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 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
2S 
 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PR4881.S5 
 
 Sleeping beauty, and other prose fancies, 
 
 3 1924 013 515 873 
 
sleeping Beauty and Other 
 Prose Fancies 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 351 5873 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY AND 
 OTHER PROSE FANCIES 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE 
 
 t 
 
 JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 
 1900 
 
 a 
 
Copyright, i^oo 
 By John Lane 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 UNIVERSITY PHESS • JOHN WILSON 
 AND SON ■ CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 CLEMENT SHORTER, 
 
 WITH ADMIRATION OF A COURAGEOUS CRITICAL 
 GIFT TOO RARELY EMPLOYED, AND 
 IN FRIENDSHIP. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I. Sleeping Beauty i 
 
 II. A Literary Omnibus ii 
 
 III. The Silver Girl i6 
 
 IV. Words written to Music .... 24 
 V. At Elim are Twelve Wells ... 35 
 
 VI. The Blue Jar 41 
 
 VII. A Danish Bathing Place .... 48 
 VIII. An Affectionate Letter from Tab- 
 by S5 
 
 IX. Desiderium 61 
 
 X. The Second Coming of the Ideal 63 
 
 XI. A Desultory Note on Values . . 95 
 
 XII. So this is America ! 103 
 
 XIII. Poetry and the Jubilee .... 120 
 
 XIV. The Lesson of Romeike. . . .131 
 XV. Concerning a Definition of Poe- 
 try . . 143 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 XVI. The Dethroning of Stevenson . 151 
 
 XVII. A New Woman Poet 161 
 
 XVIII. Mr. Stephen Phillips' Poetry . 170 
 
 XIX. Tragedy and Mr. William Watson 181 
 XX. A Propos The Browning Love- 
 
 Letters 192 
 
 XXI. Hubert Crackanthorpe .... 200 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 " Every woman is a sleeping beauty," I said, 
 sententiously. 
 
 " Only some need more waking than 
 others?" replied my cynical friend. 
 
 " Yes, some will only awaken at the kiss of 
 great love or great genius, which are not far 
 from the same thing," I replied. 
 
 " I see," said the gay editor with whom I 
 was talking. 
 
 Our conversation was of certain authors of 
 our acquaintance, and how they managed 
 their inspiration, of what manner were their 
 muses, and what the methods of their stimulus. 
 Some, we had' noted, throve on constancy, to 
 others inconstancy was the lawless law of 
 their being; and so accepted had become 
 these indispensable conditions of their literary 
 activity that the wives had long since ceased 
 to be jealous of the other wives. To a house- 
 •hold dependent on poetry, constancy in many 
 cases would mean poverty, and certain good 
 
2 SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 literary wives had been known to rate their 
 husbands with a lazy and unproductive faith- 
 fulness. The editor sketched a tragic minage 
 known to him, where the husband, a lyric 
 poet of fame, had become so chronically 
 devoted to his despairing wife that destitution 
 stared them in the face. It was in vain that 
 she implored him, with tears in her eyes, to 
 fall in love with some other woman. She, she 
 alone, he said, must be his inspiration; but 
 as the domesticated muse is too often a muse 
 of exquisite silence, too happy to sing its 
 happiness, this lawful passion, which might 
 otherwise have been turned to account, was 
 unproductive too. 
 
 "And such a pretty woman," said the 
 editor, sympathetically. Of another happier 
 case of domestic hallucination, he made the 
 remark : " Says he owes it all to his wife ! and 
 you never saw such a plain woman in your 
 life." 
 
 " How do you know she is plain ? " I asked ; 
 " may n't it be that the husband's sense of 
 beauty is finer than yours ? Do you think 
 all beauty is for all men .? or that the beauty 
 all can see is best worth seeing .' " 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY 3 
 
 And then we spoke the words of wisdom 
 and wit which I have written in ebony on the 
 lintel of this little house of words. He who 
 would write to live must talk to write, and I 
 confess that I took up this point with my 
 friend, and continued to stick to it, no doubt 
 to his surprise, because I had at the moment 
 some star-dust on the subject nebulously 
 streaming and circling through my mind, 
 which I was anxious to shape into something 
 of an ordered world. So I talked not to hear 
 myself speak, but to hear myself think, — 
 always, I will anticipate the malicious reader in 
 saying, an operation of my mind of delightful 
 unexpectedness. 
 
 " Why ! you 're actually thinking," chuckles 
 one's brain to itself, " go on. Dance while 
 the music's playing;" and so the tongue goes 
 dancing with pretty partners of words, till 
 suddenly one's brain gives a sigh, the wheels 
 begin to slow down, and music and dancing 
 stop together, till some chance influence, a 
 sound, a face, a flower, how or whence we 
 know not, comes to wind it up again. 
 
 The more one ponders the mystery of 
 beauty, the more one realises that the pro- 
 
4 SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 foundest word in the philosophy of aesthetics 
 is that of the simple-subtle old proverb: 
 Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Beauty, 
 in fact, is a collaboration between the beholder 
 and the beheld. It has no abstract existence, 
 and is visible or invisible as one has eyes to 
 see or not to see it, that is, as one is endowed 
 or not endowed with the sense of beauty, an 
 hieratic sense which, strangely enough, is 
 assumed as common to humanity. Particu- 
 larly is this assumption made in regard to the 
 beauty of women. Every man, however 
 beauty-blind he may really be, considers 
 himself a judge of women — though he might 
 hesitate to call himself a judge of horses. 
 Far indeed from its being true that the sense 
 of beauty is universal, there can be little 
 doubt that the democracy is for the most part 
 beauty-blind, and that while it has a certain 
 indifferent pleasure in the comeliness that 
 comes of health, and the prettiness that goes 
 with ribbons, it dislikes and fears that finer 
 beauty which is seldom comely, never pretty, 
 and always strange. 
 
 National galleries of art are nothing against 
 this truth. Once in awhile the nation may 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY 5 
 
 rejoice over the purchase of a bad picture it 
 can understand, but for the most part — what 
 to it are all these strange pictures, with their 
 disquieting colours and haunted faces ? What 
 recks the nation at large of its Bellinis or its 
 Botticellis ? what even of its Titians or its 
 Tintorettos ? Was it not the few who bought 
 them, with the money of the many, for the 
 delight of the few? 
 
 Well, as no one would dream of art-criticism 
 \iy plebiscite, why should universal conventions 
 of the beauty of women find so large an 
 acceptance merely because they are universal? 
 There are vast multitudes, no doubt, who 
 deem the scented-soap beauties of Bouguereau 
 more beautiful than the strange ladies of 
 Botticelli, and, were you to inquire, you would 
 discover that your housemaid wonders to 
 herself, as she dusts your pictures to the 
 sound of music-hall song, what you can see 
 in the plain lean women of Burne-Jones, 
 or the repulsive ugliness of "The Blessed 
 Damosel." She thanks heaven that she was 
 not born with such a face, as she takes a 
 reassuring glance in the mirror at her own 
 regular prettiness, and more marketable bloom. 
 
6 SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 For, you see, this beauty is still asleep for her 
 — as but a few years ago it was asleep for all 
 but the artists who first kissed it awake. 
 
 All beauty was once asleep like that, even 
 the very beauty your housemaid understands 
 and perhaps exemplifies. It lay asleep await- 
 ing the eye of the beholder, it lay asleep 
 awaiting the kiss of genius ; and, just as one 
 day nothing at all seemed beautiful, so some 
 day all things will come to seem so, if the 
 revelation be not already complete. 
 
 For indeed much beauty that was asleep 
 fifty years ago has been passionately awak- 
 ened, and given a sceptre and a kingdom 
 since then : the beauty of lonely neglected 
 faces that no man loved, or loved only by 
 stealth, for fear of the mockery of the blind ; 
 the beauty of unconventional contours and 
 unpopular colouring, the beauty of pallor, of 
 the red-haired, and the fausse maigre. The 
 fair and the fat are no longer paramount, and 
 the beauty of forty has her day. 
 
 Nor have the discoveries of beauty been 
 confined to the faces and forms of women. 
 In Nature too the waste places where no man 
 sketched or golfed have been reclaimed for 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY 7 
 
 the kingdom of beauty. The little hills had 
 not really rejoiced us till Wordsworth came, 
 but we had learnt his lesson so well that the 
 beauty of the plain slept for us all the longer, 
 till with Tennyson and Millet it awakened at 
 last, — the beauty of desolate levels, solitary 
 moorlands, and the rich melancholy of the 
 fens. 
 
 Wherever we turn our eyes, we find the 
 beauty of character supplanting the beauty of 
 form, or, if not supplanting, asserting its claim 
 to a place beside the haughty sister who 
 would fain keep Cinderella, red-headed and 
 retrouss^e, in the background — yes ! and for 
 many even supplanting ! It is only when 
 regularity of form and personal idiosyncrasy 
 and intensity of character are united in a 
 face, that the so-called classical beauty is 
 secure of holding its own with those whose 
 fealty most matters — and that union to any 
 triumphant degree is exceedingly rare. Even 
 when that union has come about there are 
 those, in this war of the classicism and roman- 
 ticism of faces, who would still choose the 
 face dependent on pure effect for its charm ; 
 no mask of unchanging beauty, but a beauty 
 
8 SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 whose very life is change, and whose magic, 
 so to say, is a miraculous accident, elusive 
 and unaccountable. 
 
 Miraculous and unaccountable ! In a sense 
 all beauty is that, but in the case of the regu- 
 lar, so to say, authorized beauty, it seems 
 considerably less so. For in such faces, the 
 old beauty-masters will tell you, the brow is 
 of such a breadth and shape, the nose so 
 long, the mouth shaped in this way, and the 
 eyes set and coloured in that ; and thus, of 
 this happy marriage of proportions, beauty 
 has been born. This they will say in spite of 
 the everyday fact of thousands of faces being 
 thus proportioned and coloured without the 
 miracle taking place, ivory lamps in which no 
 light of beauty burns. And it is this fact that 
 proves the truth of the newer beauty we are 
 considering. Form is thus seen to be depen- 
 dent on expression, though expression, the 
 new beauty-masters would contend, is inde- 
 pendent of form. For the new beauty there 
 are no such rules; it is, so to say, a prose 
 beauty, for which there is no formulated 
 prosody, entirely free and individual in its 
 rhythms, and personal in its effects. Sculp- 
 
SLEEPING BEAUTY 9 
 
 tjjre is no longer its chosen voice among the 
 arts, but rather music with its myriad mean- 
 ings, and its infinitely responsive inflections. 
 
 You will hear it said of such beauty — that 
 it is striking, individual, charming, fascinating 
 and so on, but not exactly beautiful. This, if 
 you are an initiate of the new beauty, you 
 will resist, and permit no other description 
 but beauty — the only word which accurately 
 expresses the effect made upon you. That 
 such effect is not produced upon others need 
 not depress you ; for similarly you might say 
 of the beauty that others applaud that for you 
 it seems attractive, handsome, pretty, dainty 
 and so on, but not exactly beautiful; or ad- 
 mitting its beauty, that it is but one of many 
 types of beauty, the majority of which are 
 neither straight-lined nor regular. 
 
