons who knew, and knew about, each other. In what sense is the present London society representative of that caste ? (One really cannot go on disfiguring the column with in- verted conunas, and if any indignant democrat objects to a convenient usurpation of meaning, he must settle it with his intelligence.) It is a commonplace to say that society has been in- vaded by millionaires, and so forth ; but that is an inaccurate way of stating the facts. The old society was not rigidly exclusive ; jn fact, the opposite quality has always characterised English society, from the Restoration onwards, and dis- tinguished it from the Continental. The titular aristocracy had its formal privileges, but actually the most powerful members of the society were often men of " no birth." Certainly it welcomed genius, or what it took for such, quite as freely 186 SOCIETY as now ; indeed, more freely, since its note on the whole was more intellectual. Beauty, of course, was welcomed, as in the case of the Gunnings. As for money, most of what was in the country be- longed to it, but it kept a shrewd eye on fortunes made outside it, and was quite ready to deal with them. The chief points to be noted about it are that it represented political power, and that it was small. If a man was admitted to any part of it he was admitted to the whole. It was a large family, this small community, mostly re- lated and mutually known. You were either in it or outside it. All was simple and plain sailing. Much later than a hundred years ago London society was so small and definite that hostesses did not invite men to their evening parties ; the men merely heard of them and went. . . . When we come to fifty years ago — from that point to twenty-five or so — we find still a certain definite- ness, though greater numbers and less coherence. A growing democracy had taken away some of the political power, and so the importance was in a large measure artificial, but the idea of society still stood for a concrete thing. To be in society meant something quite definite to Thackeray ; he uses the phrase without either irony or defini- tion. Persons in society patronised persons who were not, though the grounds for inclusion had become rather haphazard and shadowy. But now ? The numbers have become so great 187 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS and the coherence so slight that a point is reached when the word " society " means nothing at all. The fact is commonly misrepresented. It is supposed that society stands for what it stood, only larger, diluted, more vulgar, and so on. Really the old society, grown too large for cohe- rence, has split into sets ; admission to one does not mean admission to another ; the comprehen- sive word has lost significance altogether. Let us look at the constituents of the word, as the ordinary Londoner or reader of London papers understands it. First, in a monarchical country the society frequented by the Sovereign has of course a definite importance, which varies indeed, but which is obvious and need not be elaborated. Next there is a class or a set which possesses political power (of course, in some cases a cross-division with the other, but distinct), to belong to which is a spring- board in politics. This represents the old society in a sense, and is the only true survival of it, for social importance without pohtical influence is a vain thing, a mere engine of foolish snobbery. But it is — ^this may seem a paradox — more con- centrated, because it is no longer coterminous with birth, while its political power is of course less definite. A few families and their connections and in- timates undoubtedly have considerable pohtical power, however, and form a set. It shows fairly well in its absorption of talent ; it is wealthy and 188 SOCIETY does not lay itself out for extraneous wealth ; it is exclusive. Then there is an exclusive set based on birth and tradition, respectable to those of us who like old names and things, with little or no weight in politics. And then there is a welter of people whose only claim to social im- portance is in the possession of titles or the asso- ciation with them, or, directly, the possession of money. They fill the paragraphs of fashionable intelligence, but they are not important, and to twist the natural sense of society into a technical one on their account is really excessive. It is a shifting, vague body, easily accessible to wealth ; and it is to be observed that whereas in old days if wealth was admitted to society it was admitted to the whole, now it commonly stops short here, for the splitting into sets has produced a small society more exclusive than the old. It is part of this body which is attacked with so much fury and exaggeration by lady novelists ; with exaggeration, because morality is a much more constant thing than they suppose ; with fury, be- cause — ^well, why with fury one wonders a little. And then, of course, there are sets or coteries of intellectual or artistic interests, in which titles or wealth may or may not be, and which the snob is at liberty to call society or not as he chooses. All these sets cross at points, but there is not a jumble ; there is distinction enough for definition. 189 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS We perceive, then, that society is not dead. But that small part of it which is politically power- ful and therefore stands for the society our ances- tors knew, is beyond the reach of the ordinary aspirant with money in his purse, and moreover is apart from the consideration of great titles and old names, though it may contain some. Through all the letters and journals and memoirs interest- ing to the student of English manners, the same names recur in succeeding generations as power- ful, or at least mixing with the powerful. But now you might be a perfectly respectable duke of an old creation and never meet, for example, the Prime Minister of the day. There is an ob- vious change, and a corollary is that the fimctions and seasons and so forth, about which the para- graphist is busy, are much less important than they were, because the powerful people follow their own tastes and are apt to stay away. The mistake made by the guileless reader of the para- graphs is in supposing that they deal with events and people that necessarily matter. The reveren- tial novelist with his " great ladies," again, mis- applies that dignity to any woman who gives large parties in a big house. Society, as it is generally understood, is often unfairly attacked. Most of it is no more harmful than money with- out duties inevitably implies. If its manners have lost in decorum here and there, they have gained in ease. It is still better than merely 190 SOCIETY plutocratic. Only — it does not matter. The society which does is even more remote from the average citizen than it was and not at all at the mercy of the paragraphist. It is a hard saying for the aspirant, but it is true. 191 XXVI THE DISCOMFORTS OF THE LAW THE insulted reader remarks, with some natural heat, perhaps, that whatever my experiences may be, his own include no collision with the legal authorities of his country. The law has no terrors for him. No policeman has arrested him, no judge has sentenced him ; he has not even been threatened by a solicitor. What do I mean by the law being a daily discom- fort to him ? Let me keep my offensive insinua- tions to myself. Quite so, quite so, respectable reader. The suggestion ought never to have been made. You may turn the page without a stain upon your character, I believe, on my con- science, that you are neither a murderer, a thief, nor even a bankrupt. I meant only to write of some occasional incon- veniences which even the best of us may suffer from the law. But since we have mentioned criminals and suchlike, let us rest a moment from our own proper troubles, and by an act of sympathetic imagination figure the really daily N 198 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS discomfort which the law may be to others. The exercise will do us good. We need not linger over the more serious aspect of the law. Fear, suspicion, hatred — ^these emotions are beyond the scope of this occasion. Probably, though, our imagination exaggerates them, for men get used to most things, and because humanity is stronger than convention, the relations between the breakers and avengers of the law are not without kindness or even humour. What would most rankle in my mind were I a criminal would be, I think, the folly of the law ija encouraging me to go the whole hog. If I were a criminal, I am sure I should be one on a small and timid scale, and should sufier accord- ingly. For if you commit great and serious crimes you are sent to penal servitude, which aU, the experts say is much better than imprisonment with hard labour. Just as, if you owe half a million you suffer little or no inconvenience, but if you only owe ten pounds you may be sent to prison for not paying it. I suppose the law has some vague idea of encouraging a spirit of enter- prise, but it puzzles my old-fashioned morality. In the way of mere discomfort, however, as an habitual criminal, I should resent more than anything else, the ineffable air of transcendent virtue which policemen don with their uniforms. (I can't believe that they wear it with their other clothes ; I refuse to imagine the discomfort of it 194 THE DISCOMFORTS OF THE LAW in the domestic circle.) Even as a layman, so to speak, I think it goes a little too far. No one admires the force more than I, no one relies more heartily on its courage, ability, and courtesy. But this conscious air of Puritan and Hero, so happily combined, is rather overwhelming. A Dean in gaiters looks on me as a brother, but there is no such human condescension in the eye under the helmet. It tells me that my tweed suit may or may not cover a villain, but that beneath the blue uniform is a man utterly impeccable. Now if I knew that this pattern might at any moment interrupt my professional pursuits with a heavy hand, I should resent the transcendent virtue quite bitterly. I should cry out to be pitted against normal humanity, not against para- gons. The other day I saw in Hyde Park a woman in custody. She was middle-aged, the policeman was a very young man. They marched along, his hand on her arm. She was insisting volubly on her innocence of the offence whatever it was, with which she was charged. He was silent, serene, Olympian. There was nothing harsh or bullying in his manner ; on the contrary, it sug- gested a polite impersonality, dashed with pity that such poor creatures as his prisoner should be. But in every feature, in every line of his body, in his upright bearing and pose of head, there shone forth illimitable confidence in the greatness and beneficence of his ofiice, and in his personal 195 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS immunity from human frailty. Well, well I An agreeable state of mind, very likely, but what an aggravation for the poor woman I To fall a little below the standard of average humanity and find oneself confronted with an angel 1 But let us leave wrong-doers and go back to ourselves. The delays and changes of the law are a commonplace. Probably the explanation is that judges and lawyers are secret adherents to Tolstoy's principle of non-resistance, and try to spread it among us. They seek to prevent your hitting back, even by the civilised method of going to law, and so they make it as unpleasant as pos- sible. One is loth to suppose that really it's your money they want — ^that the whole thing is an elaborate swindle. And one has only to watch a barrister examining a witness to realise that he dislikes and despises those who meddle with the law, and tries to disgust them with it. We should look for good motives in every one. Some people complain of solicitors. They seem to me a very fine body of men, full of generous enthusiasms. A friend in financial difficulties showed me recently a budget of letters he had re- ceived from them. Such noble letters ! " What ? " I could hear the writers exclaim, " What ? He owes you £4 17s. 8d. ? The scoundrel ! The unutterable villain ! Bring me my sword — I will hack him in pieces 1 No — stay — I will write him a letter." It is beautiful to think of such 196 THE DISCOMFORTS OF THE LAW swift and hot emotion in the cause of clients, a little on the other side hysteria, perhaps, but so reckless and loyal. Unselfish indignation is a rare quality, and should be encouraged. No, really it comes to this, that I have nothing much to object to in the law. Provided you are innocent, and, unless it makes a mistake, for which (if it ever finds it out) it will pardon you, it will do nothing worse to you than empty your pocket and ruin your nervous system. Still, I do wish policemen would look a little less sainted. They make me feel criminal. 197 XXVII ON BEING PATRONISED I SPEAK of being patronised in the thin-lipped modern sense. Of old there was much to be said for it. We have not, all of us, Dr. Johnson's independent spirit, and comfortable quarters in some pleasant house, a certainty of provand and freedom from duns and cares might well have been thought worth gaining at the ex- pense of a little courtier-work and the composition of high-coloured dedications. I have always envied the lot of the poet Gay with his kind, eccentric duchess. All this, however, I have said before — in vain. Being patronised nowadays means an intimation conveyed to you, by phrasing or intona- tion, that a person addressing you is your superior but is nevertheless interested, more or less, in your existence or activities. That is all : there is nothing solid in it, and one might suppose that irritation would be the sole result to oneself. As a matter of fact, one's emotions on being patronised vary rather oddly, and I think are worth a trifle of analysis. 199 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS The other day a young man of thirty or so, whose aptitudes and abihties would hardly qualify him to black boots or sweep a crossing or sit in Parlia- ment, but who is a fashionable young man in his way, addressed me as follows : " How are you f " he said, with a condescension on the pronoun no device of writing can reproduce ; " what's your news ? " I was very angry, answered him curtly, and am ready with something nasty whenever I hear his name mentioned. ... A schoolboy broke off an important conversation about some game or other to ask me, with an easy tolerance, how I liked writing. I was much amused and replied good-humouredly Mrs. A., who is a vaguely aristocratic person without manners, good looks, or education, offers me her hand as though she were conferring a privilege on me, almost ironically. I do not mind very much, but am inclined to be sarcastic about her. . . . Mrs. B., who started life in a Houndsditch tripe shop (I believe) and is the wife of the enormously and nefariously rich B., treated me when I met her with undisguised contempt for the humility of my position. I thought it a good joke and rather liked her. . . . Old C, who is almost the most distinguished- looking old gentleman I have ever seen, and is entitled at his age to suppose that family and all that count for something, is polite and charming, but with a distinct sense of distance in our rela- tion. It seems natural and I do not object in the 200 ON BEING PATRONISED least ; but I do, and very strongly, in the case of his idiot nephew. . . . The beautiful Miss D., stupid, coarse-minded, and mercenary, has a lofty air which is rather irritating ; but then it is pleasant to look at her Old Mrs. E. puts pointed and intimate questions to me without the least right. It never occurs to me to resent them, and I reply quite frankly. . . . And so on. I am getting tired of the alphabet, but I think the differences are curious. With some trouble I have worked out a theory of them. Conceited and little-minded folk resent being patronised by any one. You, reader, and I, large-minded people with a sense of humour, do not mind or can enjoy being patronised by those who are very much older or very much younger than we, or by those whose claim to be superior to us is obviously ridiculous. That principle covers the great majority of cases in which we acquiesce. It is nothing to be patronised by an undergraduate : it is sometimes pathetic, for the patronising air is based, not on what he is, but on what he thinks he will be, and one knows that he will probably be disappointed. It seems a humdrum thing to him that one should be a barrister in a small way, or a schoolmaster, or a