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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013568385 
 
BOON, THE MIND OF 
 THE RACE, THE WILD 
 ASSES OF THE DEVIL, 
 and THE LAST TRUMP 
 By H. G. WELLS 
 
A Modern Love Story 
 
 ANN VERONICA 
 
 By H. G. WELLS 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 7/- net. 
 
 Also Adelphi Library, cloth, 3/6 net. 
 
 Also crown 8vo, cloth, 3I6 net. 
 
 Also Unwin's Pocket Novels, 1/9 net. 
 
 " Like all Mr. Wells' work, the book is 
 inflamed with sincerity, and it abounds in 
 flashes of raw life which almost blind the 
 judgment with their intense reality. ... It 
 must be read by everyone who wants to 
 understand the modern movement, and to 
 see it pictured by a modern of the moderns, 
 who is at once a sound artist and a deep and 
 sensitive thinker^-' — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 ' ' Whether one accepts Mr. Wells' reading: 
 of the feminine riddle or not, one gladly 
 concedes he has written^ a novel which in 
 its frank sincerity, and its bold grappling 
 with a social question of compelling- force, 
 stands out as one of the best things he has 
 given us." — The Globe. 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN LTD XONDON 
 
Boon, The Mind of the 
 Race, The Wild Asses of the 
 Devil, and The Last Trump 
 
 Being a First Selection from the 
 Literary Remains of George Boon, 
 Appropriate to the Times 
 
 Prepared for Publication 
 by Reginald Bliss 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE COUSINS OF CHARLOTTE 
 BRONT4," "A CHILD'S HISTORY OF THE 
 CRYSTAL PALACE," "FIRELIGHT RAMBLES," 
 "EDIBLE FUNGI," "WHALES IN CAPTIVITY," 
 AND OTHER WORKS 
 
 WITH 
 
 An Ambiguous Introduction by 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 (Who is in Truth the 
 Author of the entire Book) 
 
 T. FISHER UN WIN LTD 
 LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE 
 
 US 7 
 
Fir A published in 1915 
 Second Impression 1915 
 Second Edition 1920 
 
 (4W rights reserved) 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Whenever a publisher gets a book by one 
 author he wants an Introduction written to 
 it by another, and Mr. Fisher Unwin is no 
 exception to the rule. Nobody reads Intro- 
 ductions, they serve no useful purpose, and 
 they give no pleasure, but they appeal to 
 the business mind, I think, because as a rule 
 they cost nothing. At any rate, by the 
 pressure of a certain inseparable intimacy 
 between Mr. Reginald Bliss and myself, 
 this Introduction has been extracted from 
 me. I will confess that I have not read his 
 book through, though I have a kind of 
 first-hand knowledge of its contents, and 
 that it seems to me an indiscreet, ill-advised 
 book. . . . 
 
 I have a very strong suspicion that this 
 Introduction idea is designed to entangle 
 me in the responsibility for the book. In 
 America, at any rate, " The Life of George 
 Meek, Bath Chairman," was ascribed to me 
 upon no better evidence. Yet any one 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 who likes may go to Eastbourne and find 
 Meek with chair and all complete. But 
 in view of the complications of the book 
 market and the large simplicities of the 
 public mind, I do hope that the reader 
 —and by that I mean the reviewer— will 
 be able to see the reasonableness and the 
 necessity of distinguishing between me and 
 Mr. Reginald Bliss. I do not wish to escape 
 the penalties of thus participating in, and 
 endorsing, his manifest breaches of good 
 taste, literary decorum, and friendly obli- 
 gation, but as a writer whose reputation 
 is already too crowded and confused and 
 who is for the ordinary purposes of every 
 day known mainly as a novelist, I should 
 be glad if I could escape the public identi- 
 fication I am now repudiating. Bliss is 
 Bliss and Wells is Wells. And Bliss can 
 can write all sorts of things that Wells could 
 not do. 
 
 This Introduction has really no more 
 to say than that. 
 
 H, G. WELLS. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK AND GEORGE BOON 9 
 
 CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 BEING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF " THE MIND OF 
 
 THE RACE " 40 
 
 CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 THE GREAT SLUMP, THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS, 
 
 AND THE GARDEN BY THE SEA ... 59 
 
 CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 OF ART, OF LITERATURE, OF MR. HENRY JAMES . 79 
 
 CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
 
 OF THE ASSEMBLING AND OPENING OF THE WORLD 
 
 CONFERENCE ON THE MIND OF THE RACE . 120 
 7 
 
8 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 PAGE 
 OF NOT LIKING HALLERY AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
 
 FOR THE DISCOURAGEMENT OF LITERATURE 163 
 
 CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 
 WILKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS . .178 
 
 CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF " THE WILD ASSES OF THE 
 
 DEVIL" 210 
 
 CHAPTER THE NINTH 
 THE HUNTING OF THE WILD ASSES OF THE DEVIL 238 
 
 CHAPTER THE TENTH 
 THE STORY OF THE LAST TRUMP . . . 277 
 
BOON, THE MIND OF 
 THE RACE, THE WILD 
 ASSES OF THE DEVIL, 
 and THE LAST TRUMP 
 
 CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 
 The Back of Miss Bathwick and 
 George Boon 
 
 §1 
 
 It is quite probable that the reader does 
 not know of the death of George Boon, 
 and that " remains " before his name upon 
 the title-page will be greeted with a certain 
 astonishment. In the ordinary course of 
 things, before the explosion of the war, 
 the death of George Boon would have 
 been an event— oh ! a three-quarters of a 
 column or more in the Times event, and 
 
10 BOON 
 
 articles in the monthlies and reminiscences. 
 As it is, he is not so much dead as missing. 
 Something happened at the eleventh hour 
 —I think it was chiefly the Admiralty 
 report of the fight off the Falkland Islands 
 — that blew his obituary notices clean out 
 of the papers. And yet he was one of our 
 most popular writers, and in America I 
 am told he was in the " hundred thousand 
 class." But now we think only of Lord 
 Kitchener's hundred thousands. 
 
 It is no good pretending about it. The 
 war has ended all that. Boon died with 
 his age. After the war there will be a 
 new sort of book-trade and a crop of new 
 writers and a fresh tone, and everything 
 will be different. This is an obituary of 
 more than George Boon. ... I regard the 
 outlook with profound dismay. I try to 
 keep my mind off it by drilling with the 
 Shrewsbury last line of volunteers and train- 
 ing down the excrescences of my physical 
 style. When the war is over will be time 
 enough to consider the prospects of a 
 superannuated man of letters. We National 
 Volunteers are now no mere soldiers on 
 paper ; we have fairly washable badges 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 11 
 
 by way of uniform ; we have bought our- 
 selves dummy rifles ; we have persuaded 
 the War Office to give us a reluctant recogni- 
 tion on the distinct understanding that we 
 have neither officers nor authority. In the 
 event of an invasion, I understand, we are 
 to mobilize and . . . do quite a number of 
 useful things. But until there is an invasion 
 in actual progress, nothing is to be decided 
 more precisely than what this whiff of 
 printer's shrapnel, these four full stops, 
 conveys. . . . 
 
§2 
 
 1 must confess I was monstrously dis- 
 appointed when at last I could get my 
 hands into those barrels in the attic in 
 which Boon had stored his secret writings. 
 There was more perhaps than I had expected ; 
 I do not complain of the quantity, but of 
 the disorder, the incompleteness, the want 
 of discipline and forethought. 
 
 Boon had talked so often and so con- 
 vincingly of these secret books he was 
 writing, he had alluded so frequently to 
 this or that great project, he would begin 
 so airily with " In the seventeenth chapter 
 of my 4 Wild Asses of the Devil,' " or " I 
 have been recasting the third part of our 
 ' Mind of the Race,' " that it came as an 
 enormous shock to me to find there was 
 no seventeenth chapter ; there was not 
 even a completed first chapter to the former 
 work, and as for the latter, there seems 
 
 12 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 13 
 
 nothing really finished or settled at all 
 beyond the fragments I am now issuing, 
 except a series of sketches of Lord Rosebery, 
 for the most part in a toga and a wreath, 
 engaged in a lettered retirement at his 
 villa at Epsom, and labelled " Patrician 
 Dignity, the Last Phase "—sketches I sup- 
 press as of no present interest — and a 
 complete gallery of imaginary portraits 
 (with several duplicates) of the Academic 
 Committee that has done so much for 
 British literature (the Polignac prize, for 
 example, and Sir Henry Newbolt's pro- 
 fessorship) in the last four or five years. 
 So incredulous was I that this was all, that 
 I pushed my inquiries from their original 
 field in the attic into other parts of the 
 house, pushed them, indeed, to the very 
 verge of ransacking, and in that I greatly 
 deepened the want of sympathy already 
 separating me from Mrs. Boon. But I 
 was stung by a thwarted sense of duty, 
 and quite resolved that no ill-advised in- 
 terference should stand .between me and 
 the publication of what Boon has always 
 represented to me as the most intimate 
 productions of his mind. 
 
14 BOON 
 
 Yet now the first rush of executorial 
 emotion is over I can begin to doubt about 
 Boon's intention in making me his " literary 
 executor." Did he, after all, intend these 
 pencilled scraps, these marginal caricatures, 
 and — what seems to me most objectionable 
 —annotated letters from harmless pro- 
 minent people for publication? Or was his 
 selection of me his last effort to prolong 
 what was, I think, if one of the slightest, 
 one also of the most sustained interests of 
 his life, and that was a prolonged faint 
 jeering at my expense ? Because always — 
 it was never hidden from me — in his most 
 earnest moments Boon jeered at me. I 
 do not know why he jeered at me, it was 
 always rather pointless jeering and far below 
 his usual level, but jeer he did. Even 
 while we talked most earnestly and brewed 
 our most intoxicating draughts of project 
 and conviction, there was always this scarce 
 perceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule 
 floating like a drowning sprig of blue borage 
 in the cup. His was indeed essentially 
 one of those suspended minds that float 
 above the will and action ; when at last 
 reality could be evaded no longer it killed 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 15 
 
 him ; he never really believed nor felt the 
 urgent need that goads my more accurate 
 nature to believe and do. Always when 
 I think of us together, I feel that I am on 
 my legs and that he sits about. And yet 
 he could tell me things I sought to know, 
 prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs 
 to a conviction in me that I alone could 
 never attain. 
 
 He took life as it came, let his fancy 
 play upon it, selected, elucidated, ignored, 
 threw the result in jest or observation or 
 elaborate mystification at us, and would 
 have no more of it. . . . He would be 
 earnest for a time and then break away. 
 " The Last Trump " is quite typical of the 
 way in which he would -turn upon himself. 
 It sets out so straight for magnificence ; 
 it breaks off so abominably. You will 
 read it. 
 
 Yet he took things more seriously than 
 he seemed to do. 
 
 This war, I repeat, killed him. He could 
 not escape it. It bore him down. He 
 did his best to disregard it. But its worst 
 stresses caught him in the climax of a 
 struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought 
 
16 BOON 
 
 on by a freak of bathing by moonlight— in 
 an English October, a thing he did to 
 distract his mind from the tension after 
 the Marne— and it destroyed him. The last 
 news they told him was that the Germans 
 had made their " shoot and scuttle " raid 
 upon Whitby and Scarborough. There was 
 much circumstantial description in the 
 morning's paper. They had smashed up 
 a number of houses and killed some hundreds 
 of people, chiefly women and children. Ten 
 little children had been killed or mutilated 
 in a bunch on their way to school, two old 
 ladies at a boarding-house had had their 
 legs smashed, and so on. 
 
 " Take this newspaper," he said, and 
 held it out to his nurse. " Take it," he 
 repeated irritably, and shook it at her. 
 
 He stared at it as it receded. Then he 
 seemed to be staring at distant things. 
 
 " Wild Asses of the Devil," he said at 
 last. " Oh ! Wild Asses of the Devil ! I 
 thought somehow it was a joke. It wasn't 
 a joke. There they are, and the world is 
 theirs." 
 
 And he turned his face to the wall and 
 never spoke again. 
 
§3 
 
 But before I go on it is necessary to explain 
 that the George Boon I speak of is not 
 exactly the same person as the George 
 Boon, the Great Writer, whose fame has 
 reached to every bookshop in the world. 
 The same bodily presence perhaps they 
 had, but that is all. Except when he 
 chose to allude to them, those great works 
 on which that great fame rests; those books 
 and plays of his that have made him a 
 household word in half a dozen continents, 
 those books with their style as perfect and 
 obvious as the gloss upon a new silk hat, 
 with their flat narrative trajectory that 
 nothing could turn aside, their unsubdued 
 and apparently unsubduable healthy note, 
 their unavoidable humour, and their robust 
 pathos, never came between us. We talked 
 perpetually of literature and creative pro- 
 jects, but never of that " output " of his. 
 
 2 17 
 
18 BOON 
 
 We talked as men must talk who talk at 
 all, with an untrammelled freedom; now 
 we were sublime and now curious, now 
 we pursued subtleties and now we were 
 utterly trivial, but always it was in an 
 undisciplined, irregular style quite unsuit- 
 able for publication. That, indeed, was 
 the whole effect of the George Boon I am 
 now trying to convey, that he was indeed 
 essentially not for publication. And this 
 effect was in no degree diminished by the 
 fact that the photograph of his beautiful 
 castellated house, and of that extraordinarily 
 irrelevant person Mrs. Boon — for I must 
 speak my mind of her — and of her two 
 dogs (Binkie and Chum), whom he detested, 
 were, so to speak, the poulet and salade in 
 the menu of every illustrated magazine. 
 
 The fact of it is he was one of those 
 people who will not photograph j so much 
 of him was movement, gesture, expression, 
 atmosphere, and colour, and so little of 
 him was form. His was the exact converse 
 of that semi-mineral physical quality that 
 men call handsome, and now that his career 
 has come to its sad truncation I see no 
 reason why I should further conceal the 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 19 
 
 secret of the clear, emphatic, solid impres- 
 sion he made upon all who had not met him. 
 It was, indeed, a very simple secret ; — 
 
 He never wrote anything for his public 
 with his own hand. 
 
 He did this of set intention. He dis- 
 trusted a certain freakishness of his finger- 
 tips that he thought might have injured 
 him with his multitudinous master. He 
 knew his holograph manuscript would cer- 
 tainly get him into trouble. He employed 
 a lady, the lady who figures in his will, 
 Miss Bathwick, as his amanuensis. In Miss 
 Bathwick was all his security. She was 
 a large, cool, fresh-coloured, permanently 
 young lady, full of serious enthusiasms ; 
 she had been faultlessly educated in a girls' 
 high school of a not too modern type, 
 and she regarded Boon with an invincible 
 respect. She wrote down his sentences 
 ^(spelling without blemish in all the European 
 languages) as they came from his lips, 
 with the aid of a bright, efficient, new-look- 
 ing typewriter. If he used a rare word or 
 a whimsical construction, she would say, 
 " I beg your pardon, Mr. Boon," and he 
 would at once correct it ; and if by any 
 
20 BOON 
 
 lapse of an always rather too nimble ima- 
 gination he carried his thoughts into regions 
 outside the tastes and interests of that 
 enormous ante-bellum public it was his for- 
 tune to please, then, according to the nature 
 of his divagation, she would either cough 
 or sigh or — in certain eventualities — get 
 up and leave the room. 
 
 By this ingenious device— if one may 
 be permitted to use the expression for so 
 pleasant and trustworthy an assistant- 
 he did to a large extent free himself from 
 the haunting dread of losing his public by 
 some eccentricity of behaviour, some quirk 
 of thought or fluctuation of " attitude " 
 that has pursued him ever since the great 
 success of " Captain Clay ball," a book he 
 wrote to poke fun at the crude imaginings 
 of a particularly stupid schoolboy he liked, 
 had put him into the forefront of our literary 
 world. 
 
§4 
 
 He had a peculiar, and, I think, a ground- 
 less terror of the public of the United States 
 of America, from which country he derived 
 the larger moiety of his income. In spite 
 of our remonstrances, he subscribed to the 
 New York Nation to the very end, and he 
 insisted, in spite of fact, reason, and my 
 earnest entreaties (having regard to the 
 future unification of the English-speaking 
 race), in figuring that continental empire 
 as a vain, garrulous, and prosperous female 
 of uncertain age, and still more uncertain 
 temper, with unfounded pretensions to in- 
 tellectuality and an ideal of refinement of 
 the most negative description, entirely on 
 the strength of that one sample. One might 
 as well judge England by the Spectator. 
 My protests seemed only to intensify his 
 zest in his personification of Columbia as 
 the Aunt Errant of Christendom, as a wild, 
 
 81 
 
22 BOON 
 
 sentimental, and advanced maiden lady of 
 inconceivable courage and enterprise, whom 
 everything might offend and nothing cow. 
 "I know," he used to say, "something 
 will be said or done and she'll have 
 hysterics j the temptation to smuggle some- 
 thing through Miss Bathwick's back is 
 getting almost too much for me. I could, 
 you know. Or some one will come along 
 with something a little harder and purer 
 and emptier and more emphatically hand- 
 some than I can hope to do. I shall 
 lose her one of these days. . . . How can 
 I hope to keep for ever that proud and 
 fickle heart ? " 
 
 And then I remember he suddenly went 
 off at a tangent to sketch out a great novel 
 he was to call " Aunt Columbia." " No," 
 he said, " they would suspect that — ' Aunt 
 Dove.' " She was to be a lady of great, 
 unpremeditated wealth, living on a vast 
 estate near a rather crowded and trouble- 
 some village. Everything she did and said 
 affected the village enormously. She took 
 the people's children into her employment ; 
 they lived on her surplus vegetables. She 
 was to have a particularly troublesome and 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 23 
 
 dishonest household of servants and a spoiled 
 nephew called Teddy. And whenever she 
 felt dull or energetic she drove down into 
 the village and lectured and blamed the 
 villagers — for being overcrowded, for being 
 quarrelsome, for being poor and numerous, 
 for not, in fact, being spinster ladies of 
 enormous good fortune. . . . That was only 
 the beginning of one of those vast schemes 
 of his that have left no trace now in all 
 the collection. 
 
 His fear of shocking America was, I 
 think, unfounded ; at any rate, he succeeded 
 in the necessary suppressions every time, 
 and until the day of his death it was rare 
 for the American press-cuttings that were 
 removed in basketfuls almost daily with 
 the other debris of his breakfast-table to 
 speak of him in anything but quasi-amorous 
 tones. He died for them the most spiritual 
 as well as the most intellectual of men ; 
 " not simply intellectual, but lovable." 
 They spoke of his pensive eyes, though, 
 indeed, when he was not glaring at a camera 
 they were as pensive as champagne, and 
 when the robust pathos bumped against 
 the unavoidable humour as they were swept 
 
24 BOON 
 
 along the narrow torrent of his story they 
 said with all the pleasure of an apt quotation 
 that indeed in his wonderful heart laughter 
 mingled with tears. 
 
§5 
 
 I think George Boon did on the whole 
 enjoy the remarkable setting of his philo- 
 sophical detachment very keenly j the mon- 
 strous fame of him that rolled about the 
 world, that set out east and came back 
 circumferentially from the west and beat 
 again upon his doors. He laughed irre- 
 sponsibly, spent the resulting money with 
 an intelligent generosity, and talked of other 
 things. "It is the quality of life," he said, 
 and " The people love to have it so." 
 
 I seem to see him still, hurrying but not 
 dismayed, in flight from the camera of an 
 intrusive admirer — an admirer not so much 
 of him as of his popularity — up one of his 
 garden walks towards his agreeable study. 
 I recall his round, enigmatical face, an 
 affair of rosy rotundities, his very bright, 
 active eyes, his queer, wiry, black hair that 
 went out to every point in the heavens, 
 his ankles and neck and wrists all protruding 
 
 25 
 
26 BOON 
 
 from his garments in their own peculiar 
 way, protruding a little more in the stress 
 of flight. I recall, too, his general effect 
 of careless and, on the whole, commend- 
 able dirtiness, accentuated rather than cor- 
 rected by the vivid tie of soft orange-coloured 
 silk he invariably wore, and how his light 
 paces danced along the turf. (He affected 
 in his private dominions trousers of faint 
 drab corduroy that were always too short, 
 braced up with vehement tightness, and 
 displaying claret-coloured socks above his 
 easy, square-toed shoes.) And I know that 
 even that lumbering camera coming clumsily 
 to its tripod ambush neither disgusted nor 
 vulgarized him. He liked his game ; he 
 liked his success and the opulent stateliness 
 it gave to the absurdities of Mrs. Boon and 
 all the circumstances of his profoundly 
 philosophical existence ; and he liked it 
 all none the worse because it was indeed 
 nothing of himself at all, because he in his 
 essence was to dull intelligences and com- 
 monplace minds a man invisible, a man 
 who left no impression upon the camera- 
 plate or moved by a hair's breadth the 
 scale of a materialist balance. 
 
§6 
 
 But I will confess the state of the remains 
 did surprise and disappoint me. 
 
 His story of great literary enterprises, 
 holograph and conducted in the profoundest 
 secrecy, tallied so completely with, for ex- 
 ample, certain reservations, withdrawals that 
 took him out of one's company and gave 
 him his evident best companionship, as it 
 were, when he was alone. It was so entirely 
 like him to concoct lengthy books away 
 from his neatly ordered study, from the 
 wise limitations of Miss Bathwick's signifi- 
 cant cough and her still more significant 
 back, that we all, I think, believed in these 
 unseen volumes unquestioningly. While 
 those fine romances, those large, bright 
 plays, were being conceived in a publicity 
 about as scandalous as a royal gestation, 
 publicly planned and announced, developed, 
 written, boomed, applauded, there was, we 
 
28 BOON 
 
 knew, this undercurrent of imaginative acti- 
 vity going on, concealed from Miss Bath- 
 wick's guardian knowledge, withdrawn from 
 the stately rhythm of her keys. What 
 more natural than to believe he was also 
 writing it down ? 
 
 Alas I I found nothing but fragments. 
 The work upon which his present fame is 
 founded was methodical, punctual and care- 
 ful, and it progressed with a sort of inevitable 
 precision from beginning to end, and so 
 on to another beginning. Not only in tone 
 and spirit but in length (that most impor- 
 tant consideration) he was absolutely trust- 
 worthy ; his hundred thousand words of 
 good, healthy, straightforward story came 
 out in five months with a precision almost 
 astronomical. In that sense he took his 
 public very seriously. To have missed his 
 morning's exercises behind Miss Bathwick's 
 back would have seemed to him the most 
 immoral— nay, worse, the most uncivil of 
 proceedings. 
 
 " She wouldn't understand it," he would 
 say, and sigh and go. 
 
 But these scraps and fragments are of 
 an irregularity diametrically contrasting 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICH 29 
 
 with this. They seem to have been begun 
 upon impulse at any time, and abandoned 
 with an equal impulsiveness, and they are 
 written upon stationery of a variety and 
 nature that alone would condemn them in 
 the eyes of an alienist. The handwriting 
 is always atrocious and frequently illegible, 
 the spelling is strange, and sometimes in- 
 decently bad, the punctuation is sporadic, 
 and many of the fragments would be at 
 once put out of court as modern literature 
 by the fact that they are written in pencil 
 on both sides of the paper ! Such of the 
 beginnings as achieve a qualified complete- 
 ness are of impossible lengths ; the longest 
 is a piece — allowing for gaps — of fourteen 
 thousand words, and another a fragment 
 shaping at about eleven. These are, of 
 course, quite impossible sizes, neither essay 
 nor short story nor novel, and no editor or 
 publisher would venture to annoy the public 
 with writings of so bizarre a dimension. 
 In addition there are fragments of verse. 
 But I look in vain for anything beyond 
 the first chapter of that tremendous serial, 
 " The Wild Asses of the Devil," that kept 
 on day by day through June and July to 
 
30 BOON 
 
 the very outbreak of the war, and only a 
 first chapter and a few illustrations and 
 memoranda and fragments for our " Mind 
 of the Race," that went on intermittently 
 for several years. Whole volumes of that 
 great hotchpotch of criticism are lost in 
 the sandbanks of my treacherous memory 
 for ever. 
 
 Much of the matter, including a small 
 MS. volume of those brief verses called 
 Limericks (personal always, generally action- 
 able, and frequently lacking in refinement), 
 I set aside at an early date. Much else also 
 I rejected as too disjointed and unfinished, 
 or too eccentric. Two bizarre fragments 
 called respectively " Jane in Heaven " and 
 " An Account of a Play," I may perhaps 
 find occasion to issue at a later date, and 
 there were also several brief imitations of 
 Villiers de l'lsle Adam quite alien to con- 
 temporary Anglo-Saxon taste, which also 
 I hold over. Sometimes upon separate 
 sheets, sometimes in the margins of other 
 compositions, and frequently at the end of 
 letters received by him I found a curious 
 abundance of queer little drawings, cari- 
 catures of his correspondents, burlesque 
 
THE BACH OF MISS BATHWICK 81 
 
 renderings of occurrences, disrespectful side- 
 notes to grave and pregnant utterances, 
 and the like. If ever the correspondence of 
 George Boon is published, it will have to 
 be done in fac-simile. There is a consider- 
 able number of impressions of the back of 
 Miss Bathwick's head, with and without 
 the thread of velvet she sometimes wore 
 about her neck, and quite a number of 
 curiously idealized studies of that American 
 reading public he would always so gro- 
 tesquely and annoy ingly insist on calling 
 " Her." And among other things I found 
 a rendering of myself as a short, flattened 
 little object that has a touch of malignity 
 in it I had no reason to expect. Few or 
 none of these quaint comments are drawn 
 with Indian ink upon millboard in a manner 
 suitable for reproduction, and even were 
 they so, I doubt whether the public would 
 care for very many of them. (I give my 
 own portrait — it is singularly unlike me — 
 to show the style of thing he did.) 
 
82 BOON 
 
 Of the "Mind of the Race" I may 
 perhaps tell first. I find he had written 
 out and greatly embellished the singularly 
 vivid and detailed and happily quite ima- 
 ginary account of the murder of that eminent 
 litterateur, Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole, with 
 which the " Mind of the Race " was to have 
 concluded ; and there are an extraordinarily 
 offensive interview with Mr. Raymond Blath- 
 wayt (which, since it now " dates " so 
 markedly, I have decided to suppress alto- 
 gether) and an unfinished study of " the 
 Literary Statesmen of the Transition Years 
 from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth 
 Centuries " (including a lengthy comparison 
 of the greatness of Lords Bryce and Morley, 
 a eulogy of Lord Morley and a discussion 
 whether he has wit or humour) that were 
 new to me. And perhaps I may note at 
 this point the twenty sixpenny washing 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 33 
 
 books in which Boon had commenced what 
 I am firmly convinced is a general index of 
 the works of Plato and Aristotle. It is 
 conceivable he did this merely as an aid to 
 his private reading, though the idea of a 
 popular romancer reading anything will 
 come to the general reader with a little 
 shock of surprise. 
 
 Boon's idea of Aristotle (in modern dress), 
 from the washing books. 
 
 (When asked, " Why in modern dress t " Boon replied simply 
 that he would be.) 
 
 For my own part and having in memory 
 his subtle and elusive talk, I am rather 
 inclined to think that at one time he did 
 go so far as to contemplate a familiar and 
 humorous commentary upon these two 
 pillars of the world's thought. An edition 
 
 3 
 
34 BOON 
 
 of them edited and copiously illustrated 
 by him would, I feel sure, have been a 
 remarkable addition to any gentleman's 
 library. If he did turn his mind to anything 
 of the sort he speedily abandoned the idea 
 again, and with this mention and the note 
 that he detested Aristotle, those six and 
 twenty washing books may very well follow 
 the bulk of the drawings and most of the 
 verse back into their original oblivion. . . . 
 
 Boon's idea of Plato, from the washing books. 
 
 (Boon absolutely rejected the Indian Bacchus bust as a 
 portrait of Plato. When asked why, he remarked merely that 
 it wasn't like him.) 
 
§7 
 
 But now you will begin to understand the 
 nature of the task that lies before me. If 
 I am to do any justice to the cryptic George 
 Boon, if indeed I am to publish anything 
 at all about him, I must set myself to edit 
 and convey these books whose only publica- 
 tion was in fact by word of mouth in his 
 garden arbours, using these few fragments 
 as the merest accessories to that; I have 
 hesitated, I have collected unfavourable 
 advice, but at last I have resolved to make 
 at least one experimental volume of Boon's 
 remains. After all, whatever we have of 
 Aristotle and Socrates and all that we most 
 value of Johnson comes through the testi- 
 mony of hearers. And though I cannot 
 venture to compare myself with Boswell. . . . 
 I know the dangers I shall run in this 
 attempt to save my friend from the devasta- 
 ting expurgations of his written ostensible 
 
 35 
 
86 BOON 
 
 career. I confess I cannot conceal from 
 myself that, for example, I must needs show 
 Boon, by the standards of every day, a 
 little treacherous. 
 
 When I thrust an arm into one or other of 
 the scores of densely packed bins of press 
 cuttings that cumber the attics of his 
 castellated mansion and extract a sample 
 clutch, I find almost invariably praise, not 
 judicious or intelligent praise perhaps, but 
 slab and generous praise, paragraphs, advice, 
 photographs, notices, notes, allusions and 
 comparisons, praise of the unparalleled gloss 
 on his style by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole 
 under the pseudonym of " Simon up to 
 Snuff," praise of the healthiness of the tone 
 by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under the 
 pseudonym of " The Silver Fish," inspired 
 announcements of some forthcoming venture 
 made by Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole under 
 the pseudonym of " The True-Born English- 
 man," and interesting and exalting specula- 
 tions as to the precise figure of Boon's 
 income over Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole's own 
 signature ; I find chatty, if a little incoher- 
 ent, notices by Braybourne of the most 
 friendly and helpful sort, and interviews 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 37 
 
 of the most flattering description by this 
 well-known litterateur and that. And I 
 reflect that while all this was going on, there 
 was Boon on the other side of Miss Bath- 
 wick's rampart mind, not only not taking 
 them and himself seriously, not only not 
 controlling his disrespectful internal com- 
 mentary on these excellent men, but posi- 
 tively writing it down, regaling himself 
 with the imagined murder of this leader of 
 thought and the forcible abduction to sinister 
 and melancholy surroundings of that ! 
 
 And yet I find it hard to do even this 
 measure of justice to my friend. He was 
 treacherous, it must be written, and yet he 
 was, one must confess, a singularly attractive 
 man. There was a certain quality in his 
 life— it was pleasant. When I think of 
 doing him justice I am at once dashed 
 and consoled by the thought of how little 
 he cared how I judged him. And I recall 
 him very vividly as I came upon him on 
 one occasion. 
 
 He is seated on a garden roller— an 
 implement which makes a faultless outdoor 
 seat when the handle is adjusted at a suit- 
 able angle against a tree, and one has taken 
 
38 BOON 
 
 the precaution to skid the apparatus with a 
 piece of rockery or other convenient object. 
 His back is against the handle, his legs lie 
 in a boneless curve over the roller, and an 
 inch or so of native buff shows between the 
 corduroy trousers and the claret-coloured 
 socks. He appears to be engaged partly 
 in the degustation of an unappetizing lead 
 pencil, and partly in the contemplation of a 
 half-quire of notepaper. The expression of 
 his rubicund face is distinctly a happy one. 
 At the sound of my approach he looks up. 
 " I've been drawing old Keyhole again ! " 
 he says like a schoolboy. 
 
THE BACK OF MISS BATHWICK 39 
 
 Nevertheless, if critics of standing are to 
 be drawn like this by authors of position, 
 then it seems to me that there is nothing 
 before us but to say Good-bye for ever to 
 the Dignity of Letters. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 Being the First Chapter of " The Mind 
 or the Race " 
 
 §1 
 
 It was one of Boon's peculiarities to main- 
 tain a legend about every one he knew, 
 and to me it was his humour to ascribe a 
 degree of moral earnestness that I admit 
 only too sadly is altogether above my 
 quality. Having himself invented this great 
 project of a book upon the Mind of the Race 
 which formed always at least the thread 
 of the discourse when I was present, he 
 next went some way towards foisting it 
 upon me. He would talk to me about it 
 in a tone of remonstrance, raise imaginary 
 difficulties to propositions I was supposed 
 to make and superstitions I entertained, 
 speak of it as " this book Bliss is going to 
 write " ; and at the utmost admit no more 
 
 40 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 41 
 
 than collaboration. Possibly I contributed 
 ideas ; but I do not remember doing so 
 now very distinctly. Possibly my influence 
 was quasi-moral. The proposition itself fluc- 
 tuated in his mind to suit this presentation 
 and that, it had more steadfastness in mine. 
 But if I was the anchorage he was the ship. 
 At any rate we planned and discussed a 
 book that Boon pretended that I was writing 
 and that I believed him to be writing, in en- 
 tire concealment from Miss Bathwick, about 
 the collective mind of the whole human race. 
 Edwin Dodd was with us, I remember, 
 in one of those early talks, when the thing 
 was still taking form, and he sat on a large 
 inverted flowerpot — we had camped in the 
 greenhouse after lunch — and he was smiling, 
 with his head slightly on one side and a 
 wonderfully foxy expression of being on his 
 guard that he always wore with Boon. 
 Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist 
 Press Association, a militant agnostic, and 
 a dear, compact man, one of those Middle 
 Victorians who go about with a preoccupied, 
 caulking ^air, as though, after having been 
 at great cost and pains to banish God from 
 the Universe, they were resolved not to 
 
42 BOON 
 
 permit Him back on any terms whatever. 
 He has constituted himself a sort of alert 
 customs officer of a materialistic age, saying 
 suspiciously, " Here, now, what's this rap- 
 ping under the table here ? " and examining 
 every proposition to see that the Creator 
 wasn't being smuggled back under some 
 specious new generalization. Boon used to 
 declare that every night Dodd looked under 
 his bed for the Deity, and slept with a 
 large revolver under his pillow for fear of 
 a revelation. . . . From the first Dodd had 
 his suspicions about this collective mind of 
 Boon's. Most unjustifiable they seemed to 
 me then, but he had them. 
 
 " You must admit, my dear Dodd " 
 
 began Boon. 
 
 " I admit nothing," said Dodd smartly. 
 