 For when it is said that certain faces are 
 not exactly beautiful, what is meant is that 
 they fail to conform to one or other of the 
 straight-lined types; but by what authority 
 has it been settled once and for all that beauty 
 cannot exist outside the straight line and the 
 chubby curve ? It matters not what authority 
 one were to bring, for vision is the only 
 
lo SLEEPING BEAUTY 
 
 authority in this matter, and the more ancient 
 the authority the less is it final, for it has 
 thus been unable to take account of all the 
 types that have come into existence since its 
 day, types spiritual, intellectual, and artistic, 
 born of the complex experience of the modern 
 world. 
 
 And yet it has not been the modern world 
 alone that has awakened that beauty indepen- 
 dent of, and perhaps greater than, the beauty 
 of form and colour ; rather it may be said to 
 have reawakened it by study of certain subtle 
 old masters of the Renaissance ; and the great 
 beauties who have made the tragedies and 
 love-stories of the world, so far as their faces 
 have been preserved to us, were seldom 
 "beautiful," as the populace would under- 
 stand beauty. For perhaps the highest 
 beauty is visible only to genius, or that great 
 love which, we have said, is a form of genius. 
 It was only, it will be remembered, at the kiss 
 of a prince that Sleeping Beauty might open 
 her wonderful eyes. 
 
A LITERARY OMNIBUS 
 
 There were ten of us travelling life's journey 
 together from Oxford Circus to the Bank, one 
 to fall away early at Tottenham Court Road, 
 leaving his place unfilled till we steamed into 
 Holborn at Mudie's, where, looking up to 
 make room for a new arrival, I perceived, 
 with an unaccustomed sense of being at home 
 in the world, that no less than four of us were 
 reading. It became immediately evident that 
 in the new arrival our reading party had made 
 an acquisition, for he carried three books in 
 a strap, and to the fourth, a dainty blue cloth 
 volume with rough edges, he presently applied 
 a paper-knife with that eager tenderness which 
 there is no mistaking. The man was no 
 mere lending library reader. He was an 
 aristocrat, a poet among readers, a bookman 
 pur sang. We were all more or less of the 
 upper crust ourselves, with the exception of a 
 dry and dingy old gentleman in the remote 
 corner who, so far as I could determine, was 
 
12 A LITERARY OMNIBUS 
 
 deep in a digest of statutes. His interest in 
 the new-comer was merely an automatic rais- 
 ing of the head as the 'bus stopped, and an 
 automatic sinking of it back again as we once 
 more rumbled on. The rest of us, however, 
 were not so poorly satisfied. This fifth reader 
 to our coach had suddenly made us conscious 
 of our freemasonry, and henceforward there 
 was no peace for us till we had, by the politest 
 stratagems of observation, made out the titles 
 of the books from which as from beakers our 
 eyes were silently and strenuously drinking 
 such different thoughts and dreams. 
 
 The lady third from the door on the side 
 facing me was reading a book which gave 
 me no little trouble to identify, for she kept 
 it pressed on her lap with tantalising per- 
 sistence, and the headlines, which I was able 
 to spell out with eyes grown telescopic from 
 curiosity, proved those tiresome headlines 
 which refer to the contents of chapter or 
 page instead of considerately repeating the 
 title of the book. It was not a novel. I 
 could tell that, for there wasn't a scrap of 
 conversation, and it wasn't novelist's type. 
 I watched like a lynx to catch a look at the 
 
A LITERARY OMNIBUS 13 
 
 binding. Suddenly she lifted it up, I cannot 
 help thinking out of sheer kindness, and it 
 proved to be a stately unfamiliar edition of 
 a book I should have known well enough, 
 simply The French Revolution. Why will 
 people tease one by reading Carlyle in any 
 other edition but the thin little octavos, with 
 the sticky brown and black bindings of old? 
 The pretty dark-haired girl next but one on 
 my own side what was she reading ? No ! . . . 
 But, she was, really ! 
 
 Need I say that my eyes beat a hasty re- 
 treat to my little neighbour, the new-comer, 
 who sat facing me next to the door, one of 
 whose books in the strap I had instantly 
 recognised as Weir of Hermiston. Of the 
 other two, one was provokingly turned with 
 the edges only showing, and of the edges I 
 could n't be quite sure, though I was al- 
 most certain they belonged to an interesting 
 new volume of poems I knew of. The third 
 had the look of a German dictionary. But, 
 of course, it was the book he was reading 
 that was the chief attraction, and I rather 
 like to think that probably I was the only 
 one of his fellow travellers who succeeded 
 
14 A LITERARY OMNIBUS 
 
 in detecting the honey-pot from which he 
 was delicately feeding. It took me some 
 little time, though the book, with its ribbed 
 blue cover gravely lined with gold and its 
 crisp rose-yellow paper, struck me with in- 
 stant familiarity. " Preface to Second Edi- 
 tion," deciphered backwards, was all I was 
 able to make out at first, for the paper-knife 
 loitered dreamily among the opening pages, 
 till at last with the turning of a page, the 
 prose suddenly gave place to a page prettily 
 broken up with lines and half-lines of italics, 
 followed by a verse or two — and " Of course," 
 I exclaimed to myself, with a curious involun- 
 tary gratitude. " It is Dr. Wharton's Sappho." 
 And so it was. That penny 'bus was thus 
 carelessly carrying along the most priceless 
 of written words. We were journeying in 
 the same conveyance with 
 
 " Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the top- 
 most bough, 
 A -top on the topmost twig — which the pluckers 
 
 forgot somehozv — 
 Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get 
 it till now J " 
 with 
 
 " I loved thee, Atthis, long agoj " 
 
A LITERARY OMNIBUS 15 
 
 with 
 
 " The moon has set, and the Pleiades j it is mid- 
 night, the time is going by, and I sleep alone." 
 
 Yes, it was no less a presence than Sappho's 
 that had stepped in amongst us at the corner 
 of New Oxford Street. Visibly it had been 
 a little black-bearded bookman, rather French 
 in appearance, possibly a hard-worked teacher 
 of languages — but actually it had been Sap- 
 pho. So strange are the contrasts of the 
 modern world, so strange the fate of beauti- 
 ful words. Two thousand five hundred years ! 
 So far away from us was the voice that had 
 suddenly called to us, a lovely apparition of 
 sound, as we trundled dustily from Oxford 
 Circus to the Bank. 
 
 " The moon has set, and the Pleiades ; it 
 is midnight, the time is going by, and I sleep 
 alone," I murmured, as the conductor dropped 
 me at Chancery Lane. 
 
THE SILVER GIRL 
 
 Sometimes when I have thought that the 
 Sphinx's mouth is cruel, and could not forget 
 its stern line for all her soft eyes, I have re- 
 assured myself with the memory of a day 
 when I saw it so soft and tender with heavenly 
 pity, that I could have gone down on my knees 
 then and there by the side of the luncheon 
 table, where the champagne was already cool- 
 ing in the ice-pail, and worshipped her — 
 would have done so had I thought such pub- 
 lic worship to her taste. It was no tenderness 
 to me, but that was just why I valued it. 
 Tender she has been to me, and stern anon, 
 as I have merited; but, would you under- 
 stand the heart of woman, know if it be 
 soft or hard, you will not trust her tenderness 
 (or fear her sternness) to yourself ; you will 
 watch, with a prayer in your heart, for her 
 tenderness to others. 
 
 She came late to our lunch that day, and 
 explained that she had travelled by omnibus. 
 
THE SILVER GIRL 17 
 
 As she said the word omnibus, for some 
 reason as yet mysterious to me, I saw the 
 northern lights I love playing in the heaven 
 of her face. I wondered why, but did not 
 ask as yet, delaying, that I might watch 
 those fairy fires of emotion, for her face was 
 indeed like a star of which a little child told 
 me the other day. I think some one must 
 have told him first, for as we looked through 
 the window one starlit night, he communicated 
 very confidentially that whenever any one in 
 the world shed a tear of pure pity, God's 
 angels caught it in lily-cups and carried it 
 right up to heaven, and that when God had 
 thus collected enough of them, he made them 
 into a new star. " So," said the little boy, 
 " there must have been a good many kind 
 people in the world to cry all those stars." 
 
 It was of that story I thought as I said to 
 the Sphinx, — 
 
 " What is the matter, dear Madonna? 
 Your face is the Star of Tears." 
 
 And then I ventured gently to tease her. 
 
 "What can have happened? No sooner 
 did you speak the magic word ' omnibus,' 
 than you were transfigured and taken from 
 
i8 THE SILVER GIRL 
 
 my sight in a silver cloud of tears. An 
 omnibus does not usually awaken such ten- 
 derness, or call up northern lights to the 
 face as one mentions it, . . . though," I 
 added wistfully, " one has met passengers to 
 and from heaven in its musty corners, trav- 
 elled life's journey with them a penny stage, 
 and lost them for ever. . . .'' 
 
 " So," I further ventured, " may you have 
 seemed to some fortunate fellow-passenger, 
 an accidental companion of your wonder, as 
 from your yellow throne by the driver . . ." 
 
 " Oh, do be quiet," she said, with a little 
 flash of steel. " How can you be so flippant ? " 
 and then, noting the champagne, she ex- 
 claimed with fervor : " No wine for me to- 
 day ! It 's heartless, it 's brutal. All the 
 world is heartless and brutal . . . how selfish 
 we all are ! Poor fellow ! . . . I wish you 
 could have seen his face ! " 
 
 " I sincerely wish I could," I said, " for 
 then I should no doubt have understood why 
 the words ' omnibus ' and ' champagne,' not 
 unfamiliar words, should . . . well, make you 
 look so beautiful." 
 
 " Oh, forgive me ! Have n't I told you .? " 
 
THE SILVER GIRL 19 
 
 she said, as absent-mindedly she watched the 
 waiter filling her glass with champagne. 
 
 "Well," she continued, "you know the 
 something Arms, where the 'bus always 
 stops a minute or so on its way from Ken- 
 sington. I was on top, near the driver, and, 
 while we waited, my neighbour began to peel 
 an orange and throw the pieces of peel down 
 on to the pavement. Suddenly a dreadful, 
 tattered figure of a man sprang out of some 
 corner, and, eagerly picking up the pieces of 
 peel, began ravenously to eat them, looking 
 up hungrily for more. Poor fellow ! he had 
 quite a refined, gentle face, and I should n't 
 have been surprised to hear him quote 
 Horace, after the manner of Stevenson's 
 gentlemen in distress. I was glad to see 
 that the others noticed him too. Quite a 
 murmur of sympathy sprang up amongst us, 
 and a penny or two rang on the pavement. 
 But it was the driver who did the thing that 
 made me cry. He was one of those prosper- 
 ous young drivers, with beaver hats and 
 smart overcoats, and he had just lit a most 
 well-to-do cigar. With the rest of us he had 
 looked down on poor Lazarus, and for a 
 
20 THE SILVER GIRL 
 
 moment, but only for a moment, with a cer- 
 tain contempt. Then a wonderful kindness 
 came into his face, and, next minute, he had 
 done a great deed — he had thrown Lazarus 
 his newly-lit cigar." 
 