scribbler in the papers — to him who is going to set the world on fire — and his manner shows a certain lofty pity in con- sequence. Thirty years hence, poor fellow, under- graduates will be patronising him. Small-minded, 201 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS indeed, to be annoyed by him. Only the hard of fibre, again, can be annoyed by patronising age. We at least have possibilities of life for ever denied to the aged, and should be humbled before them. It is likely enough that their experience has taught them nothing of value, but it is the merest courtesy to assume otherwise and to recognise a definite privilege. It is one which the most amiable of them waive, of course, but we should never object to their assertion of it. As for the patronisers whose assumption is manifestly absurd, we have a prompt consolation in the amusement of observers, which is a compliment to ourselves, and in the funny story we may make of the incident. Mrs. B., for instance — ^the mere existence of Mrs. B. is a joke. The existence of B., with his hateful hoards, is a public, scandal, a failure of civilisation, but his wife, whose costly nourishment and adornment would support a small town, is a simple, harmless crea- ture, merely a stupid luxury the community per- mits itself. In all her idle life she has done no action and made no remark requiring the least intelligence, and when she patronises poor, hard- working men who fill some useful place in the com- munity she is a truly comic figure, mildly to be relished. One should really enjoy the irony of her. Then by whom does one dislike to be patronised ? By those whom one admits to be one's superiors ? I think not. In the first place, it is not the busi- ness of an Englishman, as I take him, to admit 202 ON BEING PATRONISED that any one is really as essentially his superior. Certainly it is not your business, if you have the luck to be a gentleman as well as an Englishman, for an English gentleman, it is well known, is the noblest creature on God's earth. At the most he may admit that some one is technically and by accident his superior. If he regards a duke as in this case he runs no risk, for dukes have been taught humility and are anxious that their dukedoms should be ignored. If a king — of less native kindness than his present Majesty — ^took to patronising him, he would hardly mind. Apart from accident, and given equal chances, an Englishman ought to believe himself the equal of anybody. Or, if he be humble-minded — a great pity, I think — ^and sees in another moral qualities he makes no pretence of possessing for himself, why, then, the idea of a man patronising one on the strength of being self- sacrificing or religious or economical, or something of that sort, is too comically priggish for one's annoyance. No : if we are annoyed by patronis- ing airs, it is not because we think the patronisers our superiors, but because we are afraid the rest of the world thinks so. We are afraid the rest of the world would think the patronising airs justified by facts — ^though not by an amiable theory of manners. When that annoying Mrs. A. gives me that condescending hand, other people may agree with me that her manner is ill-bred, but mata.y> far too many, would say that her confounded 203 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS connections and social position, and all that non- sense, justify the condescension in fact, and that is why I say sarcastic things about her. So "with the young man I spoke of : I know that my greater knowledge and intelligence, and so forth, are the qualities that really matter, but so many people would rather be handsome and rich and splendidly attired as he is. Sometimes even I myself — but I will not confuse the theory. The most objectionable of all patronisers are people of our own calling, whom we despise but the world exalts above us. Of course, I would not write X.'s trivial and vulgar books if I could, but I am aware that he has a greater name in the world, and I de- clare that the next time he tells me that he too had a hard struggle for bread and cheese in his time I shall let him know what I think of him. Again, while people in factitious positions of im- portance are humble we may forgive them ; if they dare to patronise us, they must suffer for the world's folly. Unfortunately, we can't make them suffer very acutely. Such is my theory of our discontent or other- wise under airs of patronage. The reason of the airs is, I suppose, the reason why our ancestors tortm-ed their captive enemies or why some people bully their dependents. It is the assertion of power. As when you beat a fellow creature, or bully him, so when you patronise him you visibly assert a position of advantage over him. You 204 ON BEING PATRONISED are trying to be a superman, after your fashion. To patronise is a little less coarse than to torture or to bully, but it is much on the same plane. Finer natures assert their power by conferring benefits, and so we know that some of the greatest egoists in the world are the most actively bene- ficent persons. One might say that patronising a man was half-way between flogging him and giving him ten pounds. All three actions may spring (may, for beneficence is sometimes other- wise inspired) from the same motive, and that is the excuse for the spirit of independence which disdains a favour. But I wonder if it is a further refinement in the sense of power which makes us suffer and enjoy airs of patronage we might, but do not, effectually resent. Strong people, we know, often like to be bullied by weak. A delicious feeling, that you could turn the tables by raising a finger and lazily refrain ! It may be another refinement when the sexes are different, no doubt, but the first is a more general explanation. Take notice, all you dear foolish patronising folk, that my graceful submission to your airs is not timidity, or recognition of your absurd pretensions. I could crush you in half a minute, but because I am strong and noble I refrain. It is I, not you, who am asserting my power and my ego, really. . . I must remember to think of this next time. 205 XXVIII ON WAITING FOR DINNER WAITING is a real curse on our social life, disastrous in its effects and frightful in its implications. I do not refer to the waiting necessary in human endeavour and com- petition. The barrister waiting in his bare cham- bers for his first brief, the author waiting for the public to be educated up to his level, the politician waiting for his side to come in — ^they suffer tragi- cally perhaps, but they suffer what is in the natural order of things, like birth or death, or having one's hair cut. Such waiting ap that is a legitimate trial of endurance, and the strong triumph. The waiting I am to write of now is wickedly and wantonly imposed, and half its horrors come frqm our knowledge that it is unnecessary, so that mere irritation grows into black fury and seeds of mad- ness are sown in our brains. Here again, how- ever, we must distinguish. There is a sort of waiting which is heartlessly inflicted, but which can be borne by an effort. That is when, a definite period is put to it. If you need urgently to see 207 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS some potent person on business, and he from a desire to assert his importance or to make you an easier prey, or some other sinister motive puts you off to Thursday week, you vow vengeance, of course, or at least you hope he will be maimed in an accident, but you can brace yoiu-self to bear the waiting, because it is to cease at a definite time. The waiting which is intolerable, which breaks the strongest constitution and muddles the sanest intelligence, is waiting for what should happen at once, and may happen at any moment, but happens not, and the supreme type of it is waiting for dinner. Consider first the suffering. After a day of exhausting toil or tiresome idleness a man arrives at the hour of dinner. His body needs it, and still more does his soul need it : the whole man cries out for a cessation of worry and boredom, for the moments of pleasure which humanity must in some fashion procure or perish. He has en- dured till now, but his power of endurance is running out. Well, he goes, let us imagine, to a restaurant, where he is to meet a friend. A kindly smile — ah, the pathos of that smile ! — ^humanises the wrinkles of care ; he thinks of the food and drink ready for him, but he thinks more keenly still of the genial interchange of jokes and stories, the affectionate gaiety of this friendly union. His lips begin to frame the questions he has to ask, the news he has to tell. Cheerfully he enters, 208 ON WAITING FOR DINNER expectantly he looks round. His friend is not there. Ah, well, the friend will be there soon. He gives his overcoat to the attendant, and sits down. What a good fellow the friend is ! How delightful to dine with him ! Five minutes pass. He strolls over to the fireplace, and looks at a picture on the wall of the ante-room. Five minutes pass. He reflects that waiting for dinner is rather a bore when one is hungry. Five minutes pass. He feels uncomfortable and anxious. A cab stops outside. Thank heaven, here is his friend. M is not his friend. Five minutes pass. Other people enter, greet waiting friends cheerfully or with apologies, hurry into the dining-room. His friend comes not. Five minutes pass. He begins to think that, hungry as he is, his irritation will prevent his eating. Ten minutes pass. His friend has many good qualities, but this sort of thing is intolerable. Something gnaws him inside. He paces the room, he looks savagely at other people. He rages against his friend and To be wrath with those we love Doth work like madness in the brain. Five minutes pass. Life is a black business, its toils kill one and its pleasures are invariably spoiled. The agony of hunger, the agony of indecision — shall he begin dinner ? — and the agony of outraged friendship and kindness tear his soul to tatters. Five minutes pass. Forty-five minutes of intense suffering, which must make an indelible mark on o 209 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS his character, leaving him a wiser and a worse man! A thief who picked his pocket, a ruffian who knocked him down, would have done him no such injury as this so-called friend. You can spoil nothing in a man that matters so much as his temper. Now consider the implication on the other side. The friend who has caused this suffering and de- terioration of character has been talking oblivious of the time, or been absorbed in a book, or finishing a rubber of bridge. Of course, there are people who really meet with accidents when they go out to dinner ; they are to be pitied and avoided. They are few, however ; as a rule the reason of the crime is trivial and avoidable. It is almost in- credible, but true, that there are men and women so destitute of imagination that they realise nothing of the suffering they cause, and honestly think their offence a light one : they prove it by offer- ing frankly a trivial excuse. I can only say that they are unfit for civilised life. But that, again, must be an infrequent case. Most of the criminals must know their crime, and, indeed, they usually invent some plausibly serious lie to excuse it. Very good : we have then among us a number of persons who 'are ready to inflict an extremity of nervous agony on us in mere wantonness, or for small convenience to themselves. In so far as this quality goes, they are cruel savages. What is to be done with them ? I am acquainted with 210 ON WAITING FOR DINNER a person who, on a strict average, keeps three people waiting half an hour a day — that is, a hundred and eighty-two hours and a half in the year or more than a week. In other words, she causes nearly a month in the year of irritation, rage, pain, and black passions. So wonderful is human conceit that these criminals often seem to suppose that they are popular people at the very moment of their crime. They enter smiling, tell a glib lie, or say they are so sorry with obvious unconcern. The fatuous fools ! They may be loved at other times, they may be as gifted and popular as they please, but at that moment there is no one present who — could we but follow our hearts — would not like them to be publicly chastised. Waiting, however, when there is some one with whom to talk is not necessarily maddening. With an effort one's mind may be distracted, and one can soothe irritation by abusing the absent. It is true that one's digestion may be upset and the dinner may be injured or spoiled, and these, certainly, are grave disasters. Yet these evils, profound and terrible though they be, are as nothing to the evils of waiting alone. Then there 's no succour at all. You must simply wait, wait, wait, while your nerves quiver and jump and ache. Brute strength no longer tyrannises over us. Barons maraud no more. Some day the tyranny of money also will be crushed, and some day 211 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS we shall deal with the enemies of our nerves. Then will the builder cease to build at untimely hours, and in the morning the milkman's can will be hushed. And then will be branded as monsters and driven from our society the wretches who keep us waiting for dinner. 212 XXIX CONCERNING SIZE SOMEBODY rebuked me the other day lor writing nothing but short things, and wished me to write a novel as long as " Clarissa," or the like. My excuse or explanation would not be of general interest, I fear, but the conversation set me meditating about size, and I managed to disengage a few ideas on the subject which may set the reader's fancies also a-wandering — ^and that is always a service to him in a workaday world. Some people are impressed by size, others de- preciate it. To some it seems vulgar, to others noble. Some souls it exalts, others it depresses. It is, of course, too large a theme, in all its psycho- logical and metaphysical implications and meta- phorical uses, to be dealt with in a little article. But let us take a few of its appearances and con- sider how diversely they afiect our fellow creatures, and let us begin with our dear selves. The size of human bodies is rather an intimate theme, to be handled delicately, lest offence inadvertently 213 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS be given. Proceeding with caution, one may say that in men bulk is less admired than it was, in spite of all our athletics. Small, keen, hatchet- faced men are credited with wit, large men are thought stupid. Fat men are supposed by many to lack all mental refinement. It is sometimes even diificult for them to be credited with any capacity for feeling of any sort, so that their mis- fortunes are heard of with guffaws, as merely a humorous incongruity. That is clearly unfair, and it is probably so to think them dead to all romance : nay, your lethargic, dreamy fellow, the prey of romance, is more likely to be fat than his active brother who has no time for it. In the upper and comfortable classes of this country women are visibly larger than they used to be. Ladies thought divinely tall in their youth are of average height now in a London drawing-room. It is to be supposed, therefore, on immemorial considerations, that largeness in women is admired. The Turks — ^but let us go on to something else. Are large houses vulgar ? Certainly a parvenu who should build himself a house the size of Chats- worth or Raby would be vulgar, as lacking a sense of proportion in a matter of taste. The inheritors of such places are, of course, not vulgar to live in them, though they are sometimes most unfortunate. Enormous houses survive the time of necessary retainers and a warlike state ; they are useless for all modern purposes except display ; pathetic, 214 CONCERNING SIZE then, when old, they are certainly vulgar when new. We proceed from our bodies and houses to the wider fields of individual life. Here, with- out question, there is a general misconception about size. The superficies, as it were, of a man's life is far less important than people think. For example, men who go about all over the world, wintering in one country, spending the summer in another, and so on, are supposed to see more life than the stay-at-homes. It is not necessarily true. You see what you have eyes to see. The man with the wide field for amusement and romance may know little of either, and a child playing in a suburban garden may have more of both. Those cosmopolitan travelling men are quite commonly obsessed by the facilities of different routes, the merits of different hotels — see nothing, can tell nothing. Indeed, to see the least way below the surface of things you must take the trivial common- places of life for granted ; to be occupied with trains and constant changes is fatal. In this respect, size, in the ser se of space, is vastly over- rated. And in regard to adventure size is nothing, a few narrow streets, areas and roofs furnish cats with a life of incessant adventure in love and war. Let us pass from ourselves to our country. Its smallness used to be a point of affection with our ancestors. It was a right little, tight little island. In these days we speak rather of the Empire on which the sun never sets, and are proud 215 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS of its largeness. The ingenious Mr. Chesterton among others, deplores this fact, and remarks that patriotism is more vehement in small com- munities. There is indeed a great clash of minds and temperaments in this matter. On the one hand there are megalomaniacs with whom the chief attraction of the Empire is its size and who would like to annex the moon. On the other certain intellectuals find its size abhorrent, vulgar. The area of Australia depresses them ; they are annoyed by the square miles in Canada. In both cases there is a sad inability to rise from the con- crete to the abstract. The greatness of the Empire is not in its size, but in the ideas of justice and toleration, public order and public service which it embodies. If these ideas are vulgar, then the Empire is vulgar ; if they are fine, it is a fine thing to spread them. But I cannot help fancying that my friends of the intellectuals have a sub- conscious feeling that in a small community their eminence were more remarkable ; for my part, if I am to be absorbed in a crowd I rather like it to be a big one — it is all a question of vanity — and prefer to be unknown on a vast scale. Let us go further, to the size of the universe. No, there I must stop ; the universe leaves me without ideas. I hke to be a citizen of a great community, but confronted with the universe one can only take refuge in metaphysics — ^to-my mind a discomfortable hiding-place. 