 " You perceive something more extensive 
 than individual wills and individual pro- 
 cesses of reasoning in mankind, a body of 
 thought, a trend of ideas and purposes, a 
 thing made up of the synthesis of all the 
 individual instances, something more than 
 their algebraic sum, losing the old as they 
 fall out, taking up the young, a common 
 Mind expressing the species " 
 
 " Oh— figuratively, perhaps ! " said Dodd. 
 
§2 
 
 For my own part I could not see where 
 Dodd's " figuratively " comes in. The 
 mind of the race is as real to me as the 
 mind of Dodd or my own. Because Dodd 
 is completely made up of Dodd's right leg 
 plus Dodd's left leg, plus Dodd's right arm 
 plus Dodd's left arm, plus Dodd's head and 
 Dodd's trunk, it doesn't follow that Dodd 
 is a mere figurative expression. . . . 
 
 Dodd, I remember, protested he had a 
 self-consciousness that held all these con- 
 stituents together, but there was a time 
 when Dodd was six months old, let us say, 
 and there are times now when Dodd sleeps 
 or is lost in some vivid sensation or action, 
 when that clear sense of self is in abeyance. 
 There is no reason why the collective mind 
 of the world should not presently become 
 at least as self-conscious as Dodd. Boon, 
 indeed, argued that that was happening 
 
 43 
 
44 BOON 
 
 even now, that our very talk in the green- 
 house was to that synthetic over-brain 
 like a child's first intimations of the idea 
 of " me." " It's a fantastic notion," said 
 Dodd, shaking his head. 
 
 But Boon was fairly launched now upon 
 his topic, and from the first, I will confess, 
 it took hold of me. 
 
 " You mustn't push the analogy of Dodd's 
 mind too far," said Boon. " These great 
 Over-minds " 
 
 " So there are several ! " said Dodd. 
 
 " They fuse, they divide. These great 
 Over-minds, these race minds, share nothing 
 of the cyclic fate of the individual life ; 
 there is no birth for them, no pairing and 
 breeding, no inevitable death. That is the 
 lot of such intermediate experimental crea- 
 tures as ourselves. The creatures below 
 us, like the creatures above us, are free 
 from beginnings and ends. The Amoeba 
 never dies ; it divides at times, parts of it 
 die here and there, it has no sex, no be- 
 getting. (Existence without a love interest. 
 My God ! how it sets a novelist craving !) 
 Neither has the germ plasm. These Over- 
 minds, which for the most part clothe 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 45 
 
 themselves in separate languages and main- 
 tain a sort of distinction, stand to us as 
 we stand to the amoebae or the germ cells 
 we carry ; they are the next higher order 
 of being ; they emerge above the intense, 
 intensely denned struggle of individuals 
 which is the more obvious substance of lives 
 at the rank of ours ; they grow, they divide, 
 they feed upon one another, they coalesce 
 and rejuvenate. So far they are like amoebae. 
 But they think, they accumulate experiences, 
 they manifest a collective will." 
 
 " Nonsense ! " said Dodd, shaking his 
 head from side to side. 
 
 " But the thing is manifest ! " 
 
 " I've never met it." 
 
 " You met it, my dear Dodd, the moment 
 you were born. Who taught you to talk ? 
 Your mother, you say. But whence the 
 language ? Who made the language that 
 gives a bias to all your thoughts ? And 
 who taught you to think, Dodd ? Whence 
 came your habits of conduct ? Your 
 mother, your schoolmaster were but mouth- 
 pieces, the books you read the mere fore- 
 front of that great being of Voices ! There 
 it is— your antagonist to-day. You are 
 
46 BOON 
 
 struggling against it with tracts and argu- 
 ments. . . ." 
 
 But now Boon was fairly going. Physic- 
 ally, perhaps, we. were the children of our 
 ancestors, but mentally we were the off- 
 spring of the race mind. It was clear as 
 daylight. How could Dodd dare to argue ? 
 We emerged into a brief independence of 
 will, made our personal innovation, be- 
 came, as it were, new thoughts in that great 
 intelligence, new elements of effort and 
 purpose, and were presently incorporated 
 or forgotten or both in its immortal growth. 
 Would the Race Mind incorporate Dodd 
 or dismiss him ? Dodd sat on his flower- 
 pot, shaking his head and saying " Pooh ! " 
 to the cinerarias ; and I listened, never 
 doubting that Boon felt the truth he told 
 so well. He came near making the Race 
 soul incarnate. One felt it about us, recep- 
 tive and responsive to Boon's words. He 
 achieved personification. He spoke of wars 
 that peoples have made, of the roads and 
 cities that grow and the routes that develop, 
 no man planning them. He mentioned styles 
 of architecture and styles of living; the 
 Gothic cathedral, I remember, he dwelt upon, 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 47 
 
 a beauty that arose like an exhalation out 
 of scattered multitudes of men. He in- 
 stanced the secular abolition of slavery and 
 the establishment of monogamy as a deve- 
 lopment of Christian teaching, as things 
 untraceable to any individual's purpose. 
 He passed to the mysterious consecutiveness 
 of scientific research, the sudden determi- 
 nation of the European race mind to 
 know more than chance thoughts could 
 tell it. . . . 
 
 " Francis Bacon ? " said Dodd. 
 
 " Men like Bacon are no more than 
 bright moments, happy thoughts, the dis- 
 covery of the inevitable word ; the race 
 mind it was took it up, the race mind it 
 was carried it on." 
 
 " Mysticism ! " said Dodd. " Give me 
 the Rock of Fact ! " He shook his head 
 so violently that suddenly his balance was 
 disturbed ; clap went his feet, the flower- 
 pot broke beneath him, and our talk was 
 lost in the consequent solicitudes. 
 
48 
 
 BOON 
 
 Dodd the Agnostic just before the flowerpot broke. 
 
§3 
 
 Now that I have been searching my 
 memory, I incline rather more than I did to 
 the opinion that the bare suggestion at any 
 rate of this particular Book did come from 
 me. I probably went to Boon soon after 
 this talk with Dodd and said a fine book 
 might be written about the Mind of Human- 
 ity, and in all likelihood I gave some outline 
 — I have forgotten what. I wanted a larger 
 picture of that great Being his imagination 
 had struck out. I remember at any rate 
 Boon taking me into his study, picking out 
 Goldsmith's " Inquiry into the Present State 
 of Polite Learning," turning it over and 
 reading from it. " Something in this line ? " 
 he said, and read : 
 
 " ' Complaints of our degeneracy in literature as 
 well as in morals I own have been frequently exhibited 
 of late. . . . The dullest critic who strives at a reputa- 
 tion for delicacy, by showing he cannot be pleased . . .' 
 
 4 49 
 
50 BOON 
 
 " The old, old thing, you see ! The weak 
 protest of the living." 
 
 He turned over the pages. " He shows 
 a proper feeling, but he's a little thin. . . . 
 He says some good things. But — ' The 
 age of Louis XIV, notwithstanding these 
 respectable names, is still vastly superior.' 
 Is it ? Guess the respectable names that 
 age of Louis XIV could override ! — Vol- 
 taire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, 
 D'Alembert ! And now tell me the re- 
 spectable names of the age of Louis XIV. 
 And the conclusion of the whole matter — 
 
 " ' Thus the man who, under the patronage of the 
 great, might have done honour to humanity, when 
 only patronized by the bookseller becomes a thing 
 a little superior to the fellow who works at the press.' 
 
 " ' The patronage of the great ' ! ' Fellow 
 who works at the press ' ! Goldsmith was 
 a damnably genteel person at times in spite 
 of the ' Vicar ' ! It's printed with the long 
 ' s,' you see. It all helps to remind one 
 that times have changed." . . . 
 
 I followed his careless footsteps into the 
 garden ; he went gesticulating before me, 
 repeating, " ' An Inquiry into the State of 
 
THE MIND bF THE RACE 51 
 
 Polite Learning ' ! That's what your ' Mind 
 of the Race ' means. Suppose one did 
 it now, we should do it differently in every 
 way from that." 
 
 " Yes, but how should we do it ? " 
 said I 
 
 The project had laid hold upon me. I 
 wanted a broad outline of the whole 
 apparatus of thinking and determination in 
 the modern State ; something that should 
 bring together all its various activities, 
 which go on now in a sort of deliberate 
 ignorance of one another, which would 
 synthesize research, education, philosophical 
 discussion, moral training, public policy. 
 " There is," I said, " a disorganized abun- 
 dance now." 
 
 " It's a sort of subconscious mind," said 
 Boon, seeming to take me quite seriously, 
 " with a half instinctive will. ..." 
 
 We discussed what would come into the 
 book. One got an impression of the enor- 
 mous range and volume of intellectual acti- 
 vity that pours along now, in comparison 
 with the jejune trickle of Goldsmith's 
 days. Then the world had— what ? A few 
 English writers, a few men in France, 
 
52 BOON 
 
 the Royal Society, the new Berlin Academy 
 (conducting its transactions in French), all 
 resting more or less upon the insecure 
 patronage of the " Great " ; a few schools, 
 public and private, a couple of dozen of 
 universities in all the world, a press of 
 which The Gentleman's Magazine was the 
 brightest ornament. Now 
 
 It is a curious thing that it came to us 
 both as a new effect, this enormously greater 
 size of the intellectual world of to-day. 
 We didn't at first grasp the implications of 
 that difference, we simply found it necessi- 
 tated an enlargement of our conception. 
 " And then a man's thoughts lived too in 
 a world that had been created, lock, stock, 
 and barrel, a trifle under six thousand years 
 ago ! . . ." 
 
 We fell to discussing the range and divi- 
 sions of our subject. The main stream, we 
 settled, was all that one calls " literature " 
 in its broader sense. We should have to 
 discuss that principally. But almost as 
 important as the actual development of 
 ideas, suggestions, ideals, is the way they 
 are distributed through the body of human- 
 ity, developed, rendered, brought into touch 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 53 
 
 with young minds and fresh minds, who 
 are drawn so into participation, who them- 
 selves light up and become new thoughts. 
 One had to consider journalism, libraries, 
 book distribution, lecturing, teaching. Then 
 there is the effect of laws, of inventions. . . . 
 " Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way," 
 said Boon, " one might fill volumes. One 
 might become an Eminent Sociologist. You 
 might even invent terminology. It's a 
 
 chance " 
 
 We let it pass. He went on almost at 
 once to suggest a more congenial form, a con- 
 versational novel. I followed reluctantly. 
 I share the general distrust of fiction as a 
 vehicle of discussion. We would, he insisted, 
 invent a personality who would embody 
 our Idea, who should be fanatically obsessed 
 by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who 
 should preach it on all occasions and be 
 brought into illuminating contact with all 
 the existing mental apparatus and organi- 
 zation of the world. " Something of your 
 deep moral earnestness, you know, only 
 a little more presentable and not quite so 
 vindictive," said Boon, " and without your— 
 lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo 
 
54 BOON 
 
 Maxse : the same white face, the same 
 bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion 
 of nervous intensity, the same earnest, 
 quasi-reasonable voice — but instead of that 
 anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent 
 passion for the racial thought. He must 
 be altogether a fanatic. He must think 
 of the Mind of the Race in season and out 
 of season. Collective thought will be no 
 joke to him ; it will be the supremely 
 important thing. He will be passionately a 
 patriot, entirely convinced of your pro- 
 position that ' the thought of a community 
 is the life of a community,' and almost 
 as certain that the tide of our thought is 
 ebbing " 
 
 " Is it ? " said I. 
 
 " I've never thought. The ' Encyclo- 
 paedia Britannica ' says it is." 
 
 " We must call the ' Encyclopaedia Bri- 
 tannica.' " 
 
 "As a witness — in the book — rather ! 
 But, anyhow, this man of ours will believe 
 it and struggle against it. It will make him 
 ill ; it will spoil the common things of life 
 for him altogether. I seem to see him inter- 
 rupting some nice, bright, clean English 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 55 
 
 people at tennis. ' Look here, you know,' 
 he will say, ' this is all very well. But 
 have you thought to-day ? They tell me 
 the Germans are thinking, the Japanese.' 
 I see him going in a sort of agony round 
 and about Canterbury Cathedral. ' Here 
 are all these beautiful, tranquil residences 
 clustering round this supremely beautiful 
 thing, all these well-dressed, excellent, fresh- 
 coloured Englishmen in their beautiful 
 clerical raiment — deans, canons — and what 
 have they thought, any of them ? I keep my 
 ear to the Hibbert Journal, but is it enough ? ' 
 Imagine him going through London on an 
 omnibus. He will see as clear as the adver- 
 tisements on the hoardings the signs of 
 the formal breaking up of the old Victorian 
 Church of England and Dissenting cultures 
 that have held us together so long. He 
 will see that the faith has gone, the habits 
 no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like 
 cut string— there is nothing to replace these 
 things. People do this and that dispersedly ; 
 there is democracy in beliefs even, and any 
 notion is as good as another. And there is 
 America. Like a burst Haggis. Intellec- 
 tually. The Mind is confused, the Race, 
 
56 BOON 
 
 in the violent ferment of new ideas, in 
 the explosive development of its own con- 
 trivances, has lost its head. It isn't thinking 
 any more ; it's stupefied one moment and 
 the next it's diving about 
 
 " It will be as clear as day to him that 
 a great effort of intellectual self-control 
 must come if the race is to be saved from 
 utter confusion and dementia. And no- 
 body seems to see it but he. He will go 
 about wringing his hands, so to speak. I 
 fancy him at last at a writing-desk, nervous 
 white fingers clutched in his black hair. 
 ' Plow can I put it so that they must attend 
 and see ? ' " 
 
 So we settled on our method and principal 
 character right away. But we got no farther 
 because Boon insisted before doing anything 
 else on drawing a fancy portrait of this 
 leading character of ours and choosing his 
 name. We decided to call him Hallery, 
 and that he should look something like 
 this — 
 
THE MIND OF THE RACE 57 
 
 
 cf 
 
 Hallery preparing to contradict. 
 
58 BOON 
 
 That was how " The Mind of the Race " 
 began, the book that was to have ended 
 at last in grim burlesque with Hallery's 
 murder of Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole in his 
 villa at Hampstead, and the conversation 
 at dawn with that incredulous but literate 
 policeman at Highgate — he was reading 
 a World's Classic — to whom Hallery gave 
 himself up. 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, 
 and the Garden by the Sea 
 
 §1 
 
 The story, as Boon planned it, was to 
 begin with a spacious Introduction. We 
 were to tell of the profound decadence of 
 letters at the opening of the Twentieth 
 Century and how a movement of revival 
 began. A few notes in pencil of this open- 
 ing do exist among the Remains, and to 
 those I have referred. He read them over 
 to me. . . . 
 
 " ' We begin,' " he said, '"in a minor 
 key. The impetus of the Romantic move- 
 ment we declare is exhausted ; the Race 
 Mind, not only of the English-speaking 
 peoples but of the whole world, has come 
 upon a period of lethargy. The Giants 
 of the Victorian age ' " 
 
 59 
 
60 BOON 
 
 My eye discovered a familiar binding 
 among the flowerpots. " You have been 
 consulting the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' " 
 I said. 
 
 He admitted it without embarrassment. 
 
 " I have prigged the whole thing from 
 the last Victorian Edition — with some slight 
 variations. . . / The Gfiants of the Victorian 
 age had passed. Men looked in vain for 
 their successors. For a time there was an 
 evident effort to fill the vacant thrones ; 
 for a time it seemed that the unstinted exer- 
 tions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of 
 Mr. Stephen Phillips might go some way 
 towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. 
 And then, slowly but surely, it crept into 
 men's minds that the game was up ' " 
 
 " You will alter that phrase ? " I said. 
 
 " Certainly. But it must serve now . . . 
 ' that, humanly speaking, it was impossible 
 that anything, at once so large, so copious, so 
 broadly and unhesitatingly popular, so nobly 
 cumulative as the Great Victorian Repu- 
 tations could ever exist again. The Race 
 seemed threatened with intellectual barren- 
 ness ; it had dropped its great blossoms, 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 61 
 
 and stood amidst the pile of their wilting 
 but still showy petals, budless and bare. 
 It is curious to recall the public utterances 
 upon literature that distinguished this 
 desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus 
 of despair. There is in the comments of 
 such admirable but ageing critics as still 
 survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and 
 the venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. 
 Mumchance, an inevitable suggestion of 
 widowhood ; the judges, bishops, statesmen 
 who are called to speak upon literature 
 speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable 
 note as of a thing that is dead. Year after 
 year one finds the speakers at the Dinner 
 of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the 
 impudence of their appeal. I remember 
 at one of these festivities hearing the voice 
 of Mr. Justice Gummidge break. . . . The 
 strain, it is needless to say, found its echo 
 in Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole ; he confessed 
 he never read anything that is less than 
 thirty years old with the slightest enjoy- 
 ment and threw out the suggestion that 
 nothing new should be published — at least 
 for a considerable time — unless it was clearly 
 shown to be posthumous. . . . 
 
62 BOON 
 
 " ' Except for a few irresistible volumes 
 of facetiousness, the reading public very 
 obediently followed the indications of 
 authority in these matters, just as it had 
 followed authority and sustained the Giants 
 in the great Victorian days. It bought 
 the long-neglected classics — anything was 
 adjudged a classic that was out of copyright 
 — it did its best to read them, to find a rare 
 smack in their faded allusions, an immediate 
 application for their forgotten topics. It 
 made believe that architects were still like 
 Mr. Pecksniff and schoolmasters like Squeers, 
 that there were no different women from 
 Jane Austen's women, and that social wisdom 
 ended in Ruskin's fine disorder. But with 
 the decay of any intellectual observation 
 of the present these past things had lost 
 their vitality. A few resolute people main- 
 tained an artificial interest in them by 
 participation in quotation-hunting compe- 
 titions and the like, but the great bulk 
 of the educated classes ceased presently 
 to read anything whatever. The classics 
 were still bought by habit, as people who 
 have lost faith will still go to church ; but 
 it is only necessary to examine some sur- 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 63 
 
 viving volume of this period to mark the 
 coruscation of printer's errors, the sheets 
 bound in upside down or accidentally not 
 inked in printing or transferred from some 
 sister classic in the same series, to realize 
 that these volumes were mere receipts for 
 the tribute paid by the pockets of stupidity 
 to the ancient prestige of thought. . . . 
 
 " ' An air of completion rested upon the 
 whole world of letters. A movement led 
 by Professor Armstrong, the eminent edu- 
 cationist, had even gone some way towards 
 banishing books from the schoolroom — 
 their last refuge. People went about in the 
 newly invented automobile and played open- 
 air games ; they diverted what attention 
 they had once given to their minds to the 
 more rational treatment of their stomachs. 
 Reading became the last resort of those too 
 sluggish or too poor to play games ; one 
 had recourse to it as a substitute for the 
 ashes of more strenuous times in the earlier 
 weeks of mourning for a near relative, and 
 even the sale of classics began at last to 
 decline. An altogether more satisfying and 
 alluring occupation for the human intelli- 
 gence was found in the game of Bridge. 
 
64 BOON 
 
 This was presently improved into Auction 
 Bridge. Preparations were made for the 
 erection of a richly decorative memorial 
 in London to preserve the memory of 
 Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal ; an 
 Academy of uncreative literature was estab- 
 lished under the Presidency of Lord Reay 
 (who had never written anything at all), 
 and it seemed but the matter of a few years 
 before the goal of a complete and final 
 mental quiet would be attained by the 
 whole English-speaking community. . . .' " 
 
§2 
 
 " You know," I said, " that doesn't exactly 
 represent " 
 
 " Hush ! " said Boon. " It was but a 
 resting phase ! And at this point I part 
 company with the ' Encyclopaedia.' " 
 
 " But you didn't get all that out of the 
 ' Encyclopaedia ' ? " 
 
 " Practically— yes. I may have rear- 
 ranged it a little. The Encyclopaedist is a 
 most interesting and representative person. 
 He takes up an almost eighteenth-century 
 attitude, holds out hopes of a revival of 
 Taste under an Academy, declares the inter- 
 est of the great mass of men in literature 
 is always ' empirical,' regards the great Vic- 
 torian boom in letters as quite abnormal, 
 and seems to ignore what you would call that 
 necessary element of vitalizing thought. . . . 
 It's just here that Hallery will have to 
 dispute with him. We shall have to bring 
 
 5 65 
 
66 BOON 
 
 them together in our book somehow. . . . 
 Into this impressive scene of decline and 
 the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic 
 Hallery of ours, reciting with passionate 
 conviction, * The thought of a nation is the 
 life of a nation.' You see our leading 
 effect ? " 
 
 He paused. " We have to represent 
 Hallery as a voice crying in the wilderness. 
 We have to present him in a scene of infin- 
 ite intellectual bleakness, with the thinnest 
 scrub of second-rate books growing con- 
 temptibly, and patches of what the Ency- 
 clopaedist calls tares — wind-wilted tares — 
 about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like 
 some lone bird circling in the empty air 
 beneath the fading stars. . . . Well, some- 
 thing of that effect, anyhow I And then, 
 you know, suddenly, mysteriously one grows 
 aware of light, of something coming, of 
 something definitely coming, of the dawn 
 of a great Literary Revival. ..." 
 
 " How does it come ? " 
 
 " Oh ! In the promiscuous way of these 
 things. The swing of the pendulum, it 
 may be. Some eminent person gets bored 
 at the prospect of repeating that rigmarole 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 67 
 
 about the great Victorians and our present 
 slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes 
 a leaf from one of Hallery's books. We 
 might have something after the fashion 
 of the Efficiency and Wake-up-England 
 affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl 
 at dawn ? " 
 
 " I've heard them at twilight. They say, 
 ' Come back. Come back.' But what has 
 that to do wjth " 
 
 " Nothing. There's a movement, a stir, 
 a twittering, and then a sudden promiscuous 
 uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in 
 the newspapers, paragraphs, letters, asso- 
 ciations, societies, leagues. I imagine a 
 very great personality indeed in the most 
 extraordinary and unexpected way coming 
 in. . . ." (It was one of Boon's less amiable 
 habits to impute strange and uncanny enter- 
 prises, the sudden adoption of movements, 
 manias, propagandas, adhesion to vege- 
 tarianism, socialism, the strangest eccen- 
 tricities, to the British Royal Family.) " As 
 a result Hallery finds himself perforce a 
 person of importance. ' The thought of a 
 nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it 
 from royal lips ; ' a literature, a living soul, 
 
68 BOON 
 
 adequate to this vast empire,' turns up in 
 the speech of a statesman of the greatest 
 literary pretensions. Arnold White re- 
 sponds to the new note. The Daily Express 
 starts a Literary Revival on its magazine 
 page and offers a prize. The Times follows 
 suit. Reports of what is afoot reach social 
 circles in New York. . . . The illumination 
 passes with a dawnlike swiftness right across 
 the broad expanse of British life, east and 
 west flash together ; the ladies' papers and 
 the motoring journals devote whole pages 
 to ' New Literature,' and there is an enormous 
 revival of Book Teas. . . . That sort of 
 thing, you know — extensively." 
 
§3 
 
 " So much by way of prelude. Now 
 picture to yourself the immediate setting 
 of my conference. Just hand me that book 
 by the ' Encyclopaedia.' " 
 
 It was Mallock's "New Republic." He 
 took it, turned a page or so, stuck a finger 
 in it, and resumed : 
 
 " It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the 
 seaside, Bliss. A long wall, plaster-faced, 
 blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil 
 glass against the lower orders, is pierced 
 by cast-iron gates clumsily classical, and 
 through the iron bars of these there is 
 visible the deserted gatekeeper's lodge, its 
 cracked windows opaque with immemorial 
 dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles 
 beneath the rusty cypresses and stone- 
 pines that border the carriage-way. An 
 automobile throbs in the road ; its occupants 
 regard a board leaning all askew above the 
 
 69 
 
70 BOON 
 
 parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the 
 board, which has been enriched by the 
 attentions of the passing boy with innumer- 
 able radiant mud pellets, one reads with 
 difficulty — 
 
 THIS CLASSICAL VILLA 
 
 with magnificent gardens in the Victorian- 
 Italian style reaching down to the sea, and 
 replete with Latin and Greek inscriptions, 
 a garden study, literary associations, fully 
 matured Oxford allusions, and a great 
 number of conveniently arranged 
 bedrooms, to be 
 
 LET OR SOLD. 
 
 Apply to the owner, 
 Mr. W. H. MALLOCK, 
 
 original author of 
 " The New Republic." 
 
 Key within. 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 71 
 
 " ' This must be it, my dear Archer,' 
 says one of the occupants of the motor-car, 
 and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals 
 — the urbane presence of the Encyclopedist. 
 He descends, and rings a clangorous bell. 
 . . . Eh?" 
 " It's the garden of the ' New Republic ' ? " 
 " Exactly. Revisited. It's an aston- 
 ishing thing. Do you know the date of 
 the ' New Republic ' ? The book's nearly 
 forty years old ! About the time of Matthew 
 Arnold's ' Friendship's Garland,' and since 
 that time there's been nothing like a sys- 
 tematic stocktaking of the English-speaking 
 mind — until the Encyclopaedist reported 
 ' no effects.' And I propose to make this 
 little party in the motor-car a sort of scratch 
 expedition, under the impetus of the pro- 
 posed Revival of Thought. They are pro- 
 specting for a Summer Congress, which is 
 to go into the state of the republic of letters 
 thoroughly. It isn't perhaps quite Gosse's 
 style, but he has to be there— in a way he's 
 the official British man of letters— but we 
 shall do what we can for him, we shall make 
 him show a strong disposition towards 
 protective ironies and confess himself not 
 
72 BOON 
 
 a little bothered at being dragged into the 
 horrid business. And I think we must have 
 George Moore, who has played uncle to so 
 many movements and been so uniformly 
 disappointed in his nephews. And William 
 Archer, with that face of his which is so 
 exactly like his mind, a remarkably fine 
 face mysteriously marred by an expression 
 of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly, 
 Keyhole." 
 
 " Why Keyhole ? " I asked. 
 
 " Hallery has to murder some one. I've 
 planned that — and who would he; murder 
 but Keyhole ? . . . And we have to hold 
 the first meeting in Mallock's garden to 
 preserve the continuity of English thought. 
 
 " Very well ! Then we invent a morose, 
 elderly caretaker, greatly embittered at this 
 irruption. He parleys for a time through 
 the gate with all the loyalty of his class, 
 mentions a number of discouraging defects, 
 more particularly in the drainage, alleges 
 the whole place is clammy, and only at 
 Gosse's clearly enunciated determination to 
 enter produces the key." 
 
 Boon consulted his text. " Naturally one 
 would give a chapter to the Villa by the 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 73 
 
 Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors 
 explore. They visit one scene after another 
 familiar to the good Mallockite ; they de- 
 scend 'the broad flights of steps flanked 
 by Gods and Goddesses ' that lead from one 
 to another of the ' long, straight terraces 
 set with vases and Irish yews,' and the yews, 
 you know, have suffered from the want of 
 water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under 
 the benediction of our modest climate, has 
 already veiled the classical freedom — the 
 conscientious nudity, one might say^of 
 the statuary. The laurels have either grown 
 inordinately or perished, and the ' busts of 
 orators, poets, and philosophers ' ' with Latin 
 inscriptions,' stand either bleakly exposed 
 or else swallowed up in a thicket. There 
 is a pleasing struggle to translate the legends, 
 and one gathers scholarship is not extinct 
 in England. 
 
 " The one oasis in a universal weediness 
 is the pond about the ' scaly Triton,' which 
 has been devoted to the culture of spring 
 onions, a vegetable to which the aged 
 custodian quite superfluously avows himself 
 very ' partial.' The visitors return to the 
 house, walk along its terrace, survey its 
 
74 BOON 
 
 shuttered front, and they spend some time 
 going through its musty rooms. Doctor 
 Keyhole distinguishes himself by the feverish 
 eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie 
 slept and where was the boudoir of Mrs. 
 Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and 
 painful scandal about these two underlies 
 the ' New Republic,' and professes a thirsty 
 desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously 
 as possible. The others drag him away 
 to the summer dining-room, now a great 
 brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so 
 pleasantly dined her guests. The little 
 arena about the fountain in a porphyry 
 basin they do not find, but the garden 
 study they peer into, and see its inkpot in 
 the shape of a classical temple, just as Mr. 
 Maliock has described it, and the windowless 
 theatre, and, in addition, they find a small 
 private gas-works that served it. The old 
 man lets them in, and by the light of 
 uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat- 
 disordered ruins of the scene before which 
 Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert 
 who was Ruskin, preached. It is as like 
 a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as need be. 
 The Brocken act-drop above hangs low 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 75 
 
 enough to show the toes of the young witch, 
 still brightly pink. . . . 
 
 " They go down to the beach, and the 
 old man, with evil chuckles, recalls a hither- 
 to unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing 
 in the 'seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and 
 a flushed and startled Doctor Jenkinson, 
 Greek in thought rather than action, play 
 the chief parts, and then they wade through 
 a nettle-bed to that ' small classical portico ' 
 which leads to the locked enclosure contain- 
 ing the three tombs, with effigies after the 
 fashion of Genoa Cemetery. But the key 
 of the gate is lost, so that they cannot go 
 in to examine them, and the weeds have 
 hidden the figures altogether. 
 
 " ' That's a pity,' some one remarks, 
 ' for it's here, no doubt, that old Laurence 
 lies, with his first mistress and his last — 
 under these cypresses.' 
 
 " The aged custodian makes a derisive 
 noise, and every one turns to him. 
 
 " ' I gather you throw some doubt ? ' 
 the Encyclopaedist begins in his urbane 
 way. 
 
 " ' Buried— under the cypresses— -first 
 mistress and last ! ' The old man makes 
 
76 BOON 
 
 his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful 
 merriment. 
 
 "'But isn't it so?' 
 
 " ' Bless y'r 'art, no ! Mr. Laurence — 
 buried ! Mr. Laurence worn't never alive ! ' 
 
 " ' But there was a young Mr. Laurence ? ' 
 
 " ' That was Mr. Mallup 'imself, that was ! 
 'E was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup, 
 and sometimes 'e went about pretendin' 
 to be Mr. Laurence and sometimes he was 
 
 Mr. Leslie, and sometimes But there, 
 
 you'd 'ardly believe. 'E got all this up 
 — cypresses, chumes, everythink — out of 
 'is 'ed. Po'try. Why ! 'Ere ! Jest come 
 along 'ere, gents ! ' 
 
 " He leads the way along a narrow privet 
 alley that winds its surreptitious way towards 
 an alcove. 
 
 " ' Miss Merton,' he says, flinging the door 
 of this open. 
 
 " ' The Roman Catholic young person ? ' 
 says Doctor Tomlinson Keyhole. 
 
 " ' Quite right, sir,' says the aged custo- 
 dian. 
 
 " They peer in. 
 
 "Hanging from a peg the four visitors 
 behold a pale blue dress cut in the fashion 
 
THE GARDEN BY THE SEA 77 
 
 of the 'seventies, a copious ' chignon ' of 
 fair hair, large earrings, and on the marble 
 bench a pair of open-work stockings and 
 other articles of feminine apparel. A tall 
 mirror hangs opposite these garments, and 
 in a little recess convenient to the hand are 
 the dusty and decaying materials for a 
 hasty ' make-up.' 
 
 " The old custodian watches the effect 
 of this display upon the others with masked 
 enjoyment. 
 
 " ' You mean Miss Merton painted ? ' 
 said the Encyclopaedist, knitting his brows. 
 
 " ' Mr. Mallup did,' says the aged custo- 
 dian. 
 
 " ' You mean ? ' 
 
 " ' Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. 'E got 
 'er up too. Parst 'er orf as a young lady, 
 'e did. Oh, 'e was a great mistifier was 
 Mr. Mallup. None of the three of 'em wasn't 
 real people, really ; he got 'em all up.' 
 
 " ' She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate, 
 proud mouth, and a worn, melancholy look,' 
 muses Mr. Archer. 
 
 " ' And young Laurence was in love with 
 her,' adds the Encyclopaedist. . . . 
 
 " * They was all Mr. Mallup,' says the 
 
78 BOON 
 
 aged custodian. ' Made up out of 'is 'ed. 
 And the gents that pretended they was Mr. 
 'Uxley and Mr. Tyndall in disguise, one 
 was Bill Smithers, the chemist's assistant, 
 and the other was the chap that used to 
 write and print the Margate Advertiser 
 before the noo papers come.' " 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry 
 James 
 
 §1 
 
 The Garden by the Sea chapter was to 
 have gone on discursively with a discussion 
 upon this project of a conference upon the 
 Mind of the Race. The automobile-ful of 
 gentlemen who had first arrived was to 
 have supplied the opening interlocutors, 
 but presently they were to have been 
 supplemented by the most unexpected acces- 
 sories. It would have been an enormously 
 big dialogue if it had ever been written, and 
 Boon's essentially lazy temperament was 
 all against its ever getting written. There 
 were to have been disputes from the outset 
 as to the very purpose that had brought 
 them all together. " A sort of literary 
 
 79 
 
80 BOON 
 
 stocktaking " was to have been Mr. Archer's 
 phrase. Repeated. Unhappily, its commer- 
 cialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely ; 
 he was to say something passionately bitter 
 about its " utter lack of dignity." Then, 
 relenting a little, he was to urge as an 
 alternative " some controlling influence, some 
 standard and restraint, a new and better 
 Academic influence." Doctor Keyhole was 
 to offer his journalistic services in organizing 
 an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which 
 was to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the 
 pitch of a gleaming silence. 
 
 In the midst of this conversation the 
 party is joined by Hallery and an American 
 friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking 
 meticulously accurate English, and still later 
 by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. 
 Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led 
 into it by a distinguished hostess, by Mr. 
 W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that 
 Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss 
 winter sports hotels. All these people drift 
 in with an all too manifestly simulated 
 accidentalness that at last arouses the distrust 
 of the elderly custodian, so that Mr. Orage, 
 the gifted Editor of the New Age, arriving 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 81 
 
 last, is refused admission. The sounds of 
 the conflict at the gates do but faintly per- 
 turb the conference within, which is now 
 really getting to business, but afterwards 
 Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by 
 a dexterously plied rake and incurably 
 embittered, makes his existence felt by a 
 number of unpleasant missiles discharged 
 from over the wall in the direction of any 
 audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets 
 into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree 
 overlooking the seaward corner of the pre- 
 mises, and from this he contributes a number 
 of comments that are rarely helpful, always 
 unamiable, and frequently in the worst 
 possible taste. 
 