 " Splendid ! " I ventured to interject. 
 
 " Yes, indeed ! " she continued ; " and I 
 could n't help telling him so. . . . But you 
 should have seen the poor fellow's face as he 
 picked it up. Evidently his first thought was 
 that it had fallen by mistake, and he made as 
 if to return it to his patron. It was an im- 
 possible dream that it could be for him — a 
 mere rancid cigar-end had been a windfall, 
 but this was practically a complete, unsmoked 
 cigar. But the driver nodded reassuringly, 
 and then you should have seen the poor 
 fellow's joy. There was almost a look of 
 awe, that such fortune should have befallen 
 him, and tears of gratitude sprang into his 
 eyes. Really, I don't exaggerate a bit. I 'd 
 have given anything for you to have seen 
 him — though it was heart-breaking, that 
 terrible look of joy, such tragic joy. No 
 look of misery or wretchedness could have 
 touched one like that. Think how utterly, 
 
THE SILVER GIRL 21 
 
 abjectly destitute one must be for a stran- 
 ger's orange-peel to represent dessert, and an 
 omnibus-driver's cigar set us crying for 
 joy '• 
 
 " Gentle heart," I said. " I fear poor Laz- 
 arus did not keep his cigar long. ..." 
 
 " But why ? . . . " 
 
 " Why ? Is it not already among the stars, 
 carried up by those angels who catch the tears 
 of pity, and along with Uncle Toby's 'damn,' 
 and such bric-a-brac, in God's museum of fair 
 deeds ? We shall see it shining down on us 
 as the stars come out to-night. Yes ! that 
 will be a pretty astronomical theory to ex- 
 change with the little boy who told me that 
 the stars are made of tears. Some are made 
 of tears, I shall say, but some are the glow- 
 ing ends of newly lit cigars, thrown down by 
 good omnibus-drivers to poor, starving fel- 
 lows who haven't a bed to sleep in, nor a 
 dinner to eat, nor a heart to love them, and 
 not even a single cigar left to put in their 
 silver cigar-cases." 
 
 "That driver is sure of heaven, anyhow," 
 said the Sphinx. 
 
 " Perhaps, dear, when the time comes for 
 
22 THE SILVER GIRL 
 
 us to arrive there, we will find him driving 
 the station 'bus — who knows? But it was 
 a pretty story, I must say. That driver 
 deserves to be decorated." 
 
 " That 's what I thought," said the Sphinx, 
 eagerly. 
 
 " Yes ! We might start a new society : 
 The League of Kind Hearts; a Society for the 
 Encouragement of Acts of Kindness. How 
 would that do ? Or we might endow a fund 
 to bear the name of your 'bus-driver, and to 
 be devoted in perpetuity to supplying desti- 
 tute smokers with choice cigars." 
 
 " Yes," said the Sphinx, musingly, " that 
 driver made me thoroughly ashamed of my- 
 self. I wish I was as sure of heaven as 
 he is." 
 
 " But you are heaven," I whispered ; " and 
 ct propos heaven, here is a little song which 
 I wrote for you last night, and with which I 
 propose presently to settle the bill. I call it 
 the Silver Girl: 
 
 " ' Whiter than whiteness was her breast, 
 And softer than new fallen snow. 
 So pure a peace, so deep a rest, 
 Yet purer peace below. 
 
THE SILVER GIRL 23 
 
 " ' Her face was like a moon-white flower 
 That swayed upon an ivory stem, 
 Her hair a whispering silver shower, 
 Each foot a silver gem. 
 
 " ' And in a fair white house of dreams, 
 
 With hallowed windows all of pearl. 
 She sat amid the haunted gleams, 
 That little silver girl ; 
 
 " ' Sat singing songs of snowy white. 
 
 And watched all day, with soft blue eyes. 
 Her white doves flying in her sight. 
 And fed her butterflies. 
 
 " ' Then when the long white day was passed. 
 The white world sleeping in the moon. 
 White bed, and long white sleep at last — 
 She will not waken soon.' " 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO 
 MUSIC 
 
 It is one of the many advantages of that sim- 
 plicity of taste which is ignorance, that an 
 incorrigible incapacity for connoisseurship in 
 the sister arts of cookery and music should 
 enable one to be as happy with a bad dinner 
 eaten to the sound of bad music, as others 
 whose palates are attuned to the Neronian 
 nightingales, and whose ears admit no har- 
 monies less refined than the bejewelled 
 harmonies of Chopin. 
 
 I have eaten dinners delicate as silver- 
 points, in rooms of canary-coloured quiet, 
 where the candles burn hushedly in their little 
 silken tents, and the soft voices of lovers 
 rise and fall upon the dreaming ear ; but I 
 confess that it was the soothing quiet, the 
 healing tones of light and colour, and the 
 face of the Sphinx irradiated by some dream 
 of halcyon's tongues a la Persane, rather than 
 the beautiful food, that inspired my passionate 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 25 
 
 peace. Mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and 
 peas of living green had made me just as 
 happy, gastronomically speaking, and I dare 
 not mention what I order sometimes, and 
 even day after day with a love that never 
 tires, when I dine alone. Alone ! 
 
 . . . the very word is. like a bell 
 
 To toll me back from thee to my sole self ; 
 
 for even this very night have I dined alone in 
 a great solitude of social faces, low necks, 
 electric lights, and the spirited band that has 
 given me more pleasure than any music in 
 London, always excepting my Bayreuth, the 
 barrel-organ. Yes ! strange as it may seem, 
 I had come deliberately to hear this music, 
 and secondarily to eat this dinner. What 
 effect selections from Sullivan and "The 
 Shop Girl," in collaboration with the three- 
 and-sixpenny table d'hote, would have upon 
 more educated digestions it concerns me not 
 to inquire ; on mine they produce a sort of 
 agonised ecstasy of loneliness — and to-night 
 as I sat at our little lonely table in a corner 
 of the great gallery and looked out across 
 the glittering peristyle, ate that dinner and 
 
26 WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 
 
 listened to that music, I shuddered with joy 
 at my fearful loneliness. 
 
 I might have dined with the Beautiful, or 
 have sent a telegraphic invitation to the 
 Witty; I might have sat at meat with the 
 Wise ; but no ! I would dine instead with the 
 memories of dinners that were gone, and 
 as the music did Miltonic battle near the 
 ceiling, marched with clashing tread, or 
 danced on myriad silken feet, wailed like the 
 winds of the world, or laughed like the sun, 
 my solitude grew peopled awhile with shapes 
 fair and kind, who sat with me and lifted the 
 glass and gave me their deep eyes, ladies who 
 had intelligence in love, as Dante wrote, 
 ladies of great gentleness and consolation, 
 for whom God be thanked. But always in 
 my ears, whatever the piece that was a-play- 
 ing, the music came sweeping with dark surge 
 across my fantasy, as though a sudden wind 
 had dashed open a warm window, and let in 
 a black night of homeless seas. 
 
 For in truth one I loved was out to-night 
 on dark seas. She fares out across an ocean 
 I have never sailed, to a land of which no 
 man knows ; and for her voyage she has only 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 27 
 
 her silver feet, walking the inky waters, and 
 the great light of her holy face to guide her 
 steps. Ah ! that I were with her to-night, 
 walking hand in hand those dark waters- 
 Oh, wherefore slip away thus companionless, 
 fearless little voyager? Was it that I was 
 unworthy to voyage those seas with you, that 
 the weight of my mortality would have 
 dragged down your bright immortality — 
 youngest of the immortals. . . . From that 
 sea which the Divine alone may tread, comes 
 back no answer, nor light of any star; but 
 there has stolen to my side and kissed my 
 brow a shape dearer than all the rest, dear 
 beyond dearness, a little earthly-heavenly 
 shape who always comes when the rest have 
 gone, and loves to find me sitting alone. She 
 it is who leans her cheek against mine, as I 
 try to read beautiful words out of the dead 
 man's book at my side, she it is who whispers 
 that we shall be too late to find a seat in the 
 pit unless we hurry, and she it is who gaily 
 takes my arm as we trot off together on happy 
 feet. The great commissionaire takes no note 
 of her, he thinks I am alone ; besides we 
 seldom go in hansoms, and seldom sit in 
 
28 WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 
 
 stalls. . . . Enough, O Music! be merciful. 
 Be lonely no more, lest you break the heart 
 of the lonely. 
 
 " Ah ! you have never seen her I " I whisper 
 to myself as the waiter brings me my coffee 
 — and I look at him again with a certain 
 curiosity as I think that he has never seen 
 her. Never to have seen her ! 
 
 And then presently, as if in pity, the music 
 will change; perhaps it will play some sustain- 
 ing song of faith, and strike a sort of glory 
 across one's heart, the haughty heart of 
 sorrow ; or it will be human and gay, and 
 suddenly turn this solitude of diners into a 
 sort of family gathering of humanity, throw- 
 ing open sad hearts, that, like oneself, appear 
 to be doing nothing but dine, and giving one 
 glimpses into dreaming heads, linking, all in 
 one great friendship of common joys and 
 sorrows, the one sweet beginning, and the 
 one mysterious end. 
 
 In this mood faces one has seen more than 
 once become friends, and I confess that the 
 sight of certain waiters moving in their accus- 
 tomed places almost moved me to tears. 
 Such is the pathos of familiarity. 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 29 
 
 So my thoughts took another turn, and I 
 fell to thinking with tenderness of the friends 
 about town that the Sphinx and I had made 
 in our dinings — friends whom it had cost 
 us but a few odd shillings and sixpences 
 to make, yet friends we had fancied we 
 might trust and even seek in a day of 
 need. If they found me starving some 
 night in the streets, I think they would 
 take me in; and I think I know a coffee- 
 stall man who would give me an early morn- 
 ing cup of coffee, and add a piece of cake, 
 were I to come to him bare-footed some 
 wintry dawn. 
 