216 XXX THE LACK OF PLOTS THEY have an interest and charm for ever fresh and compelUng. But I do not mean the plots of plays. I doubt, to be sure, if the slender stream of narrative which is generally all our contemporary stage has to offer by way of plot deserves the good old name. It was in- evitable that our stage stories should grow thinner, because our dramatists, who have never been inventive, having been accustomed for centuries cheerfully and freely to borrow their stories and to say nothing about it, are in these present evil times compelled to forego this advantage or to confess their want of invention. Happily for them the public insistence on a " strong " stage story is very much on the wane. Managers still cry out for it, from force of habit, and will refuse a play by a beginner which does not make some show of possessing it, but when a dramatist has made his name he may give it the go-by and prosper none the less. Natural character and dialogue are more profitable. For my part, 2ir PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS though practically I am glad, having no stories to tell, sentimentally I regret that the taste for melodrama has declined. I had ever a weakness for intriguing adventuresses and villainous Majors, and one day to invent a new game for them has been my dear ambition all my life. If this much desired and most improbable gift be discovered in me now, I doubt it will no longer bring fame and fortune. On the stage the plot is no more the thing, and in this sense of the word there is nothing to be said about it. But plots in real life, your genuine or alleged conspiracies — ^how one's eye darts on them in the monotonous record of man in society 1 If, as some philosophers have thought, the true business of mankind is to furnish material for the sense of humour in the gods, how Olympus must throng round the telescope when two little insects lay their heads together to molest an unsuspecting third ! If the plot be base and wicked, mere earthly humour requires it to fail and the plotters to be caught in their trap ; but humorous or not a plot is always interesting. What would history be without its plots ? An account of thfe evolution of societies — " stoopid, scientific," as old Pen- dennis said — is all very well, but when we come to persons and events we insist on plots. It is the plotting element which makes Scotch history so attractive. The Gowrie conspiracy, the plot to murder Darnley, the plot, if it was one, to dis- 218 THE LACK OF PLOTS honour Mary Queen of Scots by forged letters — even without the genius of Mr. Andrew Lang these matters would enthral us. The Gunpowder Plot was quite possibly got up by James himself, and I often think the contrivance and pretended detec- tion of bogus plots must have been the highest joy of artistic statesmanship in the past. For, next to the successful execution of a plot, the triumph of upsetting one must have been the keenest delight — no wonder Cicero was so con- ceited about his score off Catiline — and James, by this hypothesis, had the real pleasure of plotting and the glory of detecting a plot at the same time. Alas ! I have been using the past tense. Where now are plots and plotters ? There is a dull dearth of them in this mechanical, businesslike age. Only one Government in Europe plots, lays traps for incautious opponents, schemes to set other countries by the ears, and the plots of this Government, as revealed by our vigilant journalists and editors, almost soften my patriotic hostility to it. No other Government plots ; even the alleged brilliant double-dealing of Russian diplo- macy turns out to be a bubble. In the domestic politics of our own country there is practically no plotting. Somebody accused Mr. Winston Churchill of it some time ago, but seemed to mean only that Mr. Churchill had the very natural wish to serve his country in an important position. That is not plotting, and there is no plot when 219 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS there is no pretence or concealment. A famous wit, when urged to expose the conspiracy of the press to run down his work, said that you cannot expose conspirators who conspire at the top of their voices. I question even if the nobles who contrived our glorious Revolution were plotters, even with the artistic treachery of Sunderland thrown in ; every one knew what they were about except poor James the Second. There must be secret meetings and something of the " hush ! we are observed " business to constitute a plot, and there must be some definite aim. The dis- appearance of assassination as a political weapon in this country has been a severe blow to the plotter's art. What could be duller, even if they existed, than the supposed plots about devolution and fiscal reform ? The practical joke of private life is a form of plotting which has sadly waned. We have not the spirits for it. Even its simple form of con- spiring to make a man believe that another person is somebody else is seldom practised. On the whole this is a relief, because the vanity of practical jokers is so great that they bore you for months afterwards with references to their achievement. Besides, an innocent plot is not the real thing. There is no attraction about conspirators when exposure does not matter to anybody, about secret meetings which might just as well be pubUc. Fear, I think, is the true soul of plots, the real 220 THE LACK OF PLOTS fear of the actors, the imaginative fear of the reader. The strange joy of fear, it is probable, still accounts for many an intrigue or domestic treachery. But that is not what I want. I insist not on dark lanterns, cloaks, and daggers, but I do want the ruin of statesmen and measures, great wars and the overthrow of kings, to be arranged by people who affect to do nothing of the kind, smiling over their wine, meeting by pretended chance, and hushing when observed. And no one will oblige me. 221 XXXI A PLEA FOR SMILES I WISH some social potentate would introduce a fashion of smiling in public. Lyrics of an earlier day — for now lyrics are mostly sombre — exhorted people to be merry on special occasions ; but had I the lyrical gift I would sing the virtue of constant smiling, in our walks abroad, in trains and omnibuses. Especially in omnibuses : I use them a good deal, and in this rainy weather one goes inside, when of necessity one's attention is rather concentrated on one's fellow passengers, and one is damp and unhappy, and life is very hard, and it would be so much more pleasant if those eleven brothers and sisters pretended to be pleased with one's society instead of looking ready to smash one's face in for twopence. They looked at me like that this very morning, all the way down Piccadilly and the Strand and Fleet Street. I grew afraid of their eyes, so ferocious were they, so intolerant of my existence — which, heaven knows, I admit to be of little enough profit in the world — so ready to suspect me of criticism. I 223 PEOPLE AM) QUESTIONS screwed my head round and looked out upon the street, and of the hundreds or thousands of faces we passed I saw but two happy and smiling, and one of these smiled because another man was splashed all over with mud. I want some prince or duke or actor manager to set an example of smiling constantly, and not only when a brother comes to grief. Xt is useless for an obscure person to begin, useless and dangerous ; for if you smile on a stranger who is a man, he thinks you discover something ludicrous in him and is insulted, and if on a female stranger, she suspects you of in- tentions unduly familiar. And we continue to regard each other with the scowl of dislike or the gaze of emphasised indifference. I know of course the obvious answer. I shall be told that the faculty of laughter and smiles distinguishes man from the other animals, and that he has not enjoyed the talent long enough to dispense it so freely. But consider. The other animals have methods of assuming a kindly feel- ing which we lack. Dogs wag their tails and jump up at us, cats rub against our legs, horses push their noses into our chests. We can do none of these things. That affectionate gaiety "which M. Maeterhnck praises in his dog we can affect only by smiling lips and eyes. We should not be so proud, therefore, of this human dis- tinction as to keep it for rare occasions. I shall be told also that I am not original, that some other 224 A PLEA FOR SMILES man, long before my day, found out the virtues of smiles and laughter. Sterne, for instance, remarked that laughter opened the heart and lungs. But that is not what I mean. I plead in the first instance for artificial smiles — ^hypocritical smiles if you will. It is true that in the silly system of social economy in which we live few of us have great cause for general smiles ; most of us are overworked and underpaid. We should not avenge these discomforts on the innocent. By all means, if we know of an underworked and overpaid person let us try to embitter his existence by scowling at him. But the chances are that we in the Putney 'bus are in the same disastrous boat and should cheer one another, and even yon well-appointed fellow may not be, as he seems, prosperous and fit for scowls ; he may be a comparatively harm- less impostor — ^he may merely have stolen his fur coat. We might go deeply together into the philosophy of forbidding looks. That air of critical dis- approval, that apparent surprise and disgust because another man walks abroad and goes about his business — we might trace it to the humours of our climate and connect it with our snobbish- ness, our protestant attitude, and our tendency to suicide. To explain all is to pardon all, or so they say. I seek not to explain or pardon, still less to abolish the inward feeling. Some peculiar national merit may lurk in it ; it may be rash p 225 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS to tamper with it ; discontent is sometimes at least divine, and this is a world in which I have to write articles for bread. All I desire of a fellow countryman is that he should pretend to acquiesce in the fact that he is not alone on God's earth, and look pleasant when I pass him. It will be an effort at first, but habit will make it quite easy. He does far more difficult things because they are the fashion. In private life, among his friends, when he understands that hilarity is expected of him, he will often laugh without knowing why till his mouth aches, sometimes as ineptly as Egnatius, as when perchance he mistakes the identity of the funny man. One little smile, faint and fleeting, when he meets a fellow creature's eyes in public, should not be too hard of achieve- ment. We know that the pretended signs of a feeling, oft repeated, will induce the feeling in reality, and it need not be a possibly damaging content with life, but merely tolerance of another sufferer. I should like so much to smile at him, but until my prince or duke sets the fashion I am afraid. I remember hearing of some aboriginal tribe somewhere remarkable for never laughing, and when questioned by a traveller about this peculiarity, they answered simply that they saw nothing to laugh at. Perhaps they had reason; perhaps to many of us there is nothing very humorous or cheerful about life — but then all the more should we pretend. 226 XXXII THE LATE MR. ALFRED CHUDDER JUDGED by the ordinary standards of great- ness Alfred Chudder, who died a few weeks ago at the age of eighty-one, cannot be regarded as an instance of the rule that the world knows nothing of its greatest men. His was not, in the ordinary sense at least, a useful life. He did not invent or discover anything. He had no profession or trade. He was in no respect a pro- phet, had no message for his generation, seeming in truth to regard passing events and the problems of contemporary life with an equanimity which almost amounted to indifference. He was not, again, the representative of an ancient family or a leader of fashion, nor were his means more than a jnodest competence. Except when he was born and when he died (he was never married) it is probable that his name never appeared in the newspapers. The world at large, therefore, may be excused if it knew nothing of him. Yet he was a truly remarkable man, and I, who was privileged to see something of him in his later 227 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS years, am unwilling that he should pass into the great silence altogether without record. Alfred Chudder was remarkable in this, that although he was not an eminent man, he was one of the few men living who looked and spoke like one. He realised thoroughly and completely one's idea of how an eminent man should look and speak. More particularly did he strike one's eye and ear as a man aristocratically eminent. He was one of Nature's dukes — ^the only one in my experience — fulfilling the golden dreams one had in childhood of what a duke should be. His appearance was familiar to me some years before I met him, since we lived in neighbouring streets, and I saw him frequently in my walks abroad. I never had any doubt but that he was one of the most eminent men in the country. He was tall, broad-shouldered, of a full bodily habit, and a very upright carriage. His face was large, of a reddish colour, strong-featured, clean-shaven. The second time I saw him he took off his hat to a lady, and disclosed a broad forehead and a magnificent sweep of silky white hair. He walked slowly, looking about him, con- scious, as it seemed to me, that passers-by must be whispering his famous name to one another. He dressed fashionably, but always with a dis- tinctive note — a hat broader-brimmed than the common, or the like, and affected the fresh and gay — ^white waistcoats and light-coloured gloves. 