 Such was Boon's plan for the second chapter 
 of "The Mind of the Race." But that 
 chapter he never completely planned. At 
 various times Boon gave us a number of 
 colloquies, never joining them together in 
 any regular order. The project of taking 
 up the discussion of the Mind of the Race 
 at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it 
 down, and taking the villa by the sea foj 
 the meeting-place, was at once opposed 
 by Hallery and bis American friend with 
 
 6 
 
82 BOON 
 
 an evidently preconcerted readiness. They 
 pointed out the entire democratization of 
 thought and literature that had been going 
 on for the past four decades. It was no 
 longer possible to deal with such matters 
 in the old aristocratic country-house style ; 
 it was no longer possible to take them up 
 from that sort of beginning ; the centre 
 of mental gravity among the English-speak- 
 ing community had shifted socially and 
 geographically ; what was needed now was 
 something wider and ampler, something 
 more in the nature of such a conference as 
 the annual meeting of the British Associa- 
 tion. Science left the gentleman's mansion 
 long ago ; literature must follow it — had 
 followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's 
 Villa by the sea was to come back to a 
 beaten covert. The Hearst representative 
 took up a strongly supporting position, 
 and suggested that if indeed we wished 
 to move with the times the thing to do was 
 to strike out boldly for a special annex 
 of the Panama Exhibition at San Francisco 
 and for organization upon sound American 
 lines. It was a case, he said, even for 
 " exhibits." Sir Henry Lunn, however, 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 83 
 
 objected that in America the Anglo-Saxon 
 note was almost certain to be too exclu- 
 sively sounded ; that we had to remember 
 there were vigorous cultures growing up 
 and growing up more and more detachedly 
 upon the continent of Europe ; we wanted, 
 at least, their reflected lights . . . some 
 more central position. ... In fact, Switzer- 
 land . . . where also numerous convenient 
 hotels . . . patronized, he gathered from 
 the illustrated papers, by Lord Lytton, 
 Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson . . . and 
 all sorts of helpful leading people. 
 
§2 
 
 Meanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr. 
 George Moore and Mr. Henry James wander 
 off from the general dispute, and he invented 
 a dialogue that even at the time struck me 
 as improbable, in which both gentlemen 
 pursue entirely independent trains of thought. 
 
 Mr. Moore's conception of the projected 
 symposium was something rather in the 
 vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron, 
 and their charming companions through 
 France to Italy, but magnified to the dimen- 
 sions of an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged 
 to the scale of a stream of refugees. " What, 
 my dear James," he asked, " is this mind 
 of humanity at all without a certain touch 
 of romance, of adventure ? Even Mallock 
 appreciated the significance of frou-frou; 
 but these fellows behind here . . ." 
 
 To illustrate his meaning better, he was 
 to have told, with an extraordinary and 
 loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little 
 
 84 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 85 
 
 experience that had been almost forced upon 
 him at Nismes by a pretty little woman 
 from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had 
 had, and particularly the peculiar effect that 
 the coincidence that both Nebraska and 
 Nismes begin with an " N " and end so 
 very differently, had had upon his imagina- 
 tion. ... 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not 
 merely to state but also to ignore, laboured 
 through the long cadences of his companion 
 as an indefatigable steam-tug might labour 
 endlessly against a rolling sea, elaborating 
 his own particular point about the proposed 
 conference. 
 
 " Owing it as we do," he said, " very, 
 very largely to our friend Gosse, to that 
 peculiar, that honest but restless and, as 
 it were, at times almost malignantly ambi- 
 tious organizing energy of our friend, I 
 cannot altogether — altogether, even if in 
 any case I should have taken so extreme, 
 so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put 
 it violently, stand out-, yet I must confess 
 to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, 
 an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, 
 of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intel- 
 
86 BOON 
 
 lectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in 
 a superb and towering manner enough no 
 doubt, but still essentially going to and 
 fro rather than in any of the completed 
 senses of the word getting there, that does 
 so largely constitute the aggregations and 
 activities we are invited to traverse. My 
 poor head, such as it is and as much as it 
 can and upon such legs — save the mark ! — 
 as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its 
 inconsiderable part among the wheels and 
 the rearings and the toots and the whistles 
 and all this uproar, this — Mm, Mm !— let 
 us say, this infernal uproar, of the occasion ; 
 and if at times one has one's doubts before 
 plunging in, whether after all, after the 
 plunging and the dodging and the close 
 shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin 
 to feel that one is getting through, whether 
 after all one will get through, and whether 
 indeed there is any getting through, whether, 
 to deepen and enlarge and display one's 
 doubt quite openly, there is in truth any 
 sort of ostensible and recognizable other 
 side attainable and definable at all, whether, 
 to put this thing with a lucidity that verges 
 on the brutal, whether our amiable and in 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 87 
 
 most respects our adorable Gosse isn't in- 
 deed preparing here and now, not the gather- 
 ing together of a conference but the assem- 
 bling, the meet, so to speak, of a wild-goose 
 chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless 
 description." 
 
 At that moment Mr. George Moore was 
 saying : " Little exquisite shoulders with- 
 out a touch of colour and with just that 
 suggestion of rare old ivory in an old shop 
 window in some out-of-the-way corner of 
 Paris that only the most patent abstinence 
 from baths and the brutality of soaping " 
 
 Each gentleman stopped simultaneously. 
 
 Ahead the path led between box-hedges 
 to a wall, and above the wall was a pine- 
 tree, and the Editor of the New Age was 
 reascending the pine-tree in a laborious and 
 resolute manner, gripping with some diffi- 
 culty in his hand a large and very formidable 
 lump of unpleasantness. . . . 
 
 With a common impulse the two gentle- 
 men turned back towards the house. 
 
 Mr. James was the first to break the 
 momentary silence. " And so, my dear 
 Moore, and so — to put it shortly— without any 
 sort of positive engagement or entanglement 
 
88 BOON 
 
 or pledge or pressure — I came. And at 
 the proper time and again with an entirely 
 individual detachment and as little implica- 
 tion as possible I shall go. ..." 
 
 Subsequently Mr. James was to have 
 buttonholed Hallery's American, and in the 
 warm bath of his sympathy to have opened 
 and bled slowly from another vein of thought. 
 
 " I admit the abundance of — what shall 
 I say ? — activities that our friend is sum- 
 moning, the tremendous wealth of matter, 
 of material for literature and art, that has 
 accumulated during the last few decades. 
 No one could appreciate, could savour and 
 watch and respond, more than myself to 
 the tremendous growing clangour of the 
 mental process as the last half-century has 
 exhibited it. But when it comes to the 
 enterprise of gathering it together, and 
 not simply just gathering it together, but 
 gathering it all together, then surely one 
 must at some stage ask the question, Why 
 all ? Why, in short, attempt to a compre- 
 hensiveness that must be overwhelming when 
 in fact the need is for a selection that shall 
 not merely represent but elucidate and 
 lead? Aren't we, after all, all of us after 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 89 
 
 some such indicating projection of a leading 
 digit, after such an insistence on the out- 
 standingly essential in face of this abundance," 
 this saturation, this fluid chaos that per- 
 petually increases ? Here we are gathering 
 together to celebrate and summarize litera- 
 ture in some sort of undefined and unpre- 
 cedented fashion, and for the life of me I 
 find it impossible to determine what among 
 my numerous associates and friends and — 
 to embrace still larger quantities of the 
 stuff in hand — my contemporaries is con- 
 sidered to be the hterature in question. 
 So confused now are we between matter 
 and treatment, between what is stated and 
 documented and what is prepared and pre- 
 sented, that for the life of me I do not yet 
 see whether we are supposed to be building 
 an ark or whether by immersion and the 
 meekest of submersions and an altogether 
 complete submission of our distended and 
 quite helpless carcasses to its incalculable 
 caprice we are supposed to be celebrating 
 and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion 
 of flotsam at large, indicating and making 
 visible the whole tremendous cosmic inun- 
 dation. . . ." 
 
90 
 
 BOON 
 
 Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore 
 upon matters of vital importance to both of them. 
 
§3 
 
 It was entirely in the quality of Boon's 
 intellectual untidiness that for a time he 
 should go off at a tangent in pursuit of 
 Mr. Henry James and leave his literary 
 picnic disseminated about the grounds of 
 Mr. Mallock's villa. There, indeed, they 
 remained. The story when he took it up 
 again picked up at quite a different 
 point. 
 
 I remember how Boon sat on the wall 
 of his vegetable garden and discoursed upon 
 James, while several of us squatted about 
 on the cucumber-frames and big flowerpots 
 and suchlike seats, and how over the wall 
 Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins 
 at Badminton. Hueffer wanted to come 
 and talk too ; James is one of his countless 
 subjects — and what an omniscient man 
 hp is too ! — but Wilkins was too cross to 
 let him off. . . . 
 
 91 
 
92 BOON 
 
 So that all that Hueffer was able to con- 
 tribute was an exhortation not to forget 
 that Henry James knew Turgenev and that 
 he had known them both, and a flat denial 
 that Dickens was a novelist. This last 
 was the tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud 
 begun in Household Words, oh ! generations 
 ago. . . . 
 
 " Got you there, my boy ! " said Wilkins. 
 " Seven, twelve." 
 
 We heard no more from Hueffer. 
 
 " You see," Boon said, " you can't now 
 talk of literature without going through 
 James. James is unavoidable. James is to 
 criticism what Immanuel Kant is to philo- 
 sophy — a partially comprehensible essen- 
 tial, an inevitable introduction. If you 
 understand what James is up to and if you 
 understand what James is not up to, then 
 you are placed. You are in the middle of 
 the critical arena. You are in a position 
 to lay about you with significance. Other- 
 
 wise 
 
 I want to get this Hallery of mine, who 
 is to be the hero of ' The Mind of the Race,' 
 into a discussion with Henry James, but 
 that, you know, is easier said than imagined. 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 93 
 
 Hallery is to be one of those enthusias- 
 tic thinkers who emit highly concentrated 
 opinion in gobbets, suddenly. James — 
 isn't. ..." 
 
 Boon meditated upon his difficulties. 
 " Hallery's idea of literature is something 
 tremendously comprehensive, something that 
 pierces always down towards the core of 
 things, something that carries and changes 
 all the activities of the race. This sort of 
 thing." 
 
 He read from a scrap of paper — 
 " ' The thought of a community is the 
 life of that community, and if the collective 
 thought of a community is disconnected 
 and fragmentary, then the community is 
 collectively vain and weak. That does not 
 constitute an incidental defect but essential 
 failure. Though that community have cities 
 such as the world has never seen before, 
 fleets and hosts and glories, though it count 
 its soldiers by the army corps and its chil- 
 dren by the million, yet if it hold not to 
 the reality of thought and formulated will 
 beneath these outward things, it will pass, 
 and all its glories will pass, like smoke before 
 the wind, like mist beneath the sun ; it 
 
94 BOON 
 
 will become at last only one more vague 
 and fading dream upon the scroll of time, 
 a heap of mounds and pointless history, 
 even as are Babylon and Nineveh.' " 
 
 " I've heard that before somewhere," said 
 Dodd. 
 
 " Most of this dialogue will have to be 
 quotation," said Boon. 
 
 " He makes literature include philo- 
 sophy ? " 
 
 " Everything. It's all the central things. 
 It's the larger Bible to him, a thing about 
 which all the conscious direction of life 
 revolves. It's alive with passion and will. 
 Or if it isn't, then it ought to be. . . . And 
 then as the antagonist comes this artist, 
 this man who seems to regard the whole 
 seething brew of life as a vat from which 
 you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, 
 works of art. . . . Works of art whose 
 only claim is their art. . . . Hallery is going 
 to be very impatient about art." 
 
 " Ought there to be such a thing as 
 a literary artist ? " some one said. 
 
 " Ought there, in fact, to be Henry 
 James ? " said Dodd. 
 
 " I don't think so. Hallery won't think 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 95 
 
 so. You see, the discussion will be very 
 fundamental. There's contributory art, of 
 course, and a way of doing things better 
 or worse. Just as there is in war, or cook- 
 ing. But the way of doing isn't the end. 
 First the end must be judged — and then 
 if you like talk of how it is done. Get 
 there as splendidly as possible. But get 
 there. James and George Moore, neither 
 of them take it like that. They leave out 
 getting there, or the thing they get to is 
 so trivial as to amount to scarcely more 
 than an omission. . . ."- 
 
 Boon reflected. " In early life both these 
 men poisoned their minds in studios. 
 Thought about pictures even might be less 
 studio-ridden than it is. But James has 
 never discovered that a novel isn't a picture. 
 . . . That life isn't a studio. . . . 
 
 " He wants a novel to be simply and 
 completely done. He wants it to have a 
 unity, he demands homogeneity. . . . Why 
 should a book have that ? For a picture 
 it's reasonable, because you have to see it all 
 at once. But there's no need to see a book 
 all at once. It's like wanting to have a 
 whole county done in one style and period 
 
96 BOON 
 
 of architecture. It's like insisting that a 
 walking tour must stick to one valley. . . . 
 " But James begins by taking it for 
 granted that a novel is a work of art that 
 must be judged by its oneness. Judged 
 first by its oneness. Some one gave him 
 that idea in the beginning of things and he 
 has never found it out. He doesn't find 
 things out. He doesn't even seem to want 
 to find things out. You can see that in 
 him ; he is eager to accept things — elabor- 
 ately. You can see from his books that 
 he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associa- 
 tions, claims. That is his peculiarity. He 
 accepts very readily and then — elaborates. 
 He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, 
 most abundant minds alive in the whole 
 world, and he has the smallest penetration. 
 Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the 
 culmination of the Superficial type. Or 
 else he would have gone into philosophy 
 and been greater even than his wonderful 
 brother. . . . But here he is, spinning about, 
 like the most tremendous of water-boatmen 
 — you know those insects ? — kept up by 
 surface tension. As if, when once he pierced 
 the surface, he would drown. It's incredible. 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 97 
 
 A water-boatman as big as an elephant. 
 I was reading him only yesterday, ' The 
 Golden Bowl ' ; it's dazzling how never for 
 a moment does he go through." 
 
 " Recently he's been explaining himself," 
 said Dodd. 
 
 " His ' Notes on Novelists.' It's one sus- 
 tained demand for the picture effect. Which 
 is the denial of the sweet complexity of 
 life, of the pointing this way and that, of 
 the spider on the throne. Philosophy aims 
 at a unity and never gets there. . . . That 
 true unity which we all suspect, and which 
 no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is 
 to be got by penetrating, penetrating down 
 and through. The picture, on the other 
 hand, is forced to a unity because it can see 
 only one aspect at a time. I am doubtful 
 even about that. Think of Hogarth or 
 Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow 
 life it must be various and discursive. 
 Life is diversity and entertainment, not 
 completeness and satisfaction. All actions 
 are half-hearted, shot delightfully with wan- 
 dering thoughts — about something else. All 
 true stories are a felt of irrelevances. But 
 James sets out to make his novels with the 
 
 7 
 
98 BOON 
 
 presupposition that they can be made con- 
 tinuously relevant. And perceiving the dis- 
 cordant things, he tries to get rid of them. 
 He sets himself to pick the straws out of 
 the hair of Life before he paints her. But 
 without the straws she is no longer the 
 mad woman we love. He talks of ' selec- 
 tion,' and of making all of a novel definitely 
 about a theme. He objects to a ' saturation ' 
 that isn't oriented. And he objects, if you 
 go into it, for no clear reason at all. Follow- 
 ing up his conception of selection, see what 
 in his own practice he omits. In practice 
 James's selection becomes just omission 
 and nothing more. He omits everything 
 that demands digressive treatment or col- 
 lateral statement. For example, he omits 
 opinions. In all his novels you will find 
 no people with defined political opinions, 
 no people with religious opinions, none with 
 clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, 
 none definitely up to any specific impersonal 
 thing. There are no poor people dominated 
 by the imperatives of Saturday night and 
 Monday morning, no dreaming types — and 
 don't we all more or less live dreaming ? 
 And none are ever decently forgetful. All 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 99 
 
 that much of humanity he clears out before 
 he begins his story. It's like cleaning rabbits 
 for the table. 
 
 " But you see how relentlessly it follows 
 from the supposition that the novel is a 
 work of art aiming at pictorial unities ! 
 
 " All art too acutely self-centred comes 
 to this sort of thing. James's denatured 
 people are only the equivalent in fiction of 
 those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who 
 sit and sit, in the Japanese colour-prints, 
 the unresisting stuff for an arrangement 
 of blacks. . . . 
 
 " Then with the eviscerated people he 
 has invented he begins to make up stories. 
 What stories they are ! Concentrated on 
 suspicion, on a gift, on possessing a ' piece ' 
 of old furniture, on what a little girl may 
 or may not have noted in an emotional 
 situation. These people cleared for artistic 
 treatment never make lusty love, never go 
 to angry war, never shout at an election 
 or perspire at poker ; never in any way 
 date. . . . And upon the petty residuum 
 of human interest left to them they focus 
 minds of a Jamesian calibre. . . . 
 
 " The only living human motives left in 
 
100 BOON 
 
 the novels of Henry James are a certain 
 avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity. 
 Even when relations are irregular or when 
 sins are hinted at, you feel that these are 
 merely attitudes taken up, gambits before 
 the game of attainment and over-perception 
 begins. . . . His people nose out suspicions, 
 hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever 
 known living human beings do that ? The 
 thing his novel is about is always there. 
 It is like a church lit but without a con- 
 gregation to distract you, with every light 
 and line focused on the high altar. And 
 on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely 
 there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a .bit 
 of string. . . . Like his ' Altar of the Dead,' 
 with nothing to the dead at all. . . . For 
 if there was they couldn't all be candles 
 and the effect would vanish. . . . And the 
 elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole 
 Henry James exploit is only redeemed and 
 made endurable by the elaborate, copious 
 wit. Upon the desert his selection has made 
 Henry James erects palatial metaphors. . . . 
 The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading 
 Henry James is this clambering over vast 
 metaphors. . . . 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 101 
 
 " Having first made sure that he has 
 scarcely anything left to express, he then 
 sets to work to express it, with an industry, 
 a wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs 
 Newton. He spares no resource in the 
 telling of his dead inventions. He brings 
 up every device of language to state and 
 define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He 
 splits his infinitives and fills them up with 
 adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing 
 colloquialism into his service. His vast 
 paragraphs sweat and struggle ; they could 
 not sweat and elbow and struggle more if 
 God Himself was the processional meaning 
 to which they sought to come. And all 
 for tales of nothingness. ... It is leviathan 
 retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but 
 painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, 
 even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking 
 up a pea which has got into a corner of its 
 den. Most things, it insists, are beyond 
 it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and 
 with an artistic singleness of mind, pick 
 up that pea. . . ." 
 
§4 
 
 " A little while ago," said Boon, suddenly 
 struggling with his trouser pocket and pro- 
 ducing some pieces of paper, " I sketched 
 out a novel, and as it was rather in the 
 manner of Henry James I think perhaps 
 you might be interested by it now. So 
 much, that is, as there is of it. It is to be 
 called ' The Spoils of Mr. Blandish,' and it 
 is all about this particular business of the 
 selective life, Mr. Blandish, as I saw him, 
 was pretty completely taken from the James 
 ideal. . . . He was a man with an exquisite 
 apprehension of particulars, with just that 
 sense of there being a Tightness attainable, 
 a fitness, a charm, a finish. ... In any 
 little affair. ... He believed that in speech 
 and still more that in writing there was an 
 inevitable right word, in actions great and 
 small a mellowed etiquette, in everything 
 a possible perfection. He was, in fact, 
 
 102 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 103 
 
 the very soul of Henry James— as I under- 
 stand it. . . . This sort of man — 
 
 Mr. Blandish going delicately through life. 
 "Oh not oh no I But Yes ! and This is it I " 
 
 " Going delicately." 
 
 I was able to secure the sketch. 
 
 " He didn't marry, he didn't go upon 
 adventures ; lust, avarice, ambition, all 
 these things that as Milton says are to be 
 got ' not without dust and heat,' were not 
 for him. Blood and dust and heat — he 
 
104 BOON 
 
 ruled them out. But he had independent 
 means, he could live freely and delicately 
 and charmingly, he could travel and meet 
 and be delighted by all the best sorts of 
 people in the best sorts of places. So for 
 years he enriched his resonances, as an 
 admirable violin grows richer with every 
 note it sounds. He went about elaborately, 
 avoiding ugliness, death, suffering, indus- 
 trialism, politics, sport, the thought of war, 
 the red blaze of passion. He travelled 
 widely in the more settled parts of the world. 
 Chiefly he visited interesting and ancient 
 places, putting his ever more exquisite 
 sensorium at them, consciously taking deli- 
 cate impressions upon the refined wax of 
 his being. In a manner most carefully occa- 
 sional, he wrote. Always of faded places. 
 His ' Ypres ' was wonderful. His ' Bruges ' 
 and his ' Hour of Van Eyk.' . . . 
 
 " Such," said Boon, " is the hero. The 
 story begins, oh ! quite in the James 
 manner with " He read — 
 
 " ' At times it seemed inaccessible, a 
 thing beyond hope, beyond imagining, and 
 then at times it became so concrete an 
 imagination, a desire so specific, so nearly 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 105 
 
 expressed, as to grow if not to the exact 
 particulars of longitude and latitude, yet 
 at any rate so far as county and district 
 and atmosphere were concerned, so far 
 indeed as an intuition of proximity was 
 concerned, an intimation that made it seem 
 at last at certain moments as if it could 
 not possibly be very much farther than just 
 round the corner or over the crest. . . . ' 
 " But I've left a good bit of that to write 
 up. In the book there will be pages and 
 sheets of that sentence. The gist is that 
 Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and 
 that he has an idea of the kind of house he 
 wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, 
 progressing chapter, expands and expands ; 
 it never jumps you forward, it never lets 
 you off, you can't skip and you can't escape, 
 until there comes at last a culminating dis- 
 tension of statement in which you realize 
 more and more clearly, until you realize 
 it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing 
 long fought for and won at last, that Mr. 
 Blandish has actually come upon the house, 
 and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a 
 flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled 
 clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous 
 
106 BOON 
 
 bursting of a long blown bladder, has said 
 'This is it!' On that ' This is it' my 
 chapter ends, with an effect of enormous re- 
 lief, with something of the beautiful serenity 
 that follows a difficult parturition. 
 
 " The story is born. 
 
 " And then we leap forward to possession. 
 
 " ' And here he was, in the warmest reality, 
 in the very heart of the materialization of 
 
 his dream ' He has, in fact, got the 
 
 house. For a year or so from its first 
 accidental discovery he had done nothing 
 but just covet the house ; too fearful of 
 an overwhelming disappointment even to 
 make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility. 
 But he has, you will gather, taken apart- 
 ments in the neighbourhood, thither he 
 visits frequently, and almost every day 
 when he walks abroad the coveted house 
 draws him. It is in a little seaside place 
 on the east coast, and the only available 
 walks are along the shore or inland across 
 the golf-links. Either path offers tempting 
 digressions towards it. He comes to know 
 it from a hundred aspects and under a 
 thousand conditions of light and atmosphere. 
 
 . . And while still in the early stage he 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 107 
 
 began a curious and delicious secret practice 
 in relationship. You have heard of the 
 Spaniard in love, in love with a woman he 
 had seen but once, whom he might never 
 see again, a princess, etiquette-defended, 
 a goddess, and who yet, seeing a necklace 
 that became her, bought it for the joy of 
 owning something that was at least by 
 fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish 
 begin to buy first one little article and then, 
 the fancy growing upon him more and 
 more, things, ' pieces ' they call them, that 
 were in the vein of Samphire House. And 
 then came the day, the wonderful day, 
 when as he took his afternoon feast of the 
 eye, the door opened, some one came out 
 towards him. . . . 
 
 " It was incredible. They were giving 
 him tea with hot, inadvisable scones — but 
 their hotness, their close heaviness, he ac- 
 cepted with a ready devotion, would have 
 accepted had they been ten times as hot 
 and close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, 
 but gratefully, willingly paying his price 
 for these astonishing revelations that with- 
 out an effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in 
 between her gentle demands whether he 
 
108 BOON 
 
 would have milk and her mild inquiries as to 
 the exact quantity of sugar his habits and 
 hygienic outlook demanded, that his hostess 
 so casually made. These generous, heedless 
 people were talking of departures, of aban- 
 donments, of, so they put it, selling the 
 dear old place, if indeed any one could be 
 found to buy a place so old and so remote 
 and — she pointed her intention with a laugh 
 — so very, very dear. Repletion of scones 
 were a small price to pay for such a glow- 
 ing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, 
 thrust thus straight into the willing, amazed 
 hands. . . . 
 
 " He gets the house. He has it done up. 
 He furnishes it, and every article of furniture 
 seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. 
 And to crown it all I am going to write one 
 of those long crescendo passages that James 
 loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy 
 event linking to happy event until at last 
 the incredible completion, a butler, unques- 
 tionably Early Georgian, respectability, 
 competence equally unquestionable, a wife 
 who could cook, and cook well, no children, 
 no thought or possibility of children, and 
 to crown all, the perfect name — Mutimer ! 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 
 
 109 
 
 4- 
 
 /<£ < 
 
 Mutimer at first. 
 
 " All this you must understand is told 
 retrospectively as Blandish installs him- 
 self in Samphire House. It is told to the 
 refrain, ' Still, fresh every morning, came 
 the persuasion " This is too good to be true." ' 
 And as it is told, something else, by the 
 most imperceptible degrees, by a gathering 
 up of hints and allusions and pointing details, 
 gets itself told too, and that is the growing 
 realization in the mind of Blandish of a 
 something extra, of something not quite 
 bargained for — the hoard and the haunting. 
 About the house hangs a presence. . . . 
 
 " He had taken it at first as a mere 
 
110 BOON 
 
 picturesque accessory to the whole pictur- 
 esque and delightful wreathing of association 
 and tradition about the place, that there 
 should be this ancient flavour of the cutlass 
 and the keg, this faint aroma of buried 
 doubloons and Stevensonian experiences. 
 He had assumed, etc. . . . He had gathered, 
 etc. . . . And it was in the most imper- 
 ceptible manner that beyond his sense of these 
 takings and assumptions and gatherings there 
 grew his perception that the delicate quiver 
 of appreciation, at first his utmost tribute 
 to these illegal and adventurous and san- 
 guinary associations, was broadening and 
 strengthening, was, on'e hardly knew 
 whether to say developing or degenerating, 
 into a nervous reaction, more spinal and 
 less equivocally agreeable, into the question, 
 sensed rather than actually thought or 
 asked, whether in fact the place didn't in 
 certain lights and certain aspects and at 
 certain unfavourable moments come near 
 to evoking the ghost — if such sorites are 
 permissible in the world of delicate shades — 
 of the ghost, of the ghost of a shiver — of 
 aversion. . . . 
 
 " And so at page a hundred and fifty or 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 111 
 
 thereabouts we begin to get into the story," 
 said Boon. 
 
 " You wade through endless marshes of 
 subtle intimation, to a sense of a Presence 
 in Samphire House. For a number of pages 
 you are quite unable to tell whether this is a 
 ghost or a legend or a foreboding or simply 
 old-fashioned dreams that are being allu- 
 sively placed before you. But there is an 
 effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr. 
 Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching fur- 
 tively and steadfastly his guests, his callers, 
 his domestics, continually asking himself, 
 ' Do they note it ? Are they feeling it ? ' 
 
 " We break at last into incidents. A young 
 friend of the impossible name of Deshman 
 helps evolve the story ; he comes to stay ; 
 he seems to feel the influence from the out- 
 set, he cannot sleep, he wanders about the 
 house. . . . Do others know ? Others ? . . . 
 The gardener takes to revisiting the gardens 
 after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery 
 with an unaccountable spade in his hand 
 and answers huskily. Why should a gar- 
 dener carry a spade ? Why should he 
 answer huskily ? Why should the presence, 
 the doubt, the sense of something else 
 
112 
 
 BOON 
 
 elusively in the air about them, become 
 intensified at the encounter ? Oh ! conceiv- 
 ably of course in many places, but just 
 there ! As some sort of protection, it may 
 be. . . . Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish 
 sits at his lonely but beautifully served 
 dinner he becomes aware for the first time 
 of a change in Mutimer.. 
 
 <ss %- 
 
 Mutimer at the end of a year. 
 
 "Something told him in that instant 
 that Mutimer also knew. . . . 
 
 " Deshman comes again with a new and 
 disconcerting habit of tapping the panelling 
 and measuring the thickness of the walls 
 when he thinks no one is looking, and then 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 113 
 
 a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a 
 woman, yet not so much a woman as a 
 disembodied intelligence in a feminine 
 costume with one of those impalpable re- 
 lationships with Deshman that people have 
 with one another in the world of Henry 
 James, an association of shadows, an 
 atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost 
 sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish 
 walks about the shrubbery with the friend,, 
 elaborately getting at it — whatever it is — 
 and in front of them, now hidden by the 
 yew hedges, now fully in view, walks Desh- 
 man with the married and settled sister of 
 Mr. Blandish. . . . 
 
 " ' So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the 
 point down towards the newly discovered 
 sensitiveness, ' where we feel, he it seems 
 knows.'' 
 
 " She seemed to consider. 
 
 " ' He doesn't know completely,' was her 
 qualification. 
 
 " ' But he has something — something 
 tangible.' 
 
 " ' If he can make it tangible.' 
 
 " On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played 
 for a time. 
 
 8 
 
114 BOON 
 
 " ' Then it isn't altogether tangible yet ? ' 
 " ' It isn't tangible enough for him to 
 go upon.' 
 
 " ' Definitely something.' 
 
 " Her assent was mutely concise. 
 
 " ' That we on our part ? ' 
 
 " The we seemed to trouble her, 
 " ' He knows more than you do,' she 
 yielded. 
 
 " The gesture, the half turn, the momentary 
 halt in the paces of Mr. Blandish, plied her 
 further. 
 
 " ' More, I think, than he has admitted — 
 to any one.' 
 
 " ' Even to you ? ' 
 
 " He perceived an interesting wave of 
 irritation. ' Even to me,' he had wrung 
 from her, but at the price of all further 
 discussion. 
 
 " Putting the thing crassly," said Boon, 
 " Deshman has got wind of a hoard, of a 
 treasure, of something — Heaven as yet only 
 knows what something— buried, imbedded, 
 in some as yet unexplained way incorporated 
 with Samphire House. On the whole the 
 stress lies rather on treasure, the treasure 
 of smuggling, of longshore practices, of 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 115 
 
 illegality on the high seas. And still clearer 
 is it that the amiable Deshman wants to 
 get at it without the participation of Mr. 
 Blandish. Until the very end you are never 
 quite satisfied why Deshman wants to get 
 at it in so private a fashion. As the plot 
 thickens you are played about between 
 the conviction that Deshman wants the 
 stuff for himself and the firm belief of the 
 lady that against the possible intervention 
 of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for 
 Mr. Blandish, to secure it at least generously 
 if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall 
 under the accepted definition and all the 
 consequent confiscations of treasure trove. 
 Arid there are further beautiful subtleties 
 as to whether she really believes in this 
 more kindly interpretation of the refined 
 but dubitable Deshman. ... A friend of 
 Deshman's, shameless under the incredible 
 name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in 
 this thick, sweet flow of narrative — the 
 James method of introducing a character 
 always reminds me of going round with the 
 lantern when one is treacling for moths. 
 Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under 
 a summer dawn of delicious sweetness 
 
116 BOON 
 
 Mimbleton is found insensible on the 
 croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like 
 most of the characters in the narrative 
 from first to last, has been unable to 
 sleep. And at the near corner of the 
 house, close to a never before remarked 
 ventilator, is a hastily and inaccurately 
 refilled excavation. . . . 
 
 " Then events come hurrying in a sort 
 of tangled haste — making sibyl-like ges- 
 tures. 
 
 " At the doorway Mutimer appears — 
 swaying with some profound emotion. He 
 is still in his evening attire. He has not 
 yet gone to bed. In spite of the dawn he 
 carried a burning candle — obliquely. At 
 the sight of his master he withdraws — 
 backwards and with difficulty. . . . 
 
 " Then," said Boon, " I get my crown- 
 ing chapter : the breakfast, a peculiar 
 something, something almost palpable in 
 the atmosphere — Deshman hoarse and a 
 little talkative, Mimbleton with a possibly 
 nervous headache, husky also and demand- 
 ing tea in a thick voice, Mutimer waiting 
 uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, 
 yet noting every particular, thinking mean- 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 117 
 
 ings into every word and movement, 
 and growing more and more clear in his 
 conviction that Mutimer knows — knows 
 everything. . . . 
 
 C^- 
 
 Mutimer as the plot thickens. 
 
 (t 
 
 Book two opens with Mr. Blandish 
 practically in possession of the facts. 
 Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is — 
 1813 brandy, in considerable quantities, 
 bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire 
 House. Samphire House, instead of being 
 the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish 
 supposed, is a loaded port. But of course 
 in the novel we shall not put things coarsely, 
 and for a long time you will be by no means 
 
118 BOON 
 
 clear what the ' spirit ' is that Mr. Blandish 
 is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, 
 engaged in trying to get that brandy away, 
 trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying 
 — if one must put the thing in all the con- 
 crete crudity of his fundamental intention — 
 to sell the stuff. . . . 
 
 " Now in real life you would just go and 
 sell it. But people in the novels of Henry 
 James do not do things in the inattentive, 
 offhand, rather confused, and partial way 
 of reality : they bring enormous brains to 
 bear upon the minutest particulars of exist- 
 ence. Mr. Blandish, following the laws 
 of that world, has not simply to sell his 
 brandy : he has to sell it subtly, intri- 
 cately, interminably, with a delicacy, with 
 a dignity. . . . 
 
 " He consults friends — impalpable, intri- 
 cate, inexhaustible friends. 
 