 I have heard purists object to the smiles 
 that are bought, as if smiles can or should be 
 had for nothing, and as if it shows a bad 
 nature in a waiter to smile more sweetly upon 
 a shilling than a penny. After all, is he so 
 far wrong in deeming the heart that prompts 
 the shilling better worth a smile than the 
 reluctant hand of copper? Besides, we are 
 never so mean to ourselves as when we are 
 mean to others. A few shillings per annum 
 sown about town will surround the path of the 
 diner with smiles year in and year out. The 
 
30 WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 
 
 doors fly open as by magic at his approach, 
 and the cosiest tables in a dozen restaurants 
 are in perpetual reserve for him. I am even 
 persuaded that a consistent generosity to cab- 
 men gets known in due course among the 
 fraternity, and that thus, in process of time, 
 the nicest people may rely on getting the 
 nicest hansoms — though this may be a 
 dream. Certain I am that it brings luck to 
 be kind to a pathetic race of men for whom I 
 have a special tenderness, those amateur foot- 
 men, the cab-openers. Have you ever noticed 
 the fine manners of some of them, and their 
 lover-like gentleness with the silk skirts that 
 it is theirs to save from soilure of muddy 
 wheels .' A practical head might reflect how 
 much they do towards keeping down your 
 wife's dressmaker's bills. I daresay they 
 save her a dress a year — and yet they 
 are not treated with gratitude as a race. 
 How involuntarily one seems to assume 
 that they will accept nothing over a penny, 
 and how fingers, not penurious on other 
 occasions, automatically reject silver as they 
 ferret in pence-pockets for suitable alms ! 
 No ! not alms — payment, and sometimes 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 31 
 
 poor payment, for a courtesy that adds 
 another smile to your illusion of a smiling 
 world. 
 
 Among the many lessons I have learnt from 
 the Sphinx is one of the fair wage of the cab- 
 opener. It was the very afternoon she had 
 seen that cigar fall down from heaven, and 
 her mood was thus the more attuned to pity. 
 As we were about to drive away from the 
 place of our lunching, having been ushered to 
 our hansom by a tatterdemalion of distin- 
 guished manners, but marred unhappy coun- 
 tenance, I fumbled so long for the regulation 
 twopence, that it seemed likely he should 
 miss his reward or be run over, in running 
 after it. But at that moment the Sphinx's 
 hand shot past mine and dropped something 
 into the outstretched palm. The man took it 
 mechanically, but in a second his face flashed 
 surprise. Evidently she had given him some- 
 thing extravagant. She was watching for 
 his look, and telegraphed a smile that she 
 meant it. Then you never saw such a figure 
 of grateful joy as that shabby fellow became. 
 His face fairly shone, and for a few moments 
 he ran by our cabside wildly waving his hat, 
 
32 WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 
 
 with an indescribable emotion of affectionate 
 thankfulness. 
 
 " What did you give him, dear ? " I asked. 
 
 " Never mind ! " 
 
 " It was n't a sovereign ? " 
 
 " Never mind ! " 
 
 So I have never known what coin it was 
 that thus transfigured him ; but of this I am 
 sure : that when the time of the great Terror 
 has come to London, when the red flags wave 
 on the barricades, and the puddles of red 
 blood beneath the great guillotine in Trafalgar 
 Square luridly catch the setting sun, the 
 Sphinx and I will have a friend in that poor 
 cab-opener. 
 
 There is another friend to whom we should 
 fly for safety in those days of wrath. He, 
 too, is a cab-opener, but, so to say, of higher 
 rank — for he is the voluntary manager of a 
 thriving cab-rank which we often have occa- 
 sion to patronise. For some unknown reason 
 he is always addressed as " Cap'n," and we 
 never omit the courtesy as we salute him. 
 So we have come to know him as the Captain 
 of the Cab Rank. He is a short, thick-set, 
 sturdy little man, with an overcoat buttoned 
 
WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 33 
 
 straight beneath his chin, hands deep in his 
 pockets, a firm, determined step, and a fiery 
 face. He walks his pavement hke a veritable 
 captain on his quarter-deck, and his " Hansom 
 up ! " rings out like a stern word of command. 
 At the call a shining door of the tavern oppo- 
 site is thrown open with a slam, and a wild 
 figure of a driver clatters across in terrified 
 haste ; with his head still wrapped in the 
 warm glow he has just forsaken, he climbs 
 his dark throne, and once more shakes the 
 weary reins. Then as the little Captain 
 briskly shuts us in, with a salute that seems 
 to say that he has thus given us a successful 
 start in life, and it is not his fault if we don't 
 go on as we 've begun, he blows a shrill note 
 upon his whistle, half to call up the next cab 
 to its place in the rank, half to signalise our 
 departure, — as when sometimes a great boat 
 sets out to sea they fire guns in the harbour, 
 and excited crowds wave weeping handker- 
 chiefs from the pier. 
 
 Yes ! There are many faces I meet daily, 
 
 faces I do business with and faces I take 
 
 down to dinner, faces of the important and 
 
 the brilliant, that I should miss much less 
 
 3 
 
34 WORDS WRITTEN TO MUSIC 
 
 than the little Captain of the Cab Rank. Our 
 intercourse is of the slightest, we have little 
 opportunities of studying each other's nature, 
 and yet he is strangely vivid in my conscious- 
 ness, quite a necessary figure in my picture 
 of the world — so stamped is every part of 
 him with that most appealing and attaching 
 of all qualities, that of our common human 
 nature. He has the great gift of character, 
 and however poor and humble his lot, failure 
 is surely no word to describe him, for he is a 
 personality, and to be a personality is to have 
 succeeded in life. 
 
 Yes! I often think of the Captain as I 
 think of the famous characters in fiction, or 
 notable figures in history; and I should feel 
 very proud if I could believe he sometimes 
 thought of me. 
 
 Well, well ... it is late. The bill, waiter, 
 please! Good-night! Good-night! 
 
AT ELIM ARE TWELVE 
 WELLS 
 
 We are told that sorcery and divination are 
 once more living spiritual methods amongst 
 us — that witches' Sabbaths are held in Paris, 
 and that the philosopher's stone is being 
 sought in London. It is likely enough, and 
 indeed it has never been unlikely, for in so 
 mysterious a world one never knows by what 
 method we may hit the truth, and it is wisest 
 to try all — from divining-rod to scalpel. 
 However, it is a subject in which I am but 
 generally interested, as one of the great body 
 of the superstitious, and my personal experi- 
 ments are confined to a very innocent form of 
 divination — the ancient divination by books. 
 Virgil and the Bible used to be the books 
 mainly favoured by old consultants of the 
 " sortes," and the Bible, by its long sacred 
 associations, remains, of course, the most im- 
 pressive book to consult, if you would take the 
 oracle more or less seriously. I am given to 
 
36 TWELVE WELLS 
 
 the practice trivially with all my books — have 
 indeed sought to learn my fate from a book 
 by Mr. Jerome, or a volume of essays by Mr. 
 Andrew Lang. Calendars with texts or quo- 
 tations from poets have no inconsiderable 
 influence upon my life, and often, on rising, 
 I consult my Shakspere almanac with no 
 little anxiety. But, I suppose, it is the Puri- 
 tan fathers in my blood that send me most 
 often, and when I mean it most, to the Bible. 
 This morning, rising, for no reason that I 
 know of, in the worst of spirits, and looking 
 gloomily out across an expanse of sunlit gorse 
 and heather that should have gladdened any 
 grateful soul, indifferent to the lark and spite- 
 ful towards the cuckoo, I took a Bible down 
 from my shelf of bed-books, and, opening it 
 at random, read: At Elim are twelve wells 
 and seventy palm-trees ! From that instant, 
 no doubt illogically enough, my spirits 
 began to lift, and all through the day, when- 
 ever they momentarily fell again, as some 
 dark or wistful thought gloomed or wailed 
 through my mind, " Never mind ! " the sweet 
 old words kept whispering, "at Elim are 
 twelve wells and seventy palm-trees ! " 
 
TWELVE WELLS 37 
 
 When the children of Israel had exhausted 
 the first excitement of crossing the Red Sea, 
 when the intoxication of their triumph was 
 failing them, and the song of Moses and the 
 timbrel of Miriam were no longer in their 
 ears, they began to murmur for water, but 
 found only the waters of Marah. Then, as 
 Moses sweetened the waters with the green 
 boughs, and reproved their discontent, he 
 told them of Elim, a pleasant place but a 
 day's march or so away; and as they fared on 
 wearily through that desert of Shur, how often 
 must they have said to each other : At Elim 
 are twelve wells and seventy palm-trees — the 
 very words full of cool water and cool shade. 
 
 For all I know, the wells of Elim are long 
 since dry, its palm-trees withered, its very 
 name forgotten; and to us of another age 
 and civilisation the very symbolism is un- 
 familiar, we who go not to wells for our 
 water, and have never seen a palm-tree. Yet 
 such is the emotional impressionability of 
 words, such their power of transmitting sin- 
 cerity of feeling across time, that those simple 
 words of cool water and cool shade vibrate 
 still with their old exquisite refreshment of 
 
38 TWELVE WELLS 
 
 promise ; still speak, like spring water in 
 the eager mouth, of quenched thirst and the 
 whisper of leaves ; still make a mirage to the 
 mind of the mysterious mossy walls of old 
 wells, the delicious plash and echo, the sleepy 
 sunlight stealing on tip-toe through the ten- 
 drilled patterned shade, to kiss with sudden 
 glory some little darkling fern, — quenched 
 thirst, and all the great green rest. 
 
 Yes ; great is the comfort of words — really 
 there is no comfort save in words. It is not 
 in what the words say — not in what they 
 tell or promise or counsel us. For the most 
 comforting words are often the most irrele- 
 vant — particularly as the mood for which we 
 seek their aid is usually one of vague melan- 
 choly and undefined distress, mere spiritual 
 ennui and weariness of the soul. No ! it is 
 something in the fall of the syllables, in the 
 flower-like face of the. words ; perhaps it is 
 the tranquillising presence of perfection, a 
 sense of that eternity which lives in all 
 beauty. Here is something complete to calm 
 the ache of our incompleteness, here is some- 
 thing at peace with itself, here is something 
 that has found the perfect rest of the perfect. 
 
TWELVE WELLS 39 
 
 In fact, curiously, the words which thus 
 comfort us most are often the saddest — 
 broken cries of ancient heart-break, wistful 
 calls of long stilled passion, petals from the 
 rose of old beauty, and poignant phrases of 
 the passing of the world. 
 
 " I loved thee, Atthis, long ago," cried 
 Sappho, and time has but deepened the 
 yearning of that old regret. Yet the sigh 
 that tore her heart, by some curious alchemy, 
 brings a strange comfort to ours, that alchemy 
 of time that turns old tears to pearls, and old 
 mirth to melancholy — and so we go happy- 
 sad a summer-day for the ghostly echo of that 
 old anguished cry. 
 
 Sic transit gloria mundi ! Familiar and 
 even vulgarised as are the words, what a 
 noble chord they still strike in the heart, the 
 mighty Latin clothing the passing of the 
 world in such pomp of imperial phrase as 
 almost to suggest, even while it writes this 
 epitaph of an universe, that somehow the 
 glory can never pass away, throwing over 
 its mortality the purple pall of a hinted im- 
 mortality. 
 
 The pathos of the Greek Anthology, the 
 
40 TWELVE WELLS 
 
 haunting cadences of Omar Khayyam, sad 
 old refrains from Theocritus — it is such 
 expressions of old passion, pessimism, and 
 despair that, strangely enough, most comfort 
 the heart. Strange that the twelfth chapter 
 of Ecclesiastes should bring so keen a delight, 
 and the sorrows of Job become a joy for ever ! 
 