228 THE LATE MR. ALFRED CHUDDER After a time I thought he recognised me as a person he often saw (I discovered afterwards that this was the case) and that there was a shght interest in his regard, encouraging me to go on living, as it were. This pleased me greatly, and I wondered all the more who he might be. One day I was lunching with a friend at a club and the great unknown came into the room. Eagerly I put my question. The answer astonished me by the indifference with which it was given. " I always forget his name," said my friend. " Wait : yes, Chudder, that's it— old Chudder." I had never heard the name before, and my dis- appointment was keen. I consoled myself by accusing my own ignorance, however ; doubtless with men of his own calling or pursuit Chudder was a household word. Constant and searching inquiries assured me that it was not so. Mr. Chudder was known to a small circle of acquaintances only, and the world knew nothing of him. I put together the facts of his career as I gradually learned them. Mr. Chudder was the only son of a north-country solicitor, a rich man, who sent him to Harrow and Oxford. He was hardly remarkable as a young man, was mildly proficient in games, and took a pass degree. Having a large allowance, however, he was a member of a very good set end was noted for the care with which he dressed. On leaving Oxford he was elected into a good 229 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS London club. Shortly afterwards his father died, and it was found that unlucky speculations had dissipated his fortune. Mr. Chudder had barely seven hundred a year. He seems then to have decided on a scheme of life which, negative as it may appear, had a simple rhythm in it one finds soothing to contemplate. He took two rooms in St. James's Street, and lived almost entirely in London. An occasional country visit to friends tended to be replaced in his later life by a few weeks once a year at a sea- side hotel. He lived a great deal at his club, reading the magazines and sometimes a novel, playing cards and billiards for moderate stakes, and lunching and dining temperately but with a certain exigence of the best. Sometimes he went to a theatre. That is all. He never married, and no romance is recorded of him. Comfort, regularity, and avoidance of all strain seem to have been the exclusive objects of his life. Except on questions of food and wine he seldom disclosed a conviction or even an opinion. His services to the community cannot be reckoned high. But for my part I find something attractive in a life so like a tree's. He had been living it for fifty years, since his leaving Oxford, when I first met him. The reader may • begin to wonder, however, how it was that Mr. Chudder acquired his extra- ordinary air of greatness. I can only guess. The beginnings of it may have been at Oxford, 230 THE LATE MR. ALFRED CHUDDER where his membership of a very good set may have given him a sense of superiority to other under- graduates. Living afterwards, too, a hfe without dependence on any man's favour, obhged to do nothing he did not wish to do, attended all day with the thoughtful deference of a good club's servants, a feeling of mastery over life may have grown in him. I prefer to think that sheer artistic instinct made manner and the inner man conform to appearance. He must have felt that only a great man should look as he looked — that in some profound sense, apart from the accidents of life, great he really was. Certainly the air was irresistible. A manner of easy politeness, with a slight suggestion of pre- occupation, as of a man responsible in high affairs, and touched, only just touched, with a note of con- descension, marked him continually. His address to cabmen, policemen, waiters, and the like, was a lesson in deportment. His " Good night, con- stable," kindly, cheerful, yet a little weary in tone, to the policeman in his street as he went home, was admirable, always answered with reverence and gratitude. When he crossed the road the traffic was stopped for him immediately. Per- sonally 1 treated him by instinct, as soon as I made his acquaintance, with much more than the deference one shows to ordinary old men. " Work- ing hard ? " he would say to fme when we met, and I, who ordinarily detest that question, always 231 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS felt flattered that this great man should think my humble toil of any interest. He had never done a stroke of work in his life, but I felt somehow that he held up to me an example of noble and bene- ficent labour. When he spoke of common things there was a suggestion of something ironical and almost comic in their connection with his greatness. We were walking together once when it began to rain. He looked for a moment at the rain as though amused by its impertinence, and then, " I suppose," said he, " our only resource is a humble hansom," and I, who should have taken the humbler 'bus, felt that for him a hansom was indeed a vehicle absurdly humble. I remember, also, that once when he lunched with me at a club, and the only hot thing ready was roast beef, he remarked, " And an excellent thing, too," making me feel, but quite pleasantly, how great were his kindness and indulgence in eating it. His manner of men- tioning eminent people was cordial, and, as it were, intimate ; he did not know them, but some- how one seemed to know them through him. " That poor Duke ! " he said once as we passed Devonshire House — it was in the early days of the Fiscal question — and I seemed to be behind the political scenes at once. He had a habit of com- paring their ages with his own, which somehow gave one the idea that they had been boys together. 232 THE LATE MR. ALFRED CHUDDER But no anecdote or description can reproduce the greatness of Mr, Chudder's appearance and manner. Appearance and manner, and nothing else, unless it were the inner conviction at which I have guessed. He was not great in some eccentric field of action, like Charles Lamb's great borrower ; his actions were lunching and dining, reading the papers and sauntering about Piccadilly. Yet to doubt his greatness, before you know who he was, was impossible if you had any imagination or sense of fitness in things about you. And often, when I have met one of your disappointing great men, have I said within me — " Why, why can't you look and speak like Alfred Chudder ? " 233 XXXIII MRS. WATT PARKINSON IF any one had told me, some twenty odd years ago, that I should ever comie to asso- ciate the name of Watt Parkinson with grandeur and ceremonial and importance gene- rally I should not have believed him. For Watt Parkinson was my schoolfellow, and I did not know that he was predestined to such an atmo- sphere. In fact, I did not even know that he was Watt Parkinson. He was merely J. W. Parkinson in those days, and did not reveal the Watt to a duly impressed world until he went to Cambridge. It was known, indeed, that he was the son of a brewer, but a schoolboy may be pardoned if the significance of that fact was hidden from him, and so I failed to do obeisance. Years and increased knowledge of our social system have taught me how much it really meant. Watt Parkinson is not only the son of a brewer, but the only son of a very rich brewer. That alone entitles him, of course, to our respect, but it is to the pecuUar qualities of his wife that he owes the lofty state 235 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS he holds among those privileged to be of his acquaintance. I met this great lady — a snobbish phrase I once thought it, but it exactly fits Mrs. Watt Parkinson — for the first time two years ago. I was staying with some friends in Hampshire, and gathered from the conversation at dinner that the Watt Parkinsons were local potentates. The rector mentioned Mrs. Watt Parkinson's approval of some parochial act of his with reverential com- placence. Questioning him I found that Watt Parkinson was indeed my old schoolfellow ; the rector seemed to think I should be extremely proud of the circumstance, and I did not tell him that on account both of appearance and habits Parkinson was called Porky at school. We met Porky — when I so thought of him for the last time — on the golf links the next morning. He greeted me, as old schoolfellows use, with a manner which seemed to suggest that my survival is rather a joke, and asked me to lunch the following day. I went, I saw, and have never been so com- pletely overcome in my life. The house was a country house like another, but the air of the man who opened the door sug- gested that it was something between a cathedral and a royal palace. He showed me into the drawing-room with a sort of dreadful politeness, left me, and presently returned to say that Mrs. Watt Parkinson — it sounded Uke " Her Grace " — 236 MRS. WATT PARKINSON was in the Italian Garden, and would see me there. To the Itahan Garden I went and descried a small .group of people at the other end of it looking at ilowers. W. P. was not there, and no one ad- vanced to meet me, but when I was quite close a lady turned in my direction, smiled, and said, " I am glad to see you," as an empress might have said it to the junior attach^ of an Embassy. Then she gave me her hand, not as ordinary people shake hands, but slowly and as though she were giving me a prize. I was pre- sented to the two ladies who were with her, and then we all listened reverently while Mrs. Watt Parkinson gave us a short and simple lecture on botany. We went in to lunch. And as lunch progressed the impression that I was being entertained by royalty grew stronger and stronger. Watt Parkin- son sat with a massive dignity, and left the con- versation to his wife, smiling indulgently on us, but seeming relieved that he could give his mind to more important things. Mrs. Watt Parkinson, I think, felt that we should probably be nervous in such a presence, and spared us the effort of speech, expecting no response but murmurs of admiration and interest. She discoursed of her children and their talents and exploits. They were not, it seemed to me afterwards — not then — especially remarkable children, even on her show- ing. Little John was in the third eleven at a 237 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS preparatory school ; Elsie had learned to jump her pony ; Molly had won a prize in the local Sunday school — no wonder, if the rector was judge. " I think it right to send them there," said Mrs, Watt Parkinson, and the other two ladies looked quite ecstatic on her condescension. Not re- markable children, but we felt how kind it was of Mrs. Watt Parkinson to give us the fleeting in- timacy of hearing about them, by their Christian names, too, just like the children of ordinary people. After that she spoke of various circum- stances in the Watt Parkinson Ufe, making us all feel how refined and beneficent, and, withal, how extremely comfortable and pleasant a life with its motors and trips to Norway and so forth — it was. But never a touch of vulgar ostentation. Oh, dear no ! Everything was subdued, and sweet, and good, and kind. No, not a royal palace : it is really a cathedral that this lady builds up about her, and so servants and guests and husband seem to understand. Watt Parkinson grew rather sleepy by the end of lunch. But it was the importance of the Watt Parkinsons, the sense that their comforts and children and trips were things of public, nay, national concern, that chiefly sank into my mind. Why all this ? you ask. ReaUy, except that the Watt Parkinsons are rich, I do not know. Who was Mrs. Watt Parkinson ? Nobody in particular, I am told. What does she look like ? 238 MRS. WATT PARKINSON Well, it is probably due to my nervousness and confusion, and not to her lack of physical dis- tinction, that I cannot tell you. My recollec- tion is only of an ordinary-looking woman, and I fear I might even fail to recognise her if I saw her in the street. I go in terror of such forget- fulness. 289 XXXIV MY FRIEND TOM BINGLEY * I DON'T know what I should do without my old friend Tom Bingley. Myself a little languid as the years go on, oppressed with the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of poverty, rather adhesive to arm-chairs, more and more inclined to go to bed before midnight, I find myself refreshed and fortified by the energy and vitality of this most vital and energetic creature. Really if I were to notice any slackening in him after one of our talks I should suspect myself for a sort of vampire, drawing the swift current of his abundant vigour into my enfeebled veins ; but he is just as hearty at the end as at the beginning : in his case, emphatically, " to divide is not to take away." Tom is inexhaustible. Now the age we live in, for all its boasting about • This and the four following papers are all that I can decently take for this book from a whole year of weekly articles contributed to the JUuatraUd London News. The others, which had for their theme incidents and debates in Parliament, had an interest too ephemerla. This trifling selection I hope will not be grudged me : it is pleasant to me to have some memento of so much chatter. Q 241 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS the extraordinary pace of its life and the fever of its enterprises, is, like myself, a little languid and oppressed, a little lacking in joyousness and dash ; and being asked to write some articles, it occurs to me that I had much better give it a draught or so of Tom than doses of myself. I should only depress it further ; Tom (if there is any skill in my reporting) ought to animate it, and make it a better and happier age. He has lots of ideals and altruistic emotions. Whereas I — ^but I am going to report Tom, and I hate being egoistical. First, however, I must try to give you an idea of my friend. It is difficult. Not that the quali- ties of him are elusive, but because they are so various, and you might get jumbled. Sometimes Tom is like a steam-engine, sometimes like a great blazing fire. But you must not think for a moment that there is anything blatant about him. He never swaggers, never shouts anybody down — unless he knows him quite well. With strangers, indeed, he does not let himself go easily — though I have heard him and an unknown man in a railway carriage denounce one another's ideals fiercely and unsparingly — ^with many " Good heavens ! you actually think " and so forth — and without a break from Exeter to Paddington, But then they obviously took to one another and shook hands with a mutual instinct when they parted. With friends, with people he likes, Tom certainly can let 242 MY FRIEND TOM BINGLEY himself go to considerable lengths. He makes full use of the freedom which men (in amiable society) who are friends permit each other, and which I fear cannot always be exactly reported in print, and of course the " rot " and " bunkum " and " poppycock " with which he likes to punctuate an opponent's arguments do demand a certain intimacy. So I fear the world generally will never hear Tom at his best. In his own coimtry, at election time (Tom is in Parliament) he may be heard to advantage in public, but he has so far been silent in the House. The world generally must make shift with what I can tell it. Next to his energy and vitality what refreshes me in Tom Bingley is his definiteness. I am often in two minds, am slightly swayed by this or that disputant, but Tom is free from doubt. " Brown's an ignoramus, Jones is an idiot, Robin- son's the only fellow whose opinion is worth two- pence." " Smith say that ? Then Smith's either a fool or a liar ! " Tom always knows. And he is the same in action, I am absolutely tortured with indecision where to lunch, where to go for a two days' holiday, but Tom thinks on Monday of going to Patagonia and is off on Tuesday. " Ever been to Chicago ? Come with me next week. Rot about work ; you never do any worth calling work. I'll send you particulars when I've looked up trains and things." I had positively to hide not to be taken by force. All that refreshes me. 243 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Then there's his heartiness. I confess I shrink from hearty people as a rule, but I am fond of Tom and do not even mind his slap on the back, and once you don't mind that in a man his heartiness does you good. A catalogue of qualities, however, is a poor guide to knowledge : you will perceive Tom's, I hope, as we go along. Neither, really, does a man's objective record tell you much, but you may like to know some- thing of Tom's. He took full advantage of the public school and university education, the object of which is to send young men into the world with minds unclogged by knowledge, so that they may be fresh and sensitive to impressions. He reads a good deal for himself, however, and is always discovering with enthusiasm some author about whom we weary literary folk have been parroting for years. I once found him deep in a book, and he asked for half a minute while he finished a passage. Then, " I say, you know this is really damn fine," said Tom. He was reading Keats for the first time. He inherited a charming old place in the West, backed by a large so-called independent income, of which I have never been able to make him ashamed. He admits that