 " There are misunderstandings. One old 
 and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily 
 that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has 
 written a poem, another that he is making 
 a proposal of marriage, another that he 
 wishes an introduction to the secretary of 
 the Psychical Research Society. . . . All 
 
OF ART AND LITERATURE 119 
 
 this," said Boon, " remains, perhaps in- 
 definitely, to be worked out. Only the end, 
 the end, comes with a rush. Deshman 
 has found for him — one never gets nearer 
 to it than the ' real right people.' The real 
 right people send their agent down, a curious 
 blend of gentleman and commercial person 
 he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate 
 quantities. Ultimately he will — shall we 
 say it ? — make an offer. With a sense of 
 immense culmination the reader at last 
 approaches the hoard. . . . 
 
 " You are never told the thing exactly. 
 It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite 
 approaches and startings back, by circum- 
 locution the most delicate, that your mind 
 at last shapes its realization, that — the 
 last drop of the last barrel has gone and that 
 Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least 
 helpless — in the inner cellar. And a beau- 
 tiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without 
 opulence, hangs — diminuendo morendo — in 
 the air. ..." 
 
CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
 
 Of the Assembling and Opening of the 
 
 World Conference on the Mind of 
 
 the Race 
 
 §1 
 
 It must be borne in mind that not even the 
 opening chapter of this huge book, " The 
 Mind of the Race," was ever completely 
 written. The discussion in the Garden by 
 the Sea existed merely so far as the frag- 
 ment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I 
 do not know what Mr. Gosse contributed 
 except that it was something bright, and 
 that presently he again lost his temper and 
 washed his hands of the whole affair and 
 went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little 
 Academy thing of their own round a corner, 
 and I do not know what became of the 
 emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. 
 
 Hearst. One conversation drops out of mind 
 
 120 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 121 
 
 and another begins ; it is like the battle of 
 the Aisne passing slowly into the battle of the 
 Yser. The idea develops into the holding of 
 a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race 
 at some central place. I don't think Boon 
 was ever very clear whether that place was 
 Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or 
 Oxford during the Long Vacation, or the 
 Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It 
 was, at any rate, some such place, and it was 
 a place that was speedily placarded with all 
 sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such 
 as, " To the Central Hall," or " Section B : 
 Criticism and Reviewing," or " Section M : 
 Prose Style," or " Authors' Society (British) 
 Solicitors' Department," or " Exhibit of the 
 Reading Room of the British Museum." 
 
 Manifestly the model of a meeting of the 
 British Association for the Advancement of 
 Science dominated his mind more and more, 
 until at last he began to concoct a presi- 
 dential address. And he invented a man 
 called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and 
 illiterate, but an excellent organizer, trained 
 by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, 
 who is very directive throughout. J. B. 
 Pondlebury orders the special trains, con- 
 
122 BOON 
 
 trives impossible excursions, organizes 
 garden fetes and water parties, keeps people 
 together who would prefer to be separated, 
 and breaks up people who have been getting 
 together. Through all these things drifts 
 Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and 
 sometimes he is almost, as it were, leader and 
 sometimes he is like a drowned body in the 
 torrent below Niagara — Pondlebury being 
 Niagara. 
 
 On the whole the atmosphere of the great 
 conference was American, and yet I distinctly 
 remember that it was the Special Train to 
 Bale of which he gave us an account one 
 afternoon ; it was a night journey of con- 
 siderable eventfulness, with two adjacent 
 carriages de luxe labelled respectively 
 " Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli," 
 and " Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. 
 George Bernard Shaw," with conspicuous 
 reiterations. The other compartments were 
 less exclusive, and contained curious 
 minglings of greatness, activity, and reputa- 
 tion. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth 
 in a wagon-lit, where he remained sym- 
 pathetically silent above a crowd of younger 
 reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 123 
 
 the making of the lower berth and overflow- 
 ing into the corridor. I remember Boon 
 kept jamming new people into that conges- 
 tion. The whole train, indeed, was to be 
 fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the 
 joke. James Joyce I recall as a novelist 
 strange to me that Boon insisted was a " first- 
 rater." He represented him as being of 
 immense size but extreme bashfulness. And 
 he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John 
 Ervine, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Leonard 
 Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, 
 Katherine Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton 
 Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens, Philip 
 Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, 
 Dixon Scott, Rupert Brooke, Geoffrey Young, 
 F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph 
 
 S. Bourne, James Milne 
 
 " Through all the jam, I think we must 
 have Ford Madox Hueffer, wandering to 
 and fro up and down the corridor, with dis- 
 traught blue eyes, laying his hands on heads 
 and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the Gifted 
 Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, 
 now boasting about trivialities, and now 
 making familiar criticisms (which are 
 invariably ill-received), and occasionally 
 
124 BOON 
 
 quite absent-mindedly producing splendid 
 poetry. . . ." 
 
 Like most authors who have made their 
 way to prominence and profit, Boon was 
 keenly sympathetic with any new writer 
 who promised to do interesting work, and 
 very ready with his praise and recognition. 
 That disposition in these writing, prolific 
 times would alone have choked the corridor. 
 And he liked young people even when their 
 promises were not exactly convincing. He 
 hated to see a good book neglected, and 
 was for ever ramming " The Crystal Age " 
 and " Said the Fisherman " and " Tony 
 Drum " and " George's Mother " and " A 
 Hind Let Loose " and " Growing Pains " 
 down the throats of his visitors. But 
 there were very human and definite limits 
 to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, 
 and particularly conspicuous respectable 
 success, chilled his generosity. Conrad he 
 could not endure. I do him no wrong in 
 mentioning that ; it is the way with most 
 of us ; and a score of flourishing contem- 
 poraries who might have liked tickets for 
 the Conference special would have found, 
 great difficulty in getting them. 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 125 
 
 There is a fascination in passing judge- 
 ments and drawing up class lists. For a 
 time the high intention of the Mind of 
 the Race was forgotten while we talked 
 the narrow " shop " of London literary 
 journalism, and discovered and weighed 
 and log-rolled and — in the case of the more 
 established — blamed and condemned. That 
 Bale train became less and less like a train 
 and more and more like a descriptive 
 catalogue. 
 
 For the best part of an afternoon we 
 talked of the young and the new, and 
 then we fell into a discussion about such 
 reputations as Pickthall's and W. H. 
 Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's, 
 reputations ridiculously less than they 
 ought to be, so that these writers, who are 
 certainly as securely classic as Beckford 
 or Herrick, are still unknown to half the* 
 educated English reading public. Was it 
 .due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy 
 of publishers ? That question led us so far 
 away from the special Bale train that we 
 never returned to it. But I know that we 
 decided that the real and significant writers 
 were to be only a small portion of the 
 
126 BOON 
 
 crowd that congested the train ; there were 
 also to be endless impostors, imitators, 
 editors, raiders of the world of print. . . . 
 At every important station there was to 
 be a frightful row about all these people's 
 tickets, and violent attempts to remove 
 doubtful cases. . . . Then Mr. Clement K. 
 Shorter was to come in to advise and help 
 the conductor. . . . Ultimately this led to 
 trouble about Mr. Shorter's own creden- 
 
 DlHiIS* • • • 
 
 Some of Boon's jokes about this train 
 were, to say the best of them, obvious. 
 Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble 
 about his excess luggage, for example. 
 Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his 
 ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical 
 completeness in his travelling equipment, 
 was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the 
 train officials. Mr. Thomas Hardy had a 
 first-class ticket but travelled by choice or 
 mistake in a second-class compartment, his 
 deserted place being subsequently occupied 
 by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh 
 Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, 
 a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold- 
 nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introduc- 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 127 
 
 tions, and everything that a promising young 
 novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton, 
 Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up 
 all night in the wagon - restaurant consum- 
 ing beer enormously and conversing upon 
 immortality and whether \. extends to 
 Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end 
 of the train, I remember, there was to have 
 been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice 
 Hewlett's charger — Mr. Hewlett himself, I 
 believe, was left behind by accident at the 
 Gare de Lyons — Mr. Cunninghame Graham's 
 Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the in- 
 separable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher 
 Benson. . . . 
 
 There was also, I remember, a description 
 of the whole party running for early coffee, 
 which gave Boon ample and regrettable 
 opportunities for speculations upon the 
 deshabille of his contemporaries. Much of 
 the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, 
 but I remember Mr. Shaw was fully prepared 
 for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas, 
 over which he was wearing a saffron 
 dressing-gown decorated in green and purple 
 scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated 
 with Mr. Roger Fry, and as these special 
 
128 BOON 
 
 train allusions are all that I can ever re- 
 member Boon saying about Shaw, and as 
 the drawing does in itself amount to a 
 criticism, I give it here. . . . 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 129 
 
 How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform, 
 and got right into the middle of the picture. Re- 
 mark his earnest face. This surely is no mountebank. 
 
§2 
 
 Boon was greatly exercised over the problem 
 of a president. 
 
 " Why have a president ? " Dodd helped. 
 
 " There must be a Presidential Address," 
 said Boon, " and these things always do have 
 a president." 
 
 " Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins. 
 
 " Lord Morley," said Dodd. 
 
 " Lord Bryce." 
 
 Then we looked at one another. 
 
 " For my own part," said Boon, " if we 
 are going in for that sort of thing, I favour 
 Lord Reay. 
 
 " You see, Lord Reay has never done any- 
 thing at all connected with literature. Morley 
 and Bryce arid Rosebery have at any rate 
 written things — historical studies, addresses, 
 things like that — but Reay has never written 
 anything, and he let Gollancz make him 
 president of the British Academy without a 
 
 130 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 131 
 
 murmur. This seems to mark him out for 
 this further distinction. He is just the sort 
 of man who would be made — and who would 
 let himself be made — president of a British 
 affair of this sort, and they would hoist him 
 up and he would talk for two or three hours 
 without a blush. Just like that other con- 
 founded peer — what was his name ? — who 
 bored and bored and bored at the Anatole 
 France dinner. ... In the natural course 
 of things it would be one of these literary 
 lords. . . ." 
 
 " What would he say ? " asked Dodd. 
 
 " Maunderings, of course. It will make the 
 book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him 
 at length. . . . He will speak upon contem- 
 porary letters, the lack of current achieve- 
 ment. ... I doubt if a man like Lord Reay 
 ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes 
 what these British literary aristocrats do with 
 all their time. Probably he left off reading 
 somewhere in the eighties. He won't have 
 noted it, of course, and he will be under 
 the impression that nothing has been written 
 for the past thirty years." 
 
 " Good Lord ! " said Wilkins. 
 
 " And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. 
 
132 BOON 
 
 Endlessly. Then he will thank God for 
 the English classics, ask where now is our 
 Thackeray ? where now our Burns ? our 
 Charlotte Bronte ? our Tennyson ? say a 
 good word for our immortal bard, and sit 
 down amidst the loud applause of thousands 
 of speechlessly furious British and American 
 writers. ..." 
 
 " I don't see that this will help your book 
 forward," said Dodd. 
 
 " No, but it's a proper way of beginning. 
 Like Family Prayers." 
 
 " I suppose," said Wilkins, " if you told 
 a man of that sort that there were more 
 and better poets writing in English beauti- 
 fully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn't 
 believe it. I suppose if you said that 
 Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had 
 produced sweeter and deeper poetry than 
 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit." 
 
 " He'd have nothing of the kind. You 
 could no more get such an idea into the 
 head of one of these great vestiges of our 
 Gladstonian days than you could get it into 
 the seat of a Windsor chair. . . . And 
 people don't have fits unless something has 
 got into them. . . . No, he'd reflect quite 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 133 
 
 calmly that first of all he'd never heard of 
 this Hueffer, then that probably he was a 
 very young man. And, anyhow, one didn't 
 meet him in important places. . . . And 
 after inquiry he would find out he was a 
 journalist. . . . And then probably he'd 
 cease to cerebrate upon the question. ..." 
 
§3 
 
 " Besides," said Boon, " we must have 
 one of our literary peers because of 
 America." 
 
 " You're unjust to America," I said. 
 
 " No," said Boon. " But Aunt Dove— I 
 know her ways." 
 
 That led to a long, rambling discussion 
 about the American literary atmosphere. 
 Nothing that I could say would make him 
 relent from his emphatic assertion that it 
 is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in 
 which you can't say all sorts of things 
 and where all sorts of things have to be 
 specially phrased. " And she can't stand 
 young things and crude things " 
 
 " America ! " said Wilkins. 
 
 " The America I mean. The sort of 
 America that ought to supply young new 
 writers with caresses and — nourishment. 
 . . . Instead of which you get the Nation. 
 
 184 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 135 
 
 . . . That bleak acidity, that refined appeal 
 to take the child away." 
 
 " But they don't produce new young 
 writers ! " said Wilkins. 
 
 " But they do ! " said Boon. " And they 
 strangle them ! " 
 
 It was extraordinary what a power meta- 
 phors and fancies had upon Boon. Only 
 those who knew him intimately can under- 
 stand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to 
 him. He would touch a metaphor and then 
 return and sip it, and then sip and drink 
 and swill until it had intoxicated him hope- 
 lessly. 
 
 " America," said Boon, " can produce such 
 a supreme writer as Stephen Crane — the best 
 writer of English for the last half-century — 
 
 or Mary Austin, who used to write 
 
 What other woman could touch her ? But 
 America won't own such children. It's 
 amazing. It's a case of concealment of 
 birth. She exposes them. Whether it's 
 Shame — or a Chinese trick. . . . She'll sit 
 never knowing she's had a Stephen Crane, 
 adoring the European reputation, the florid 
 mental gestures of a Conrad. You see, 
 she can tell Conrad ' writes.' It shows. 
 
136 BOON 
 
 And she'll let Mary Austin die of neglect, 
 while she worships the ' art ' of Mary Ward. 
 It's like turning from the feet of a goddess 
 to a pair of goloshes. She firmly believes 
 that old quack Bergson is a bigger man 
 than her own unapproachable William 
 James. . . . She's incredible. I tell you 
 it's only conceivable on one supposition. 
 . . . I'd never thought before about these 
 disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove's 
 
 CcircCr. • • • 
 
 " We English do make foundlings of 
 some of her little victims, anyhow. . . . 
 But why hasn't she any natural instinct in 
 the matter ? 
 
 " Now, if one represented that peculiar 
 Bostonian intellectual gentility, the Nation 
 kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour lady's- 
 maid with a tremendous influence over the 
 Spinster's conduct. . . ." 
 
 His mind was running on. 
 
 " I begin to see a melodramatic strain in 
 this great novel, ' Miss Dove.' ... ' Miss 
 Dove's Derelicts.' . . . Too broad, I am 
 afraid. If one were to represent Sargent 
 and Henry James as two children left Out 
 one cold night in a basket at a cottage in 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 137 
 
 the village by a mysterious stranger, with 
 nothing but a roll of dollars and a rough 
 drawing of the Washington coat-of-arms to 
 indicate their parentage . . . 
 
 " Then when they grow up they go back 
 to the big house and she's almost kind 
 to them. . . . 
 
 " Have you ever read the critical articles 
 of Edgar Allan Poe ? They're very remark- 
 able. He is always demanding an American 
 Literature. It is like a deserted baby left 
 to die in its cradle, weeping and wailing for 
 its bottle. . . . What he wanted, of course, 
 was honest and intelligent criticism. 
 
 " To this day America kills her Poes. ..." 
 
 " But confound it ! " said Wilkins, 
 " America does make discoveries for 
 herself. Hasn't she discovered Lowes 
 Dickinson ? " 
 
 " But that merely helps my case. Lowes 
 Dickinson has just the qualities that take the 
 American judgement ; he carries the shadow 
 of King's College Chapel about with him 
 wherever he goes ; he has an unobtrusive 
 air of being doubly starred in Baedeker and 
 not thinking anything of it. And also she 
 took Noyes to her bosom. But when has 
 
138 BOON 
 
 American criticism ever had the intellectual 
 pluck to proclaim an American ? 
 
 " And so, you see," he remarked, going 
 off again at a tangent, "if we are going to 
 bid for American adhesions there's only one 
 course open to us in the matter of this presi- 
 dential address . . . Lord Morley. . . ." 
 
 " You're a little difficult to follow at 
 times," said Wilkins. 
 
 " Because he's the man who's safest not 
 to say anything about babies or — anything 
 alive. . . . Obviously a literary congress in 
 America must be a festival in honour of 
 sterility. 
 
 " Aunt Dove demands it. Like celebrating 
 the virginity of Queen Elizabeth. . . ." 
 
§4 
 
 I find among the fragments of my departed 
 friend some notes that seem to me to be 
 more or less relevant here. They are an 
 incomplete report of the proceedings of a 
 section S, devoted to Poiometry, apparently 
 the scientific measurement of literary great- 
 ness. It seems to have been under the con- 
 trol of a special committee, including Mr. 
 James Huneker, Mr. Slosson, Sir Thomas 
 Seccombe, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Clement 
 K. Shorter, the acting editor of the Bookman, 
 and the competition editress of the West- 
 minster Gazette. . . . 
 
 Apparently the notes refer to some paper 
 read before the section. Its authorship is 
 not stated, nor is there any account of its 
 reception. But the title is " The Natural 
 History of Greatness, with especial reference 
 to Literary Reputations." 
 
 The opening was evidently one of those 
 
 139 
 
140 BOON 
 
 rapid historical sketches frequent in such 
 papers. 
 
 " Persuasion that human beings are some- 
 times of disproportionate size appears first 
 in the Egyptian and Syrian wall paint- 
 ings. . . , Probably innate. . . . The dis- 
 couragement of the young a social necessity 
 in all early societies. In all societies? . . . 
 Exaggerated stories about the departed. . . . 
 Golden ages. Heroic ages. Ancestor wor- 
 ship. . . . Dead dogs better than living 
 lions. . . . Abraham. Moses. The Homeric 
 reputation, the first great literary cant. Re- 
 sentment against Homer's exaggerated claims 
 on the part of intelligent people. Zoilus. 
 Caricature of the Homerists in the Satyricon. 
 Other instances of unorthodox ancient criti- 
 cism. . . . Shakespeare as an intellectual 
 nuisance. . . . Extreme suffering caused to 
 contemporary writers by the Shakespeare 
 legend. . . . 
 
 " Another form of opposition to these 
 obsessions is the creation of countervail- 
 ing reputations. Certain people in certain 
 ages have resolved to set up Great Men 
 of their own to put beside these Brocken 
 spectres from the past. This marks a 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 141 
 
 certain stage of social development, the 
 beginning of self-consciousness in a civilized 
 community. Self-criticism always begins in 
 self-flattery. Virgil as an early instance of 
 a Great Man of set intentions ; deliberately 
 put up as the Latin Homer. . . . 
 
 " Evolution of the greatness of Aristotle 
 during the Middle Ages. 
 
 " Little sense of contemporary Greatness 
 among the Elizabethans. 
 
 " Comparison with the past the prelude 
 to Great-Man-Making, begins with such a 
 work as Swift's ' Battle of the Books.' Con- 
 currently the decline in religious feeling robs 
 the past of its half-mystical prestige. The 
 Western world ripe for Great Men in the 
 early nineteenth century. The Germans as 
 a highly competitive and envious people take 
 the lead. The inflation of Schiller. The 
 greatness of Goethe. Incredible dullness of 
 ' Elective Affinities,' of ' Werther,' of ' Wil- 
 helm Meister's Apprenticeship.' The second 
 part of ' Faust ' a tiresome muddle. Large 
 pretentiousness of the man's career. Resolve 
 of the Germans to have a Great Fleet, a 
 Great Empire, a Great Man. Difficulty in 
 finding a suitable German for Greatening. 
 
142 BOON 
 
 Expansion of the Goethe legend. German 
 efficiency brought to bear on the task. 
 Lectures. Professors. Goethe compared to 
 Shakespeare. Compared to Homer. Com- 
 pared to Christ. Compared to God. Dis- 
 covered to be incomparable. . . . 
 
 " Stimulation of Scotch activities. The 
 Scotch also passionately and aggressively 
 patriotic. Fortunate smallness of Scotland 
 and lack of adjacent docile Germans has 
 alone saved the world from another Prussia. 
 Desperation of the search for a real Scotch 
 First Rater. The discovery that Burns was 
 as great as Shakespeare. Greater. The 
 booming of Sir Walter Scott. Wake up, 
 England ! The production of Dickens. The 
 slow but enormous discovery of Wordsworth. 
 Victorian age sets up as a rival to the 
 Augustine. Selection of Great Men in every 
 department. The Great Victorian painters. 
 Sir Frederick Leighton compared with Titian 
 and Michael Angelo. Tennyson as Virgil. 
 Lord Tennyson at the crest of the Vic- 
 torian Greatness wave. His hair. His cloak. 
 His noble bearing. His aloofness. His Great 
 Pipe. His price per word. His intellectual 
 familiarities with Queen Victoria. . . . 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 143 
 
 "Longfellow essentially an American 
 repartee. . . . 
 
 " Ingratitude of British Royal Family to 
 those who contributed to the Victorian Great- 
 ness period, shown in the absence of repre- 
 sentative Great Men from the Buckingham 
 Palace Monument. Victoria did not do it 
 all. Compare the Albert Memorial. . . . 
 
 " Interesting task to plan an alternative 
 pedestal. Proposal to make designs for a 
 monument to our own times. Symbolic 
 corner groups by Will Dyson. Frieze of 
 representative men by Max. Canopy by 
 Wyndham Lewis. Lost opportunity for 
 much bright discussion. . . . 
 
 " Analysis of literary greatness. Is any 
 literary achievement essential to greatness ? 
 Probably a minute minimum indispensable. 
 Burns. Fitzgerald. But compare Lord 
 Acton and Lord Reay. Necessity of a 
 marked personality. Weaknesses, but no 
 unpopular vices. Greatness blighted by want 
 of dignity. Laurence Sterne. Reciprocal 
 duty of those made Great not to distress their 
 Public. But imperfectly established scandal 
 or complexity of relationship may give scope 
 for vindications and research. Or a certain 
 
144 BOON 
 
 irregularity of life may create a loyal and 
 devoted following of sympathizers. Shelley. 
 . . . Then capable advocacy is needed and 
 a critical world large enough to be effec- 
 tive but small enough to be unanimous. Part 
 an able publisher may play in establishing 
 and developing a Great Man. . . . Quiet Push, 
 not Noisy Push. Injury done by tactless 
 advertisement. . . . The element of luck. . . . 
 
 " These are the seeds of greatness, but the 
 growth depends upon the soil. The best soil 
 is a large uncritical public newly come to 
 reading, a little suspicious of the propriety 
 of the practice and in a state of intellectual 
 snobbishness. It must also be fairly uni- 
 form and on some common basis of ideas. 
 Ideally represented by the reading publics 
 of Germany, Britain, the United States, 
 and France in the middle nineteenth 
 century. . . . 
 
 " Decline in the output of Greatness to- 
 wards the end of the Victorian time. Prob- 
 ably due in all cases to an enlargement of the 
 reading public to unmanageable dimensions. 
 No reputation sufficiently elastic to cover it. 
 The growth of Chicago, New York, and the 
 West destroyed the preponderance of Boston 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 145 
 
 in America, and the Civil War broke the 
 succession of American Great Men. Rarity 
 of new American-born Greatnesses after the 
 war. Dumping of established Greatnesses 
 from England gave no chance to the native 
 market. No Protection for America in this 
 respect. In Great Britain the board schools 
 create big masses of intelligent people in- 
 accessible to the existing machinery by which 
 Greatness is imposed. The Greatness output 
 in Britain declines also in consequence. 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward, the last of the British 
 Victorian Great. Expressed admiration of 
 Mr. Gladstone for her work. Support of the 
 Spectator. Profound respect of the American 
 people. Rumour that she is represented as 
 a sea goddess at the base of the Queen 
 Victoria Memorial unfounded. Nobody is 
 represented on the Queen Victoria Memorial 
 except Queen Victoria. . . . Necessity after 
 the epoch of Mrs. Ward of more and more 
 flagrant advertisement to reach the enlarged 
 public, so that at last touch is lost with 
 the critical centres. Great Men beyond the 
 Limit. Self-exploded candidates for Great- 
 ness. Boomsters. Best Sellers. Mr. Hall 
 Caine as the shocking example. . . . 
 
 10 
 
146 BOON 
 
 " Other causes contributing to the decay of 
 Greatness among literary men. Competition 
 of politicians, princes, personages generally 
 for the prestige of the literary man. Superior 
 initial advantage in conspicuousness. The 
 genuine writer handicapped. The process 
 already beginning at the crest of the period. 
 Queen Victoria's ' Leaves from a Highland 
 Diary.' Mr. Gladstone and the higher 
 windiness. Later developments. The Kaiser 
 as a man of letters. Mr. Roosevelt as 
 writer and critic. The Essays of Presi- 
 dent Wilson. The case of Lord Rosebery. 
 Mr. Haldane as a philosopher. As a critic. 
 His opinion of Goethe. Compare the royal 
 and noble authors of Byzantium. Compare 
 the Roman Emperor becoming Pontifex 
 Maximus. Compare the cannibal chief in a 
 general's hat. . . . 
 
 " Return of the literary men as such to 
 a decent obscurity. From which they are 
 unlikely to emerge again. This an unmixed 
 blessing. So long as good writing and 
 sound thinking are still appreciated the less 
 we hear about authors the better. Never 
 so little recognized Greatness and never 
 so much wise, subtle, sweet, and boldly 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 147 
 
 conceived literary work as now. This 
 will probably continue. [He was writing 
 before the war.] The English-reading 
 literary world too large now for the 
 operations of Greatening. Doubtful case of 
 Rabindranath Tagore. Discuss this. Special 
 suitability of India as a basis for Greatness. 
 India probably on the verge of a Greatness 
 period. . . . 
 
 " Disrespect a natural disposition in the 
 young. Checked and subdued in small 
 societies, but now happily rampant in the 
 uncontrollable English-speaking communi- 
 ties. The new (undignified) criticism. The 
 English Review. Mr. Austin Harrison and 
 the street-boy style. The literature of the 
 chalked fence. The New Age. Literary 
 carbolic acid — with an occasional substi- 
 tution of vitriol. . . . Insurrection of the 
 feminine mind against worship. Miss 
 Rebecca West as the last birth of time. 
 A virile-minded generation of young women 
 indicated. Mrs. Humphry Ward blushes 
 publicly for the Freewoman in the Times. 
 Hitherto Greatness has demanded the 
 applause of youth and feminine worship 
 as necessary conditions. As necessary to 
 
148 BOON 
 
 its early stages as down to an eider chick. 
 Impossible to imagine Incipient Greatness 
 nestling comfortably upon Orage, Austin 
 Harrison, and Rebecca West. Dearth of 
 young Sidney Colvins. . . . Unhappy posi- 
 tion of various derelict and still imper- 
 fectly developed Great surviving from the 
 old times. Arnold Bennett as an aborted 
 Great Man. Would have made a Great Vic- 
 torian and had a crowd of satellite helpers. 
 Now no one will ever treasure his old hats 
 and pipes. . . . 
 
 " Idea of an experimental resurrection of 
 those who still live in our hearts. If Goethe 
 
 had a second time on earth ? Could he 
 
 do it now ? Would Lord Haldane perceive 
 him ? Imaginary description of Lord 
 Haldane's recognition of a youthful Goethe. 
 They meet by accident during a walking 
 tour in Germany. Amiable aloofness of 
 Lord Haldane. His gradual discovery of 
 an intellectual superior in his modest com- 
 panion. Public proclamation of his find. 
 . . . Doubts. . . . 
 
 " Peroration. Will the world be happy 
 without Literary Greatnesses ? Improvise 
 and take a cheerful line upon this question." 
 
s 
 
 CQ 
 
 o> 
 
 ■8 
 
 s 
 a, 
 
 4 
 
 
 a 
 1 
 
 •to 
 
 I 
 
§5 
 
 Ultimately, against every possibility of the 
 case, Boon decided that the President of his 
 conference must be Hallery. And he wrote 
 his presidential address. But he never read 
 that address to us. Some shyness I think 
 restrained him. I dig it out here now for 
 the first time, a little astonished at it, dis- 
 posed to admire something in its spirit. . . . 
 But yet one has to admit that it shows an 
 extraordinary lapse from Boon's accustomed 
 mocking humour. 
 
 Here is the opening. ^ 
 
 " Hallery then advanced to the edge of the 
 platform and fumbled with his manuscript. 
 His face was very white and his expression 
 bitterly earnest. With an appearance of 
 effort he began, omitting in his nervousness 
 any form of address to his audience — 
 
 " ' For the most part, the life of human 
 communities has been as unconscious as the 
 
 150 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 151 
 
 life of animals. They have been born as 
 unknowingly as the beasts ; they have fol- 
 lowed unforeseen and unheeded destinies, and 
 destruction has come to them from forces 
 scarcely anticipated and not understood. 
 Tribes, nations beyond counting, have come 
 and passed, with scarcely a mental activity 
 beyond a few legends, a priestly guess at 
 cosmogony, a few rumours and traditions, 
 a list of kings as bare as a schoolboy's diary, 
 a war or so, a triumph or so. . . . We are 
 still only in the beginning of history — in 
 the development, that is, of a racial memory ; 
 we have as yet hardly begun to inquire into 
 our racial origins, our racial conditions, our 
 racial future. . . . Philosophy, which is the 
 discussion of the relation of the general to 
 the particular, of the whole to the part, of 
 the great and yet vague life of the race to the 
 intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the 
 individual, is still not three thousand years 
 old. Man has lived consciously as man it 
 may be for hundreds of thousands of years, 
 he has learnt of himself by talking to his 
 fellows, he has expressed personal love and 
 many personal feelings with a truth and 
 beauty that are wellnigh final, but the 
 
152 BOON 
 
 race does but begin to live as a conscious 
 being. It begins to live as a conscious 
 being, and as it does so, the individual 
 too begins to live in a new way, a greater, 
 more understanding, and more satisfying 
 way. His thoughts apprehend interests 
 beyond himself and beyond his particular 
 life. 
 
 " At this point Hallery became so acutely 
 aware of his audience that for some seconds 
 he could not go on reading. A number of 
 people in various parts of the hall had 
 suddenly given way to their coughs, a bald- 
 headed gentleman about the middle of the 
 assembly had discovered a draught, and was 
 silently but conspicuously negotiating for 
 the closing of a window by an attendant, 
 and at the back a cultivated-looking young 
 gentleman was stealing out on tiptoe. 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 153 
 
 The first departure. 
 
 " For a moment Hallery was distressed 
 by the thought that perhaps he might 
 have taken a more amusing line than the 
 one he had chosen, and then, realizing how 
 vain were such regrets and rather quicken- 
 ing his pace, he resumed the reading of his 
 address — 
 
 " ' You see that I am beginning upon a 
 very comprehensive scale, for I propose to 
 bring within the scope of this conference all 
 that arises out of these two things, out of the 
 realization of the incompleteness of man's 
 
154 BOON 
 
 individual life on the one hand and out of 
 the realization of a greater being in which 
 man lives, of a larger racial life and ampler 
 references upon the other. All this much — 
 and with a full awareness of just how much 
 it is — I am going to claim as literature and 
 our province. Religion, I hold, every religion 
 so far as it establishes and carries ideas, 
 is literature, philosophy is literature, science 
 is literature ; a pamphlet or a leading article. 
 
 I put all these things together ' 
 
 " At this point there was a second depar- 
 ture. 
 
 JO 
 
 v. 
 
 The second departure, 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 155 
 Almost immediately followed by a third. 
 
 The third departure. 
 
 " Hallery halted for a second time and then 
 gripped the reading-desk with both hands, 
 and, reading now with a steadily accelerated 
 velocity, heeded his audience no more — 
 
 " ' I put all these things together because, 
 indeed, it is only associations of antiquity 
 and prescription and prestige can separate 
 them. Altogether they constitute the great 
 vague body of man's super-personal mental 
 life, his unselfish life, his growing life, as 
 a premeditating, self-conscious race and 
 
156 BOON 
 
 destiny. Here in growing volume, in this 
 comprehensive literature of ours, preserved, 
 selected, criticized, re-stated, continually 
 rather more fined, continually rather more 
 clarified, we have the mind, not of a mortal 
 but of an immortal adventurer. Whom for 
 the moment, fractionally, infmitesimally, 
 whenever we can forget ourselves in pure 
 feeling, in service, in creative effort or dis- 
 interested thought, we are privileged in that 
 measure to become. This wonder that we 
 celebrate, this literature, is the dawn of 
 human divinity 
 
 But though Hallery went on, I do not, 
 on reflection, think that I will. I doubt if 
 Boon ever decided to incorporate this extra- 
 ordinary Presidential Address in our book ; 
 I think perhaps he meant to revise it or 
 substitute something else. He wanted to 
 state a case for the extreme importance of 
 literature, and to my mind he carried 
 his statement into regions mystical, to say 
 the least of it, and likely to be considered 
 blasphemous by many quite right-minded 
 people. For instance, he made Hallery 
 speak of the Word that links men's minds. 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 157 
 
 He brings our poor, mortal, mental activities 
 into the most extraordinary relationship with 
 those greater things outside our lives which 
 it is our duty to revere as much as possible 
 and to think about as little as possible ; 
 he draws no line between them. ... He 
 never, I say, read the paper to us. . . . 
 I cannot guess whether he did not read 
 it to us because he doubted himself or 
 because he doubted us, and I do not even care 
 to examine my own mind to know whether I 
 do or do not believe in the thesis he sets so 
 unhesitatingly down. In a sense it is no 
 doubt true that literature is a kind of over- 
 mind of the race, and in a sense, no doubt, 
 the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and 
 the Prayer Book are literature. In a sense 
 Mr. Upton Sinclair's " Bible " for Socialists 
 of bits from ancient and modern writings 
 is literature. In a sense, too, literature 
 does go on rather like a continuous 
 mind thinking. . . . But I feel that all 
 this is just in a sense. ... I don't really 
 believe it. I am not quite sure what I do 
 really believe, but I certainly recoil from 
 anything so crudely positive as Hallery's wild 
 assertions. ... It would mean worshipping 
 
158 BOON 
 
 literature. Or at least worshipping the truth 
 in literature. . . . 
 