 Thus it was that the twelve wells and 
 seventy palm-trees of a long-lost Elim came 
 to comfort me this rnorning. So have we all 
 been comforted by the sudden song of a bird 
 heard in a fortunate moment, or by sudden 
 sunlight on a rose ; by a thousand inspiring 
 surprises of sight and sound which promised 
 nothing beyond the joy of their accident. 
 
 It is not that I believe in Elim that Elim 
 comforts me; but because the old writer, 
 by the simple sincerity of his art, has made 
 in those nine simple words a picture of rest 
 that is an Elim in itself. In the very words 
 themselves, are there not twelve wells and 
 seventy palm-trees .' 
 
THE BLUE JAR 
 
 Recently I was invited to hear music in the 
 house of a rich man. It was a great house 
 and gorgeous, and yet not without a certain 
 taste in its furnishing and its decoration, a 
 taste uncharacteristic, uncommitting, and 
 indeed representative, somewhat incongru- 
 ously, of the various tastes of the many poor 
 artists who had built and beautified it, rather 
 than of any vivifying taste in the one rich 
 man who occasionally occupied it. 
 
 " How beautiful we artists make the world 
 — for others ! " I sighed, as my soul went 
 out to the enslaved architects and painters 
 and artificers, famous, unknown, or infamous, 
 who had breathed their fatal passion for 
 beauty into this rich man's marbles, woven it 
 into his tapestries, dyed with their hearts' 
 blood his coloured glass, given their dreams 
 into his bondage, and put their very souls 
 beneath his feet. Sad artists who in every 
 corner of this house had worked with tears ! 
 
42 THE BLUE JAR 
 
 And here were the musicians ! Music too 
 was a slave in this house. The bondsmen 
 came with their long hair and white faces, 
 carrying their captive instruments in their 
 hands, the deep-lunged violoncello that breaks 
 the heart, and the little violin that brings the 
 tears. And with them too they carried in 
 little cages of manuscript the singing souls of 
 the great composers of old time, whom to-night 
 they would re-embody — they would open the 
 dark manuscripts and the souls would fly 
 forth among the strings — re-embody — that 
 Beethoven might once more utter his soul's 
 agony, and the rich man's evening thus pass 
 pleasantly by. 
 
 There were many women seated in the hall, 
 some beautiful ; they wore many garments of 
 great costliness, some beautiful; and upon 
 their necks and in their hair glittered many 
 jewels, some beautiful. But I noted that the 
 fairest jewels were upon the necks least fair 
 — yet maybe kindly so, for thus were they 
 not upon the necks that most needed them ? 
 
 "Yes," but in that fantastic mood which 
 music induces, I pursued the question a step 
 further : " Have the beautiful stones them- 
 
THE BLUE JAR 43 
 
 selves no feelings, no preferences ? How can 
 those diamonds glitter so in that terrible old 
 lady's hair ? And are those pearls really 
 happy round yonder yellow neck ? They 
 used to live once rocking and shimmering 
 deep down in a wonderful ocean. . . " 
 
 And as I mused, methought the pearls 
 answered : — 
 
 " We pearls are never happy," they said, 
 " but there is a neck seated next to you where 
 indeed it would be a joy to live ; . . . " and a 
 great tear stole down from the necklet 
 and fell into the lap of its mistress, who 
 caught it and remarked to her neighbour that 
 one of her pearls had been trying to escape. 
 
 There seems to me a certain indecency, 
 even immorality, in performing great music 
 to so trivial and commonplace a company of 
 men and women as that among which I was 
 seated. It is, of course, but a part of the 
 general profanation of the holy arts by the 
 vulgar, a profanation, however, in which per- 
 haps music suffers most, from the intense 
 intimacy of its noblest and most attractive 
 inspirations. Architecture for the most part 
 shields itself by building ugly buildings for 
 
44 THE BLUE JAR 
 
 most possible purposes, but even when it 
 builds beautifully for base uses, it is not, after 
 all, a sensitive personal art, and though the 
 soul of the architect passing by and beholding 
 the money changers in his beautiful halls can- 
 not but suffer, the marble is not so acutely 
 himself as the notes of a requiem or the words 
 of a lyric are the very flesh of the composer or 
 the poet. The painter too may hide his soul 
 away behind some impersonal subject, or in 
 some corner of a picture where few eyes are 
 likely to seek it. The poet escapes through 
 the sheer indifference of the vulgar. Great 
 poetry is of no use to amuse a crowd, nor will 
 it soothe the savage breast of the diner, as he 
 sits ruddy at evening, with napkin hanging 
 from his neck and his champagne laughing at 
 his side. Poetry has to be read to be under- 
 stood — music needs only to be played. 
 
 But music, like Latin or Greek, has an 
 aural decorative quality, a patterned surface 
 of amusing sound, accidental to its serious 
 messages of joy and sorrow. It is autobio- 
 graphy suitable for framing — it is a tragic 
 utterance of the human soul which you may- 
 use as you use tortoise-shell, without a thought 
 
THE BLUE JAR 45 
 
 of the tortoise. Music is a beautiful woman 
 singing in an unknown tongue — some few 
 love what she sings, but most see only one 
 more woman to desire. 
 
 It has been suggested that the favourite 
 music of the gods is the picturesque murmur 
 of human agony, as, deprived by distance 
 of intelligible and responsible meaning, it 
 mounts on high, just as the desperate buzzings 
 of imprisoned and bewildered insects actually 
 full of pain, strike rich chords of frenzy and 
 humorous rage to the ear of man. Play us the 
 Crucifixion ! " Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani " 
 — what exquisite anguish is there ! And it 
 is in some such mood of purely aesthetic 
 detachment that we listen to the music of the 
 great German and Italian masters. The swan 
 is dying, in great agony of spirit — but alas ! 
 for our pity, it is dying so beautifully ! It is 
 singing so wonderful a song ! 
 
 "Adelaida! Adelai'da!" cries Beethoven, 
 and his heart breaks in the cry — ah ! but the 
 cry is so beautiful ! Go on breaking for ever, 
 great heart of music, so that sometimes after 
 dinner, we may hear again that beautiful cry ! 
 
 " AdelaKda ! " 
 
46 THE BLUE JAR 
 
 I had not noticed that among the musicians 
 had been brought in a wonderful captive 
 woman, very tall and lovely, and regally 
 simple. It was she who was singing. She 
 was like a Greek temple to look on, faultlessly 
 built of white marble ; or like some moonlit 
 tower of Italy which sways like a lily from 
 afar. 
 
 There was in that great hall but one other 
 thing as bekutiful as she, — a little jar of 
 unfathomable blue, with smooth simple sides, 
 which at the same moment I caught sight of, 
 cloistered and calm in a niche high above us : 
 simple in shape as a maid, simple in colour 
 as a violet, and all mysterious as a star. 
 
 At last the evening had succeeded. Down 
 upon our troubled sea of incongruities, upon 
 mediocrity absurdly arrayed as magnificence, 
 upon pretentious plainness foolish with gems, 
 down upon the idle chatter and cheat of it all 
 shone the steady unflinching blue of that 
 little blue jar. Here at last was something 
 sufficient, complete, elemental, eternal. I 
 know nothing of pottery, and I knew as little 
 of the history of my jar as of the beautiful 
 Greek Temple who was singing. It was but 
 
THE BLUE JAR 47 
 
 two curves, like the neck and the breast of a 
 girl, enclosing a whole heaven of blue. But 
 it was perfect, perfect with the simplicity of 
 eternal things. It was complete in perfection 
 as a great line of poetry, as the flight of a 
 bird, as the curve of a falling wave. It was 
 all. 
 
 From that night I remember no woman's 
 face, no splendid lady, no single particular of 
 all that lavish magnificence. 
 
 I remember only that little blue jar. 
 
A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 
 
 Sand, sea, and sky are, I suppose, sand, 
 sea, and sky all the world over. Yet there 
 are, doubtless, places where the sand is 
 cleaner, harder, and more spacious, the sea 
 greener and fresher, and where the sky at 
 all events looks more boundless. Such a 
 place, we may say, is not Lancashire South- 
 port, where the sand is so dirty that the 
 dainty sea seldom does more than visit the 
 horizon verge; it is not fashionable and 
 over-rated Cromer, with its untidy mud cliffs 
 ever tumbling down into unsightly chaos; 
 but it emphatically is Fano, a Danish island, 
 stretching itself for some seventeen miles 
 along the North Sea, on a line say with 
 Edinburgh. Island it is called, but rather 
 is it a huge silver sandbank, seventeen miles 
 long, and at its broadest point two miles 
 broad, of low sandhills grown over with a 
 sort of sea-wheat. It has one little port, 
 
A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 49 
 
 Nordby, on the inland side, where you reach 
 it from Liverpool Street via Harwich and 
 Esbjerg, a red hotel and a cluster of quaint 
 houses, making a picturesque landing-place. 
 But here is not your stay. Here you but 
 land to drive the mile and a half across the 
 island, finally to emerge on three big hotels 
 and a few pretty villas, keeping more or less 
 together in a vast and sandy loneliness, 
 which suddenly opens like a thousand doors 
 on to the sea. 
 
 I am but little of an Odysseus, so I shall 
 not venture to assert that the air you now 
 breathe is the purest, the sand the cleanest 
 and most exquisite to the tread, the most 
 grateful to the eye, the sea-line the most 
 delightful bathing-place in the whole world. 
 I have a timid idea that the world is a big 
 place; but this I will venture to say, that for 
 sand, sea, and sky at their best Fano must 
 prove hard to beat. There is certainly no 
 English watering-place known to me that can 
 compare with it in all those respects for 
 which we go down to the seaside in flannels ; 
 and in this I am confirmed by an English 
 family, the only English family that so far 
 4 
 
so A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 
 
 has discovered Fano, — a discovery which its 
 more charming members have gone on keep- 
 ing to themselves for eleven successive years. 
 At length, however, they feel that, as the 
 Theosophist would say, the time has come 
 for Fano to be revealed to the world, and it 
 is, therefore, not without consulting their 
 security, that I make this communication. 
 Indeed, though some of them have mastered 
 the beautiful Danish tongue in the course 
 of their visits, they have grown to feel that 
 a few more English voices would improve the 
 sound of table d'hdte. 
 
 Personally, I confess that one of the most 
 original charms of Fano for me is that it 
 provides also so complete a holiday from 
 speech. Being fortunately unable to speak 
 German, and knowing as much of Danish as 
 I do of Persian, I was able to live in an en- 
 chanted palace of silence, in which only one 
 kind voice could reach me; to be invulner- 
 able to speech, and yet alive to all the charm 
 of sound — for words are so beautiful so long 
 as we don't know their meaning. I love the 
 society of my fellows so long as I cannot 
 understand what they say. Foreigners a.V 
 
A DANISH BATHING PLACE 51 
 
 ways seem so wonderful to me just on that 
 account. Thus I rather revelled in my soli- 
 tude of Danes and Germans, and loved to 
 sit, as it were, invisible amongst them, while 
 the brilliant Danish flashed and sighed from 
 
 lip to lip. 
 