he is lucky, but denies that he does nothing for it. He is, indeed, an active and (comparatively) hard-working landlord, given to scientific farming, and is immensely popular in his district, which is, to be sure, an extraordinarily 244 MY FRIEND TOM BINGLEY happy and prosperous one. It was this popularity which induced his party to persuade him into the House. Which party ? I'm afraid I can't tell you, because I must not deal with party poUtics or seem to argue a case in these columns. After all, with most men in the House — ^with men, not with machines — you would never discover with cer- tainty from their private conversation on which side they sat, and would probably guess the wrong side. Tom's party ties are loose ; he was really elected as Tom ; and at any rate in his talks with me he does not think about the Whips. He is fond of hunting and shooting, and, I am sorry to say, ascribes my disapproval not to humanity but incompetence. I think his real opinion is that the fox likes being hunted, pro- vided the right people hunt him — ^that is to say, the gentry and farmers of the fox's district. He has shot big game all over the world. He has tried mining and ranching before he came into his kingdom. He has never done any regular professional work at home. He has never married, though he is attractive to women, and the sort of man to have had what used to be called " suc- cesses " — ^at least I should think so ; but you never know. I once told him I thought there must be some secret grief about a woman in his life : his answer, which was to upset me, chair and all, on to the floor, was enigmatical, 245 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS I will try to picture him, glad that I am to have assistance in the task. Imagine a tall fellow, some six-foot-two, broad in proportion, finely made, with rather a long, odd sort of face, a good forehead, thick hair which he is always having cut but which always looks untidy, a smiling eye, a rather set mouth. Clean-shaven, a black man, as our ancestors called it, just on forty. He looks well in any sort of dress, about which he is par- ticular, though nothing of a fop, but he would have looked best in armour. That, I suppose, is because he would have done well in a fight, for there is nothing romantic about him, to my eye. He is curiously swift in the minor movements of life, and my sarcasm (which he attributes to fear) is no restraint on him when his motor is on a clear road. That brings me to our first talk after he had entered Parliament. I met him about a fortnight after he had taken his seat, and remarked that no doubt he had been profoundly impressed by the splendid business- like efficiency of the great assembly to which he had been elected. He seemed to look over my person as if considering where to plant a vigorous blow on it, and I retreated a step. " It's really beyond a joke," said he. " It's amazing, incred- ible, inconceivable ! There we are, half a thousand of us, who might be leading a decent human life elsewhere, brought together at great expense and 246 MY FRIEND TOM BINGLEY inconvenience, all to listen to one another grinding out insincere platitudes. It's like a horrible night- mare." I observed that the antiquity of the machine involved a certain amount of clumsiness. " Certain amount ! " he interrupted. " Why, its ingenuity in wasting time is simply diabolical. But it's not the machine. That ought to be im- proved, but it's not that which matters. It's the men, who hem and haw and er — er, and don't seem to have any clear ideas, and repeat themselves and each other till I'm sick. It's the infernal atmo- sphere of the place, which reduces everything to a languid game, and makes everybody feel that everything's hopeless. I shall cut it." But that was some time ago, and Tom has not cut it ; nor does he denounce it with his old vigour, as I lately pointed out to him. " I suppose I don't," said he. " It's a wicked abomination, yet, somehow, I'm getting rather to like it. It has a sort of morbid attraction for me. I sha'n't cut it yet." And just before the present Session he was quite hopeful. " There really ought to be a bit of a scrap," he said ; " some of the men do really seem keen for one." " Well ? " I asked him a few days later. " Oh, the old story. The old dull, boring game." " Oh, come," said I, " there have been some vigorous speeches. You ought to have been pleased." " Oh yes ; because somebody hit a despatch box. What's the good of that ? " " But everybody says John Burns was splendid ! " 247 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS " Yes, and I'll tell you why they say it : it's because he said there was nothing to be done immediately. That appealed at once to the most sacred convictions of the place." " Well, what would you do, Tom ? " And Tom positively would do something ; but I must not make him unpopular at his first introduction. 248 XXXV TOM ON THE RICH AND THE POOR AS we bowled along Westwards, Tom and I, in that smooth motor of his, I felt the pleasant exhilaration of swiftness in fresh air which so quickens the perceptions, until (after an hour or so in my case) it completely dulls them. Never- theless, I was ill at ease. It is true that Tom is a considerate motorist : when there is a clear stretch of road, he is at the end of it in a moment, so to say ; but he goes quite slowly through villages, or even past single cottages, and waits patiently on undecided pedestrians, dogs, and chickens. I was aware, however, of the increasing animus against motors, which I share to a great extent ; letters in the Times had much impressed me, particularly one, which, I think, is annual and is always trenchant and pointed, from Dr. Sophia Jex Blake, on the insolent selfishness of mere excitement-seekers : I was fearful of being in the quite ridiculously false position of an idle, rich brute, execrated by the deserving poI)r. And when we stopped at a country inn 249 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS for luncheon I expressed my feeling to my companion. " Don't you think," said I, " that we're rather selfish beasts ? This is all very jolly ; but, after all, we could have taken the train, and if we annoy our fellow creatures for our own pleasure, it's quite indefensible." " Well," said he, " if they had any good reason for being annoyed, I should agree with you, and what's more I should give the thing up — which I'm not at all sure you would : you separate theory and practice very conveniently, you know. But I can't see that my going quickly along a road is any legitimate grievance to people who aren't there, and when they are there I go slow — ^what ? " And he seemed to think he had said something final ; but I like my bit of argu- ment with my coffee. " Granted," said I, " for the sake of argument, that you're a model motorist. Put the bad motorists on one side : we both agree that they ought to be flogged in the first instance, and hanged in the second." " Not burnt alive ? " he asked, but I would not be interrupted, seeing something like a point before me. " Granted all the apologists say, but behind the dust nuisance and the dog-kiUing nuisance and the terrifying of timid people and occasional manslaughters — ^behind all that there's the fact that motorists tend to embitter the feehng of the poor against the rich. Even you contribute to that. You career about in a car which obviously has cost several hundred 250 TOM ON THE RICH AND THE POOR pounds and costs a lot more to keep up, and that's flaunting your riches in the eyes of your indigent fellow countrymen. I really don't like it." " Then you won't come on ? " said Tom. " You will? That's jolly kind of you. But it's all skittles, you know, really. You might as well say that I ought to pull down my house and live in a two-roomed cottage. I'm sorry if my bit of splosh annoys anybody, but I can't help these inequalities. You don't want property divided up : you're always telling me that that's nothing to do with Socialism." " Of course it hasn't — it's the antithesis of Socialism : the difference would be, though, that the man who had more would apprpximately deserve it." " Oh come," said Tom, rather acutely, I admit, " wouldn't that be worse than ever ? If I were broke and saw another fellow all over coin, I might console myself with the thought that he ought to be ashamed of himself, but if I knew that the beggar deserved it, that would be the last straw." I passed over this sophistry, which may perhaps appeal to sentiment. " In England," said I, " the rich ought to be particularly careful, for their own sake, not to exacerbate the poor. We suffer so much from them, because they are so infernally numerous. I've nothing to say against a small leisured class, accepting public duties, and taking the lead in cultiu-e. But the thousands and thousands of middle-class rich in England, who 251 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS make no return to the community at all, and simply amuse themselves : without pubUc spirit, without culture, without — " " Wo there ! " said Tom. " Don't get excited, it's bad so soon after lunch. I think you exaggerate, and anyhow I should say rich people in England were less annoy- ing than they are in some other places. They don't swagger about their money, or only the very stupidest of them, because they all want to get on in society or something of the sort and swaggering shuts them out." " There's a nice defence," said I ; " their virtue appears to be snobbery." " No," said Tom ; " it's more than that. It's a good old-fashioned tradition, aristo- cratic or whatever you like, which sort of joins on the merely rich to the people who've other things to them, don't you know, and takes ofi the rough edge. Now in the States, where there's nothing of that, the rich do flaunt their coin a bit aggressively before the poor." " Yes," said I, rather neatly, I do think, " but your argument just now comes in against you. If I were a poor manual workman, I'd rather think the rich fellow was simply a lucky brute, otherwise my equal, than be obliged by this vague tradition you speak of to regard him as belonging to a superior class, as the poor workman does here. That would be the last straw. And, by the way, it explains why wealthy Americans like to live here — ^the hat- touching, and all that." " Something in that," 252 TOM ON THE RICH AND THE POOR said Tom indulgently, "but any obvious advan- tage, physical or mental or economical, is apt to set people over other people, you know. I was reading about American universities in the Times the other day. Of course, the idea is that they should be as democratic as be blowed ; but the chaps form their own societies, to which it's the right thing to belong, and you're an outsider if you don't. I'm afraid it's human nature. Pity superiority should be based on money, as it some- times seems to be there ; but you can't lay your hand on your breast and swear we were quite free from that at Oxford. As for motors setting poor against rich, the remedy's for the poor to use them ; and as Martin Conway pointed out that's just what's happening, with excursions and things. However , . . time's up : this middle-class rich brute, without culture and all the rest of it, has the honour to offer you a seat in his anti-social motor." And of course I took it. 253 XXXVI TOM AT HOME IT is a pleasant experience to arrive with Tom at his home. Everybody seems glad to see him, and he seems glad to see everybody. There is an air of welcoming bustle, which I think should always distinguish an arrival. I hate the modern habit of gliding into a house as though one had been there for months, and had only been absent for half an hour. It is a moment to affect heartiness if one does not feel it, whether one be host or guest. But Tom (the other day) had no need of affectation. So many men on arriving home, even after long absence, go straight, after a minimum of greeting with a preoccupied air, to see if there are letters or telegrams for them. Tom, although we had arrived together, welcomed me to his house in the cordial, old-fashioned manner, shook hands with the aged butler, nodded to other domestics, addressing them by name, petted his dogs, and proceeded, with a scampering train of them, to look in at one room after another, as though to greet it or satisfy himself that it was 255 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS still there as he left it, like a boy coming gratefully- home from school. Evidently, like Catullus, he felt the blessedness of returning Larem ad nostrum. It was all very pleasant, and one's pleasure was not lessened by the fact that this home, which he loved so much, repaid him not only with affec- tion, but extreme comfort and ease. It is an old Tudor house, of sensible proportions, with a mellowed dignity, remote from pride, and with the warm, human appeal of many generations lived there and protected. But I am not writing a novel. . . . I suppose that the life of a squire, hke other lives, can only be enjoyed properly by one who takes it simply, without question of its habits. If fortune imposed such a life on me, even apart from the contempt of grooms and gamekeepers I fear my own limitations would involve, I should be questioning anomalies and inconsistencies all day long. Why shake hands with the aged butler, for example, and not with the youthful footman ? If it is a recognition of his age and dignity, then it has a ridiculous importance given to it : who am I (I should think) that shaking hands with me should be a sort of privilege ? I asked Tom if this point had occurred to him. " No," said he ; " if I bothered about things of that sort, I should never get anything done. One simply treats people as they probably expect to be treated, and trusts to their believing one's well diposed to 256 TOM AT HOME them. The butler would be htxrt if I didn't shake hands after not seeing him for months, because he's an old friend, and the footman would be embarrassed if I did, I suppose. There's no rot about its being a privilege ; it's simply the custom : thank heaven, we're not all such analytical beggars as you. I believe you're going to start again on that infernal worry about the attitude of the rich to the poor, and superiority, and all that tosh. It's rubbish. If you'll come with me on my round to-morrow, you'll witness my interviews with a lot of people employed here, and, if we've time to drive over, a few farmers who are tenants. Very good : all these are simply people who have business relations with me, but who look on me as a friend, I hope ; and, if you're horrified by any deference to me, that's only because it's the customary attitude to the squire of the place. It's nothing to do with superiority." " Hasn't it ? " said I. " But the farmer will meet you as an equal — ^you'll use the same address to one another — ^while the gamekeeper will touch his hat. How do you account for the difference ? " " It's a recog- nition of different spheres. The farmer's grand- father wouldn't have greeted mine as an equal : time has brought us closer together in habits and ways of life ; so, perhaps, with the gardener in time — I'm sure I hope so. Meanwhile this hat-touching marks a difference in our spheres, that's all." "Then why don't you touch your R 257 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS hat to him, Tom ? " He wouldn't admit he was cornered. " Oh custom — custom," said he. " I'll admit, if you like, that there may be a lingering feudal tradition in it, but essentially he thinks, like a good Englishman, that he's my equal except in fortune — and quite right too." But I could not let him end on this note of spurious humility. " Then what about the servants, Tom ? I'm sorry to find fault with a system which has made me so comfortable this evening. I've nothing to complain of personally : ' Your cellar's as good as your cook.' But my theory is that for English people to pass their Uves in personal attendance on other EngUsh people is an anachronism. It ought only to be done by an inferior race — or, at least, an inferior type. You can't make that type in a few generations, and if you took the ancestors of our servants and ourselves some eight generations back — ^with the exception of a very few families — ^you'd find much of a muchness. We're all jumbled up in blood. A militant, con- quering aristocracy forms a definite type, but in these plutocratic days you'll find plebeian faces in the House of Lords and aristocratic faces on waiters and footmen. It's really absurd to say that looking after another man's personal con- venience all day isn't the work of an inferior. Very well, then your life, my dear Tom, is simply full of improper circumstances. Here you are one man — an excellent sort of man, but a man like 258 TOM AT HOME another — one man, I say, with a whole troop of other men and women, hired to minister to you for their livelihood. It's utterly wrong. I like to see you on your native heath, but you're a frightful anachronism." Tom did not seem to care. He smiled placidly, and " What's the philosophical difference," quoth he, " between one man blacking my boots or pouring me out a glass of wine — ^yes, that's the more polite example — and another writing an article to amuse me and other people who in- directly hire him to do it ? " " The one," said I, " ministers to your base, bodily convenience, and the other improves your mental and moral tone." " Oh, does he ? " said Tom. " Seems to me they're both hirelings, anyhow." And the subject dropped. 