 Of course, one knows that real literature 
 is something that has to do with leisure and 
 cultivated people and books and shaded 
 lamps and all that sort of thing. But Hallery 
 wants to drag in not only cathedrals and 
 sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings. 
 . . . He wants literature to embrace what- 
 ever is in or whatever changes the mind of 
 the race, except purely personal particulars. 
 And I think Boon was going to make Hallery 
 claim this, just in order to show up against 
 these tremendous significances the pettiness 
 of the contemporary literary life, the poverty 
 and levity of criticism, the mean business 
 side of modern book-making and book- 
 selling. . . . 
 
 Turning over the pages of this rejected 
 address, which I am sure the reader would 
 not thank me for printing, I do come upon 
 this presentable passage, which illustrates 
 what I am saying — 
 
 " So that every man who writes to express 
 or change or criticize an idea, every man 
 who observes and records a fact in the 
 making of a research, every man who 
 
THE WORLD CONFERENCE 159 
 
 hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any 
 sort who really expresses, does thereby, in 
 that very act, participate, share in, become 
 for just that instant when he is novel and 
 authentically true, the Mind of the Race, the 
 thinking divinity. Do you not see, then, what 
 an arrogant worship, what a sacramental 
 thing it is to lift up brain and hand and 
 say, ' / too will add ' ? We bring our little 
 thoughts as the priest brings a piece of 
 common bread to consecration, and though 
 we have produced but a couplet or a dozen 
 lines of prose, we have nevertheless done 
 the parallel miracle. And all reading that 
 is reading with the mind, all conscious sub- 
 jugation of our attention to expressed beauty, 
 or expressed truth, is sacramental, is com- 
 munion with the immortal being. We lift 
 up our thoughts out of the little festering pit 
 of desire and vanity which is one's individual 
 self into that greater self. ..." 
 
 So he talks, and again presently of " that 
 world-wide immortal communion incessant 
 as the march of sun and planets amidst the 
 stars. ... 
 
 And then, going on with his vast com- 
 parison, for I cannot believe this is more 
 
160 BOON 
 
 than a fantastic parallelism : " And if the 
 mind that does, as we say, create is like the 
 wafer that has become miraculously divine, 
 then though you may not like to think of it, 
 all you who give out books, who print books 
 and collect books, and sell books and lend 
 them, who bring pictures to people's eyes, 
 set things forth in theatres,, hand out thought 
 in any way from the thinking to the attentive 
 mind, all you are priests, you do a priestly 
 office, and every bookstall and hoarding is 
 a wayside shrine, offering consolation and 
 release to men and women from the intoler- 
 able prison of their narrow selves. . .- ." 
 
§6 
 
 That, I think, is what Boon really at the 
 bottom of his heart felt and believed about 
 literature. 
 
 And yet in some way he could also not 
 believe it ; he could recognize something 
 about it that made him fill the margin of 
 the manuscript of this address with grotesque 
 figures of an imaginary audience going out. 
 They were, I know, as necessary to his whole 
 conception as his swinging reference to 
 the stars ; both were as much part of his 
 profound belief as the gargoyle on the 
 spire and the high altar are necessary parts 
 of a Gothic cathedral. And among other 
 figures I am amused rather than hurt to find 
 near the end this of myself — 
 
 11 m 
 
162 BOON 
 
 Too high-pitched even for Reginald. 
 
 S. 
 
CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 Of not liking Hallery and the Royal 
 
 Society tor the Discouragement of 
 Literature 
 
 §1 
 
 In the same peculiar receptacle in which 
 I find this presidential address I found a 
 quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, 
 upon which Boon, I should judge, had been 
 thinking about that address and why he was 
 ashamed to produce it to us, and why he 
 perceived that this audience would dislike 
 Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit 
 that they would go out before his lecture 
 was finished, and why he himself didn't 
 somehow like this Hallery that he had made. 
 All these writings are in the nature of frag- 
 ments, some are illegible and more are in- 
 comprehensible ; but it is clear that his mind 
 attacked these questions with a most extra- 
 
 163 
 
162 
 
 BOON 
 
 V 
 
 Too high-pitched even for Reginald. 
 
CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
 
 Of not liking Hallery and the Royal 
 Society for the Discouragement of 
 Literature 
 
 §1 
 
 In the same peculiar receptacle in which 
 I find this presidential address I found a 
 quantity of other papers and scraps of paper, 
 upon which Boon, I should judge, had been 
 thinking about that address and why he was 
 ashamed to produce it to us, and why he 
 perceived that this audience would dislike 
 Hallery so much that he was obliged to admit 
 that they would go out before his lecture 
 was finished, and why he himself didn't 
 somehow like this Hallery that he had made. 
 All these writings are in the nature of frag- 
 ments, some are illegible and more are in- 
 comprehensible ; but it is clear that his mind 
 attacked these questions with a most extra- 
 
 163 
 
164 BOON 
 
 ordinary width of reference. I find him 
 writing about the One and the Many, the 
 General and the Particular, the Species and 
 the Individual, declaring that it is through 
 " the dimensions {sic) of space and time " 
 that "individuation " becomes possible, and 
 citing Darwin, Heraclitus, Kant, Plato, and 
 Tagore, all with a view to determining just 
 exactly what it was that irritated people 
 in the breadth and height and expression 
 of Hallery's views. Or to be more exact, 
 what he knew would have irritated people 
 with these views if they had ever been 
 expressed. 
 
 Here is the sort of thing that I invite the 
 intelligent reader to link up if he can with 
 the very natural phenomenon of a number 
 of quite ordinary sensible people hostile and 
 in retreat before a tedious, perplexing, and 
 presumptuous discourse — 
 
 " The individual human mind spends itself 
 about equally in headlong flight from the 
 Universal, which it dreads as something that 
 will envelop and subjugate it, and in head- 
 long flight to the Universal, which it seeks 
 as a refuge from its own loneliness and silli- 
 ness. It knows very certainly that the 
 
OF DISLIKING HALLERY 165 
 
 Universal will ultimately comprehend and 
 incorporate it, yet it desires always that the 
 Universal should mother it, take it up with- 
 out injuring it in the slightest degree, foment 
 and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all 
 its distinctions, give it all the kingdoms of 
 existence to play with. . . . 
 
 " Ordinary people snuggle up to God as 
 a lost leveret in a freezing wilderness might 
 snuggle up to a Siberian tiger. . . . 
 
 " You see that man who flies and seeks, 
 who needs and does not want, does at last 
 get to a kind of subconscious compromise 
 over the matter. Couldn't he perhaps get 
 the Infinite with the chill off ? Couldn't he 
 perhaps find a warm stuffed tiger ? He cheats 
 himself by hiding in what he can pretend is 
 the goal. So he tries to escape from the 
 pursuit of the living God to dead gods, evades 
 religion in a church, does his best to insist 
 upon time-honoured formulae ; God must 
 have a button on the point. And it is our 
 instinctive protection of the subconscious 
 arrangement that makes us so passionately 
 resentful at raw religion, at crude spiritual 
 realities, at people who come at us saying 
 harsh understandable things about these 
 
166 BOON 
 
 awful matters. . . . They may wake the 
 tiger ! . . . 
 
 " We like to think of religion as something 
 safely specialized, codified, and put away. 
 Then we can learn the rules and kick about a 
 bit. But when some one comes along saying 
 that science is religion, literature is religion, 
 business — they'll come to that presently ! — 
 business is religion ! . . . 
 
 " It spoils the afternoon. . . . 
 
 " But that alone does not explain why 
 Hallery, delivering his insistent presidential 
 address, is detestable to his audience — for it is 
 quite clear that he is detestable. I'm certain 
 of it. No, what is the matter there is that 
 the aggression of the universal is pointed 
 and embittered by an all too justifiable sus- 
 picion that the individual who maintains it 
 is still more aggressive, has but armed him- 
 self with the universal in order to achieve 
 our discomfiture. . . . It's no good his being 
 modest ; that only embitters it. It is no good 
 his. making disavowals ; that only shows that 
 he is aware of it. . . . 
 
 " Of course I invented Hallery only to get 
 this burthen off myself. . . . 
 
 " All spiritual truths ought to be conveyed 
 
OF DISLIKING HALLERY 167 
 
 by a voice speaking out of a dark void. As 
 Hardy wants his spirits to speak in the 
 ' Dynasts.' Failing that, why should we 
 not deal with these questions through the 
 anonymity of a gramophone ? . . . 
 
 " A modern religion founded on a mys- 
 terious gramophone which was discovered 
 carefully packed in a box of peculiar 
 construction on a seat upon Primrose 
 Hill. ... 
 
 " How well the great organized religions 
 have understood this ! How sound is the 
 effort to meet it by shaving a priest's head 
 or obliging him to grow a beard, putting him 
 into canonicals, drilling him and regimenting 
 him, so as to make him into a mere 
 type. . . . 
 
 " If I were to found a religion, I think I 
 should insist upon masked priests. ..." 
 
§2 
 
 This idea that the defensive instinct of the 
 individuality, Jealousy, is constantly at war 
 not only with other individualities but with 
 all the great de-individualizing things, with 
 Faith, with Science, with Truth, with Beauty ; 
 that out of its resentments and intricate 
 devices one may draw the explanation of 
 most of the perplexities and humours of the 
 intellectual life, indeed the explanation of 
 most life and of most motives, is the quin- 
 tessence of Boon. The Mind of the Race 
 toils through this jungle of jealous indi- 
 viduality to emerge. And the individual, 
 knowing that single-handed he hasn't a 
 chance against the immortal, allies himself 
 with this and that, with sham immortalities, 
 and partially effaced and partially confuted 
 general things. And so it sets up its Great- 
 nesses, to save it from greatness, its solemni- 
 ties to preserve it from th« overwhelming 
 
 1«8 
 
OF DISLIKING HALLERY 169 
 
 gravity of truth. " See," it can say, " I have 
 my gods already, thank you. I do not think 
 we will discuss this matter further." 
 
 I admit the difficulty of following Boon 
 in this. I admit, too, that I am puzzled 
 about his Mind of the Race. Does he mean 
 by that expression a Great Wisdom and 
 Will that must be, or a Great Wisdom and 
 Will that might be ? 
 
 But here he goes on with the topic of 
 Hallery again. 
 
 " I invented Hallery to get rid of my- 
 self, but, after all, Hallery is really no 
 more than the shadow of myself, and if I 
 were impersonal and well bred, and if I 
 spoke behind a black screen, it would still 
 be as much my voice as ever. I do not see 
 how it is possible to prevent the impersonal 
 things coming by and through persons ; but 
 at any rate we can begin to recognize that 
 the person who brings the message is only 
 in his way like the messenger-boy who 
 brings the telegrams. The writer may have 
 a sensitive mind, the messenger-boy may 
 have nimble heels ; that does not make him 
 the creator of the thing that comes. Then 
 I think people will be able to listen to such 
 
170 BOON 
 
 lectures as this of Hallery's without remem- 
 bering all the time that it's a particular 
 human being with a white face and a lisp. 
 . . . And perhaps they will be able to respect 
 literature and fine thought for the sake 
 of the general human mind for which they 
 live and for the sake of their own recep- 
 tiveness. ..." 
 
§3 
 
 And from that Boon suddenly went off 
 into absurdities. 
 
 " Should all literature be anonymous ? " 
 he asks at the head of a sheet of notes. 
 
 " But one wants an author's name as a 
 brand. Perhaps a number would suffice. 
 Would authors write if they remained un- 
 known ? Mixed motives. Could one run a 
 church with an unsalaried priesthood ? But 
 certainly now the rewards are too irregular, 
 successful authors are absurdly flattered and 
 provoked to impossible ambitions. Could we 
 imitate the modern constitutional State by 
 permitting limited ambitions but retaining 
 all the higher positions inaccessible to mere 
 enterprise and merit ? Hereditary Novelists, 
 Poets, and Philosophers, for example. The 
 real ones undistinguished. Hereditary His- 
 torians and Scientific Men are already 
 
 practical reality. Then such mischievous 
 
 m 
 
174 BOON 
 
 organization of the conservative instincts 
 of man. Its aim was to stop all this 
 thinking. . . . 
 
 And yet in some extraordinary way that 
 either I did not note at the time or that he 
 never explained, it became presently the 
 whole Conference ! The various handbills, 
 pamphlets in outline, notes for lectures, and 
 so forth, that accompanied his notes of the 
 Proceedings of the Royal Society may either 
 be intended as part of the sectional proceed- 
 ings of the great conference or as the pro- 
 duction of this hostile organization. I will 
 make a few extracts from the more legible of 
 these memoranda which render the point 
 clearer. 
 
§5 
 
 Publishers and Book Distributors 
 
 {Comparable to the Priest who hands the 
 Elements and as much upon their 
 Honour.) 
 
 The Publisher regrets that the copy for this 
 section is missing, and fears that the sub-, 
 stance of it must be left to the imagination 
 of the reader. This is the more regrettable 
 as the section was probably of a highly 
 technical nature. 
 
 175 
 
§6 
 The Young Reviewer 
 
 Here, again, Mr. Boon's notes are not to 
 be found, and repeated applications to Mr. 
 Bliss have produced nothing but a vague 
 telegram to " go ahead." 
 
§7 
 
 The Schoolmaster and Literature 
 
 " Essentially the work of the schoolmaster 
 is to prepare the young and naturally over- 
 individualized mind for communion with the 
 Mind of the Race. Essentially his curricu- 
 lum deals with modes of expression, with 
 languages, grammar, the mathematical sys- 
 tem of statement, the various scientific 
 systems of statement, the common legend 
 of history. All leads up, as the scholar 
 approaches adolescence, to the introduction 
 to living literature, living thought, criticism, 
 and religion. But when we consider how 
 
 literature is taught in schools " 
 
 Here the writing leaves off abruptly, and 
 then there is written in very minute letters 
 far down the page and apparently after an 
 interval for reflection — 
 
 " Scholastic humour 
 
 O God J" 
 
 12 17V 
 
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 
 
 WlLKINS MAKES CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 §1 
 
 Wilkins the author began to think about 
 the Mind of the Race quite suddenly. He 
 made an attack upon Boon as we sat in the 
 rose-arbour smoking after lunch- Wilkins 
 is a man of a peculiar mental constitution ; 
 he alternates between a brooding sentimental 
 egotism and a brutal realism, and he is as 
 weak and false in the former mood as he is 
 uncompromising in the latter. I think the 
 attraction that certainly existed between him 
 and Boon must have been the attraction of 
 opposites, for Boon is as emotional and senti- 
 mental in relation to the impersonal aspects 
 of life as he is pitiless in relation to himself. 
 Wilkins still spends large portions of his 
 time thinking solemnly about some ancient 
 
 178 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 179 
 
 trouble in which he was treated unjustly ; 
 I believe I once knew what it was, but I 
 have long since forgotten. Yet when his 
 mind does get loose from his own " case " 
 for a bit, it is, I think, a very penetrating 
 mind indeed. And, at any rate, he gave a 
 lot of exercise to Boon. 
 
 " All through this book, Boon," he 
 began. 
 
 " What book ? " asked Dodd. 
 
 " This one we are in. All through this 
 book you keep on at the idea of the Mind 
 of the Race. It is what the book is about ; 
 it is its theme. Yet I don't see exactly what 
 you are driving at. Sometimes you seem 
 to be making out this Mind of the Race to 
 be a kind of God " 
 
 " A synthetic God," said Boon. " If it is 
 to be called a God at all." 
 
 Dodd nodded as one whose worst' sus- 
 picions are confirmed. 
 
 " Then one has to assume it is a con- 
 tinuing, coherent mind, that is slowly 
 becoming wider, saner, profounder, more 
 powerful ? " 
 
 Boon never likes to be pressed back upon 
 exact statements. "Yes," he said reluct- 
 
180 BOON 
 
 antly. " In general — on the whole — yes. 
 What are you driving at ? " 
 
 " lb includes all methods of expression, 
 from the poster when a play is produced 
 at His Majesty's Theatre, from the cheering 
 of the crowd when a fireman rescues a baby, 
 up to — Walter Pater." 
 
 " So far as Pater expresses anything," said 
 Boon. 
 
 " Then you go on from the elevation this 
 idea of a secular quasi-divine racial mental 
 progress gives you, to judge and condemn 
 all sorts of decent artistic and literary activi- 
 ties that don't fall in or don't admit that 
 they fall in. . . ." 
 
 " Something of that idea," said Boon, 
 growing a little testy — " something of that 
 idea." 
 
 " It gives you an opportunity of annoy- 
 ing a number of people you don't like." 
 
 " If I offend, it is their fault ! " said Boon 
 hotly. " Criticism can have no friendships. 
 If they like to take it ill. . . . My criticism 
 is absolutely honest. . . . Some of them are 
 my dearest friends." 
 
 " They won't be," said Wilkins, " when all 
 this comes out. . . . But, anyhow, your 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 181 
 
 whole case, your justification, your thesis is 
 that there is this Mind of the Race, over- 
 riding, dominating And that you are 
 
 its Prophet." 
 
 " Because a man confesses a belief, 
 Wilkins, that doesn't make him a Prophet. 
 I don't set up— I express." 
 
 " Your Mind of the Race theory has 
 an elegance, a plausibility, I admit," said 
 Wilkins. 
 
 Dodd's expression indicated that it didn't 
 take him in. He compressed his lips. Not 
 a bit of it. 
 
 " But is this in reality true ? Is this what 
 exists and goes on ? We people who sit in 
 studies and put in whole hours of our days 
 thinking and joining things together do get 
 a kind of coherence into our ideas about the 
 world. Just because there is leisure and time 
 for us to think. But are you sure that is 
 the Race at all ? That is my point. Aren't 
 we intellectually just a by-product ? If you 
 went back to the time of Plato, you would 
 say that the idea of his " Republic " was 
 what was going on in the Mind of the Race 
 then. But I object that that was only the 
 futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What 
 
182 BOON 
 
 was really going on was the gathering up 
 of the Macedonian power to smash through 
 Greece, and then make Greece conquer 
 Asia. Your literature and philosophy are 
 really just the private entertainment of 
 old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and 
 ambitious young men too delicate to hunt 
 or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world 
 until it begins to operate in will and act, 
 and the history of mankind doesn't show 
 now, and it never has shown, any consecu- 
 tive relation to human thinking. The real 
 Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not 
 literary at all, not consecutive, but like the 
 inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot " 
 
 " No," said Boon, " of a child." 
 
 " You have wars, you have great waves 
 of religious excitement, you have patriotic 
 and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived 
 and surprising economic changes " 
 
 "As if humanity as a whole were a mere 
 creature of chance and instinct," said Boon. 
 
 " Exactly," said Wilkins. 
 
 " I admit that," said Boon. " But my case 
 is that sanity grows. That what was ceases 
 to be. The mind of reason gets now out 
 of the study into the market-place." 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 188 
 
 " You mean really, Boon, that the Mind 
 of the Race isn't a mind that is, it is just 
 a mind that becomes." 
 
 " That's what it's all about," said Boon. 
 
 " And that is where I want to take you 
 up," said Wilkins. " I want to suggest that 
 the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam 
 of conscious realization that passes from 
 darkness to darkness " 
 
 " No," said Boon. 
 
 " Why not ? " 
 
 " Because I will not have it so," said 
 Boon. 
 
§2 
 
 Thebe can be no denying that from quite 
 an early stage in the discussion Boon was 
 excited and presently on the verge of ill- 
 temper. This dragging of his will into a 
 question of fact showed, I think, the 
 beginning of his irritation. And he was 
 short and presently rather uncivil in his 
 replies to Wilkins. 
 
 Boon argued that behind the individuali- 
 ties and immediacies of life there was in 
 reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that 
 larger numbers of people and a larger pro- 
 portion of people than ever before were 
 taking part in the World Mind process, and 
 that presently this would become a great 
 conscious general thinking of the race 
 together. 
 
 Wilkins admitted that there had been a 
 number of starts in the direction of im- 
 personal understanding and explanation ; 
 
 184 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 185 
 
 indeed, there was something of the sort 
 in every fresh religious beginning; but he 
 argued that these starts do not show a 
 regular progressive movement, and that none 
 of them had ever achieved any real directive 
 and unifying power over their adherents ; 
 that only a few Christians had ever grasped 
 Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intel- 
 lectual powder before it touched the crowd, 
 that nowadays there was less sign than ever 
 of the honest intellectuals getting any hold 
 whatever upon the minds and movements of 
 the popular mass. . . . 
 
 " The Mind of the Race," said Wilkins, 
 " seems at times to me much more like a 
 scared child cowering in the corner of a 
 cage full of apes." 
 
 Boon was extraordinarily disconcerted by 
 these contradictions. 
 
 " It will grow up," he snatched. 
 
 " If the apes let it," said Wilkins. " You 
 can see how completely the thinkers and 
 poets and all this stuff of literature and the 
 study don't represent the real Mind, such 
 as it is, of Humanity, when you note how 
 the mass of mankind turns naturally to make 
 and dominate its own organs of expression. 
 
186 BOON 
 
 Take the popular press, take the popular 
 theatre, take popular religion, take current 
 fiction, take the music-hall, watch the de- 
 velopment of the cinematograph. There 
 you have the real body of mankind express- 
 ing itself. If you are right, these things 
 should fall in a kind of relationship to the 
 intellectual hierarchy. But the intellectual 
 hierarchy goes and hides away in country 
 houses and beautiful retreats and provincial 
 universities and stuffy high-class periodicals. 
 It's afraid of the mass of men, it dislikes 
 and dreads the mass of men, and it affects 
 a pride and aloofness to cover it. Plato 
 wanted to reorganize social order and the 
 common life ; the young man in the two- 
 penny tube was the man he was after. He 
 Wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly 
 what to do with the young woman beside 
 him. Instead of which poor Plato has 
 become just an occasion for some Oxford 
 don to bleat about his unapproachable style 
 and wisdom. . . ." 
 
 " I admit we're not connected up yet," 
 said Boon. 
 
 " You're more disconnected than ever you 
 were. In the Middle Ages there was some- 
 
WELKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 187 
 
 thing like a connected system of ideas in 
 Christendom, so that the Pope and the 
 devout fishwife did in a sense march 
 together. ..." 
 
 You see the wrangling argument on which 
 they were launched. 
 
 Boon maintained that there was a spread- 
 ing thought process, clearly perceptible now- 
 adays, and that those detachments of Wil- 
 kins' were not complete. He instanced the 
 cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the 
 variety of articles in the modern newspaper, 
 the signs of wide discussions. Wilkins, on 
 the other hand, asserted a predominant 
 intellectual degeneration. . . . Moreover, 
 Wilkins declared, with the murmurous ap- 
 proval of Dodd, that much even of the 
 Academic thought process was going wrong, 
 that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was 
 a poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, 
 that the boom about " Mendelism " was a 
 triumph of weak thinking over comprehen- 
 sive ideas. 
 
 " Even if we leave the masses out of 
 account, it is still rather more than doubtful 
 if there is any secular intellectual growth." 
 
 And it is curious to recall now that as an 
 
188 BOON 
 
 instance of a degenerative thought process 
 among educated people Wilkins instanced 
 modern Germany. Here, he said, in the 
 case of a Mind covering over a hundred 
 million people altogether, was a real retro- 
 cession of intellectual freedom. The pre- 
 tentious expression of instinctive crudity had 
 always been the peculiar weakness of the 
 German mind. It had become more and 
 more manifest, he said, as nationalism had 
 ousted foreign influence. You see what 
 pretty scope for mutual contradiction there 
 was in all this. " Let me get books," 
 cried Wilkins, " and I will read you samples 
 of the sort of thing that passes for think- 
 ing in Germany. I will read you some 
 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some 
 of Nietzsche's boiling utterance, some of 
 Schopenhauer. 
 
 " Let me," said Wilkins, " read a passage 
 I have picked almost haphazard from 
 Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer 
 rammed down one's throat as a philosopher, 
 as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to 
 the Hegelian dose. And just listen " 
 
 He began to read in a voice of deliberate 
 malice, letting his voice italicize the more 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 189 
 
 scandalous transitions of what was certainly 
 a very foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion. 
 
 Little men have a decided inclination for big 
 women, and vice versd ; and indeed in a little man 
 the preference for big women will be so much the 
 more passionate if he himself was begotten by a big 
 father, and only remains little through the influence 
 of his mother ; because he has inherited from his 
 father the vascular system and its energy which was 
 able to supply a large body with blood. If, on the 
 other hand, his father and grandfather were both 
 little, that inclination will make itself less felt. At 
 the foundation of the aversion of a big woman to 
 big men lies the intention of Nature to avoid too big 
 a race. . . . Further, the consideration as to the 
 complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark 
 persons or brunettes ; but the latter seldom prefer the 
 former. The reason is, that fair hair and blue eyes 
 are in themselves a variation from the type, almost an 
 abnormity, analogous to white mice, or at least to grey 
 horses. In no part of the world, not even in the 
 vicinity of the Pole, are they indigenous, except in 
 Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian origin. I 
 may here express my opinion in passing that the 
 white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but 
 that by nature he has a black or brown skin, like our 
 forefathers the Hindus ; that consequently a white 
 man has never originally sprung from the womb of 
 Nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white 
 race, much as this is talked of, but every white man 
 is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange 
 world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and 
 like this requires in winter the hothouse, in the 
 course of thousands of years man became white. 
 The gipsies, an Indian race which immigrated only 
 
190 BOON 
 
 about four centuries ago, show the transition from the 
 complexion of the Hindu to our own. Therefore in 
 sexual love ]S[ature strives to return to dark hair and 
 brown eyes as the primitive type ; but the white 
 colour of the skin has become second nature, though 
 not so that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, 
 each one also seeks in the particular parts of the 
 body the corrective of his own defects and aberrations, 
 and does so the more decidedly the more important 
 the part is. Therefore snub-nosed individuals have an 
 inexpressible liking for hook-noses, parrot-faces ; and 
 it is the same with regard to all other parts. Men 
 with excessively slim, long bodies and limbs can find 
 beauty in a body which is even beyond measure 
 stumpy and short. . . . Whoever is himself in some 
 respects very perfect does not indeed seek and love 
 imperfection in this respect, but is yet more easily 
 reconciled to it than others ; because he himself in- 
 sures the children against great imperfection of this 
 part. For example, whoever is himself very white 
 will not object to a yellow complexion ; but whoever 
 has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely 
 beautiful.' (You will note that he perceives he has 
 practically contradicted this a few lines before, and 
 that evidently he has gone back and stuck in that 
 saving clause about a white skin being second nature.) 
 ' The rare case in which a man falls in love with a 
 • decidedly ugly woman occurs when, beside the exact 
 harmony of the degree of sex explained above, the 
 whole of her abnormities are precisely the opposite, 
 and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then 
 wont to reach a high degree. . . .' 
 
 " And so on and so on," said Wilkins. 
 " Just a foolish, irresponsible saying of 
 things. And all this stuff, this celibate cere- 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 191 
 
 bration, you must remember, is not even 
 fresh ; it was said far more funnily and 
 pleasantly by old Campanella in his ' City 
 of the Sun.' And, mind you, this isn't a 
 side issue Schopenhauer is upon ; it isn't 
 a moment of relaxation ; this argument is 
 essential to the whole argument of his 
 philosophy. ..." 
 
 " But after all," said Boon, " Schopen- 
 hauer is hardly to be considered a modern. 
 He was pre-Darwinian." 
 
 " Exactly why I begin with him," said 
 Wilkins. " He was a contemporary of 
 Darwin, and it was while Darwin was 
 patiently and industriously building up 
 evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent 
 of it, a complete doctrine about the Will 
 to Live, was being poured out. But what 
 I want you to notice is that while the sort 
 of cautious massing of evidence, the close 
 reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that dis- 
 tinguished the method of Darwin and Hux- 
 ley, are scarcely to be met with anywhere 
 to-day, this spouting style of doing things is 
 everywhere. Take any of the stuff of that 
 intellectual jackdaw, Bernard Shaw, and you 
 will find the Schopenhauer method in full 
 
192 BOON 
 
 development ; caught-up ideas, glib, irra- 
 tional transitions, wild assertions about the 
 Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about 
 ' fear-poisoned ' meat, about medical science, 
 about economic processes, about Russia, 
 about the Irish temperament and the English 
 intelligence, about the thoughts and mental 
 processes of everybody and every sort of 
 mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly 
 positive ever to be systematically answered. 
 And yet half at least of the English-speaking 
 intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the 
 thought process of the world. Schopenhauer 
 was a pioneer in the game of impudent 
 assertion, very properly disregarded by his 
 own generation ; Shaw's dementia samples 
 this age. You see my case ? In any ration- 
 ally trained, clear-headed period Shaw would 
 have been looked into, dissected, and dis- 
 posed of long ago. . . . And here I have 
 two other of the voices that this time 
 respects. It is all my argument that they 
 are respected now enormously, Boon ; not 
 merely that they exist. Men to talk and 
 write foolishly, to make groundless positive 
 statements and to misapprehend an opponent 
 there have always been, but this age now 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 193 
 
 tolerates and accepts them. Here is that 
 invalid Englishman, Houston Stewart Cham- 
 berlain, who found a more congenial, in- 
 tellectual atmosphere in Germany, and this 
 is his great book, ' The Foundations of the 
 Nineteenth Century.' This book has been 
 received with the utmost solemnity in the 
 highest quarters ; nowhere has it been 
 handed over to the derision which is its only 
 proper treatment. You remember a rather 
 readable and rather pretentious history we 
 had in our schooldays, full of bad ethnology 
 about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. 
 Green's ' History of the English People ' ; it 
 was part of that movement of professorial 
 barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and 
 anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman 
 were leaders ; it smelt of Carlyle and 
 Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic 
 Renascence. Well, that was evidently the 
 germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here " 
 
 Wilkins turned over the pages. 
 
 " Here he is, in fairly good form. It is 
 a section called ' The Turning Point,' and 
 it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's 
 ' our ancestors the Hindus.' It is part of 
 a sketch in outline of the history of the past. 
 
 13 
 
194 BOON 
 
 ' The important thing,' he says, is to ' fix 
 the turning-point of the history of Europe.' 
 While he was at it he might just as well 
 have fixed the equator of the history of 
 Europe and its sparking-plug and the posi- 
 tion of its liver. Now, listen — 
 
 " ' The awakening of the Teutonicfpeoples to the 
 consciousness of their all-important vocation as the 
 founders of a completely new civilization and culture 
 marks the turning-point ; the year 1200 can be 
 designated the central moment of this awakening.' 
 
 " Just consider that. He does not even 
 trouble to remind us of the very considerable 
 literature that must exist, of course, as 
 evidence of that awakening. He just flings 
 the statement out, knowing that his sort 
 of follower swallows all such statements 
 blind, and then, possibly with some qualms 
 of doubt about what may have been 
 happening in Spain and Italy and India 
 and China and Japan, he goes on — 
 
 " ' Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny 
 that the inhabitants of Northern Europe have become 
 the makers of the world's history, At no time have 
 they stood alone . , . others, too, have exercised in- 
 fluence^ — indeed, great influence — upon the destinies of 
 mankind, but then always merely as opponents of the 
 men from the north. . . .' 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 195 
 
 " Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded 
 the Mogul Empire in India just about that 
 time, and was to lay the foundations of the 
 Yuen dynasty, and prepare the way for the 
 great days of the Mings, never knew how 
 mere his relations were with these marvellous 
 ' men from the north.' The Tartars, it 
 is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere 
 about twelve hundred. . . . But let us 
 get on to more of the recital of Teutonic 
 glories. 
 
 " ' If, however, the Teutons were not the only 
 people who moulded the world's history ' (generoua 
 admission !) ' they unquestionably ' (that unquestion- 
 ably !) ' deserve the first place ; all those who appear 
 as genuine shapers of the destinies of mankind, 
 whether as builders of States or as discoverers of new 
 thoughts and of original art ' (oh Japan ! oh Ming 
 dynasty 1 oh art and life of India !) ' belong to the 
 Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is 
 short lived ' (astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, 
 modern science generally I) ; ' the Mongolians destroy 
 but do not create anything ' (Samarkand, Delhi, 
 Pekin) ; ' the great Italians of the rinascimento were 
 all born either in the north, saturated with Lombardic, 
 Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in the extreme Germano- 
 Hellenic south ; in Spain it was the Western Goths 
 who formed the element of life ; the Jews are working 
 out their " Renaissance " of to-day by following in 
 every sphere as closely as possible the example of 
 the Teutonic peoples.' 
 
196 BOON 
 
 " That dodge of claiming all the great 
 figures of the non-Teutonic nations as 
 Teutons is carried out to magnificent ex- 
 tremes. Dante is a Teuton on the strength 
 of his profile and his surname, and there is 
 some fine play about the race of Christ. He 
 came from Galilee, notoriously non-Jewish, 
 and so on ; but Lord Redesdale, who writes 
 a sympathetic Introduction, sets the seal 
 on the Teutonic nationality of Christ by" 
 reminding us that Joseph was only the 
 putative father. . . . 
 
 " It makes a born Teuton like myself feel 
 his divinity," said Wilkins, and read, 
 browsing : " ' From the moment the Teuton 
 
 awakes a new world begins to open out ' 
 
 Um ! Um ! . . . Oh, here we are again ! — 
 
 " ' It is equally untrue that our culture is a renais- 
 sance of the Hellenic and the Roman ; it was only 
 after the birth of the Teutonic peoples that the 
 renaissance of past achievements was possible and 
 not vice versd.' ... I wonder what exactly vice versd 
 means there ! . . . ' The mightiest creators of that 
 epoch — a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo — do not know 
 a word of Greek or Latin.' 
 