 Danes, charming Danes, 
 I know not what you mean ! 
 
 There was one Danish gentleman I found 
 that I could talk a little to, Pyramus and 
 Thisbe-like, through little broken chinks in 
 the wall of silence, and our talk was so 
 pleasant that I repented for a moment my 
 Trappist vow. For we talked of literature, 
 and it is so seldom one meets an Englishman 
 one can talk literature with. Every Dane, 
 on the contrary, was once a literary man in 
 his youth. My acquaintance was, I gath- 
 ered, a business man, but then our very hotel- 
 keeper had been a student at the University, 
 and was a disciple of George Brandes ! Den- 
 mark reminded me of Scotland in that. How 
 many business men in England, I wonder, 
 could talk as intelligently of English litera- 
 ture as that Dane talked that evening — of 
 what one must remember is to him a foreign 
 
52 A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 
 
 literature? Outside, a nation's literature 
 seems so much — inside, how little! Eng- 
 land is Shakspere and Byron and Dickens 
 only to the foreigners — Denmark is Hans 
 Andersen and Brandes to itself, as Scotland 
 is Burns. 
 
 My friend asked a question which quaintly 
 illustrated how much more our literature is 
 to other nations than it is to ourselves. Near 
 us was a bright little English boy, everyone's 
 playfellow, named Percy. "Percy?" asked 
 my Danish friend. '" Is he called so after 
 your poet Shelley?" I had to assure him 
 that EngHsh boys were not as a rule named 
 after the English poets, and that the pre- 
 valence of the name John was not to be 
 taken as evidence of the popularity of Keats. 
 
 Fanb does not aim 'at excitement. It gives 
 you rest. On the endless yellow shore there 
 are bathing-vans, bicycles, and those great 
 hooded wicker-chairs one associates with 
 Trouville. The firm platform-like expanse 
 of sand makes it particularly delightful for 
 bicycling, and to bicycle by the sea is to feel 
 like a disembodied spirit. I found it, too, 
 very good sand to sit and do nothing on. 
 
A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 53 
 
 Up at the Kur Hotel there is a band which 
 plays some time before you are up, and again 
 in the evening. Then there are quaint little 
 " balls " sometimes at the Kur Hotel, in 
 which the peasants in their curious, mourn- 
 ful costumes, are to be seen taking a part. 
 There is likewise a tennis-lawn, and, during 
 our stay, a kind German gentleman let off 
 a small quantity of rockets. We had, too, 
 one of the most picturesque night thunder- 
 storms I ever remember. But, on the whole, 
 I repeat, Fano does not aim at excitement. 
 It brings you rest. 
 
 The cooking? Well, hotel cuisine is the 
 favourite subject of a greater pen than mine. 
 I was assured by one gentleman that Danish 
 cooking is the finest cooking in the world. 
 " Oh, I don't know," I ventured to reply, 
 " they cook very well in Afghanistan." He 
 had n't been there, he said, so I thought he 
 might have modified his statement. But, of 
 course, Danish cooking is famous, and de- 
 servedly so. There are many Danish dishes 
 which we might well add to our menu. 
 
 And about the fish there cannot be two 
 opinions. Fish so exquisitely fresh cannot 
 
54 A DANISH BATHING-PLACE 
 
 be had in England, for the reason that fish 
 in Denmark are sold alive. The fish-shops 
 are great tanks, in which the fish go on 
 swimming till they attract a customer. The 
 fish, therefore, always came to our hotel 
 alive, — a method which prolongs life, and 
 much improves the taste of the fish after 
 death. 
 
AN AFFECTIONATE LETTER 
 FROM TABBY 
 
 Young Sebastian, who is just standing on the 
 dewy threshold of a brilliant literary reputa- 
 tion, called on me the other day, happy as a 
 girl. He is as yet innocent of the dark 
 underground passages beneath the Temple of 
 Fame, and has not yet heard the fearful 
 shriek of some young reputation as it is 
 carried away by the cat-like priests to tor- 
 ture, and perchance death, in those horrid 
 vaults. 
 
 " I 've just had such a delightful letter 
 from " he said, naming a certain distin- 
 guished majordomo of letters, whose success 
 is not perhaps so entirely unconnected with 
 literary arts as his enemies would say. 
 
 " Why, you grow pale," he said, " the tears 
 start to your eyes ! " 
 
 " Yes ! I grow pale for you," I said ; " so 
 Tabby is already in your path." 
 
S6' LETTER FROM TABBY 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he said. " Surely 
 ■is an important critic, and I don't think 
 
 I ever received a kinder letter in my life." 
 
 " Of that I have n't the smallest doubt," I 
 answered. " For I too have had affectionate 
 letters from Tabby — and my tears start to 
 think of the boyishness of heart with which, 
 just like you, I rejoiced in them. Yes, in the 
 fulness of my guileless youth I once opened 
 my heart to Tabby. I was so grateful to 
 him that I even thought I admired his poetry. 
 That is five years ago, and Tabby and I write 
 no more loving letters to each other. . . ." 
 
 " It only means, I suppose, that you have 
 quarrelled," Sebastian interrupted impatiently. 
 
 " Unhappy boy," I proceeded calmly, " shall 
 I be able to save you from Tabby ? At all 
 events, however it wrings your young heart, 
 and however angry you get, I must try. I 
 know it is hard, poor boy. You are so much 
 in love with his praise. But it must be done." 
 
 With that I rose, and, unlocking a drawer 
 of my desk, drew forth a packet of letters 
 with a sigh. Along with the letters was a 
 smaller packet of newspaper cuttings. 
 
 " Before you show me your letter, you shall 
 
LETTER FROM TABBY 57 
 
 read one of mine," I said. " I could not bear 
 to read them all again. It would too pain- 
 fully remind me of the days for ever gone 
 when Tabby used to ask me to meet 
 General ..." 
 
 " General " suggested Sebastian. 
 
 " Ah ! has he asked you to meet him 
 already ? How simple great military men 
 are ! I believe he feels it quite an honour to 
 be asked to meet Tabby's latest minor poet." 
 
 " Well, here is one that will do," I con- 
 tinued, selecting a prettily-written letter of 
 eight pages. " Read this." 
 
 As Sebastian read his face grew perplexed, 
 and as he finished it was full of disappointment. 
 
 " Why ! " he said, " it 's almost the same 
 letter as mine, with a slight difference in the 
 wording." 
 
 "Ah!" I said. "Well! now read this. 
 You have seen what the letter says about my 
 'New Poems' ; now read this article." 
 
 The article was a bitterly contemptuous 
 piece of work charged with subtle depre- 
 ciation. 
 
 " You don't mean to say that he wrote 
 that .-• " Sebastian exclaimed. 
 
58 LETTER FROM TABBY 
 
 " I know he did," I answered. 
 
 "But it's not possible. There must be 
 some mistake. The man who would do that 
 must be the meanest thing that crawls. . . ." 
 
 " That 's Tabby," I replied. 
 
 It was Sebastian's turn to grow pale, and 
 angry tears of disappointment were not far 
 from his clear young eyes. 
 
 " I 'm so sorry for you," I said. " I won't 
 show you any more of them, though for each 
 of these pretty letters I could show you a 
 poisoned paragraph, or a cloaked assassin of 
 a review. It is Tabby's way — that 's why we 
 call him Tabby — that is, velvet and claws. 
 Here in one packet is the velvet, here in the 
 other are the claws. You can hardly call him 
 an enemy, because, though he looks and 
 dresses like a man, he has the mind of a 
 maiden aunt, bitter with disappointment and 
 edged with gossip." 
 
 "Can it really be true.'" poor Sebastian 
 moaned. 
 
 " It is all too true, ray poor Sebastian ; and 
 I have still a stranger thing to tell you about 
 Tabby. It is perhaps the reason of his being 
 Tabby. He is not really a living man. You 
 
LETTER FROM TABBY 59 
 
 start ? But it is quite true. Some ten years 
 ago when poor Tabby was beginning to sport 
 himself in the literary beam, a certain great 
 critic swept down on Tabby and killed him. 
 It was a little cruel, perhaps ; but the horrible 
 thing about it all was that Tabby did not 
 honestly die, but began life again as a vam- 
 pire. Tabby is dead, though he still presides 
 at literary functions and makes polished 
 addresses, quite dead ; but the dangerous 
 thing about him is that he is of the dead who 
 scratch. Tabby, I say, lives mainly on his 
 practice as a vampire. Whenever he sees a 
 young reputation stepping gaily along the road 
 of literary fame, he sidles up to it with charm- 
 ing manners and intoxicating praise. Then 
 he sucks the blood of its young confidence, 
 and by various devilish arts, not good for us 
 even to imagine, draws the life from the poor 
 young thing — till some day it finds its 
 strength failing it — it is fading away, and 
 the last cause it suspects is — Tabby." 
 
 " But why should he follow so horrible a 
 calling >. " asked Sebastian. 
 
 " He fears the young, and yet it is only by 
 killing and feeding on the young that he can 
 
6o LETTER FROM TABBY 
 
 keep up his semblance of life. The moment 
 a young reputation escapes him his end is 
 near." 
 
 " His end is near," answered Sebastian, 
 and as I looked at his stern young face, a 
 weak twinge of ancient affection prompted a 
 momentary pity for Tabby. Tabby will suffer 
 so as he dies. 
 
DESIDERIUM 
 
 I THOUGHT that my mother came to me and 
 said : " Child, you have forgotten me." 
 
 And I answered : " But I have not for- 
 gotten Her." 
 
 And my sister came to me and said: 
 " Brother, you have forgotten me." 
 
 And I answered : " But I have not for- 
 gotten Her." 
 
 Then came the friend of my heart, and he 
 said: "Where is our love.'" 
 
 And I said: "It is with Her." 
 
 Then I thought my youth came, holy, 
 with sad eyes, and said : " Where are our 
 dreams .' " 
 
 And I answered : " O, tell me where is 
 She ? " 
 
 Then came the Earth and the Heaven. 
 And the Earth said : " Have you forgotten 
 those mornings in the dew, when you lay on 
 my green bosom and loved every little blade 
 of the grass that grows there?" 
 
62 DESIDERIUM 
 
 " No," I answered, " I have not forgotten, 
 for is not your bosom greener because of 
 Her?" 
 
 And Heaven said : " You have forgotten — 
 forgotten those pure nights when against the 
 cold cheek of the moon you laid the throbbing 
 face of your boyhood, and kissed with your 
 young lips each of my little stars." 
 
 " No," I said, " I have not forgotten — for 
 I loved you because of Her." 
 
 And a woman came, and said : " You will 
 forget me." 
 
 And I answered : "Never — until I meet 
 Her." 
 