259 XXXVII ON PIGS AND SCIENCE I SUPPOSE the reader knows a novel by Mr. E, F. Benson, called " The Angel of Pain " ? Like most of Mr. Benson's novels that I have read, it combines (yes, I know I was not asked to criticise them, but writers who can't write novels like to patronise those who can) — ^it com- bines, I say, the weirdly interesting with the flatly ordinary, some strange mysterious element with the rather tedious love-affairs of nice young men and maidens, as though Mr. Benson, after follow- ing his own mystic bent for a while, remembered that his public must have its Jenny and Jessamy. Well, in this "Angel of Pain " there's a gentleman who lives alone with birds and beasts in the country until his intimacy with them reaches the point of nightingales perching on his finger to sing. I have sometimes wondered if Mr. Benson had heard of my burying myself alone in the country for some months. It is true that no nightingale ever perched on my finger : that perhaps was just as well for me, since the man in the story finally 261 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS saw Pan and was trampled to death by his hoofs. No nightingale or thrush perched on my finger to sing, but I did make friends with a young pig. He came to me to have his back scratched with my stick, and I am sure would have followed me like a dog if I had asked him. My achievement was humble compared with that of Mr. Benson's hero, perhaps, but the principle of modest sympathy was the same. I could not help boasting of it to Tom as we walked to his home-farm to inspect a litter of pigs produced in his absence. I am sorry to say that his piglings did not bear out my powers, but scuttled to the corner of their sty, clambering over each other in their terror. The explanation may have been that my young pig was a solitary, and in his happy innocence saw in me only a friendly animal, whereas Tom's, in their populous community, had heard dark and dismal traditions of the real attitude of man to pigs, and of the end of their earthly sojourn ; or else they perceived in Tom that masterful demeanour towards the lower animals which I am sure all but dogs — who are born toadies, dear things — must secretly resent. I wonder if Mr. Benson's hero would have charmed them all the same. All this twaddle is written designedly to show that neither Tom nor I can be expected to fire ofl brightly suggestive remarks about politics or sociology in this browsing life. How can one 262 ON PIGS AND SCIENCE stroll about a farm all the morning, looking at cows and calves and young horses in their paddock, and hens with their respectable gait and ducks with their sensuous waddle, and then sit down in the afternoon and write the sort of article one would like the hopeful reader to expect of one ? Bear with me for once : eras iterabimus cequor, bad luck to it, as a more distinguished scribbler used to say. (I trust to goodness I have not quoted that lately before.) My mind works slowly — ah, so slowly and smoothly — round pigs and pantheism and Mr. Benson's novel. . . . Perhaps if I closed my eyes for a minute or two, an idea . . . an idea . . . What ? No, only thinking. Tom has really come to the rescue this time without prompting on my part, startling me with a sudden : "I say, hi ! Here's one in the eye for you ! This cove says " — it seemed he had been reading the report of the British Association, and Professor Ridgeway's excellent address to the anthropo- logical section, which seemed the easiest to him to understand — " this cove says it's all rot about our being mixed up in England, as you say, so that we're all alike. At least, he would have said so if he'd heard you. Listen to this : ' According to information obtained from one of our great industrial centres, where the educational ladder enabled any child who passed the fourth standard in the primary schools before it was eleven to 263 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS rise into the secondary schools, it was probable that no more than 5 or 6 per cent, of the children of the working classes had, at the age of sixteen, the same amount of brain-power as the average children ' — ^the average children, mark you — ' of the middle classes at the same age.' There ! What price you now ? I always thought we were jolly fine fellows. I suppose I was about the average, so it seems I was cleverer than 95 per cent, of the working-class children. He says, too, that the middle classes are the mainstay of the State, and that it's frightful skittles, or words to that effect, to tax us, preventing our marrying and all that, to educate the inferior chaps' children. Hooray ! " " Tom," said I, " we are both of us bachelors and middle-aged : was it reaUy the taxes that prevented our marrying? But let us keep to the chief point. You must be careful how you accept all these scientific men say. I should very much like to know on what possible scientific basis these statistics about middle-class children's intelligence can have been arrived at." " Oh, my dear chap," said Tom, " you can't go behind Professor Ridgeway : he must know." " I regret to say I doubt it. By the way, he was probably not thinking of you at all : the squirearchy's part of the upper class, and he was ominously silent about that. He meant bona-fide middle-class children, such as I was, and I am obliged to him for the compliment, but I am still doubtful of 264 ON PIGS AND SCIENCE its truth. You see, other men of science " " Who ? " asked Tom, with a judicial air, as though their names would have made any difference to him. " Never mind their names : several of the most eminent men of science say the opposite. To begin with, you can't inherit acquired character- istics—" " Rot ! " — " But we won't go into that. A recent Commission gave us the assurance on the highest authority that the stock does not deteriorate because the individuals live unwhole- somely. Don't you think, then, that it would be wiser to go on trying to improve the general stock rather than to concentrate on this glorious middle class ? After all, a few generations of comfort may not make quite such a mental superi- ority as your Professor supposes." " Well," said Tom, " I stick to Professor Ridgeway — ^he's ex- tremely comforting. I like being the mainstay of the State." 265 XXXVIII ON HEROES AND PALACES I TRIED hard to feel superior with Tom when I welcomed him returning from Scotland and passing through London again. There was I pursuing my Ufe of proper human toil, not exactly doing the work of the world, perhaps, but at least, something to amuse the leisure of a tiny portion of it ; and there was he fresh from his mere sport and bent on more mere sport, an unfairly privileged idler : the dignity of labour in my person sniffed at him. But the idler looked so jolly and content, and the toiler felt so other- wise, that the superiority was difficult ; the dignity of physical health in his person had an advantage over t'other dignity, somehow ; and so things go in this immoral world. However, I made my effort, and reminiscent of Doctor John- son and his condescending " What art thou to- night, Tom ? " — I wonder if the actor retorted : he might have said he would rather be a different person every night than always Doctor Johnson ; but this by the way — reminiscent of Doctor 267 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS Johnson, and as much like him as I could manage : " Well, Tom," quoth I, " what did you kill in Scotland ? " He replied simply that he had killed two stags and I forget how many grouse. " And I suppose," I continued, with a lofty irony which failed to irritate him, " that you're now going West to kill partridges, and perhaps a few pheasants, before the Session. It's a beautiful and useful life." " Don't you worry," said he ; " somebody's got to kill the things, and you've no objection to eating 'em." " Yes, but your shooting parties are such an expensive method of adding to our food- supply. Why don't you and your friends live simply, and save your money, and found splendid funds, like Mr. Carnegie ? The Bingley Fund for Toilers, to be given, say, to men who work a hundred hours a week — that would be a fine thing." " Oh, come," said he, " you're sneering at Carnegie now. I never saw such a chap ; it's all envy, because you know youHl never benefit by his prizes and things." " My dear Tom," said I earnestly, " I'm not sneering at all. I associate myself fully with all the praises bestowed on Mr. Carnegie's thought- fulness and generosity. I will not look a gift-horse in the mouth, as I'm afraid the delightful Mr. Dooley did in the case of this Hero Prize in America: I am sure his criticisms, however amusing, were ungrateful to the philanthropist, and will not be imitated by our more respectful humorists. It 268 ON HEROES AND PALACES does strike me that the oddity of a social system, which gives such enormous wealth and consequent power to one man, is almost as much thrown into relief by a good man, like Mr. Carnegie who uses his wealth for the benefit of the community to the best of his ability, as by a selfish man who spends it all on base objects ; but Mr. Carnegie is not responsible for that. I have nothing but praise for him, and if you'll fall into the Serpentine, I would really try, now, to pull you out again. I should like to be a hero." "You know," said Tom thoughtfully, "I'm inclined to think the name of the fund is a bit of a mistake. It's somehow antipathetic to English sentiment. If you call an Englishman a he!ro, it makes him feel rather an ass. It's the sort of expression women use when they hear of a chap's doing something plucky, and then it's all right ; but if you label a man officially as a hero, he'll get rather sick of it, don't you know. It's all very well for emotional journalists to write about heroes in daily life, and all that ; but in ordinary society it would be a sort of joke. You see, we make a point of taking these things calmly : I dare say it's only a pose, but there it is. I know if I saved a chap from drowning I should like him to say ' Thank you,' and perhaps we'd shake hands over it, though even that's a bit theatrical ; but that would be enough, wouldn't it ? If I were labelled as a hero — letters after my name, 269 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS you know, ' H.C.L.,' ' Hero in Civil Life,' or something of that sort — I should expect to be horribly chaffed. " Hurry up the Hero ! ' ' That infernal Hero dam nearly potted me to-day.' ' Your turn to play. Hero.' ' Give the Hero another sandwich ; they have to eat more than we do ' — all that, you know, would drive me wild. Of course, that wouldn't matter in comparison with being decently provided for, if one had lost one's means of support by being maimed while one saved another chap, or having one's widow and children looked after if one had pegged out one- self — ^but still, I'd rather not be called a hero, thank you, and I expect most Enghshmen would feel much the same about it. The fund's a splendid idea, but I rather wish it had been called some- thing else." " That's so hke a practical Enghsh- man," said I, " to worry aboiit a word when he's given a quarter of a million." " All right," said he, with an air of giving the money himself, " let 'em call it what they like." " Talking of money," said I, " do you see that an architect wants us to rebuild Buckingham Palace ? He says it was all very well in George the Fourth's time, but we're a larger concern now and the Palace ought to be ' commensurate with the growth of the nation.' Fine idea, isn't it ? When a fresh territory is added to the Empire, the Palace should have an additional storey or a new billiard-room — ^beautiful symbolism. That really 270 ON HEROES AND PALACES was George the Fourth's idea ; he found a comely house there, but thought the present affair better suited to his importlance. I think if I had been he, and wanted an authentic palace, I should have gone to St. James's. Gloomy, but then it was built by Henry VIII., who with all his faults was a regular royal King and understood the proper accessories. However, George preferred the taste of Mr. Nash. The result is ugly, to be sure, and this architect says we could have a really good new palace for the cost of a new battle- ship — a mere million or so, I suppose. You might ask the Government for it when the House meets." " Anything to obhge," said he ; " but perhaps just now we'd rather have the battleship. Sorry." 271 XXXIX A VISIT TO BOHEMIA I WENT, last August, to stay with some friends in Bohemia, and was minded on my return to write something of my experiences, my perceptions, and sensations. And then I felt a distaste for doing so, since to write things is my trade, and it is unpleasant to involve in one's trade things seen and done in the pursuit of one's private pleasures and likings. That has been my excuse, if any one cared to ask one of me, for sterility as a writer of fiction : what appeals to me in life is no longer the type, as was the case when I wrote a novel or so, but the individual action and the individual character, the strange people one meets and the apparently ordinary people who do and say such queer things. The inspired artist, no doubt, must make use of all that, but he sacrifices, I think, something of life to art. He is an inspired artist, and there's an end of it. So am not I, and I permit myself the consolation of sacrificing an art not likely to be valuable to anybody to a life which is necessarily so to me. Well, I loved Bohemia, and look back 275 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS on my visit with affection, and it seemed a sort of little treachery to myself to take the experience to market. And now, on the other hand, it seems that I might show some gratitude to Bohemia precisely by this publicity, for she is less well known among us than she ought to be, and like a woman may not be, inevitably, best pleased by an entirely secret devotion. Besides, had I gone at the expense of a newspaper asking articles of me and stayed all the while in hotels, I suppose I should have supplied the articles. So, providing that I keep out the really private element . . . This burst of egoism will be accepted, I hope, as an apology by any one in Bohemia who has looked for my printed appreciation and accused me of laziness. There is an advantage in the post- ponement. When one visits a strange country and starts writing about it immediately, one is apt, I imagine, to put down many impressions not worth recording, matters which touched the surface of one's mind merely because they were strange, but which signified little and blur the perspective of the really significant. After three months they are likely to fade, and the broader impression takes a clearer edge and the details which mean something stand out. Of course, however, one is less likely than ever to be mate- rially informing. Even if I had written inune- diately, my account would have been extremely irritating to any practical person who intended 276 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA to go to Bohemia and looked for useful informa- tion about it. I am incapable of the meanest service as a guide. As it is, I trust only to a memory fairly tenacious of impressions and lament- ably inefficient about facts, with never a note but a few names on the back of an envelope. The reader, therefore, of necessity must take my Bohemia freely mixed with the writer. If this subjective treatment repels him, there's no help for it. One other slight preliminary. I hope sincerely that no one, so far, has supposed I have used the word Bohemia in the sense of Henri Murger. It is a grievous