 " The stalwart ignorance of it ! Little 
 Latin and less Greek even Ben Jonson 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 197 
 
 allowed our William, and manifestly he 
 was fed on Tudor translations. And the 
 illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an in- 
 spiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his 
 readers. Now, in itself there is no marvel 
 in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignor- 
 ance ; it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, 
 written down ; and, God forgive us ! most 
 of us have talked in this way at one time 
 or another ; the sign and the wonder for 
 you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken 
 quite seriously by all Germany and England 
 and America, that it is accepted as first- 
 rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, 
 cut up, and sent to the butterman. It is 
 Modern Thought. It is my second sample 
 of the contemporary Mind of the Race. 
 And now, gentlemen, we come to the third 
 great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. 
 Nietzsche, I admit, had once a real and 
 valid idea, and his work is built upon that 
 real and valid idea ; it is an idea that comes 
 into the head of every intelligent person 
 who grasps the idea of the secular change 
 of species, the idea of Darwinism, in the 
 course of five or six minutes after the effec- 
 tive grasping. This is the idea that man is 
 
198 BOON 
 
 not final. But Nietzsche was so constituted 
 that to get an idea was to receive a reve- 
 lation ; this step, that every bright mind 
 does under certain circumstances take, 
 seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride 
 only possible to him, and for the rest of his 
 lucid existence he resounded variations, he 
 wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and 
 sham Indian apophthegms, round and about 
 his amazing discovery. And the whole thing 
 is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander 
 Tille's ' Von Darwin bis Nietzsche,' in which 
 this miracle of the obvious, this necessary 
 corollary, is treated as a huge advance of 
 the mind of mankind. No one slays this 
 kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and 
 goes on, a perpetually reinforced torrent 
 of unreason washing through the brain of 
 the race. There was a time when the 
 general intelligence would have resisted and 
 rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamber- 
 lain, Shaw ; now it resists such invasions 
 less and less. That, Boon, is my case." 
 
 Wilkins, with his little pile of books for 
 reference, his sombre manner, and his per- 
 sistence, was indeed curiously suggestive 
 of an advocate opening a trial. The Mind 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 199 
 
 of the Race was far less of a continuity 
 than it was when a generally recognized 
 and understood orthodox Christianity held 
 it together, as a backbone holds together 
 the ribs and limbs and head' of a body. 
 That manifestly was what he was driving 
 at, as Dodd presently complained. In those 
 stabler days every one with ideas, willingly 
 or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal 
 core, had to link up to it even if the con- 
 nection was used only as a point of departure. 
 Now more and more, as in these three 
 examples, people began irresponsibly in the 
 air, with rash assertions about life and race 
 and the tendency of things. And the louder 
 they shouted, the more fantastic and re- 
 markable they were, the more likely they 
 were to gather a following and establish a 
 fresh vortex in the deliquescent confusion. 
 
 On the whole, Boon was disposed to 
 tolerate these dispersed beginnings. " We 
 attack truth in open order," he said, " instead 
 of in column." 
 
 " I don't mind fresh beginnings," said 
 Wilkins ; "I don't mind open order, but 
 I do object to blank ignorance and sheer 
 misconception. It isn't a new beginning for 
 
200 BOON 
 
 Schopenhauer to say we are descended from 
 Hindus ; it is just stupidity and mental 
 retrogression. We are no more descended 
 from Hindus than Hindus are descended 
 from us ; that we may have a common 
 ancestry is quite a different thing. One 
 might as well say that the chimpanzee is 
 descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from a 
 chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth, 
 it is just a loud lie, that the ' Germanic ' 
 peoples realized anything whatever in the 
 year 1200. But all these — what shall I call 
 them ? — moderns are more and more up to 
 that kind of thing, stating plausible things 
 that have already been disproved, stating 
 things erroneously, inventing pseudo-facts, 
 and so getting off with a flourish. In the 
 fields of ideas, and presently in the fields 
 of action, these wildly kicking personalities 
 have swamped any orderly progress ; they 
 have arrested and disowned all that clearing 
 up of thought and all that patient, triumph- 
 ant arrangement of proven fact which 
 characterized the late eighteenth and the 
 first half of the nineteenth century. During 
 that time the great analysis of biological 
 science went on, which culminated in an 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 201 
 
 entire revision of our conceptions of species, 
 which opened a conceivable and hitherto 
 undreamed-of past and future to the human 
 imagination, which seemed to have revised 
 and relaid the very foundations of philo- 
 sophical discussion. And on that founda- 
 tion, what has been done ? " 
 
 " Naturally," cried Boon, " after a great 
 achievement there must be a pause. The 
 Mind of the Race must have its digestive 
 interludes." 
 
 " But this is indigestion ! First comes 
 Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of 
 the life process as a struggle of individuals 
 to survive. His word ' Evolution ' is the 
 quintessence of the misunderstanding ; his 
 image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding 
 through selfishness, masked plausibly and 
 disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision 
 of the truth. From that sort of thing we 
 go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man, 
 the megatherium individual of futurity, the 
 large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then 
 comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent 
 thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving 
 force with a simple name for the whole 
 process ; the ' Life Force ' and ' Will,' and 
 
202 BOON 
 
 so on. These things, my dear Boon, are 
 just the appalling bubbles of gas that show 
 how completely the Mind of the Race has 
 failed to assimilate. . . ." 
 
 " It is remarkable," said Boon, " how a 
 metaphor may run away with the clearest 
 of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not 
 so consistently gastric as all that." 
 
 " You started the metaphor," said Wilkins. 
 
 " And you mounted it and it bolted with 
 you. To these unpleasant consequences. . . . 
 Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after 
 the superficialities of the sixties and seven- 
 ties and eighties people's minds have been 
 getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the 
 reality of specific instability. The new body 
 of intellectual experiment, which isn't indi- 
 gestion at all but only a preliminary attack, 
 is all that mass of trial thinking that one 
 lumps together in one's mind when one 
 speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown 
 of specific boundaries the validity of the 
 logical process beyond finite ends breaks 
 down. We make our truth for our visible 
 purposes as we go along, and if it does not 
 work we make it afresh. We see life once 
 more as gallant experiment. The boundaries 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 203 
 
 of our universe recede not only in time and 
 space but thought. The hard-and-fast line 
 between the scientific and the poetic method 
 disappears. . . ." 
 
 " And you get Bergson," said Wilkins 
 triumphantly. 
 
 " Bergson is of that class and type that 
 exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse 
 to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He 
 takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that 
 constitute the movement of Pragmatism and 
 he makes a soft scepticism for delicate 
 minds with easy ways back to any old- 
 established orthodoxy they may regret." 
 
 " But here is my case again," said Wilkins. 
 "It is only through Bergson that the Mind 
 of the Race, the great operating mass mind 
 out there, can take hold of this new system 
 of ideas. . . ." 
 
§3 
 
 But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly 
 launched upon a vital and entirely inconclu- 
 sive controversy. Was the thought process 
 of the world growing, spreading, progress- 
 ing, or was it going to pieces ? The one 
 produced a hundred instances of the en- 
 larging and quickening of men's minds, 
 the other replied by instancing vulgarities, 
 distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense. 
 Did public advertisements make a more 
 intelligent or less intelligent appeal now 
 than they used to do ? For half an after- 
 noon they fought over the alleged degen- 
 eration of the Times, multiplying instances, 
 comparing the " Parnellism and Crime " 
 pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe's war indis- 
 cretions, and discussing the comparative 
 merits of Mr. Moberly Bell's campaign to 
 sell the twenty-year-old " Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica " and found a " Book Club " 
 
 201 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 205 
 
 that should abolish booksellers, with the 
 displayed and illustrated advertisements of 
 the new period. 
 
 The talk, you see, went high and low 
 and came to no conclusion ; but I think 
 that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in 
 shaking Boon's half-mystical confidence in 
 the inevitableness of human wisdom. The 
 honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon 
 did seem to establish that in physical science 
 there had been, and was still, a great and 
 growing process ; but he was not able to 
 prove, he could only express his faith, that 
 the empire of sanity was spreading to greater 
 and more human issues. He had to fall 
 back upon prophecy. Presently there would 
 be another big lunge forward, and so forth. 
 But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a 
 case for a steady rotting in political life, an 
 increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence 
 in the last twenty years : he instanced 
 Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the 
 vehement Feminist movement, the malignant 
 silliness of the " rebel " Labour Press, the 
 rankness of German " patriotism." . . . 
 
 " But there are young people thinking," 
 said Boon at last. " It isn't just these 
 
206 BOON 
 
 matured showings. Where one youth thought 
 thirty years ago, fifty are thinking now. 
 These wild, loud things are just an irruption. 
 Just an irruption. ..." 
 
 The mocker was distressed. 
 
 The idea of active intellectual wrongness 
 distressed him so much that he cast aside 
 all his detachment from Hallery, and showed 
 plainly that to this imaginary Hallery's idea 
 of a secular growth of wisdom in mankind he 
 himself was quite passionately clinging. . . . 
 
He was so distressed that one day he talked 
 about it to me alone for some time. 
 
 " Wilkins," he said, " insists on Facts. It 
 is difficult to argue with him on that basis. 
 You see, I don't intend Hallery's view to be 
 an induction from facts. It's a conviction, 
 an intuition. It is not the sort of thing 
 one perceives after reading the newspaper 
 placards or looking at the bookshelves in 
 the British Museum. It's something one 
 knows for certain in the middle of the night. 
 There is the Mind of the Race, I mean. It 
 is something General ; it is a refuge from 
 the Particular and it is in the nature of God. 
 That's plain, isn't it ? And through it there 
 is Communion. These phases, these irrup- 
 tions are incidents. If all the world went 
 frantic ; if presently some horrible thing, 
 some monstrous war smashed all books and 
 thinking and civilization, still the mind would 
 
 207 
 
208 BOON 
 
 be there. It would immediately go on again 
 and presently it would pick up all that had 
 been done before — just as a philosopher 
 would presently go on reading again after 
 the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with 
 the crockery. ... It keeps on anyhow. . . . 
 
 " Oh ! I don't know how, my dear fellow. 
 I can't explain. I'm not telling you of 
 something I've reasoned out and discovered ; 
 I'm telling you of something I know. It's 
 faith if you like. It keeps on and I know 
 it keeps on — although I can't for the life of 
 me tell how. ..." 
 
 He stopped. He flushed. 
 
 " That, you see, is Hallery's point of view," 
 he said awkwardly. 
 
 " But Wilkins perhaps wouldn't contradict 
 that. His point is merely that to be exact 
 about words, that God-Mind, that General 
 Mind of yours, isn't exactly to be called the 
 Mind of the Race." 
 
 " But it is the Mind of the Race," said 
 Boon. " It is the Mind of the Race. Most 
 of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to 
 it. Much of the Race is talking and doing 
 nonsense and cruelty ; astray, absurd. That 
 does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It 
 
WILKINS MAKES OBJECTIONS 209 
 
 matters to Literature. It matters because 
 Literature, the clearing of minds, the release 
 of minds, the food and guidance of minds, 
 is the way, Literature is illumination, the 
 salvation of ourselves and of every one from 
 isolations., . . ." 
 
 " Might be," I suggested. 
 
 "Must be," he said "Oh! I know I've 
 lived behind Miss Bathwick. . . . But I'm 
 breaking out. . . . One of these days I will 
 begin to dictate to her — and not mind what 
 she does. . . . I'm a successful nobody — 
 superficially — and it's only through my pri- 
 vate thoughts and private jeering that I've 
 come to see these things. ..." 
 
 14 
 
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 
 
 The Beginning of "The Wild Asses of 
 the Devil " 
 
 §1 
 
 One day a little time after the argument 
 with Wilkins, Boon told me he would read 
 me a story. He read it from a pencilled 
 manuscript. After some anxious seeking I 
 have found most of it again and put it 
 together. Only a few pages are missing. 
 Here is the story. I am sorry to say it was 
 never finished. But he gave me a very clear 
 conception of the contemplated end. That 
 I will indicate in its place. And I think 
 you will see how its idea springs from the 
 talk with Wilkins I have "had to render in 
 the "previous^chapter. 
 
 210 
 
§2 
 
 There was once an Author who pursued 
 fame and prosperity in a pleasant villa on 
 the south coast of England. He wrote 
 stories of an acceptable nature and rejoiced 
 in a growing public esteem, carefully offend- 
 ing no one and seeking only to please. He 
 had married under circumstances of qualified 
 and tolerable romance a lady who wrote 
 occasional but otherwise regular verse, he 
 was the father of a little daughter, whose 
 reported sayings added much to his popu- 
 larity, and some of the very best people in 
 the land asked him to dinner. He was a 
 deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime 
 Minister, a literary knighthood was no re- 
 mote possibility for hirn, and even the Nobel 
 Prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not 
 altogether beyond his hopes. And this 
 amount of prosperity had not betrayed him 
 into any un-English pride. He remembered 
 
 211 
 
212 BOON 
 
 that manliness and simplicity which are 
 expected from authors. He smoked pipes 
 and not the excellent cigars he could have 
 afforded. He kept his hair cut and never 
 posed. He did not hold himself aloof from 
 people of the inferior and less successful 
 classes. He habitually travelled third class 
 in order to study the characters he put into 
 his delightful novels ; he went for long walks 
 and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew 
 out his gardener. And though he worked 
 steadily, he did not give^up the care of his 
 body, which threatened a certain plumpness 
 and what is more to the point, a localized 
 plumpness, not generally spread over the 
 system but exaggerating the anterior equator. 
 This expansion was his only care. He 
 thought about fitness and played tennis, 
 and every day, wet or fine, he went for at 
 least an hour's walk. . . . 
 
 Yet this man, so representative of Edward- 
 ian literature — for it is in the reign of good 
 King Edward the story begins — in spite of 
 his enviable achievements and prospects, was 
 doomed to the most exhausting and dubious 
 adventures before his life came to its un- 
 honoured end. . . . 
 
THE WILD ASSES 213 
 
 Because I have not told you everything 
 about him. Sometimes — in the morning 
 sometimes — he would be irritable and have 
 quarrels with his shaving things, and there 
 were extraordinary moods when it would 
 seem to him that living quite beautifully 
 in a pleasant villa and being well-off and 
 famous, and writing books that were always 
 good-humoured and grammatical and a little 
 distinguished in an inoffensive way, was 
 about as boring and intolerable a life as any 
 creature with a soul to be damned could 
 possibly pursue. Which shows only that 
 God in putting him together had not for- 
 gotten that viscus the liver which is usual 
 on such occasions. . . . 
 
214 BOON 
 
 The winter at the seaside, is less agreeable 
 and more bracing than the summer, and 
 there were days when this Author had almost 
 to force himself through the wholesome, 
 necessary routines of his life, when the south- 
 west wind savaged his villa and roared in the 
 chimneys and slapped its windows with 
 gustsful of rain and promised to wet that 
 Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down 
 his neck and round his wrists and ankles 
 directly he put his nose outside his door. 
 And the grey waves he saw from his window 
 came rolling inshore under the hurrying grey 
 rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along 
 the undercliff into vast, feathering fountains 
 of foam and sud and send a salt-tasting 
 spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he 
 would put on his puttees and his waterproof 
 cape and his biggest brierwood pipe, and out 
 he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, 
 knowing that so he would be all the brighter 
 for his nice story-writing after tea. 
 
 On such a day he went out. He went 
 out very resolutely along the seaside gardens 
 of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved 
 to oblige himself to go right past the harbour 
 and up to the top of the east cliff before 
 
THE WILD ASSES 215 
 
 ever he turned his face back to the comforts 
 of fire and wife and tea and buttered 
 
 "COclST. # • • 
 
 And somewhere, perhaps half a mile 
 away from home, he became aware of a 
 queer character trying to keep abreast of 
 him. 
 
 His impression was of a very miserable 
 black man in the greasy, blue-black garments 
 of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steam- 
 ship in the harbour, and going with a sort 
 of lame hobble. 
 
 As he passed this individual the Author 
 had a transitory thought of how much 
 Authors don't know in the world, how much, 
 for instance, this shivering, cringing body 
 might be hiding within itself, of inestimable 
 value as " local colour " if only one could 
 get hold of it for " putting into " one's 
 large acceptable novels. Why doesn't one 
 sometimes tap these sources ? Kipling, for 
 example, used to do so, with most suc- 
 cessful results. . . . And then the Author 
 became aware that this enigma was hurry- 
 ing to overtake him. He slackened his 
 pace. . . . 
 
 The creature wasn't asking for a light; 
 
216 BOON 
 
 it was begging for a box of matches. And, 
 what was odd, in quite good English. 
 
 The Author surveyed the beggar and 
 slapped his pockets. Never had he seen so 
 miserable a face. It was by no means a 
 prepossessing face, with its aquiline nose, its 
 sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot eyes 
 much too close together, its V-shaped, dis- 
 honest mouth and drenched chin-tuft. And 
 yet it was attractively animal and pitiful. 
 The idea flashed suddenly into the Author's 
 head : " Why not, instead of going on, 
 thinking emptily, through this beastly 
 weather — why not take this man back home 
 now, to the warm, dry study, and give him 
 a hot drink and something to smoke, and 
 draw him out ? " 
 
 Get something technical and first-hand 
 that would rather score off Kipling. 
 
 " It's damnably cold ! " he shouted, in a 
 sort of hearty, forecastle voice. 
 
 " It's worse than that," said the strange 
 stoker. 
 
 " It's a hell of a day ! " said the Author, 
 more forcible than ever. 
 
 " Don't remind me of hell," said the stoker, 
 in a voice of inappeasable regret. 
 
THE WILD ASSES 
 
 217 
 
 The Author slapped his pockets again. 
 " You've got an infernal cold. Look here, 
 my man — confound it ! would you like a 
 hot grog ? . . ." 
 
 \ ^ NT 
 
§3 
 
 The scene shifts to the Author's study — a 
 blazing coal fire, the stoker sitting dripping 
 and steaming before it, with his feet inside 
 the fender, while the Author fusses about 
 the room, directing the preparation of hot 
 drinks. The Author is acutely aware not 
 only of the stoker but of himself. The 
 stoker has probably never been in the home 
 of an Author before ; he is probably awe- 
 stricken at the array of books, at the com- 
 fort, convenience, and efficiency of the home, 
 at the pleasant personality entertaining him. 
 . . . Meanwhile the Author does not forget 
 that the stoker is material, is " copy," is 
 being watched, observed. So he poses and 
 watches, until presently he forgets to pose in 
 his astonishment at the thing he is observing. 
 Because this stoker is rummier than a stoker 
 ought to be — 
 He does not simply accept a hot drink; 
 
 218 
 
THE WILD ASSES 219 
 
 he informs his host just how hot the drink 
 must be to satisfy him. 
 
 " Isn't there something you could put 
 in it — something called red pepper ? I've 
 tasted that once or twice. It's good. If you 
 could put in a bit of red pepper." 
 
 " If you can stand that sort of thing ? " 
 
 " And if there isn't much water, can't you 
 set light to the stuff ? Or let me drink it 
 boiling, out of a pannikin or something ? 
 Pepper and all." 
 
 Wonderful fellows, these stokers ! The 
 Author went to the bell and asked for red 
 pepper. 
 
 And then as he came back to the fire he 
 saw something that he instantly dismissed as 
 an optical illusion, as a mirage effect of the 
 clouds of steam his guest was disengaging. 
 The stoker was sitting, all crouched up, as 
 close over the fire as he could contrive ; 
 and he was holding his black hands, not to 
 the fire but in the fire, holding them 
 pressed flat against two red, glowing masses 
 of coal. . . . He glanced over his shoulder at 
 the Author with a guilty start, and then in- 
 stantly the Author perceived that the hands 
 were five or six inches away from the coal.j 
 
220 BOON 
 
 Then came smoking. The Author pro- 
 duced, one of his big cigars — for although a 
 conscientious pipe-smoker himself he gave 
 people Cigars ; and then, again struck by 
 something odd, he went off into a corner of 
 the room where a little oval mirror gave him 
 a means of watching the stoker undetected. 
 And this is what he saw. 
 
 He saw the stoker, after a furtive glance 
 at him, deliberately turn the cigar round, 
 place the lighted end in his mouth, inhale 
 strongly, and blow a torrent of sparks and 
 smoke out of his nose. His firelit face as he 
 did this expressed a diabolical relief. Then 
 very hastily he reversed the cigar again, and 
 turned round to look at the Author. The 
 Author turned slowly towards him. 
 
 " You like that cigar ? " he asked, after 
 one of those mutual pauses that break down 
 a pretence. 
 
 " It's admirable." 
 
 " Why do you smoke it the other way 
 round ? " 
 
 The stoker perceived he was caught. " It's 
 a stokehole trick," he said. " Do you mind 
 if I do it ? I didn't think you saw." 
 
 " Pray smoke just as you like," said 
 
THE WILD ASSES 221 
 
 the Author, and advanced to watch the 
 operation. 
 
 It was exactly like the fire-eater at a 
 village fair. The man stuck the burning 
 cigar into his mouth and blew sparks out of 
 his nostrils. " Ah ! " he said, with a note 
 of genuine satisfaction. And then, with the 
 cigar still burning in the corner of his mouth, 
 he turned to the fire and began to rearrange 
 the burning coals with Ms hands so as to pile 
 up a great glowing mass. He picked up 
 flaming and white-hot lumps as one might 
 pick up lumps of sugar. The Author watched 
 him, dumbfounded. 
 
 " I say ! " he cried. " You stokers get a 
 bit tough." 
 
 The stoker dropped the glowing piece of 
 coal in his hand. " I forgot," he said, and 
 sat back a little. 
 
 " Isn't that a bit — extra ? " asked the 
 Author, regarding him. " Isn't that some 
 sort of trick ? " 
 
 " We get so tough down there," said the 
 stoker, and paused discreetly as the servant 
 came in with the red pepper. 
 
 "Now you can drink," said the Author, 
 and set himself to mix a drink of a pungency 
 
222 BOON 
 
 that he would have considered murderous 
 ten minutes before. When he had done, the 
 stoker reached over and added more red 
 pepper. 
 
 " I don't quite see how it is your hand 
 doesn't burn," said the Author as the stoker 
 drank. The stoker shook his head over the 
 uptilted glass. 
 
 " Incombustible," he said, putting it down. 
 " Could I have just a tiny drop more ? 
 Just brandy and pepper, if you don't mind. 
 Set alight. I don't care for water except 
 when it's super-heated steam." 
 
 And as the Author poured out another 
 stiff glass of this incandescent brew, the 
 stoker put up his hand and scratched the 
 matted black hair over his temple. Then 
 instantly he desisted and sat looking 
 wickedly at the Author, while the Author 
 stared at him aghast. For at the corner 
 of his square, high, narrow forehead, re- 
 vealed for an instant by the thrusting back 
 of the hair, a curious stumpy excrescence 
 had been visible ; and the top of his ear 
 — he had a pointed top to his ear ! 
 
 " A-a-a-a-h ! " said the Author, with dilated 
 eyes. 
 
THE WILD ASSES 223 
 
 " A-a-a-a-h ! " said the stoker, in hopeless 
 distress. 
 
 " But you aren't ! " 
 
 " I know — I know I'm not. I know. 
 . . . I'm a devil. A poor, lost, homeless 
 devil." 
 
 And suddenly, with a gesture of inde- 
 scribable despair, the apparent stoker buried 
 his face in his hands and burst into 
 tears. 
 
 " Only man who's ever been decently 
 kind to me," he sobbed. " And now — 
 you'll chuck me out again into the beastly 
 wet and cold. . . . Beautiful fire. . . . Nice 
 drink. . . . Almost homelike. . . . Just to 
 torment me. . . . Boo-ooh ! " 
 
 And let it be recorded to the credit of 
 our little Author, that he did overcome his 
 momentary horror, that he did go quickly 
 round the table, and that he patted that 
 dirty stoker's shoulder. 
 
 " There !" he said. "There! Don't mind 
 my rudeness. Have another nice drink. 
 Have a hell of a drink. I won't turn you 
 out if you're unhappy — on a day like this. 
 Have just a mouthful of pepper, man, and 
 pull yourself together." 
 
224 BOON 
 
 And suddenly the poor devil caught hold 
 of his arm. " Nobody good to me," he 
 sobbed- " Nobody good to me." And his 
 tears ran down over the Author's plump 
 little hand — scalding tears. 
 
§4 
 
 All really wonderful things happen rather 
 suddenly and without any great emphasis 
 upon their wonderfulness, and this was no 
 exception to the general rule. This Author 
 went on comforting his devil as though this 
 was nothing more than a chance encounter 
 with an unhappy child, and the devil let his 
 grief and discomfort have vent in a manner 
 that seemed at the time as natural as any- 
 thing could be. He was clearly a devil of 
 feeble character and uncertain purpose, much 
 broken down by harshness and cruelty, 
 and it throws a curious light upon the 
 general state of misconception with regard 
 to matters diabolical that it came as a quite 
 pitiful discovery to our Author that a devil 
 could be unhappy and heart-broken. For a 
 long time his most earnest and persistent 
 questioning could gather nothing except that 
 his guest was an exile from a land of great 
 
 15 a« 
 
226 BOON 
 
 warmth and considerable entertainment, and 
 it was only after considerable further applica- 
 tions of brandy and pepper that the sobbing 
 confidences of the poor creature grew into 
 the form of a coherent and understandable 
 narrative. 
 
 And then it became apparent that this 
 person was one of the very lowest types of 
 infernal denizen, and that his role in the 
 dark realms of Dis had been that of watcher 
 and minder of a herd of sinister beings 
 hitherto unknown to our Author, the Devil's 
 Wild Asses, which pastured in a stretch of 
 meadows near the Styx. They were, he 
 gathered, unruly, dangerous, and enterprising 
 beasts, amenable only to a certain formula 
 of expletives, which instantly reduced them 
 to obedience. These expletives the stoker- 
 devil would not repeat ; to do so except 
 when actually addressing one of the Wild 
 Asses would, he explained, involve torments 
 of the most terrible description. The bare 
 thought of them gave him a shivering fit. 
 But he gave the Author to understand that 
 to crack these curses as one drove the Wild 
 Asses to and from their grazing on the 
 Elysian fields was a by no means disagreeable 
 
THE WILD ASSES 227 
 
 amusement. The ass-herds would try who 
 could crack the loudest until the welkin 
 rang. 
 
 And speaking of these things, the poor 
 creature gave a picture of diabolical life 
 that impressed the Author as by no means 
 unpleasant for any one with a suitable 
 constitution. It was like the Idylls of Theo- 
 critus done in fire ; the devils drove their 
 charges along burning lanes and sat gossiping 
 in hedges of flames, rejoicing in the warm 
 dry breezes (which it seems are rendered 
 peculiarly bracing by the faint flavour of 
 brimstone in the air), and watching the 
 harpies and furies and witches circling in 
 the perpetual afterglow of that inferior sky. 
 And ever and again there would be holidays, 
 and one would take one's lunch and wander 
 over the sulphur craters picking flowers of 
 sulphur or fishing for the souls of usurers 
 and publishers and house-agents and land- 
 agents in the lakes of boiling pitch. It was 
 good sport, for the usurers and publishers 
 and house-agents and land-agents were 
 always eager to be caught ; they crowded 
 round the hooks and fought violently for the 
 bait, and protested vehemently and enter- 
 
228 BOON 
 
 tainingly against the Rules and Regulations 
 that compelled their instant return to the 
 lake of fire. 
 
 And sometimes when he was on holiday 
 this particular devil would go through the 
 saltpetre dunes, where the witches' brooms 
 grow and the blasted heath is in flower, 
 to the landing-place of the ferry whence the 
 Great Road runs through the shops and 
 banks of the Via Dolorosa to the New Judge- 
 ment Hall, and watch the crowds of damned 
 arriving by the steam ferry-boats of the 
 Consolidated Charon Company. This steam- 
 boat-gazing seems about as popular down 
 there as it is at Folkestone. Almost every 
 day notable people arrive, and, as the devils 
 are very well informed about terrestrial 
 affairs — for of course all the earthly news- 
 papers go straight to hell — whatever else 
 could one expect ? — they get ovations of an 
 almost undergraduate intensity. At times 
 you can hear their cheering or booing, as 
 the case may be, right away on the pastures 
 where the Wild Asses feed. And that had 
 been this particular devil's undoing. 
 
 He had always been interested in the 
 career of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone. . . . 
 
THE WILD ASSES 229 
 
 He was minding the Wild Asses. He 
 knew the risks. He knew the penalties. 
 But when he heard the vast uproar, when 
 he heard the eager voices in the lane of fire 
 saying, " It's Gladstone at last 1 " when he 
 saw how quietly and unsuspiciously the Wild 
 Asses cropped their pasture, the temptation 
 was too much. He slipped away. He saw 
 the great Englishman landed after a slight 
 struggle. He joined in the outcry of 
 " Speech ! Speech ! " He heard the first 
 delicious promise of a Home Rule movement 
 which should break the last feeble links of 
 Celestial Control. . . » 
 
 And meanwhile the Wild Asses escaped— 
 according to the rules and the prophe- 
 cies. . . . 
 
§5 
 
 The little Author sat and listened to this 
 tale of a wonder that never for a moment 
 struck him as incredible. And outside his 
 rain-lashed window the strung-out fishing 
 smacks pitched and rolled on their way 
 home to Folkestone harbour. . . . 
 
 The Wild Asses escaped. 
 
 They got away to the world. And his 
 superior officers took the poor herdsman 
 and tried him and bullied him and passed 
 this judgement upon him : that he must go 
 to the earth and find the Wild Asses, and 
 say to them that certain string of oaths 
 that otherwise must never be repeated, and 
 so control them and bring them back to 
 hell. That — or else one pinch of salt on their 
 tails. It did not matter which. One by one 
 he must bring them back, driving them by 
 spell and curse to the cattle-boat of the 
 ferry. And until he had caught and brought 
 
 230 
 
THE WILD ASSES 231 
 
 them all back he might never return again 
 to the warmth and comfort of his accustomed 
 life. That was his sentence and punishment. 
 And they put him into a shrapnel shell and 
 fired him out among the stars, and when he 
 had a little recovered he pulled himself 
 together and made his way to the world. 
 
 But he never found his Wild Asses and 
 after a little time he gave up trying. 
 
 He gave up trying because the Wild Asses, 
 once they had got out of control, developed 
 the most amazing gifts. They could, for 
 instance, disguise themselves with any sort 
 of human shape, and the only way in which 
 they differed then from a normal human 
 being was — according to the printed paper of 
 instructions that had been given to their 
 custodian when he was fired out — that " their 
 general conduct remains that of a Wild Ass 
 of the Devil." 
 
 " And what interpretation can we put 
 upon that ? " he asked the listening Author. 
 
 And there was one night in the year — 
 Walpurgis Night — when the Wild Asses 
 became visibly great black wild asses and 
 kicked up their hind legs and brayed. They 
 had to. " But then, of course," said the 
 
«32 BOON 
 
 devil, " they would take care to shut them- 
 selves up somewhere when they felt that 
 coming on." 
 
 Like most weak characters, the stoker 
 devil was intensely egotistical. He was 
 anxious to dwell upon his own miseries and 
 discomforts and difficulties and the general 
 injustice of his treatment, and he was care- 
 less and casually indicative about the pecu- 
 liarities of the Wild Asses, the matter which 
 most excited and interested the Author. 
 He bored on with his doleful story, and the 
 Author had to interrupt with questions 
 again and again in order to get any clear 
 idea of the situation. 
 
 The devil's main excuse for his nerveless- 
 ness was his profound ignorance of human 
 nature. " So far as I can see," he said, 
 " they might all be Wild Asses. I tried it 
 once " 
 
 " Tried what ? " 
 
 " The formula. You know." 
 
 " Yes ? " 
 
 " On a man named Sir Edward Carson." 
 
 " Well ? " 
 
 " Ugh I " said the devil. 
 
 " Punishment ? " 
 
THE WILD ASSES 288 
 
 " Don't speak of it. He was just a 
 professional lawyer-politician who had lost 
 his sense of values. » . . How was I to 
 know ? . . > But our people certainly know 
 how to hurt. . . ." 
 
 After that it would seem this poor devil 
 desisted absolutely from any attempt to 
 recover his lost charges. He just tried to 
 live for the moment and make his earthly 
 existence as tolerable as possible. It was 
 clear he hated the world. He found it 
 cold, wet, draughty. * . . " I can't under- 
 stand why everybody insists upon living 
 outside of it," he said. " If you went 
 inside " 
 
 He sought warmth and dryness. For a 
 time he found a kind of contentment in 
 charge of the upcast furnace of a mine, and 
 then he was superseded by an electric-fan. 
 While in this position he read a vivid account 
 of the intense heat in the Red Sea, and he 
 was struck by the idea that if he could get 
 a job as stoker upon an Indian liner he might 
 snatch some days of real happiness during 
 that portion of the voyage. For some time 
 his natural ineptitude prevented his realizing 
 this project, but at last, after some bitter 
 
234 BOON 
 
 experiences of homelessness during a London 
 December, he had been able* to ship on an 
 Indiaward boat — only to get stranded in 
 Folkestone in consequence of a propeller 
 breakdown. And so here he was I 
 
 He paused. 
 
 " But about these Wild Asses ? " said the 
 Author. 
 
 The mournful, dark eyes looked at him 
 , hopelessly. 
 
 " Mightn't they do a lot of mischief ? " 
 asked the Author. 
 
 " They'll do no end of mischief," said the 
 despondent devil. 
 
 " Ultimately you'll catch it for that ? " 
 
 " Ugh ! " said the stoker, trying not to 
 think of it. 
 
§6 
 
 Now the spirit of romantic adventure 
 slumbers in the most unexpected places, 
 and I have already told you of our plump 
 Author's discontents. He had been like a 
 smouldering bomb for some years. Now, he 
 burst out. He suddenly became excited, 
 energetic, stimulating, uplifting. 
 
 The Author upUfts the devil. 
 
 He stood over the drooping devil. 
 
 " But my dear chap ! " he said. " You 
 must pull yourself together. You must do 
 better than this. These confounded brutes 
 
 235 
 
286 BOON 
 
 may be doing all sorts of mischief. While 
 you — shirk. . . ." 
 
 And so on. Real ginger. 
 
 " If I had some one to go with me. Some 
 one who knew his way about." 
 
 The Author took whisky in the excitement 
 of the moment. He began to move very 
 rapidly about his room and make short, 
 sharp gestures. You know how this sort of 
 emotion wells up at times. " We must work 
 from some central place," said the Author. 
 " To begin with, London perhaps." 
 