THE SECOND COMING OF 
 THE IDEAL 
 
 One Sunday morning, a few months ago, I 
 passed along the sumptuous corridors of the 
 Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, on my 
 way to the writing-room, and I came to a 
 spacious scarlet hall, set about with plush 
 couches and little writing-desks. Exquisite 
 and imperious women sat in cosy flirtation 
 with respectful young Americans, and there 
 was a happy buzz of vanity in the air. 
 Wealth, luxury, idleness, were all about me, 
 purring and sunning themselves in the elec- 
 tric light; and yet, for some unknown and 
 doubtless trivial reason, I was sad. As I 
 look back I can only account for my sadness 
 by the fact that I was to sit answering week- 
 old letters, while these happy people flirted. 
 A little reason is always the best to give for 
 a great sadness — though, indeed, how could 
 one help being sad in the presence of so 
 much marble and so many millionaires ! 
 
64 IDEALISM 
 
 Well, at all events I was sad ; but suddenly, 
 as I looked about for an unoccupied desk, 
 what was this voice of ancient comfort speak- 
 ing to me from a little group, one reader and 
 two listeners, — a grey-haired, rather stern, 
 old man, a grey-haired old lady, a boy, not 
 specially intent, — rich people, you would say, 
 to look at them : " Many waters cannot quench 
 love, neither can the floods drown it ; if a man 
 would give all the substance of his house for 
 love it would utterly be contemned'' 
 
 It was a New England father persisting in a 
 private morning service here among the triflers. 
 
 I felt like those of whom one has read in 
 Sunday-school stories, who, passing the door 
 of some little mission-house one rainy night, 
 heard a word or a hymn that seemed miracu- 
 lously intended for them. Surely that stern 
 old Puritan father had been led to read that 
 particular chapter, that particular Sunday 
 morning, more for my sake than, at all 
 events, for the sake of his little boy, who 
 might quite reasonably and respectfully have 
 complained that he was too young as yet to 
 comprehend writing so profoundly beautiful 
 and suggestive as the Hebrew scriptures. 
 
IDEALISM 65 
 
 Yes ! it was evidently for the poor idealist 
 in the House of Astor that the message was 
 intended. For the boy weariness, for the 
 mother platitude, for the father a text — for 
 me a bird singing; and all day long I kept 
 saying to myself, lonely there among the 
 millionaires : " Many waters shall not quench 
 love, neither shall the floods drown it; if a 
 man would give all the substance of his house 
 for love, it would utterly be contemned." 
 
 If a wild rose had suddenly showered its 
 petals down from the ceiling, or a spring 
 bubbled up through the floor, or a dove 
 passed in flight through the hall, the effect 
 of contrast could hardly have been more un- 
 expected than the surprising sound of those 
 old words thus spoken at that moment, in 
 that place. They had for the ear the same 
 shock of incongruity, of wilful transportation 
 out of one world into another quite alien, 
 which Cleopatra's' Needle has for the eye 
 amid the hansoms and railway-bridges of 
 the Thames' embankment, or the still greater 
 shock of juxtaposition with which one looks 
 upon the Egytian obelisk in Central Park. 
 
 But there was this difTerence. The obe- 
 S 
 
66 IDEALISM 
 
 lisks tell of a dead greatness, of a power 
 passed away, whereas those words told of 
 an ever-living truth, and bore witness, even 
 by their very quotation in such a context, to 
 a power no materialism can crush, no pessi- 
 mism stifle, the deathless idealism of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 That the heart of man can still go on 
 dreaming after all these centuries of pain 
 and superficial disillusion is perhaps the 
 greatest proof of the authenticity of his 
 dreams. How often, indeed, must such 
 words, such promises of the poet and the 
 prophet, have rung as with a hollow mock- 
 ery in the ears of man ; in the downfall of 
 despairing peoples, with all their unregarded 
 d6bris of individual hopes and dreams; in 
 dark ages of oppression, iron epochs of mili- 
 tarism in which the very flowers might well 
 have feared to blossom, the very birds to 
 sing ; and in the ears of no people so hope- 
 lessly as of that whose poet gave us this song 
 of songs ; that people which, as if in ironical 
 return for the persecution of ages, has contri- 
 buted most to the idealism of mankind. Yet, 
 through all, the indomitable dreams arise, and 
 
IDEALISM 6^ 
 
 the indestructible words promise on as of old. 
 Though the dream passes into the dust, the 
 dust rises again in the dream. 
 
 But idealism has deadlier foes than the 
 iron heel of the soldier, or the rack of the 
 priest — each in his way sometimes a stern 
 idealist himself; it has even more to fear 
 from the slothful materialism of luxury, the 
 sneer of cynicism, and those fashions of 
 philosophy which hold up the dust in deri- 
 sion of the dream. Being an eternal princi- 
 ple in Nature, idealism has nothing to fear 
 from any, or all, of the three. It cannot die 
 — it can only 
 
 " Suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
 It may be darkened during more or less 
 lengthy periods of eclipse, but from all such 
 periods it has come out brighter than ever 
 before, and it is perhaps from the most 
 serious period of eclipse in its history that 
 I hold it to be at present emerging. 
 
 Of course, it must not be forgotten that 
 in the darkest of such periods, the area of 
 eclipse has always been relative, and has 
 
68 IDEALISM 
 
 never covered the whole or even the majority 
 of mankind. As literature and art are our 
 only, or our chief, means of making an esti- 
 mate, perhaps we lay undue stress on their 
 changing temper from time to time, and too 
 easily grant the implied presumption of a few 
 specialized individuals to speak for the world 
 at large. As in political elections there is 
 always a large proportion of non-voters, in- 
 cluding perhaps a majority of wise heads; 
 so in this matter of spiritual representation 
 there are comparatively few who record their 
 votes. And it may well be that these silent 
 ponderers on the mystery of life are the best 
 worth hearing. 
 
 It is in the nature of heresies to make a 
 noise, and doubt and dissatisfaction always 
 gain an advertisement out of all proportion 
 to their representative value. Whatever 
 doubts and fears have darkened the souls 
 of philosophers during the last nineteen 
 hundred years, however bitterly or drearily 
 or tragically they have read the riddle of 
 life, we must not forget that there have 
 been Christians all the time, — Christians 
 quite content with their own answer to the 
 
IDEALISM 69 
 
 riddle; as, indeed (to refer to a still more 
 complete and apparently final, eclipse) 
 throughout the Christian era, there have 
 been worshippers of the old gods all the 
 time; and as also, in the vicissitudes of 
 both, and ages before either were thought 
 of, there has been the Hebrew, equally con- 
 tented with his answer to the riddle all the 
 time. Similarly, to compare small things 
 with great, amid all the mirk of French 
 realism, men have gone on quietly enjoying 
 Jane Austen and Sir Walter all the time. 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, while it has been the 
 most superficially sensitive, it has not been 
 the profoundest amongst us, or at all events 
 a majority of the profound, who have been 
 most conscious of the recent eclipse of ideal- 
 ism ; and yet it were idle to deny that many 
 profound and serious minds have, during the 
 last twenty years or so, come under its 
 shadow. 
 
 To some, indeed, in religion, in politics, in 
 literature and all the arts, idealism has seemed 
 to go down for ever before a criticism which 
 has called itself realism, but which, when it 
 has not been mere superficialism, has really 
 
70 IDEALISM 
 
 been one of the friends of idealism in dis- 
 guise. In religion, despair; in politics, sel- 
 fishness; in literature and all the arts, the 
 hard and ugly and cynical surface. And per- 
 haps, in the field of politics this is hardly the 
 hour to make an annunciation of the ideal. 
 Think of Armenia ! Think of Dreyfus ! 
 
 In fact, idealism in politics seems for the 
 moment to have forsaken Europe to take 
 refuge with those American arms which have 
 made themselves the unselfish champions of 
 an oppressed people ; though, alas ! when we 
 turn from the idealism of American foreign 
 politics to enquire concerning the progress 
 of democracy in the greatest democratic 
 nation in the world, we may well pause in 
 our optimism and await developments. 
 
 Thirty or forty years ago it seemed indeed 
 as if the world were at last to have an oppor- 
 tunity of being governed on some broader 
 principle than narrow commercial interests, 
 and that at last the application of moral 
 ideas to politics was to be attempted. Such 
 was the illusion created by the eloquence 
 of John Bright and Mr. Gladstone, and the 
 moral enthusiasm of Mr. John Morley. Much 
 
IDEALISM 71 
 
 later, we dreamed a brief dream of a like beau- 
 tiful rose-colour during the phantom morn- 
 ing of Lord Roseberry's short and merry 
 administration. But alas ! the cynic and the 
 diplomatist and the usurer once more pull 
 the strings of nations, and Toryism, bloody 
 and unabashed, again lifts its head in the 
 counsels of the world. 
 
 Certainly if in politics the present hour is 
 not that darkest hour that precedes the dawn, 
 we may well despair. 
 
 But the dawn necessarily comes latest in 
 politics ; and perhaps the mission of the suc- 
 cessful politician is rather to fight than to 
 announce the dawn. 
 
 However, turning to fields from which the 
 news is more momentous to the human soul, 
 and applying to such watchmen of morning 
 as the poet, the artist, and the philosopher, 
 the news is more cheering — though for the 
 past twenty years it has been cheerless 
 enough. 
 
 No doubt man is a good deal of a coward, 
 and a very little alarm will make him cry out 
 that all is lost. Rob him of his trinity, and 
 he cries out that you have stolen his religion ; 
 
72 IDEALISM 
 
 frighten away his dryads and his fauns, his 
 ribboned shepherds and shepherdesses, and 
 with Keats, he declares that " beauty and 
 loveliness have passed away." Run a railway 
 through the Lake District and Mr. Ruskin 
 conceives that the world is no longer beauti- 
 ful. For man's hold on the realities is so 
 uncertain that they have only to change the 
 fashion of their garments for him to believe 
 them lost for ever. In any new form he finds 
 an enemy of some old faith — instead of the 
 friend it probably is. He seems incapable 
 of learning that the gods are always chang- 
 ing their names. 
 
 Most of man's troubles, many of his trage- 
 dies, and perhaps all his despairs, have sprung 
 and still spring from the simple fact of his 
 being so incorrigible a formalist. 
 
 There is nothing man loves so much as to 
 make laws that he knows he cannot live up 
 to ; to immolate himself on impossible altars ; 
 to take two words that really mean the same 
 thing, and shed his blood for them. And, 
 indeed, there is seldom a battle in which 
 both sides are not fighting for the same 
 cause. 
 
IDEALISM 73 
 
 Will man never learn to apply to his own 
 generation that old text which proclaims that 
 " the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life " ? 
 It was for this sin that idealism has died, 
 over and over again. It is for this sin, too, 
 that realism is dying. Will idealism, one 
 wonders, be any wiser now that it is so 
 surely being born again? 
 