insult to a nation once, at any rate, of great importance in the world, with a glorious and tragic history, that its name should be applied to a set of people whose chief claim to interest others is their indifference to the obliga- tions of civilised society. In Paris " Bohemia " meant something real and definite, to be sure. In London it has always been an imposture. With the snobbishness which runs, clamantly or subtly, all through our social life, to be called " Bohemian " seems to some folk a finer thing than frankly to be of our middle classes. It puts them apart. The proof is that when they are successful and are courted, more or less, by the upper classes — snobbish things force snobbish words on us — they shed their Bohemianism as swiftly as may be. That there are others, a few, who live what is 277 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS called a Bohemian life by reason of a more finely intractable spirit, I do not deny. But surely it is a foolishly improper thing to call these — ^true artists, it may be, but certainly not of the most enduring fibre — ^by the name of a people whose history is stamped with the seal of heroic sacrifice, heroic patience. The reader who suspected me of a mild jocularity is rebuked. Fierce and grim has been the story of Bohemia and of an ever-recurring pathos. Those bitter Hussite wars, with their stern battles and flinging of councillors out of windows on to soldiers' spears, were a lamentable thing but a fine thing. John Hus stood for the reform of a corrupt Church before Luther, and his fellow Bohemians were fighting for an idea. The Thirty Years' War began in Prague and ended in Prague. That fatal battle of the White Mountain meant the forcing of a whole people into a religion against their will, with beheadings and scourgings, meant the sup- pression of one nationality by another. To suffer two centuries of an alien domination and to be at the end of it essentially a free people, ready and able when the occasion came to assert its birth and its language — surely that is a noble persistence. Through it all has been the bitterness of rulers of another race, since the rule of Bohemian princes, sprung from that dim Princess who first built the two castles with the Moldau flowing between them, came to an early end and the German Luxem- 278 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA burgs came in. Good and bad jkhose German Luxemburgs ; the blind King John who neglected his kingdom but brought undying renown on its arms, the great King Charles whose memory I love for his beautiful bridge, the magnificent King Rudolph. Always the Bohemians wanted to like them and responded to understanding, and more^ especially to understanding of their beautiful Cech tongue. Few things more pathetic in history than their wish to make the best of the Palatine Frederick and his English wife, the ill- fated Stuart Elizabeth, and the tale of how he failed them, turning coward at that fatal White Mountain. It was as though a man should find the lady of his love to be a strumpet. A stern and sad story, that of Bohemia. I thought of these things as I went in the train down the beautiful bank of the Elbe from Dresden to Prague. I thought of them rather languidly, however, for the brooding spirit of Prague had not yet taken hold of me. Moreover, I was weary of the journey. My travels seldom take me farther than Hammersmith or Hampstead, and in the endless hours between Flushing and Dresden I vowed that no country in the world was worth such tedium. We stayed two hours at Essens, starting and backing continually, with whistle shriUing and horns blowing, and, as it seemed to a painful traveller attempting sleep, with a noise of drums and trumpets. I know the Germans are 279 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS dreadfully efficient, but " fallible man must fail somewhere " : since we had lost two hours at Essen, it seemed well to the train to lose another when it left that place, loafing casually through a flat and uninteresting country, so that at Dresden we were three hours late, and I had to sleep there if I would make the beautiful journey to Prague by dayUght. But it was all ordered for my artistic good, for Dresden, so sleek and self-satisfied, withal so handsome in its spacious modern way, was fitted to deepen by the contrast the sad, romantic city I was to visit. I suppose that every well-ordered German town must make the patriotic Englishman, especially if he be a Londoner, melancholy and jealous. I wandered all over it, the poorest as well as the richest quarters, and I saw hardly one figure so obviously under the weather as half a dozen I see any day between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, and there seemed to be no parallel at all to the squalid parts of London. Happy Germans, thought I, who have a Govern- ment which really governs and has not for its ideal the doing of nothing it can contrive to avoid ! I was not discouraged by the best physical type I saw in the streets. One sees as strong and healthy men and women in London. It is the German average which is so creditable ; it is our " tail " which is so disgraceful. I am not going to write about the Germans, however, and will only pay them one more complimeirf. I do so because 280 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA the fairness which a stiQng people should mete to a possible enemy has not always been conspicuous in us of late. I saw nothing of the alleged rude- ness of German people and German officials : quite the contrary. I lost my way in Dresden and had to ask it of a dozen people (with hardly a word of German in my head) before I found it, and I was always treated with courtesy. So did the Customs officials treat me : one in particular I remember with respect for his severely military but considerate bearing, his air of officer in a crack regiment, his sword and his eyeglass. It is true that my own terror of the unfamiliar made me servilely polite to them, and I may have appealed to the tender side of the masterful character. . . . But I ramble, and must get on to Prague, along the bank of the Elbe with the gay steamers on the water and the hills on the other side, and, when we had crossed the Austrian frontier into Bohemia, with the Cech as well as the German names of stations increasing my sense of strangeness and quickening my curiosity. In Prague at last, I felt myself quite clear of Germany, for the softer and kinder sound of Cech was about my ears at the station, and I saw Cech names at street corners as I drove to " The Black Horse," which has its name outside in Cech and French, but not in German. Then I sent at once for a guide who could speak English. Oh, I am well aware that the superior person is sniffing, but I was never that even at home, though 281 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS one may seem so to people who will praise the conmiercial drama, and I was not going to miss three-quarters of what I should have seen that I might assume superior airs afterwards. I sent for a guide, and a most serviceable one he proved, and I recommended him for the rare sympathy with which he understood, unofiended, my desire at times for silence and reverie rather than for in- formation. I will requite a little of his service with a mild advertisement. His name is Beutler, and they are sure to know of him at your hotel. So I set forth to see Prague, and soon, very soon, felt myself profoundly glad that I had come. 282 II THERE is, naturally, the life and movement of a modern town : spacious streets make a rea- sonably fine show of shop-fronts : tramways with clanging bells traverse the Pricopy, where my hotel was. (German names for the streets have been banished.) No doubt the Praguers are rightly proud of all this. The place is populous, and perhaps the novelty of the Cech tongue helped me to think the citizens a lively and talkative folk. But I was quickly in the past. We walked under the majestic Powder Tower, which is opposite the Black Horse, and was built in the sixteenth century, and were ushered into the old world. Through narrower streets than the spacious Pricopy we came into the most ancient Jewish synagogue and cemetery in Europe. They are well known, that Jewish cemetery and that synagogue of Prague, and I suppose are honoured among Jews. For my part I did not care to linger in them, for Jews to me tell of antiquity wherever they and their ritual are found, of antiquity in general and of the East, and it was old Europe I was seeking there. 283 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS They have a real part in the history of Prague, for they turned out and fought hke men for the city, and were honoured accordingly ; but Jews are Jews everywhere, and they are not in tune with my thoughts. Somewhat hastily and per- functorily a literary temperament paid its tribute of platitude to humanity : the ground swollen to a little hill with the innumerable dead, the pebbles, for the Christian flowers, on the tombs, the sombre, stunted trees and bushes, the dreary sadness of this graveyard, now unused and de- serted, ail that had its obvious pathos of mortality. But I was seeking dead Bohemians. I saw much more than I remember, then and on my second visit to Prague, coming home from my friends. Likely enough my chief impressions leave out much I should have retained ; I give them as they come back to me. We went on to the market- place, where are the Town Hall and the Tein Church and the Kinsky Palace. It was em- phatically a market-place of the Middle Ages : there are many others, but has any of them such a stamp of the Middle Ages on it as the Clock of Prague, which is on the wall of the Town Hall, the clock which tells the time by the sun and when it strikes the hour shows us Christ and the Twelve Apostles passing across two windows above, while the cock crows, and Mammon nods his head, and other significant things happen ? I had a strange and strong idea about it. The little figures of the 284 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA Christ and his Apostles are high up, and so might easily be of a small human stature, and as each one stopped a moment on his passage and turned full face and seemed to look down into the square, I thought them ghosts of the dead world who consciously looked upon the living. Three or four times I heard the clock strike and always I had that strong impression, not that the figures were the ghosts of their prototypes, but that they were spirits of the Middle Ages come back. I think of them still passing every hour before the indifferent Praguers, pausing gravely a moment to look down on their successors. . . . The Tein is a fine church, but I leave architecture to more knowledgeable writers. Mr. Arthur Symons has written well of Prague, though he loved it far less than I, and of its buildings. I think he makes overmuch of their harshness and abruptness, but harsh and abrupt they are. The Kinsky Palace in this square is harsh and gloomy, strong and firm and standing without compromise for the powerful past, and so look other palaces of Bohemian nobles I saw, fit for lords of a stern history. I hope they remember it. Then, after this and that matter of interest, we stood on the Karlov Most, which is Charles his Bridge, and beheld the glory of Prague. Under- neath us the broad Moldau, flowing between the new Town and the Little Town ; high up on our left, as we looked up the stream, the splendid and 285 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS sombre Hradchin, the great castle of Prague, churches and crowded roofs between us and it ; on the other side, higher still, the hill where stands what remains of the Vyshehrad, the more ancient castle of the first Bohemian Princess ; behind us wooded islands ; on the right bank fine modem buildings, spacious walks. . . . Prague is a very beautiful city, and would be still, though you took away its ancient glories ; but the impression I had even then, and far more deeply when late at night I stood alone on the Karlov Most, was first of all, first and last, the sense of " old, unhappy, far-ofi things." The quotation is somewhat hack- neyed, but it must be used of Prague if it is never used again. One might know of the long-ago battles, but the sense was deeper than knowledge, the sense of oldness and of sadness. The oldness was all round and about one, and the sadness surely was in the air. I was not consciously re- membering that this was a great city when Vienna was a village, and that now Bohenxia is only a part of the Austrian Empire ; not consciously noting the touch of sorrow there is in Slav faces, which marks this race, partly German though it be, from its confident Saxon neighbours ; dimly clairvoyant I knew myself among the ghosts of the unhappy dead. . . . My guide had much to say on the Bridge, of the two Bridge Towers, and of the various sainted statues, and chiefly of Saint John of Nepomuk with his 286 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA starry halo, -which commemorates the tale of stars shining when his body sank in the river. Bas-reliefs too commemorate that history ; how he refused to betray to the wicked King Wenzel the Queen's secret told in the confessional, and how she, like the Saint, was cruelly murdered. He stands as the patron Saint of Bohemia now, and was made so, I imagine, when the Jesuits took the country in hand after the White Mountain. Thence I went through the Little Town and up the steep hill to the great Hradchin, and walked through spacious courts, and stood impressed in council chambers and in the vast Hall of Vladislav, where tournaments were held of old. I stood at the window whence the councillors were hurled in the approved Bohemian fashion, by the Pro- testant nobles at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War : they fell on a dunghill and escaped the bullets sent after them, truly an exciting ex- perience ! There is a fine view of Prague from this window, and here again one feels the force of that line of Wordsworth. Well in tune with the history of Prague is the fact that the last balls given in the Hradchin's stately Spanish Hall by an Austrian Prince were given by the ill-fated Rudolph. I must not compete with the guide-books, however, and therefore I will write nothing of the Cathedral of St. Vitus, much as it impressed me, so that in it I begged a silent reverie of my informing guide. We went back by a 287 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS difierent way, down many deep steps where children were playing and their mothers sat and worked, across the Karlov Most again, and through a court of the University, where is the statue of a bearded young man to mark how valiantly the students fought against the Swedes : it is set in long grass and wild-growing shrubs, and again the melancholy — but I repeat myself too often. Those are a few of my more definite impressions, those that stand out in my memory : it is due to my guide to add that he showed me many more sights than these. On my return visit to Prague I saw more of the social life, the publicly social at least, of the place, and observed, as I suppose one generally observes on the Continent, that people seem to be more easily satisfied than in England with conversation. My hotel was the Savoy of the town, in a simpler and cheaper way, and its open restaurant was full up to half- past one or so with folk talking and smoking and drinking the deservedly eternal beer of the country, tunic-wearing officers conspicuous here and there, lacking nothing, I judged, of a due pride in their profession. Prague dines after the theatre, which I thought a sensible custom, if theatres^ must begin early, and after a comic opera in Cech, vivaciously played but indiffer- ently sung — ^it was not at the National Theatre — my friends and I finished dinner at twelve o'clock, a cosy enough hour, if only Prague lay abed later. 