 It was not two hours later that they 
 started, this Author and this devil he had 
 taken to himself, upon a mission. They 
 went out in overcoats and warm under- 
 clothing — the Author gave the devil a 
 thorough outfit, a double lot of Jaeger's 
 extra thick — and they were resolved to find 
 the Wild Asses of the Devil and send them 
 back to hell, or at least the Author was, in 
 the shortest possible time. In the picture 
 you will see him with a field-glass slung 
 under his arm, the better to watch suspected 
 cases ; in his pocket, wrapped in oiled paper, 
 is a lot of salt to use if by chance he finds 
 a Wild Ass when the devil and his string of 
 
THE WILD ASSES 237 
 
 oaths is not at hand. So he started. And 
 when he had caught and done for the Wild 
 Asses, then the Author supposed that he 
 would come back to his nice little villa and 
 his nice little wife, and to his little daughter 
 who said the amusing things, and to his 
 popularity, his large gilt-edged popularity, 
 and — except for an added prestige — be just 
 exactly the man he had always been. Little 
 knowing that whosoever takes unto himself 
 a devil and goes out upon a quest, goes out 
 upon a quest from which there is no 
 
 returning 
 
 Nevermore. 
 
 Precipitate start of tht Wild Ass hunters. 
 
CHAPTER THE NINTH 
 
 The Hunting of the Wild Asses of the 
 Devil 
 
 §1 
 
 At this point the surviving manuscript 
 comes to an abrupt end. 
 
 But Boon read or extemporized far beyond 
 this point. 
 
 He made a figure that was at once absurd 
 and pitiful of his little Author making this 
 raid upon the world, resolved to detect and 
 exorcise these suspected Wild Asses, and he 
 told us at great length of how steadily and 
 inevitably the poor enthusiast entangled 
 himself in feuds and false accusations, libels 
 and denunciations, free fights, burglaries, and 
 so to universal execration in a perpetually 
 tightening coil. " I'll stick to it," he 
 squeaks, with every fresh blow of Fate. 
 
 238 
 
THE WILD ASSES 289 
 
 Behind him, with a developing incurable 
 bronchitis that could never be fatal, toiled 
 the devil, more and more despondent, more 
 and more draggle-tailed, voiceless and un- 
 helpful. 
 
 After a time he was perpetually trying to 
 give his Author the slip. 
 
 But continually it is clearer that there 
 were diabolical Wild Asses loose and active 
 in the affairs of the world. . . . 
 
 One day the Author had an inspiration. 
 " Was your lot the only lot that ever 
 escaped ? " 
 
 " Oh no ! " said the devil. " Ages before 
 — there were some. It led to an awful row. 
 Just before the Flood. They had to be 
 drowned out. That's why they've been 
 so stiff with me. . . . I'm not quite sure 
 whether they didn't interbreed. They say 
 in hell that the world has never been quite 
 the same place since. ..." 
 
 You see the scope this story gave Boon's 
 disposition to derision. There were endless 
 things that Boon hated, movements that 
 seemed to him wanton and mischievous, 
 outbreaks of disastrous violence, evil ideas. 
 I should get myself into as much hot water 
 
240 JBUUJN 
 
 as his Author did if I were to tell all this 
 poor man's adventures. He went to Ulster, 
 he pursued prominent Tariff Reformers, he 
 started off to Mexico and came back to 
 investigate Pan-Germanism. I seem to 
 remember his hanging for days about the 
 entrance to Printing House Square. . . . 
 And there was a scene in the House of 
 Commons. The Author and the devil had 
 been tracking a prominent politician — never 
 mind whom — with the growing belief that 
 here at last they had one of them. And 
 Walpurgis Night grew near. Walpurgis 
 Night came. 
 
 " We must not lose sight of him," said the 
 Author, very alert and ruthless. " If neces- 
 sary we must smash the windows, blow open 
 doors." 
 
 But the great man went down to the House 
 as though nothing could possibly happen. 
 They followed him. 
 
 " He will certainly rush home," said the 
 Author, as the clock crept round to half- 
 past eleven. " But anyhow let us get into 
 the Strangers' Gallery and keep our eyes on 
 him to the last," 
 
 They managed it with difficulty. 
 
THE WILD ASSES 241 
 
 I remember how vividly Boon drew the 
 picture for us : the rather bored House, a 
 coming and going of a few inattentive 
 Members, the nodding Speaker and the 
 clerks, the silent watchers in the gallery, 
 a little flicker of white behind the grille. 
 And then at five minutes to twelve the 
 honourable Member arose. . . . 
 
 " We were wrong," said the Author. 
 
 " The draught here is fearful," said the 
 devil. " Hadn't we better go ? " 
 
 The honourable Member went on speaking 
 showy, memorable, mischievous things. The 
 seconds ticked away. And then — then it 
 happened. 
 
 The Author made a faint rattling sound in 
 his throat and clung to the rail before him. 
 The devil broke into a cold sweat. There, 
 visible to all men, was a large black Wild 
 Ass, kicking up its heels upon the floor of 
 the House. And braying. 
 
 And nobody was minding ! 
 
 The Speaker listened patiently, one long 
 finger against his cheek. The clerks bowed 
 over the papers. The honourable Member's 
 two colleagues listened like men under an 
 anaesthetic, each sideways, each with his arm 
 
 16 
 
242 BOON 
 
 over the back of the seat. Across the House 
 one Member was furtively writing a letter 
 and three others were whispering together. 
 
 The Author felt for the salt, then he 
 gripped the devil's wrist. 
 
 " Say those words ! " he shouted quite 
 loudly — " say those words ! Say them now. 
 Then — we shall have him." 
 
 But you know those House of Commons 
 ushers. And at that time their usual alert- 
 ness had been much quickened by several 
 Suffragette outrages. Before the devil had 
 got through his second sentence or the 
 Author could get his salt out of his pocket 
 both devil and Author were travelling vio- 
 lently, scruff and pant-seat irresistibly 
 gripped, down Saint Stephen's Hall. . . . 
 
§2 
 
 " And you really begin to think," said 
 Wilkins, " that there has been an increase 
 in violence and unreasonableness in the 
 world ? " 
 
 " My case is that it is an irruption," said 
 Boon. " But I do begin to see a sort of 
 violence of mind and act growing in the 
 world." 
 
 " There has always been something con- 
 vulsive and extravagant in human affairs," 
 said Wilkins. " No public thing, no col- 
 lective thing, has ever had the sanity of 
 men thinking quietly in a study." 
 
 And so we fell to discussing the Mind 
 of the Race again, and whether there was 
 indeed any sanity growing systematically out 
 of human affairs, or whether this Mind of 
 the Race was just a poor tormented rag 
 of partial understanding that would never 
 control the blind forces that had made and 
 
 213 
 
244 BOON 
 
 would destroy N it. And it was inevitable 
 that such a talk should presently drift to 
 the crowning human folly, to that crowned 
 Wild Ass of the Devil, aggressive militarism. 
 That talk was going on, I remember, one 
 very bright, warm, sunny day in May, or it 
 may be in June, of 1914. And we talked 
 of militarism as a nourish, as a kicking up 
 of the national heels, as extravagance and 
 waste ; but, what seems to me so singular 
 now, we none of us spoke of it or thought of 
 it as a thing that could lead to the full 
 horror of a universal war. Human memory 
 is so strange and treacherous a thing that 
 I doubt now if many English people will 
 recall our habitual disregard in those days 
 of war as a probability. We thought of it 
 as a costly, foolish threatening, but that it 
 could actually happen ! 
 
§3 
 
 Some things are so shocking that they seem 
 to have given no shock at all, just as there 
 are noises that are silences because they 
 burst the ears. And for some days after 
 the declaration of war against Germany the 
 whole business seemed a vast burlesque. 
 It was incredible that this great people, for 
 whom all Western Europe has mingled, and 
 will to the end of time mingle, admiration 
 with a certain humorous contempt, was 
 really advancing upon civilization, enor- 
 mously armed, scrupulously prepared, bel- 
 lowing, " Deutschland, Deutschland ueber 
 Alles ! " smashing, destroying, killing. We 
 felt for a time, in spite of reason, that it 
 was a joke, that presently Michael would 
 laugh. . . . 
 
 But by Jove ! the idiot wasn't laugh- 
 ing. . . . 
 
 For some weeks nobody in the circle about 
 
 245 
 
246 BOON 
 
 Boon talked of anything but the war. The 
 Wild Asses of the Devil became an allusion, 
 to indicate all this that was kicking Europe 
 to splinters. We got maps, and still more 
 maps ; we sent into the town for news- 
 papers and got special intelligence by tele- 
 phone ; we repeated and discussed rumours. 
 The Belgians were showing pluck and re- 
 source, but the French were obviously 
 shockingly unprepared. There were weeks 
 — one may confess it now that they have 
 so abundantly proved the contrary — when 
 the French seemed crumpling up like paste- 
 board. They were failing to save the line 
 of the Meuse, Maubeuge, Lille, Laon ; there 
 were surrenders, there was talk of treachery, 
 and General French, left with his flank 
 exposed, made a costly retreat. It was one 
 Sunday in early September that Wilkins 
 came to us with a Sunday Observer. " Look," 
 he said, " they are down on the Seine ! 
 They are sweeping right round behind the 
 Eastern line. They have broken the French 
 in two. Here at Senlis they are almost 
 within sight of Paris. ..." 
 
 Then some London eavesdropper talked of 
 the Uritish retreat. " Kitchener says our 
 
THE WILD ASSES 247 
 
 Army has lost half its fighting value. Our 
 base is to be moved again from Havre to 
 La Rochelle. ..." 
 
 Boon sat on the edge of his hammock. 
 
 " The Germans must be beaten," he said. 
 " The new world is killed ; we go back ten 
 thousand years ; there is no light, no hope, 
 no thought nor freedom any more unless the 
 Germans are beaten. . . . Until the Germans 
 are beaten there is nothing more to be done 
 in art, in literature, in life. They are a 
 dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, 
 interfering, and intolerably conceited people. 
 A world under their dominance will be 
 intolerable. I will not live in it. . . ." 
 
 " I had never believed they would do it," 
 said Wilkins. . . . 
 
 " Both my boys," said Dodd, " have gone 
 into the Officers' Training Corps. They 
 were in their cadet corps at school." 
 
 " Wasn't one an engineer ? " asked Boon. 
 
 " The other was beginning to paint rather 
 well," said Dodd. " But it all has to stop." 
 
 " I suppose I shall have to do some- 
 thing," said the London eavesdropper. " I'm 
 thirty-eight. ... I can ride and I'm pretty 
 fit. . . . It's a nuisance." 
 
248 BOON 
 
 " What is a man of my kind to do ? " 
 asked Wilkins. " I'm forty-eight." 
 
 " I can't believe the French are as bad 
 as they seem," said Boon. " But, anyhow, 
 we've no business to lean on the French. . . . 
 But I wonder now Pass me that map." 
 
§4 
 
 Next week things had mended, and the 
 French and British were pushing the Germans 
 back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever 
 doubts we had felt about the French were 
 dispelled in that swift week of recovery. 
 They were all right. It was a stupendous 
 relief, for if France had gone down, if her 
 spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberal- 
 ism, all republicanism, all freedom and light 
 would have gone out in this world for 
 centuries. 
 
 But then again at the Aisne the Germans 
 stood, and our brisk rush of hope sobered 
 down towards anxiety as the long flanking 
 movement stretched towards the sea and the 
 Antwerp situation developed. . . . 
 
 By imperceptible degrees our minds began 
 to free themselves from the immediate 
 struggle of the war, from strategy and move- 
 ments, from the daily attempt to unriddle 
 
 249 
 
250 BOON 
 
 from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches, 
 Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and unin- 
 forming maps what was happening. It 
 became clear to us that there were to be no 
 particular dramatic strokes, no sudden, 
 decisive battles, no swift and clear con- 
 clusions. The struggle began to assume in 
 our minds its true proportions, its true 
 extent, in time, in space, in historical con- 
 sequence. We had thought of a dramatic 
 three months' conflict and a redrawn map 
 of Europe ; we perceived we were in the 
 beginnings of a far vaster conflict ; the end 
 of an age ; the slow, murderous testing and 
 condemnation of whole systems of ideas 
 that had bound men uneasily in communities 
 for all our lives. We discussed — as all the 
 world was discussing — the huge organization 
 of sentiment and teaching that had produced 
 this aggressive German patriotism, .this tre- 
 mendous national unanimity. Ford Madox 
 Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a 
 disciplined professoriate, of all education 
 turned into a war propaganda, of the delib- 
 erate official mental moulding of a whole 
 people that was at once fascinating and 
 incredible. We went over Bernhardi and 
 
THE WILD ASSES 251 
 
 Treitschke ; we weighed Nietzsche's share in 
 that mental growth. Our talk drifted with 
 the changing season and Boon's sudden 
 illness after his chill, from his garden to 
 his sitting-room, where he lay wrapped 
 up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient 
 with this unaccustomed experience of 
 ill-health. 
 
 " You see how much easier it is to grow 
 an evil weed than a wholesome plant," he 
 said. " While this great strong wickedness 
 has developed in Germany, what thought 
 have we had in our English-speaking com- 
 munity ? What does our world of letters 
 amount to ? Clowns and dons and prigs, 
 cults of the precious and cults of style, a 
 few squeaking author-journalists and such 
 time-serving scoundrels as I, with my patent 
 Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my 
 thousands a year. None of us with any 
 sense of a whole community or a common 
 purpose ! Where is our strength to go 
 against that strength of the heavy Ger- 
 man mind ? Where is the Mind of our 
 Race ? " 
 
 He looked at me with tired eyes. 
 
 " It has been a joke with us," he said. 
 
252 BOON 
 
 " Is there no power of thought among 
 free men strong enough to swing them 
 into armies that can take this monster by 
 the neck ? Must men be bullied for ever ? 
 Are there no men to think at least as 
 earnestly as one climbs a mountain, and 
 to write with their uttermost pride ? Are 
 there no men to face truth as those boys 
 at Mons faced shrapnel, and to stick for the 
 honour of the mind and for truth and beauty 
 as those lads stuck to their trenches ? Bliss 
 and I have tried to write of all the world of 
 letters, and we have found nothing to write 
 about but posturing and competition and 
 sham reputations, and of dullness and im- 
 pudence hiding and sheltering in the very 
 sheath of the sword of thought. . . . For a 
 little while after the war began our people 
 seemed noble and dignified ; but see now 
 how all Britain breaks after its first quiet 
 into chatter about spies, sentimentality about 
 the architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, 
 the bitter persecution of stray Germans, and 
 petty disputes and recriminations like a pool 
 under a breeze. And below that nothing. 
 While still the big thing goes on, ungrasped, 
 day after day, a monstrous struggle of our 
 
THE WILD ASSES 253 
 
 world against the thing it will not have. . . . 
 No one is clear about what sort of thing we 
 will have. It is a nightmare in which we 
 try continually to escape and have no- 
 whither to escape. . . . What is to come 
 out of this struggle ? Just anything that 
 may come out of it, or something we mean 
 shall come out of it ? " 
 
 He sat up in his bed ; his eyes were 
 bright and he had little red spots in his 
 cheeks. 
 
 " At least the Germans stand for some- 
 thing. It may be brutal, stupid, intolerable, 
 but there it is — a definite intention, a scheme 
 of living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But 
 what the devil do we stand for ? Was there 
 anything that amounted to an intellectual 
 life at all in all our beastly welter of 
 writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish 
 fiction and fiction without style, of lazy 
 history, popular philosophy, slobbering criti- 
 cism, Academic civilities ? Is there any- 
 thing here to hold a people together ? Is 
 there anything to make a new world ? A 
 literature ought to dominate the mind of its 
 people. Yet here comes the gale, and all we 
 have to show for our racial thought, all the 
 
254 BOON 
 
 fastness we have made for our souls, is a 
 flying scud of paper scraps, poems, such 
 poems ! casual articles, whirling headlong in 
 the air, a few novels drowning in the 
 floods. . . ." 
 
§5 
 
 There were times during his illness and 
 depression when we sat about Boon very 
 much after the fashion of Job's Comforters. 
 And I remember an occasion when Wilkins 
 took upon himself the responsibility for a 
 hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's 
 realistic sentimentality something at once akin 
 and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism, 
 so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, 
 and then was moved to spirited contradiction. 
 Wilkins declared that the war was like one 
 of those great illnesses that purge the system 
 of a multitude of minor ills. It was changing 
 the spirit of life about us ; it would end a 
 vast amount of mere pleasure-seeking and 
 aimless extravagance; it was giving people 
 a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid 
 apprehension of human brotherhood. This 
 ineffective triviality in so much of our 
 literary life ' of which Boon complained 
 
 255 
 
256 BOON 
 
 would give place to a sense of urgent 
 purpose. . . . 
 
 " War," said Boon, turning his face towards 
 Wilkins, "does nothing but destroy." 
 
 "All making is destructive," said Wilkins, 
 while Boon moved impatiently ; " the sculptor 
 destroys a block of marble, the painter scatters 
 a tube of paint. ..." 
 
 Boon's eye had something of the expres- 
 sion of a man who watches another ride his 
 favourite horse. 
 
 " See already the new gravity in people's 
 faces, the generosities, the pacification of a 
 thousand stupid squabbles " 
 
 " If you mean Carsonism," said Boon, " it's 
 only sulking until it can cut in again." 
 
 " I deny it," said Wilkins, warming to his 
 faith. "This is the firing of the clay of 
 Western European life. It stops our little 
 arts perhaps — but see the new beauty that 
 comes. . . . We can well spare our professional 
 books and professional writing for a time to 
 get such humour and wonder as one can find 
 in the soldiers' letters from the front. Think 
 of all the people whose lives would have been 
 slack and ignoble from the cradle to the grave, 
 who are being twisted up now to the stem 
 
THE WILD ASSES 257 
 
 question of enlistment, think of the tragedies 
 of separation and danger and suffering that 
 are throwing a stern bright light upon ten 
 thousand obscure existences. . . ." 
 
 "And the noble procession of poor devils 
 tramping through the slush from their burning 
 homes, God knows whither ! And the light of 
 fire appearing through the cracks of falling 
 walls, and charred bits of old people in the 
 slush of the roadside, and the screams of men 
 disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby 
 in a wet shed full of starving refugees who 
 do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins." 
 
 " Oh, if you choose to dwell on the 
 horrors ! " 
 
 "The one decent thing that we men who 
 sit at home in the warm can do is to dwell on 
 the horrors and do our little best to make sure 
 that never, never shall this thing happen again. 
 And that won't be done, Wilkins, by leaving 
 War alone. War, war with modern machines, 
 is a damned great horrible trampling monster, 
 a filthy thing, an indecency ; we aren't doing 
 anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul 
 stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a 
 colossal sanitary job. These men who go for 
 us into the trenches, they come back with no 
 
 17 
 
258 BOON 
 
 illusions. They know how dirty and mon- 
 strous it is. They are like men who have gone 
 down for the sake of the people they love ±o 
 clear out a choked drain. They have no 
 illusions about being glorified. They only hope 
 they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies 
 altogether ruined. And as for the bracing 
 stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their 
 favourite song now in the trenches is — 
 
 " ' Nobody knows how bored we are, 
 
 Bored we are, 
 
 Bored we are, 
 
 Nobody knows how bored we are, 
 
 And nobody seems to care.' 
 
 Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously 
 ennobled." 
 
 He laid his hand on a daily newspaper 
 beside him. 
 
 " Oh, you're not the only one. I will make 
 you ashamed of yourself, Wilkins. Here's the 
 superlative to your positive. Here's the sort 
 of man I should like to hold for five minutes 
 head downwards in the bilge of a trench, writing 
 on the Heroic Spirit in the Morning Post. He's 
 one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full 
 of books and promise themselves much moral 
 benefit from the bloodshed in France. Cole- 
 
THE WILD ASSES 259 
 
 ridge, he says, Coleridge — the heroic, self-con- 
 trolled Spartan Coleridge was of his opinion 
 and very hard on Pacificism — Coleridge com- 
 plained of peace-time in such words as these : 
 ' All individual dignity and power, engulfed in 
 courts, committees, institutions. . . . One bene- 
 fit-club for mutual flattery.' . . . And then, I 
 suppose, the old loafer went off to sponge on 
 somebody. . . . And here's the stuff the heroic, 
 spirited Osborn, the Morning Post gentleman 
 — unhappily not a German, and unhappily too 
 old for trench work — quotes with delight now 
 — now ! — after Belgium ! — 
 
 " ' My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield ! 
 With these I till, with these I sow, 
 With these I reap my harvest field — 
 No other wealth the gods bestow : 
 With these I plant the fertile vine, 
 With these I press the luscious wine. 
 
 My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield ! 
 They make me lord of all below — 
 For those who dread my spear to wield, 
 Before my shaggy shield must bow. 
 Their fields, their vineyards, they resign, 
 And all that cowards have is mine.' 
 
 "He goes on to this — 
 
 " ' It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such 
 staunch braggadocio. It blares out a political truth 
 
260 BOON 
 
 of timeless validity in words that are by no means 
 politic. Sparta was the working model in ancient 
 times of the State that lives by and for warfare, though 
 never despising the rewards of an astute diplomacy ; 
 she was the Prussia of antiquity, . . . 
 " ' Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.' . . . 
 
 " You see the spirit of him ! You see what 
 has got loose ! It is a real and potent spirit ; 
 you have to reckon with it through all this 
 business. To this sort of mind the ' Pacificist ' 
 is a hateful fool. The Pacificist prefers making 
 vineyards, painting pictures, building Gothic 
 cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling 
 ' Bruteland, Bruteland, over all ! ' and killing 
 people and smashing things up. He is a 
 maker. That is what is intended here by a 
 ' coward.' All real creative activity is hateful 
 to a certain ugly, influential, aggressive type 
 of mind, to this type of mind that expresses 
 itself here in England through the Morning 
 Post and Spectator. Both these papers are 
 soaked through and through with a genuine 
 detestation of all fine creation, all beauty, 
 all novelty, all frank, generous, and pleasant 
 things. In peace-time they maintain an atti- 
 tude of dyspeptic hostility to free art, to free 
 literature, to fresh thought. They stand un- 
 compromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and 
 
THE WILD ASSES 261 
 
 restriction — as ends in themselves. When you 
 talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good of the 
 war, I ask you to note the new exultation that 
 has come into these evil papers. When they 
 speak of the 'moral benefits' of war they 
 mean the smashing up of everything that they 
 hate and we care for. They mean reaction. 
 This good man Osborn, whom I have never 
 seen or heard of before, seems to be quint- 
 essential of all that side. I can imagine him. 
 I believe I could reconstruct him from this 
 article I have here, just as anatomists have 
 reconstructed extinct monsters from a single 
 bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emo- 
 tional note suggests Oxford. He is a classical 
 scholar. And that is the extent of his know- 
 ledge. Something in this way." 
 He began to sketch rapidly. 
 
262 BOON 
 
 Fancy portrait of Mr. E. B. Osborn, singing 
 about his sword and his shield and his 
 ruthless virility, and all that sort of thing. 
 
 u 
 
 You have to realize that while the 
 Pacificists talk of the horrible ugliness of war 
 and the necessity of establishing an ever- 
 lasting world-peace, whiskered old ladies in 
 hydropaths, dons on the Morning Post, chatter- 
 ing district visitors and blustering, bellowing 
 parsons, people who are ever so much more 
 representative of general humanity than we 
 literary oddities — all that sort of people tucked 
 away somewhere safe, are in a state of belli- 
 gerent lustfulness and prepared — oh, prepared 
 to give the very eyes of everybody else in this 
 country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all 
 their servants and see the poor taxed to the 
 devil, first for a victory over Germany and then 
 
THE WILD ASSES 263 
 
 for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of 
 Prussian swagger on our part (with them, of 
 course, on the very top of it all) that we can 
 contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All 
 the dowagers are mewing for blood, all the male 
 old women who teach classics and dream of 
 reaction at Oxford and Cambridge are having 
 the time of their lives. They trust to panic, 
 to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity 
 that comes with fatigue. They trust to the 
 exhaustion of delicate purposes and sensitive 
 nerves. And this force-loving, bullying silli- 
 ness is far more likely to come out on top, 
 after the distresses of this war, after the decent 
 men are dead in the trenches and the wise 
 ones shouted to silence, than any finely intel- 
 lectual, necessarily difficult plan to put an end 
 for ever to all such senseless brutalities." 
 
 ',' I think you underrate the power of — well, 
 modern sanity," said Wilkins. 
 
 " Time will show," said Boon. " I hope I 
 do." 
 
 "This man Osborn, whoever he may be, 
 must be just a fantastic extremist. ... I do 
 not see that he is an answer to my suggestion 
 that for the whole mass of people this war 
 means graver thought, steadier thought ? a 
 
264 BOON 
 
 firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by 
 books and formal literature that people think. 
 There is the tremendous effect of realized and 
 
 accumulated facts " 
 
 " Wilkins," said Boon, " do not cuddle such 
 illusions. It is only in books and writings 
 that facts get assembled. People are not 
 grasping any comprehensive effects at all at 
 the present time. One day one monstrous 
 thing batters on our minds — a battleship is 
 blown up or a hundred villagers murdered — 
 and next day it is another. We do not so 
 much think about it as get mentally scarred. . . . 
 You can see in this spy hunt that is going on 
 and in the increasing denunciations and wrang- 
 ling of the papers how the strain is telling. . . • 
 Attention is overstrained and warms into 
 violence. People are reading no books. They 
 are following out no conclusions. No intel- 
 lectual force whatever is evident dominating 
 the situation. No organization is at work for a 
 sane peace. Where is any power for Pacificism ? 
 Where is any strength on its side ? America is 
 far too superior to do anything but trade, the 
 Liberals here sniff at each other and quarrel 
 gently but firmly on minor points, Mr. Norman 
 Angell advertises himself in a small magazine 
 
THE WILD ASSES 265 
 
 and resents any other work for peace as though 
 it were an infringement of his copyright. Read 
 the daily papers ; go and listen to the talk of 
 people! Don't theorize, but watch. The 
 mind you will meet is not in the least like a 
 mind doing something slowly but steadfastly ; 
 far more is it like a mind being cruelly smashed 
 about and worried and sticking to its immediate 
 purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. 
 Until at last it is a pointed intensity. It is 
 like a dying man strangling a robber in his 
 death-grip. . . . We shall beat them, but we 
 shall be dead beat doing it. . . . You see, 
 Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do. In 
 a sort of way this war has inverted our relations. 
 I say these things now because they force 
 themselves upon me. ..." 
 
 Wilkins considered for some moments. 
 
 " Even if nothing new appears," he said at 
 last, "the mere beating down and discredit- 
 ing of the militarist system leaves a world 
 released. . . ." 
 
 " But will it be broken down ? " said Boon. 
 " Think of the Osborns." 
 
 And then he cried in a voice of infinite 
 despair: "No! War is just the killing of 
 things and the smashing of things. And when 
 
266 BOON 
 
 it is all over, then literature and civilization 
 will have to begin all over again. They will 
 have to begin lower down and against a 
 heavier load, and the days of our jesting are 
 done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose 
 and there is no restraining them. What is 
 the good, Wilkins, of pretending that the Wild 
 Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking 
 better than we know ? It is all evil. Evil. 
 An evil year. And I lie here helpless, spitting 
 and spluttering, with this chill upon my chest. 
 ... I cannot say or write what I would. . . . 
 And in the days of my sunshine there were 
 things I should have written, things I should 
 have understood. ..." 
 
§6 
 
 Afterwards Boon consoled himself very much 
 for a time by making further speculative 
 sketches of Mr. Osborn, as the embodiment of 
 the Heroic Spirit. I append one or two of the 
 least offensive of these drawings. 
 
 867 
 
268 
 
 BOON 
 
 Fancy ekefeh of Mr. Osborn (the Heroic Spirit) compelling 
 his tailor to make him trousers for nothing. 
 
 My weapon with my tailor speaks, 
 It cuts my coat and sews my breeks. 
 
THE WILD ASSES 
 
 269 
 
 Mr. Osborn, in a moment of virile indignation, 
 twiping St. Franci* of Assist one with a club. 
 
270 
 
 BOON 
 
 The soul of Mr. Osborn doing a war dance 
 (as a Spartan Bed Indian) in order to 
 work itself up for a " Morning Post " article. 
 
THE WILD ASSES 
 
 271 
 
 Mr. Osborn's dream of himself as a Prussian 
 Spartan refreshing himself with Hero's food 
 {fresh human liver) and drink (blood and 
 champagne) after a good Oo In at some 
 Pacificist softs. 
 
Boon's pessimistic outlook on the war had 
 a profoundly depressing effect upon me. I 
 do all in my power to believe that Wilkins 
 is right, and that the hopelessness that 
 darkened Boon's last days was due to the 
 overshadowing of his mind by his illness. 
 It was not simply that he despaired of the 
 world at large j so far as I am concerned, 
 he pointed and barbed his opinion by show- 
 ing how inevitable it was that the existing 
 publishing and book trade would be shattered 
 to fragments. Adapted as I am now to the 
 necessities of that trade, incapable as I am 
 of the fresh exertions needed to bring me 
 into a successful relationship to the unknown 
 exigencies of the future, the sense of com- 
 plete personal ruin mingled with and intensi- 
 fied the vision he imposed upon me of a 
 world laid waste. I lay awake through 
 long stretches of the night contemplating 
 
 272 
 
THE WILD ASSES 273 
 
 now my own life, no longer in its first vigour, 
 pinched by harsh necessities and the fiercer 
 competition of a young and needy generation, 
 and now all life with its habits and traditions 
 strained and broken. My daily fatigues at 
 drill and the universal heavy cold in the head 
 that has oppressed all Britain this winter 
 almost more than the war, have added their 
 quota to my nightly discomfort. And when 
 at last I have slept I have been oppressed 
 with peculiar and melancholy dreams. 
 
 One is so vividly in my mind that I am 
 obliged to tell it here, although I am doubtful 
 whether, except by a very extreme stretching 
 of the meaning of words, we can really 
 consider it among the Remains of George 
 Boon. 
 
 It was one of those dreams of which the 
 scenery is not so much a desolate place 
 as desolation itself, and I was there toiling 
 up great steepnesses with a little box of 
 something in my hand. And I knew, in that 
 queer confused way that is peculiar to dreams, 
 that I was not myself, but that I was the 
 Author who is the hero of the Wild Asses of 
 the Devil, and also that I was neither he nor 
 I, but all sorts of authors, the spirit of author- 
 
 18 
 
274 BOON 
 
 ship, no Author in particular but the Author 
 
 at large, an<Lthat, since the melancholy devil 
 
 had deserted me — he had sneaked off Heaven 
 
 knows whither — it rested with me and with 
 
 me alone to discover and catch and send 
 
 out of this tormented world those same 
 
 Wild Asses of the Devil of which you have 
 
 read. And so I had salt in my box, Attic 
 
 Salt, a precious trust, the one thing in all the 
 
 universe with which I could subdue them. 
 
 And then suddenly there I was amidst all 
 
 those very asses of which I have told you. 
 
 There they were all about me, and they were 
 
 more wild and horrible than I can describe 
 
 to you. It was not that they were horrible 
 
 in any particular way, they* were just horrible, 
 
 and they kicked up far over head, and leapt 
 
 and did not even seem to trouble to elude 
 
 my poor ineffectual efforts to get within 
 
 salting distance of them. I toiled and I 
 
 pursued amidst mad mountains that were 
 
 suddenly marble flights of stairs that sloped' 
 
 and slid me down to precipices over which 
 
 I floated ; and then we were in soft places 
 
 knee-deep in blood-red mud ; and then 
 
 they were close to my face, eye to eye, 
 
 enormous revolving eyes, like the lanterns 
 
THE WILD ASSES 275 
 
 of lighthouses ; and then they swept away, 
 and always I grew smaller and feebler 
 and more breathless, and always they grew 
 larger, until only their vast legs danced about 
 me on the sward, and all the rest was hidden. 
 And all the while I was tugging at my box 
 of Attic Salt, to get it open, to get a pinch. 
 Suddenly I saw they were all coming down 
 upon me, and all the magic salt I had was 
 in the box that would not open. . . . 
 
 I saw the sward they trampled, and it 
 was not sward, it was living beings, men 
 hurt by dreadful wounds, and poor people 
 who ran in streaming multitudes under 
 the beating hoofs, and a lichenous growth 
 of tender things and beautiful and sweet 
 and right things on which they beat, splash- 
 ing it all to blood and dirt. I could not 
 open my box. I could not open my box. 
 And a voice said : " Your box ! Your box ! 
 Laugh at them for the fools they are, and 
 at the salt sting of laughter back they will 
 fly to hell ! " 
 
 But I could not open my box, for I 
 thought of my friends' sons and dear friends 
 of my own, and there was no more spirit 
 in me. "We cannot laugh!" I cried. 
 
276 BOON 
 
 ti 
 
 We cannot laugh ! Another generation ! 
 Another generation may have the heart to 
 do what we cannot do." 
 
 And the, voice said : " Courage ! Only 
 your poor courage can save us ! " 
 
 But in my dream I could do no more 
 than weep pitifully and weep, and when I 
 woke up my eyes were wet with tears. 
 
CHAPTER THE TENTH 
 
 The Story of the Last Trump 
 
 §1 
 
 " After this war," said Wilkins, " after 
 its revelation of horrors and waste and 
 destruction, it is impossible that people will 
 tolerate any longer that system of diplo- 
 macy and armaments and national aggression 
 that has brought this catastrophe upon 
 mankind. This is the war that will end 
 war." 
 
 " Osborn," said Boon, " Osborn." 
 
 " But after all the world has seen ! " 
 
 " The world doesn't see," said Boon. . . . 
 Boon's story of the Last Trump may 
 well come after this to terminate my book. 
 It has been by no means an easy task to 
 assemble the various portions of this manu- 
 script. It is written almost entirely in 
 
 277 
 
278 BOON 
 
 pencil, and sometimes the writing is so bad 
 as to be almost illegible. But here at last 
 it is, as complete, I think, as Boon meant 
 it to be. It is his epitaph upon his dream 
 of the Mind of the Race. 
 
§2 
 
 The Story of the Last Trump 
 
 The story of the Last Trump begins in 
 Heaven and it ends in all sorts of places 
 round about the world. . . . 
 
 Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place, 
 and the blessed ones do not go on for ever 
 singing Alleluia, whatever you may have 
 been told. For they too are finite creatures, 
 and must be fed with their eternity in little 
 bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So 
 that there are mornings and changes and 
 freshness, there is time to condition their 
 lives. And the children are still children, 
 gravely eager about their playing and ready 
 always for new things ; just children they are, 
 but blessed as you see them in the pictures 
 beneath the careless feet of the Lord God. 
 And one of these blessed children routing 
 about in an attic — for Heaven is, of course, 
 
 279 
 
280 BOON 
 
 full of the most heavenly attics, seeing that 
 it has children — came upon a number of 
 instruments stored away, and laid its little 
 chubby hands upon them. . . . 
 