288 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA Like Paris, however, it seems to sleep hardly at all, and when at two o'clock one had observed from one's window the more persistent pleasure- seekers moving on to another restaurant, it was surprising to be awaked by tramway bells at five. The winter is the " season " at Prague, and its citizens must use a good deal of artificial light then, I imagine. Being there in the summer I did not see many eminent people, but I did have the gratification of being shown, lunching affably in the restaurant, a gentleman who owns a hundred — or was it a thousand ? — castles scattered over the Empire : that seemed to me the real thing in the way of an aristocrat, and one would have been hardly human, and certainly not English, not to be impressed. I mingle Socialism with my Toryism, but a limited number of aristocrats with from fifty to a few hundred castles apiece, and quarterings to correspond — that is essential — ^would give a pretty air to a country. This one seemed to be in the picture in old Prague, though he was not a Bohemian. I saw less of the people generally in Prague than of the peasants in the country, but I noticed that town and country Bohemians have one thing in common, a passion- ate love of their language which makes any scraps of it a foreigner may acquire touchingly grateful to them. It is always difficult to have a passion- ate national feeling without a corresponding antipathy — and in spite of the social philosophers, T 289 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS I think such feelings, which warm the interest of life, no bad thing in their way. The Praguers are all bilingual, of course, but most of them would rather not talk German, especially to Germans. I came across a pleasant instance of this in my second visit. Wishing to go once more to my beloved Karlov Most, and losing my way, as my custom is in most places, I approached a Praguer of the poorer class, and saluted him. (By the way, I wish we had more of the hat-raising custom in England. I should like to raise mine to any man I asked a favour of in the street, policeman or otherwise, but fear to be thought comic or ironical, and it seems to me boorish not to do so in a shop to a female server, but there one fears to be thought familiar — what a people we are !) " Prosim ! " said I — which means, " If you please," " Sorry to trouble you," " Thank you," and^ anything polite : it is the most useful word in Cech, and next to it I recommend to men of taste the word " Pivo," which means beer. " Prosim ! " said I, and " Karlov Most ? " pointing vaguely with my stick ; whereon he, perceiving that I wished to be polite but did not really possess his language, began to talk volubly in German ; then perceiving further (I confess) that I did not understand that, he evidently thought I must be a really nice man, took me by the arm, and walked some way with me. Then, of course, I at once took the wrong turning : there 290 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA was a shout of " Pan ! Pan ! "— " Mister," that is, or " Sir " — from several market women who had observed the incident and wished to prosper this non-German-speaking stranger, and with much vigorous pointing, and many " Prosims " on my part I went off in quite a halo of popularity. A similar thing happened to me in a country town, and there was a stronger instance when one morning I was walking up and down before my friend's house and an old peasant woman came by. She mutterd a " Good morning." in German, rather sulkily, and I gave it her back in Cech ; swiftly she came up to me, took my hand and kissed it. The action was too naturally and simply done to be embarrassing, but I thought it infinitely touching. Truly they love their lan- guage, oppressed for so long, coming to its own again only this last hundred years. But for all the kindhness of the Praguers, their pleasant late hours, their noisy tramways, the bustle and life of the place, first and last Prague stood for the sadness of human history, for a long fight that was in vain, for hopes disappointed and greatness gone but remembered visibly. For old unhappy far-ofE things And battles long ago. — I shall never quote it again. 291 Ill BOHEMIA, as no doubt the reader knows — ^but I am sure I did not until I went there, having learned no geography at school : so perhaps he will forgive my mentioning it — Bohemia is a plain surrounded by mountains, and Prague is in the middle. As I journeyed then to the eastern frontier where lived my friends, I passed through a country which was interesting enough to a stranger, especially in the towns and villgaes, with their churches rather harsh in line but often bright in colour, but was not beautiful until one drew to the mountains. Then, indeed, its beauty was wonderful, and between the station and the house, a matter of several miles, my eyes feasted, for if you have mountains and woods and rolling, cornfields, do you want much else ? My eyes feasted and my mind was busy, for to untravelled me the country was passing strange : I was cer- tainly out of England. The buildings in the villages we passed, the quaint churches, the many painted Madonnas by the roadside — every- thing was strange. If Bohemia led the first 292 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA Tevolt against Rome, the conquering Jesuits did not their work negligently, and to the eye at least there is no more Catholic land than Bohemia is now. The drive was not tame either, for motors were novel there, and horses still reared and fretted — and oxen in carts, another touch of strange, turned and tried to flee. Annoyed men held them, and I have a memory of a very beautiful child turning a furious face on us from a cart with a rearing horse. The children seemed mostly fair and were often extremely pretty; they grow darker as they grow older and get something of a dour look, partly the sadness I generally seemed to see in Bohemian faces, partly that which peasants, in spite of Virgil and other fond poets, have in most parts. There were comely girls, but the women age soon, I suppose, with toil. Only bright kerchiefs round their heads seemed to remain of a national dress. Yes, there was much to see while I drove to my friend's house. The prejudice I mentioned when I began almost •stops me from saying anything at all of the house where I spent one of the delightful and memorable times of my life, but a word or two should be said, for its history is significant. Itself two thousand feet, I think, above the sea, it stands at the foot of a steep hill where once stood an intensely feudal castle. This was held by a good knight whom misfortune (drove to the free-booting which was the common 293 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS resource of an unlucky gentleman, and which he practised with success, until one day the King of Bohemia arrived with an army and razed his castle and hanged him to a tree by the golden chain, tradition said, he had won in honourable battle. From the top of the hill, where but a few stones remain of this old castle, one looks over woods and corn-lands to the mountains of the frontier, over which might come some day — ^but heaven forbid it ! — ^the Prussians into Bohemia. One may see also the hills whereon stood other feudal castles, with their stories of wrong-doing and romance. The present house was built as a monastery in the seventeenth century by the Jesuits, and there is in its gardens a stone pillar which once stood hard by the village church, and which was used as stocks and whipping-post by those gentle ministers of the religion of love for the punishment of peasants who neglected mass. Since I am by no means the only Englishman who has been to this hospitable house, it is likely enough some readers may recognise it : I have said so much of it only because it is significant of Bohemia and her grim history. The life qi a country house is much the same in most countries, save that " abroad " one is spared the premature sociality of the English breakfast-table, and the life was the more familiar here because my hosts were linguists, and for most of my stay I could be accommodated with my 294 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA native language. And that was to the good, since it left one's mind fresher for impressions when we visited the neighbourhood. But, ah ! that monstrous omission in the education of an Englishman 1 It is almost incredible that one's schooling, if you throw in the University, should go on till one's twenty-fourth year, that one should be reckoned, as for the sake of the argument I admit that I was, a more intelligent youth than the ordina,ry, and that one should emerge from it all with no modern language but one's own. I am all for the classics : to be cultivated one must begin at the beginning ; but it would have been so easy in that receptive season to gain fluency at least, if one had been rightly taught, in a couple of contemporary foreign languages with no sacri- fice of Greek and Latin. One teaches oneself French, of course, imperceptibly so far as reading goes, but with the little practice one has in average London, the strain of talking it and understanding the spoken word is grievous. They say our Foreign Minister is not at home in it, and that, if true, I can easily understand, since he is as old as I : it may be that boys are more sanely educated now. Foreigners spoil us in this matter ; diploma- tists in London all speak English. It was Bis- marck, I believe, who did most to displace French as the universal diplomatic language ; and I think it would have been well for us if he had left it alone, for then one might have more practice 295 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS at home, and be less of an oaf abroad. It some- times happened that when a larger party than usual was at this house in Bohemia the air was extremely polyglot : there would be Cech, and some German, and French, and merciful EngUsh for poor me, and I grew so confused that I protest, when once I was suddenly addressed in English, I nearly asked the speaker to speak more slowly, pleading my want of practice in the language. Of all the tongues I like best to listen to the Cech, partly for its softness, partly perhaps that no one expected me to understand it. This is a sad digression in two senses, but when one has a grievance it is folly to miss an opportunity of declaring it : a use should be found for every- thing. Well, from this most pleasant starting-point I went hither and thither, and saw many an in- teresting and beautiful place, and heard many an interesting and significant story, and drank in strangeness as untravelled persons use. We went to Brandys, a pretty place of holiday resort, and saw where Komensky lay hid : he who was a Bohemian Bunyan on one side of him and on another wrote the still valuable " Didactic " on which Mr. Walter Keatinge has written a good English book. We went to Zamperg, where there is a screen of skulls in the Church. I know not if it be unique but it is sufficiently curious. It was made after a pestilence of those who had died 296 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA whether in gratitude that any one survived or in reproach I know not : I suppose a proper humility is in the one motive, but logic seems to be in the other. Some visitors find that screen most horrible and wish they had never seen it, fearing it will haunt their dreams. I confess I had not that emotion ; but I felt sad for poor humanity and its end, and wondered, in my literary way, what philosophy Hamlet would have found for so many thousand skulls, ^ We went to Usti on the Ordlice — ^to keep to Cech names — which is a town of flourishing manufactures, and ascended the stations of the Cross — a little shrine with a descriptive picture at each stage — founded by some pious rich man, and from the highest looked down on the close-clustered town. There is always an exulting sort of joy in looking down on a city from a hill, why I know not, unless it be that one has something of the thrill of an in- tending invader and conqueror. A more beautiful view of the same kind we had when we stood over another town, Kysperk, where the church has a gorgeous, yet beautiful, painted ceiling. Many churches we visited, strange (to my more sombre experiences in that way) in the gaiety — for it came to that — of their pictures and decora- tions, less consonant (to my prejudices of associa- tion) than our plainer churches with those feelings of thoughtful sympathy with humanity which one outside the religious fold may feel in a church. 297 PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS The Bohemian peasant is devout, I believe. Like other institutions, the Catholic Church there has good and bad servants. I heard stories of village priests which were not edifying, but doubtless simple faith survives such shocks. Many villages I passed through, motoring or walking, with sad- faced (perhaps my fancy) but not ungenial men, with women marked by toil but with kind smiles for a greeting, with interested, bare-legged children. The spirit of feudalism lingers here, but I think it is in the attitude of a servant to his individual lord and has nothing in it of class servility or respect for the better coat. I imagine that the skilful and respectable head gardener, who kisses his lord's hand, would expect another aristocrat, not his lord, to return his hat-raising salute in kind on the public road, and would not be dis- appointed. And so the time went all too swiftly by, and with my bundle of impressions and re- membered joys I started back for England. 298 IV I AM far from thinking that a stay of a few weeks entitles me to an opinion about Bohemia as a whole and the futm-e of its most interesting people. And my reading on the subject has been practically confined to the histories of Count'Lutzow, who has paid us the great compliment of writing his valuable and fascinating works in English, ending with his latest book " The Life of John Hus." Still, I had the advantage of much con- versation with those who know all there is to be known, and my eyes, I suppose, are not much less observant than other folks' — and, in fine, I may as well say what I think. It is a rarely stimulating experience to be in a country which has a strong national feeling in it. In this Bohemia has been compared with Ireland ; but the comparison is unjust, for the national feeling is far more thoroughly pervading in Bohemia, and — I would say it without offence — more profound and more sincere. It touches all classes, for one thing ; it is based on a genuine racial difference; it has its clear sign in a language 299' PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS spoken universally {hroughout it. The difference between England and Ireland is chiefly one of climate ; there is no such predominance of Celtic blood as there is of the Cech in Bohemia ; a large class is indifferent, to say the least of it, to national feeling. Erse is spoken in out-of-thcrway dis- tricts and is strongly advocated by literary men who cannot speak it themselves. Cech is uni- versal in Bohemia. A little while ago it was not, to be sure, the language of the aristocrats among themselves, and the elder of them still converse commonly in German, but the younger speak it as a point of honour. There is a break in its literature from the White Mountain till a hundred years or so ago — for two hundred years, that is — l)ut since then the literature has been continu- ously strengthened. There is, no doubt, a pro- German party in Bohemia, but it is a small and diminishing minority, and I am told that the Jews, who were of the German party, are now significantly inclined to fall into line. Well, such a feeling as this throughout a country is a bracing thing, and refreshes the visitor. It even refreshed me. I know the political philosopher looks askance at it as retrograde, favouring as he does less homogeneous groups, and pointing out that German is the more important language commercially. For my part I favotir most things -which add to the interest and vividness of life, and " retrograde " and " progressive " are always 300 A VISIT TO BOHEMIA dubious phrases. Moreover, if Cech, in the literal sense, is not spoken by many millions, it is, after all, a variety of the great Slav language which is. As to the future of this movement, even as to its intentions, it would be more than impertinent were I to dogmatise. The present Austrian Govern- ment is mild, and the Bohemians are loyal to the Emperor. But of one thing I am certain. If in the changes and chances of European politics it came to pass that such a repression of nationality and language as has been tried in Prussian Poland were tried in Bohemia, its success would be utterly and for ever impossible. At present, however, it is enough to think of literature and national songs — I heard some that were charming and haunting, and reminded me, when their meaning^ was explained, of the best of the old Scot^— and an ancient history and an ancient language still warmly alive and binding Bohemians together. 301 Fkinted b^ BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD Tavistock Stkeet CoveSt Gabden London