 Now indeed I cannot tell what these in- 
 struments were, for to do so would be to 
 invade mysteries. . . . But one I may tell 
 of, and that was a great brazen trumpet 
 which the Lord God had made when He 
 made the world— for the Lord God finishes 
 all His jobs — to blow when the time for our 
 Judgement came round. And He had made 
 it and left it ; there it was, and everything 
 was settled exactly as the Doctrine of Pre- 
 destination declares. And this blessed child 
 conceived one of those unaccountable passions 
 of childhood for its smoothness and brassi- 
 ness, and he played with it and tried to blow 
 it, and trailed it about with him out of the 
 attic into the gay and golden streets, and, 
 after many fitful wanderings, to those celes- 
 tial battlements of crystal of which you have 
 doubtless read. And there the blessed child 
 fell to counting the stars, and forgot all 
 about the Trumpet beside him until a 
 flourish of his elbow sent it over. . . . 
 
 Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell, 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 281 
 
 and for a day or so, which seemed but 
 moments in heaven, the blessed child watched 
 its fall until it was a glittering little speck of 
 brightness. . . . 
 
 When it looked a second time the trump 
 was gone. . . . 
 
 I do not know what happened to that 
 child when at last it was time for Judgement 
 Day and that shining trumpet was missed. 
 I know that Judgement Day is long over- 
 passed, because of the wickedness of the 
 world ; I think perhaps it was in a.d. 1000 
 when the expected Day should have dawned 
 that never came, but no other heavenly 
 particulars do I know at all, because now 
 my scene changes to the narrow ways of 
 this Earth. . . . 
 
 And the Prologue in Heaven ends. 
 
§3 
 
 And now the scene is a dingy little shop 
 in Caledonian Market, where things of an 
 incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such 
 as seek after an impossible cheapness. In 
 the window, as though it had always been 
 there and never anywhere else, lies a long, 
 battered, discoloured trumpet of brass that 
 no prospective purchaser has ever been able 
 to sound. In it mice shelter, and dust and 
 fluff have gathered after the fashion of this 
 world. The keeper of the shop is a very old 
 man, and he bought the shop long ago, but 
 already this trumpet was there ; he has no 
 idea whence it came, nor its country of origin, 
 nor anything about it. But once in a moment 
 of enterprise that led to nothing he decided 
 to call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm, 
 though he ought to have known that what- 
 ever a shawm may be the last thing it was 
 
 282 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 283 
 
 likely to be is a trumpet, seeing that they 
 are always mentioned together. And above 
 it hung concertinas and melodeons and 
 cornets and tin whistles and mouth-organs 
 and all that rubbish of musical instruments 
 which delight the hearts of the poor. Until 
 one day two blackened young men from the 
 big motor works in the Pansophist Road 
 stood outside the window and argued. 
 
 They argued about these instruments in 
 stock and how you made these instruments 
 sound, because they were fond of argument, 
 and one asserted and the other denied that 
 he could make every instrument in the place 
 sound a note. And the argument rose high, 
 and led to a bet. 
 
 " Supposing, of course, that the instru- 
 ment is in order," said Hoskin, who was 
 betting he could. 
 
 " That's understood," said Briggs. 
 
 And then they called as witnesses certain 
 other young and black and greasy men in 
 the same employment, and after much argu- 
 ment and discussion that lasted through 
 the afternoon, they went in to the little 
 old dealer about teatime, just as he was 
 putting a blear-eyed, stinking paraffin-lamp 
 
284 BOON 
 
 to throw an unfavourable light upon his 
 always very unattractive window. And after 
 great difficulty they arranged that for the 
 sum of one shilling, paid in advance, Hoskin 
 should have a try at every instrument in the 
 shop that Briggs chose to indicate. 
 
 And the trial began. 
 
 The third instrument that was pitched 
 upon by Briggs for the trial was the strange 
 trumpet that lay at the bottom of the window, 
 the trumpet that you, who have read the 
 Introduction, know was the trumpet for the 
 Last Trump. And Hoskin tried and tried 
 again, and then, blowing desperately, hurt 
 his ears. But he could get no sound from 
 the trumpet. Then he examined the trumpet 
 more carefully and discovered the mice and 
 fluff and other things in it, and demanded 
 that it should be cleaned ; and the old dealer, 
 nothing loth, knowing they were used to 
 automobile-horns and such-like instruments, 
 agreed to let them clean it on condition that 
 they left it shiny. So the young men, after 
 making a suitable deposit (which, as you 
 shall hear, was presently confiscated), went 
 off with the trumpet, proposing to clean it 
 next day at the works and polish it with the 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 285 
 
 peculiarly excellent brass polish employed 
 upon the honk-honk horns of the firm. And 
 this they did, and Hoskin tried again. 
 
 But he tried in vain. Whereupon there 
 arose a great argument about the trumpet, 
 whether it was in order or not, whether 
 it was possible for any one to sound it. For 
 if not, then clearly it was outside the con- 
 dition of the bet. 
 
 Others among the young men tried it, 
 including two who played wind instruments 
 in a band and were musically knowing men. 
 After their own failure they were strongly 
 on the side of Hoskin and strongly against 
 Briggs, and most of the other young men 
 were of the same opinion. 
 
 " Not a bit of it," said Briggs, who was a 
 man of resource. " I'll show you that it 
 can be sounded." 
 
 And taking the instrument in his hand, 
 he went towards a peculiarly powerful foot 
 blow-pipe that stood at the far end of the 
 toolshed. " Good old Briggs ! " said one of 
 the other young men, and opinion veered 
 about. 
 
 Briggs removed the blow-pipe from its 
 bellows and tube, and then adjusted the 
 
286 BOON 
 
 tube very carefully to the mouthpiece of 
 the trumpet. Then with great deliberation 
 he produced a piece of bees-waxed string 
 from a number of other strange and filthy 
 contents in his pocket and tied the tube 
 to the mouthpiece. And then he began to 
 work the treadle of the bellows. 
 
 " Good old Briggs ! " said the one who 
 had previously admired him. 
 
 And then something incomprehensible 
 happened. 
 
 ,It was a flash. Whatever else it was, it 
 was a flash. And a sound that seemed to 
 coincide exactly with the flash. 
 
 Afterwards the young men agreed to it 
 that the trumpet blew to bits. It blew to 
 bits and vanished, and they were all flung 
 upon their faces — not backward, be it noted, 
 but on their faces — and Briggs was stunned 
 and scared. The toolshed windows were 
 broken and the various apparatus and cars 
 around were much displaced, and no traces 
 of the trumpet were ever discovered. 
 
 That last particular puzzled and per- 
 plexed poor Briggs very much. It puzzled 
 and perplexed him the more because he had 
 had an impression, so extraordinary, so 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 287 
 
 incredible, that he was never able to describe 
 it to any other living person. But his 
 impression was this : that the flash that 
 came with the sound came, not from the 
 trumpet but to it, that it smote down to it 
 and took it, and that its shape was in the 
 exact likeness of a hand and arm of fire. 
 
§4 
 
 And that was not all, that was not the only 
 strange thing about the disappearance of 
 that battered trumpet. There was some- 
 thing else, even more difficult to describe, 
 an effect as though for one instant something 
 opened. . . . 
 
 The young men who worked with Hoskin 
 and Briggs had that clearness of mind which 
 comes of dealing with machinery, and they 
 all felt this indescribable something else, as 
 if for an instant the world wasn't the world, 
 but something lit and wonderful, larger 
 
 This is what one of them said of it. 
 
 " I felt," he said, " just for a minute — 
 as though I was blown to Kingdom Come." 
 
 " It is just how it took me," said another. 
 " ' Lord,' I says, ' here's Judgement Day ! ' 
 and then there I was sprawling among the 
 files. . . ." 
 
 But none of the others felt that they could 
 say anything more definite than that. 
 
 888 
 
§5 
 
 Moreover, there was a storm. All over 
 the world there was a storm that puzzled 
 meteorology, a moment's gale that left the 
 atmosphere in a state of wild swaygog, 
 rains, tornadoes, depressions, irregularities 
 for weeks. News came of it from all the 
 quarters of the earth. 
 
 All over China, for example, that land of 
 cherished graves, there was a duststorm, 
 dust leaped into the air. A kind of earth- 
 quake shook Europe — an earthquake that 
 seemed to have at heart the peculiar in- 
 terests of Mr. Algernon Ashton ; everywhere 
 it cracked mausoleums and shivered the pave- 
 ments of cathedrals, swished the flower-beds 
 of cemeteries, and tossed tombstones aside. 
 A crematorium in Texas blew up. The sea 
 was greatly agitated, and the beautiful har- 
 bour of Sydney, in Australia, was seen to be 
 
 19 289 
 
■ 
 
 290 BOON 
 
 littered with sharks floating upside down 
 in manifest distress. . . . 
 
 And all about the world a sound was 
 heard like the sound of a trumpet instantly 
 cut short. 
 
§6 
 
 But this much is only the superficial dressing 
 of the story. The reality is something differ- 
 ent. It is this : that in an instant, and for 
 an instant, the dead lived, and all that are 
 alive in the world did for a moment see the 
 Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of 
 angels, and all His array looking down upon 
 them. They saw Him as one sees by a flash of 
 lightning in the darkness, and then instantly 
 the world was opaque again, limited, petty, 
 habitual. That is the tremendous reality 
 of this story. Such glimpses have happened 
 in individual cases before. The Lives of the 
 saints abound in them. Such a glimpse it 
 was that came to Devindranath Tagore 
 upon the burning ghat at Benares. But 
 this was not an individual but a world 
 experience ; the flash came to every one. 
 Not always was it quite the same, and 
 thereby the doubter found his denials, when 
 
 291 
 
292 BOON 
 
 presently a sort of discussion broke out in 
 the obscurer Press. For this one testified 
 that it seemed that " One stood very near 
 to me," and another saw " all the hosts of 
 heaven flame up towards the Throne." 
 
 And there were others who had a vision 
 of brooding watchers, and others who ima- 
 gined great sentinels before a veiled figure, 
 and some one who felt nothing more divine 
 than a sensation of happiness and freedom 
 such as one gets from a sudden burst of sun- 
 shine in the spring. ... So that one is 
 forced to believe that something more than 
 wonderfully wonderful, something altogether 
 strange, was seen, an d that all these various 
 things that people thought they saw were 
 only interpretations drawn from their experi- 
 ences and their imaginations. It was a 
 light, it was beauty, it was high and solemn, 
 it made this world seem a flimsy trans- 
 parency. . . . 
 
 Then it had vanished. . . . 
 
 And people were left with the question 
 of what they had seen, and just how much 
 it mattered, 
 
§7 
 
 A little old lady sat by the fire in a small 
 sitting-room in West Kensington. Her cat 
 was in her lap, her spectacles were on her 
 nose ; she was reading the morning's paper, 
 and beside her, on a little occasional table, 
 was her tea and a buttered muffin. She had 
 finished the crimes and she was reading 
 about the Royal Family. When she had 
 read all there was to read about the Royal 
 Family, she put down the paper, deposited 
 the cat on the hearthrug, and turned to her 
 tea. She had poured out her first cup and 
 she had just taken up a quadrant of muffin 
 when the trump and the flash came. Through 
 its instant duration she remained motionless 
 with the quadrant of muffin poised halfway 
 to her mouth. Then very slowly she put 
 the morsel down. 
 
 " Now what was that ? " she said. 
 
 She surveyed the cat, but the cat was quite 
 
 293 
 
294 BOON 
 
 calm. Then she looked very, very hard at 
 her lamp. It was a patent safety lamp, and 
 had always behaved very well. Then she 
 stared at the window, but the curtains were 
 drawn and everything was in order. 
 
 " One might think I was going to be ill," 
 she said, and resumed her toast. 
 
§8 
 
 Not far away from this old lady, not more 
 than three-quarters of a mile at most, sat 
 Mr. Parchester in his luxurious study, writing 
 a perfectly beautiful, sustaining sermon about 
 the need of Faith in God. He was a hand- 
 some, earnest, modern preacher, he was 
 rector of one of our big West End churches, 
 and he had amassed a large, fashionable 
 congregation. Every Sunday, and at con- 
 venient intervals during the week, he fought 
 against Modern Materialism, Scientific Edu- 
 cation, Excessive Puritanism, Pragmatism, 
 Doubt, Levity, Selfish Individualism, Further 
 Relaxation of the Divorce Laws, all the 
 Evils of our Time— and anything else that 
 was unpopular. He believed quite simply, 
 he said, in all the old, simple, kindly 
 things. He had the face of a saint, 
 but he had rendered this generally accept- 
 able by growing side whiskers. And 
 
 395 
 
296 BOON 
 
 nothing could tame the beauty of his 
 voice. 
 
 He was an enormous asset in the spiritual 
 life of the metropolis— to give it no harsher 
 name— and his fluent periods had restored 
 faith and courage to many a poor soul 
 hovering on the brink of the dark river of 
 thought. ... 
 
 And just as beautiful Christian maidens 
 played a wonderful part in the last days of 
 Pompeii, in winning proud Roman hearts 
 to a hated and despised faith, so Mr. Par- 
 chester's naturally graceful gestures, and his 
 simple, melodious, trumpet voice won back 
 scores of our half -pagan rich women to church 
 attendance and the social work of which his 
 church was the centre. . . . 
 
 And now by the light of an exquisitely 
 shaded electric lamp he was writing this 
 sermon of quiet, confident belief (with occa- 
 sional hard smacks, perfect stingers in fact, 
 at current unbelief and rival leaders of 
 opinion) in the simple, divine faith of our 
 fathers. . . . 
 
 When there came this truncated trump 
 and this vision. . . . 
 
§9 
 
 Of all the innumerable multitudes who for 
 the infinitesimal fraction of a second had 
 this glimpse of the Divinity, none were so 
 blankly and profoundly astonished as Mr. 
 Parchester. For — it may be because of his 
 subtly spiritual nature — he saw, and seeing 
 believed. He dropped his pen and let it 
 roll across his manuscript, he sat stunned, 
 every drop of blood fled from his face and 
 his lips and his eyes dilated. 
 
 While he had just been writing and arguing 
 about God, there was God ! 
 
 The curtain had been snatched back for an 
 instant ; it had fallen again ; but his mind 
 had taken a photographic impression of 
 everything that he had seen — the grave 
 presences, the hierarchy, the effulgence, the 
 vast concourse, the terrible, gentle eyes. 
 He felt it, as though the vision still con- 
 tinued, behind the bookcases, behind the 
 
 297 
 
298 BOON 
 
 pictured wall and the curtained window : 
 even now there was judgement ! 
 
 For quite a long time he sat, incapable 
 of more than apprehending this supreme 
 realization. His hands were held out limply 
 upon the desk before him. And then very 
 slowly his staring eyes came back to imme- 
 diate things, and fell upon the scattered 
 manuscript on which he had been engaged. 
 He read an unfinished sentence and slowly 
 recovered its intention. As he did so, a pic- 
 ture of his congregation came to him as he 
 saw it from the pulpit during his evening 
 sermon, as he had intended to see it on the 
 Sunday evening that was at hand, with Lady 
 Rupert in her sitting and Lady Blex in hers 
 and Mrs. Munbridge, the rich and in her 
 Jewish way very attractive Mrs. Munbridge, 
 running them close in her adoration, and 
 each with one or two friends they had brought 
 to adore him, and behind them the Hexhams 
 and the Wassinghams, and behind them 
 others and others and others, ranks and ranks 
 of people, and the galleries on either side 
 packed with worshippers of a less dominant 
 class, and the great organ and his magnificent 
 choir waiting to support him and supple- 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 299 
 
 ment him, and the great altar to the left of 
 him, and the beautiful new Lady Chapel, 
 done by Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis 
 and all the latest people in Art, to the right. 
 He thought of the listening multitude, seen 
 through the haze of the thousand electric 
 candles, and how he had planned the para- 
 graphs of his discourse so that the notes of 
 his beautiful voice should float slowly down, 
 like golden leaves in autumn, into the smooth 
 tarn of their silence, word by word, phrase 
 by phrase, until he came to — 
 
 "Now to God the Father, God the 
 Son " 
 
 And all the time he knew that Lady 
 Blex would watch his face and Mrs. Mun- 
 bridge, leaning those graceful shoulders of 
 hers a little forward, would watch his 
 face. . . . 
 
 Many people would watch his face. 
 
 All sorts of people would come to Mr. 
 Parchester's services at times. Once it was 
 said Mr. Balfour had come. Just to hear 
 him. After his sermons, the strangest people 
 would come and make confessions in the 
 beautifully furnished reception-room beyond 
 the vestry. All sorts of people. Once or 
 
300 BOON 
 
 twice he had asked people to come and 
 listen to him ; and one of them had been 
 a very beautiful woman. And often he had 
 dreamt of the people who might come : 
 prominent people, influential people, re- 
 markable people. But never before had it 
 occurred to Mr. Parchester that, a little 
 hidden from the rest of the congregation, 
 behind the thin veil of this material world, 
 there was another auditorium. And that God 
 also, God also, watched his face. 
 
 And watched him through and through. 
 
 Terror seized upon Mr. Parchester. 
 
 He stood up, as though Divinity had 
 come into the room before him. He was 
 trembling. He felt smitten and about to 
 be smitten. 
 
 He perceived that it was hopeless to 
 try and hide what he had written, what 
 he had thought, the unclean egotism he 
 had become. 
 
 " I did not know," he said at last. 
 
 The click of the door behind him warned 
 him that he was not alone. He turned 
 and saw Miss Skelton, his typist, for it was 
 her time to come for his manuscript and 
 copy it out in the specially legible type 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 301 
 
 he used. For a moment he stared at her 
 strangely. 
 
 She looked at him with those deep, adoring 
 eyes of hers. " Am I too soon, sir ? " she 
 asked in her slow, unhappy voice, and 
 seemed prepared for a noiseless departure. 
 
 He did not answer immediately. Then 
 he said : " Miss Skelton, the Judgement of 
 God is close at hand ! " 
 
 And seeing she stood perplexed, he said — 
 
 " Miss Skelton, how can you expect me 
 to go on acting and mouthing this Tosh 
 when the Sword of Truth hangs over us ? " 
 
 Something in her face made him ask a 
 question. 
 
 " Did you see anything ? " he asked. 
 
 " I thought it was because I was rubbing 
 my eyes." 
 
 " Then indeed there is a God ! And He is 
 watching us now. And all this about us, 
 this sinful room, this foolish costume, this 
 preposterous life of blasphemous preten- 
 sion 1 " 
 
 He stopped short, with a kind of horror 
 on his face. 
 
 With a hopeless gesture he rushed by her. 
 He appeared wild-eyed upon the landing 
 
302 BOON 
 
 before his manservant, who was carrying 
 a scuttle of coal upstairs. 
 
 " Brompton," he said, " what are you 
 doing ? " 
 
 *€oal, sir." 
 
 " Put it down, man 1 " he said. " Are 
 you not an immortal soul ? God is here ! 
 As close as my hand ! Repent ! Turn to 
 Him! The Kingdom of Heaven is at 
 hand ! " 
 
§10 
 
 Now if you are a policeman perplexed 
 by a sudden and unaccountable collision 
 between a taxicab and an electric standard, 
 complicated by a blinding flash and a sound 
 like an abbreviated trump from an auto- 
 mobile horn, you do not want to be bothered 
 by a hatless clerical gentleman suddenly 
 rushing out of a handsome private house and 
 telling you that " the Kingdom of Heaven 
 is at hand I " You are respectful to him 
 because it is the duty of a policeman to be 
 respectful to Gentlemen, but you say to 
 him, " Sorry I can't attend to that now, sir. 
 One thing at a time. I've got this little 
 accident to see to." And if he persists in 
 dancing round the gathering crowd and com- 
 ing at you again, you say : " I'm afraid I 
 must ask you just to get away from here, 
 sir. You aren't being a 'elp, sir." And if, 
 on the other hand, you are a well-trained 
 
304 BOON 
 
 clerical gentleman, who knows his way about 
 in the world, you do not go on pestering a 
 policeman on duty after he has said that, 
 even although you think God is looking at 
 you and Judgement is close at hand. You 
 turn away and go on, a little damped, look- 
 ing for some one else more likely to pay 
 attention to your tremendous tidings. 
 
 And so it happened to the Reverend 
 Mr. Parchester. 
 
 He experienced a curious little recession 
 of confidence. He went on past quite a 
 number of people without saying anything 
 further, and the next person he accosted 
 was a flower-woman sitting by her basket 
 at the corner of Chexington Square. She 
 was unable to stop him at once when he 
 began to talk to her because she was tying 
 up a big bundle of white chrysanthemums 
 and had an end of string behind her teeth. 
 And her daughter who stood beside her was 
 the sort of girl who wouldn't say " Bo ! " 
 to a goose. 
 
 " Do you know, my good woman," said 
 Mr. Parchester, " that while we poor creatures 
 of earth go about our poor business here, 
 while we sin and blunder and follow every 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 305 
 
 sort of base end, close to us, above us, around 
 us, watching us, judging us, are God and 
 His holy angels ? I have had a vision, and 
 I am not the only one. I have seen. We 
 are in the Kingdom of Heaven now and 
 here, and Judgement is all about us now ! 
 Have you seen nothing ? No light ? No 
 sound ? No warning ? " 
 
 By this time the old flower-seller had 
 finished her bunch of flowers and could 
 speak. " I saw it," she said. " And Mary — 
 she saw it." 
 
 " Well ? " said Mr. Parchester. 
 
 " But, Lord ! It don't mean nothing ! " 
 said the old flower-seller. 
 
 20 
 
§11 
 
 At that a kind of chill fell upon Mr. Par- 
 chester. He went on across Chexington 
 Square by his own inertia. 
 
 He was still about as sure that he had seen 
 God as he had been in his study, but now 
 he was no longer sure that the world would 
 believe that he had. He felt perhaps that 
 this idea of rushing out to tell people was 
 precipitate and inadvisable. After all, a 
 priest in the Church of England is only one 
 unit in a great machine ; and in a world- 
 wide spiritual crisis it should be the task of 
 that great machine to act as one resolute 
 body. This isolated crying aloud in the 
 street was unworthy of a consecrated priest. 
 It was a dissenting kind of thing to do. 
 A vulgar individualistic screaming. He 
 thought suddenly that he would go and tell 
 his Bishop— the great Bishop Wampach. 
 He called a taxicab, and within half an hour 
 
 306 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 307 
 
 he was in the presence of his commanding 
 officer. It was an extraordinarily difficult 
 and painful interview. . . . 
 
 You see, Mr. Parchester believed. The 
 Bishop impressed him as being quite angrily 
 resolved not to believe. And for the first 
 time in his career Mr. Parchester realized 
 just how much jealous hostility a beauti- 
 ful, fluent, and popular preacher may 
 arouse in the minds of the hierarchy. 
 It wasn't, he felt, a conversation. It was 
 like flinging oneself into the paddock 
 of a bull that has long been anxious to 
 gore one. 
 
 " Inevitably," said the Bishop, " this 
 theatricalism, this star-turn business, with 
 its extreme spiritual excitements, its exagger- 
 ated soul crises and all the rest of it, leads to 
 such a breakdown as afflicts you. Inevit- 
 ably ! You were at least wise to come to 
 me. I can see you are only in the beginning 
 of your trouble, that already in your mind 
 fresh hallucinations are gathering to over- 
 whelm you, voices, special charges and mis- 
 sions, strange revelations. ... I wish I had 
 the power to suspend you right away, to 
 send you into retreat. . . ." 
 
308 BOON 
 
 Mr. Parchester made a violent effort to 
 control himself. " But I tell you," he said, 
 " that I saw God ! " He added, as if to 
 reassure himself : " More plainly, more cer- 
 tainly, than I see you." 
 
 " Of course," said the Bishop, " this is 
 how strange new sects come into existence ; 
 this is how false prophets spring out of the 
 bosom of the Church. Loose-minded, excit- 
 able men of your stamp " 
 
 Mr. Parchester, to his own astonish- 
 ment, burst into tears. " But I tell you," 
 he wept, " He is there. I have seen. I 
 know." 
 
 " Don't talk such nonsense ! " said the 
 Bishop. " There is no one here but you 
 and I ! " 
 
 Mr. Parchester expostulated. " But," he 
 protested, " He is omnipresent." 
 
 The Bishop controlled an expression of 
 impatience. "It is characteristic of your 
 condition," he said, " that you are unable 
 to distinguish between a matter of fact and 
 a spiritual truth. . . . Now listen to me. 
 If you value your sanity and public decency 
 and the discipline of the Church, go right 
 home from here and go to bed. Send for 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 309 
 
 Broadhays, who will prescribe a safe seda- 
 tive. And read something calming and 
 graceful and purifying. For my own part, 
 I should be disposed to recommend the ' Life 
 of Saint Francis of Assisi.' ..." 
 
§12 
 
 Unhappily Mr. Parchester did not go home. 
 He went out from the Bishop's residence 
 stunned and amazed, and suddenly upon 
 his desolation came the thought of Mrs. 
 Munbridge. . . . 
 
 She would understand. . . . 
 
 He was shown up to her own little sitting- 
 room. She had already gone up to her room 
 to dress, but when she heard that he 
 had called, and wanted very greatly to see 
 her, she slipped on a loose, beautiful tea- 
 gown neglige thing, and hurried to him. 
 He tried to tell her everything, but she only 
 kept saying " There ! there ! " She was 
 sure he wanted a cup of tea, he looked so 
 pale and exhausted. She rang to have the 
 tea equipage brought back ; she put the 
 dear saint in an arm-chair by the fire ; she 
 put cushions about him, and ministered to 
 him. And when she began partially to 
 
 310 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 311 
 
 comprehend what he had experienced, she 
 suddenly realized that she too had experi- 
 enced it. That vision had been a brain- 
 wave between their two linked and sym- 
 pathetic brains. And that thought glowed 
 in her as she brewed his tea with her own 
 hands. He had been weeping ! How ten- 
 derly he felt all these things ! He was more 
 sensitive than a woman. What madness 
 to have expected understanding from the 
 Bishop ! But that was just like his un- 
 worldliness. He was not fit to take care of 
 himself. A wave of tenderness carried her 
 away. " Here is your tea ! " she said, bend- 
 ing over him, and fully conscious of her 
 fragrant warmth and sweetness, and sud- 
 denly, she could never afterwards explain 
 why she was so, she was moved to kiss him 
 on his brow. . . . 
 
 How indescribable is the comfort of a 
 true-hearted womanly friend ! The safety 
 of it ! The consolation ! . . . 
 
 About half-past seven that evening Mr. 
 Parchester returned to his own home, and 
 Brompton admitted him. Brompton was 
 relieved to find his employer looking quite 
 restored and ordinary again. " Brompton," 
 
312 BOON 
 
 said Mr. Parchester, " I will not have the 
 usual dinner to-night. Just a single mutton 
 cutlet and one of those quarter-bottles of 
 Perrier Jouet on a tray in my study. I 
 shall have to finish my sermon to-night." 
 (And he had promised Mrs. Munbridge 
 he would preach that sermon specially for 
 her.) 
 
§13 
 
 And as It was with Mr. Parchester and 
 Brompton and Mrs. Munbridge, and the 
 taxi-driver and the policeman and the little 
 old lady and the automobile mechanics 
 and Mr. Parchester's , secretary and the 
 Bishop, so it was with all the rest of the 
 world. If a thing is sufficiently strange and 
 great no one will perceive it. Men will go 
 on in their own ways though one rose from 
 the dead to tell them that the Kingdom of 
 Heaven was at hand, though the Kingdom 
 itself and all its glory became visible, blinding 
 their eyes. They and their ways are one. 
 Men will go on in their ways as rabbits will 
 go on feeding in their hutches within a 
 hundred yards of a battery of artillery. For 
 rabbits are rabbits, and made to eat and 
 breed, and men are human beings and 
 creatures of habit and custom and prejudice ; 
 and what has made them, what will judge 
 
 313 
 
314 BOON 
 
 them, what will destroy them — they may turn 
 their eyes to it at times as the rabbits will 
 glance at the concussion of the guns, but it 
 will never draw them away from eating 
 their lettuce and sniffing after their does. 
 
§14 
 
 There was something of invalid peevish- 
 ness even in the handwriting of Boon's 
 last story, the Story of the Last 
 Trump. 
 
 Of course, I see exactly what Boon is 
 driving at in this fragment. 
 
 The distresses of the war had for a time 
 broken -down his faith in the Mind of the 
 Race, and so he mocked at the idea that under 
 any sort of threat or warning whatever 
 men's minds can move out of the grooves 
 in which they run. And yet in happier 
 moods that was his own idea, and my belief 
 in it came from him.. That he should, in 
 his illness, fall away from that saving confi- 
 dence which he could give to me, and that 
 he should die before his courage returned, 
 seems just a part of the inexplicable tragedy 
 of life. Because clearly this end of the Story 
 of the Last Trump is forced and false, is 
 
 315 
 
316 BOON 
 
 unjust to life. I know how feebly we appre- 
 hend things, I know how we forget, but 
 because we forget it does not follow that 
 we never remember, because we fail to appre- 
 hend perfectly it does not follow that we 
 have no understanding. And so I feel that 
 the true course of the Story of the Last 
 Trump should have been far larger and much 
 more wonderful and subtle than Boon made 
 it. That instant vision of God would not 
 have been dismissed altogether. People 
 might have gone on, as Boon tells us they 
 went on, but they would have been haunted 
 nevertheless by a new sense of deep, tremen- 
 dous things. . . . 
 
 Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would 
 have been far more difficult to tell the story 
 of how a multitude of common-place people 
 were changed by a half-dubious perception 
 that God was indeed close at hand to them, 
 a perception that they would sometimes 
 struggle with and deny, sometimes realize 
 overwhelmingly ; it would have been a 
 beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it 
 may be if Boon had lived he would have 
 written it. He could have written it. But 
 he was too ill for that much of writing, 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 317 
 
 and the tired pencil turned to the easier 
 course. . . . 
 
 I can't believe after all I know of him, 
 and particularly after the intimate talk 
 I have repeated, that he would have re- 
 mained in this mood. He would, I am 
 certain, have altered the Story of the Last 
 Trump. He must have done so. 
 
 And so, too, about this war, this dreadful 
 outbreak of brutish violence which has 
 darkened all our lives, I do not think he 
 would have remained despairful. As his 
 health mended, as the braveries of spring 
 drew near, he would have risen again to the 
 assurance he gave me that the Mind is im- 
 mortal and invincible. 
 
 Of course there is no denying the evil, 
 the black evils of this war ; many of us are 
 impoverished and ruined, many of us are 
 wounded, almost all of us have lost friends 
 and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways. 
 And all that is going on yet. The black 
 stream of consequence will flow for centuries. 
 But all this multitudinous individual un- 
 happiness is still compatible with a great 
 progressive movement in the general mind. 
 Being wounded and impoverished, being 
 
318 BOON 
 
 hurt and seeing things destroyed, is as much 
 living and learning as anything else in the 
 world. The tremendous present disaster of 
 Europe may not be, after all, a disaster for 
 mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be 
 realized, and they can be realized only by 
 experience ; complacencies, fatuities have 
 to be destroyed ; we have to learn and 
 relearn what Boon once called " the bitter 
 need for honesty." We must see these 
 things from the standpoint of the Race 
 Life, whose days are hundreds of years. . . . 
 Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for 
 me the fact that Boon is dead and our 
 little circle is scattered. I feel that no 
 personal comfort nor any further happiness 
 of the mind remains in store for me. My 
 duties as his literary executor still give me 
 access to the dear old house and the garden 
 of our security, and, in spite of a considerable 
 coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon — 
 who would willingly have all this material 
 destroyed and his reputation rest upon his 
 better-known works — I make my duty my 
 excuse to go there nearly every day and 
 think. I am really in doubt about many 
 matters. I cannot determine, for example, 
 
THE LAST TRUMP 319 
 
 whether it may not be possible to make 
 another volume from the fragments still 
 remaining over after this one. There are 
 great quantities of sketches, several long 
 pieces of Vers Libre, the story of " Jane in 
 Heaven," the draft of a novel. And so I go 
 there and take out the papers and fall into 
 fits of thinking. I turn the untidy pages 
 and think about Boon and of all the stream 
 of nonsense and fancy that was so much 
 more serious to him and to me than the 
 serious business of life. I go there, I know, 
 very much as a cat hangs about its home 
 after its people have departed— that is to 
 say, a little incredulously and with the gleam 
 of a reasonless hope. . . . 
 
 There must, I suppose, come a limit to 
 these visitations, and I shall have to go about 
 my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon's 
 eye that she will presently demand con- 
 clusive decisions. In a world that has grown 
 suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must 
 go on with my work under difficult and novel 
 conditions (and now well into the routines 
 of middle age) as if there were no such things 
 as loss and disappointment. I am, I learned 
 long ago, an uncreative, unimportant man. 
 
320 BOON 
 
 And yet, I suppose, I do something; I 
 count ; it is better that I should help than 
 not in the great task of literature, the great 
 task of becoming the thought and the 
 expressed intention of the race, the task 
 of taming violence, organizing the aim- 
 less, destroying error, the task of waylaying 
 the Wild Asses of the Devil and sending 
 them back to Hell. It does not matter 
 how individually feeble we writers and dis- 
 seminators are ; we have to hunt the Wild 
 Asses. As the feeblest puppy has to bark 
 at cats and burglars. And we have to do 
 it because we know, in spite of the darkness, 
 the wickedness, the haste and hate, we 
 know in our hearts, though no momentary 
 trumpeting has shown it to us, that judge- 
 ment is all about us and God stands close 
 at hand. 
 
 Yes, we go on. 
 
 But I wish that George Boon were still 
 in the world with me, and I wish that he 
 could have written a different ending to the 
 Story of the Last Trump. 
 
 Printed in Qreat Britain by 
 UHWIH BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE QREBHAM PBBSS, WOKUJQ AKD LONDON 
 
 1111