 What do I mean by idealism ? I use the 
 word in no technically philosophical or nar- 
 rowly artistic sense. I mean by idealism, the 
 attitude of those who insist on the beautiful 
 in human life, and consider that the beauti- 
 ful rather than the ugly contains the key to 
 its mysterious meaning. In short, one might 
 say that idealism is man's optimistic deduc- 
 tion from the beautiful ; or still more briefly, 
 that idealism is the optimism of the beauti- 
 ful, as so-called " realism " has been the 
 pessimism of the ugly. The favorite moods 
 of idealism are love and wonder, of realism 
 scrutiny and scepticism. The idealist is a 
 poet, the realist is his critic. Realism, prop- 
 erly understood, is only one of the methods 
 of idealism, and it is its work, by breaking 
 up the old forms into which idealism from 
 
74 IDEALISM 
 
 time to time hardens, to prepare the world 
 for new expressions of the ideal. 
 
 That the heart of idealism has failed it, 
 is no doubt due, even in its most indirect 
 manifestations of lost courage, to the destruc- 
 tive theological criticism brought to bear on 
 religion by the physical sciences on the one 
 hand and literary criticism on the other. 
 That the Bible may be fallible as history and 
 symbolic as revelation, is in the end noth- 
 ing against its supreme authority as the Book 
 of the Soul. The childish cosmogony and 
 the legendary history of the Iliad of the 
 Hebrews detract nothing from its matchless 
 spiritual science. Jonah is no relevant argu- 
 ment against St. John. 
 
 Already even the time is past when specula- 
 tive curates could make a fashionable reputa- 
 tion for engaging heterodoxy on the quaint- 
 nesses of antique faith, and that idealism 
 should ever have been alarmed by the easily- 
 won victories of secularism marks what would 
 appear to be one of the eternal weaknesses of 
 its constitution. 
 
 For the worst of idealism is that it is al- 
 ways giving the wrong reasons for itself. 
 
IDEALISM 75 
 
 Instead of courageously taking its stand on 
 its own intrinsic certitude, on the facts of 
 its great feelings, on the evidences for itself 
 in the deep heart of human nature, it clings 
 to documents, to the superseded expressions 
 of old moods of inspiration and moments of 
 insight. It quotes past authority, instead of 
 present perception, and thus realism, which 
 is merely another name for science, explodes 
 the authority, and for a while idealism is 
 disconsolate. 
 
 For example, idealism began long ago with 
 the belief that man was what we call a 
 spiritual being, and in proof thereof pointed 
 to such well-known facts of man's supremacy 
 as the acknowledged fact that sun, moon, and 
 stars revolved round the world ! But when 
 Copernicus came and declared this bad as- 
 tronomy, idealism took fright, and for a while 
 feared that man might not be a spirit, 
 after all. Yet it had only given a bad rea- 
 son for a good belief. And this one may 
 take as typical of the kind of mistakes ideal- 
 ism has all along been making and realism 
 correcting. 
 
 By a spiritual being one is driven to the 
 
^6 IDEALISM 
 
 conclusion that one really means a being 
 eternally individual and responsible ; a being 
 whose dreams are not limited by life, and 
 whose duties are not ended by death. The 
 present writer in an earlier stage of his de- 
 velopment somewhat too lightly called in 
 question the present value of the concept of 
 the hereafter of the soul, the immortal con- 
 tinuity of the individual. Its tendency, he 
 once feared, was to minimise the significance 
 of our present existence. He now sees — 
 or thinks he sees — that the precise opposite 
 is the truth, and that not only is the signifi- 
 cance of a man's life intensified by, but per- 
 haps, indeed, it entirely depends upon, its 
 enduring for ever. 
 
 We have often been told, and perhaps have 
 ourselves often declared it, that this desire 
 for immortality, this pathetic longing for con- 
 tinued existence, is merely the lust of egoism, 
 a deceit of full blood ; and a great poet has 
 thanked " whatever gods there be " — 
 
 " That no life lives for ever, 
 That dead men rise up never, 
 That even the weariest river 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea." 
 
IDEALISM ^^ 
 
 But to be tired of the disappointments of 
 life is not to be tired of life, and. perhaps the 
 lover is wiser, who amid all the uncertainties 
 and frustrations and agonies of love, hopes 
 only for one final satisfaction, and in that 
 hope alone is content, its eternal continuance. 
 No true lover is satisfied without a promise, 
 or at least a hope, that the love for a year or 
 a day will develop into the love that lasts 
 
 alway. 
 
 He " cannot be at peace 
 
 In having love upon a mortal lease." 
 
 In spite of the reason which tells us that 
 beauty is beauty, and delight delight, for how- 
 ever short a time we hold it in our hands, its 
 lasting for ever seems to be a condition of 
 completeness in any human enterprise or 
 interest worth beginning. The love that 
 cannot last for ever should take some other 
 name. 
 
 Indirectly the whole of mortal aspiration 
 rests upon man's instinctive, mostly uncon- 
 scious, reliance that it is for some divine 
 immortal end. No morality will be strong 
 enough ultimately to take the place of im- 
 mortal responsibility as an incentive, though 
 
78 IDEALISM 
 
 for a time, to use a homely image, morality, 
 like a train from which the locomotive has 
 been detached while still in motion, will ap- 
 pear to move of itself, from the momentum 
 of old religion. There will be good socialists 
 for a while because of the Christian altruism 
 stored in their blood ; but it cannot be long 
 before those who have transferred their egos 
 to the state, and exchanged their own per- 
 sonal hopes of salvation for an abstract hope 
 of the good of the race, will be asking them- 
 selves why a race doomed to perish is any 
 more important in kind than an individual 
 similarly doomed. Either the individual is 
 everything — or the race is nothing. Either 
 man is a spirit, that is, a being whose actions 
 and destinies have an eternal significance, 
 or the world is a preposterous masquerade, 
 worth taking part in for those who can light- 
 heartedly repose in the movement and colour 
 of it, but hardly worth the pain of a tooth- 
 ache, and certainly quite unworthy the cost 
 of a single martyrdom. 
 
 It is the way of man first to dream, then 
 to doubt, then to despair, and finally to sneer 
 both at his dream, his doubt, and his despair. 
 
IDEALISM 79 
 
 Human history is continually going this round 
 of evolution — with its poets, its sceptics, its 
 pessimists, and its cynics. An age of spiritual 
 despair has recently passed into a brief period 
 of bitter and brutal cynicism, but the moon 
 of change is once more bringing in the 
 dreams. Once more man begins to " think 
 nobly of the soul." Certain coarse old voices 
 will no doubt have him merely a ridiculous 
 animal still, but their audiences are thinning. 
 Young men, in belated imitation, are to be 
 heard preaching their little gospels of brutal- 
 ity, and vainly hoping to stem the rising tide 
 of idealism by miscalling it " sentimental- 
 ism , " but such are wearing last year's 
 fashions. There has never been sufficient life 
 in cynicism to allow it a long day. A little 
 stinging fly, it loses its sting as it uses it — 
 and though the natural history of the illustra- 
 tion be fabulous, its application will serve. 
 Sentiraentalism ! After all, is there any sen- 
 timentalism more shallow and dangerous 
 than the sentimentalism of brute force, the 
 sentimentalism which glorifies man's lust of 
 destruction, and bids the ape and the tiger 
 rise again ? If to practise pity, and to seek 
 
8o IDEALISM 
 
 peace be sentimentalism, to prefer gentleness 
 to cruelty, beauty to ugliness, self-sacrifice to 
 selfishness, — then blessed be sentimental- 
 ism. 
 
 All idealism, let us repeat, rests on the 
 spirituality of man, and that spirituality upon 
 his immortality — and as for all these nothing 
 of the nature of material proof is forthcoming, 
 nothing beyond the circumstantial evidence 
 of the soul, nothing of material proof is 
 properly adducible against them. 
 
 That idealism has given bad reasons, does 
 not disprove that it has the best of reasons 
 for itself. It has made the mistake of giving 
 materialistic authority for spiritual things ; it 
 is constantly stumbling over its own supersti- 
 tions, and, in very truth, degenerating into 
 sentimentalism. 
 
 As in religion, it pins its faith to old forms, 
 and denies the formative energies of vital 
 spiritual natures, so in art it will attach 
 itself to certain periods and places and schools, 
 and allow none other the seal of its approba- 
 tion, forgetting that beauty has never yet 
 been born so beautiful but that she must 
 needs be born again. 
 
IDEALISM 8i 
 
 Thus because beauty is known to have 
 dwelt in Greece, it is fabled that there she 
 laid down for ever in a marble tomb ; or in 
 Italy, maybe, we shall still find her haunting 
 ancient cities ; certain dead masters knew her 
 secrets — but always we are taken to a grave. 
 In some old palace, some old painting, some 
 old book, it is that beauty lies buried ; and if 
 you boldly declare that you saw her rising, 
 like Venus from the sea, in the soaring towers 
 of New York, or heard her singing to herself, 
 maybe, in Manchester — some one is sure to 
 say, " Oh, no ! you must be mistaken ; the age 
 of beauty is past, the days of miracles are 
 ended." On the face of every classic beauty 
 has written the word " Resurgam," but those 
 who watch in stupor by her tomb are not those 
 who witness her resurrection. To such one 
 day will come a startling touch upon the 
 shoulder, and beauty already abroad in the 
 world, with a strange morning light upon 
 her face, will say, " I am not there — I am 
 arisen." 
 
 How often does it prove that the so-called 
 idealists are the materialists, the so-called 
 materialists the only vital idealists. It is 
 6 
 
82 IDEALISM 
 
 certainly true in religion, it is certainly true 
 in art. Perhaps idealism is more often found 
 where you would least expect it, among the 
 so-called Philistines who build and bridge and 
 victual the world ; for we may be sure that 
 Thebes was not the only city whose walls 
 were built to music. The ugliest industrial 
 city that ever blackened the blue sky and 
 fouled the green earth was built to music too, 
 else it had never been built at all. The most 
 inveterate idealists I have ever met have 
 been business men, and those are few who do 
 not run their business in the interests of a 
 dream — unacknowledged and perhaps even 
 forgotten. There is a certain pathos in this, 
 for such men have seldom a glimpse of their 
 own poetry, — though they often have " liter- 
 ary" daughters, daughters who will babble 
 idealism, while their fathers humbly practise 
 it. We are never so near to the ideal as 
 when we touch the real, and the gates of the 
 spirit are in the walls of matter. 
 
 Either man is a spirit or he is the most 
 ridiculous of all animals. Only an immortal 
 destiny, an eternal significance, can justify his 
 fantastic tricks before high heaven ; and the 
 
IDEALISM 83 
 
 supposed demolition of his spiritual preten- 
 sions by the criticism of science gave, as we 
 have said, an opportunity to the cynic such 
 as he had never before enjoyed in the history 
 of mankind. The cup of man's humiliation 
 was filled with the invention of the scientific 
 novel, that so-called " realistic " presentation 
 of human life which depicted only the physi- 
 cal side of the human paradox and degraded 
 even that, reducing man and beast to a lowest 
 common denominator of biology. 
 
 But it was of this final humiliation that the 
 new idealism was to be born. Realism had 
 now mistaken its function. So long as it 
 had confined itself to correcting the mistakes 
 of idealism, to discrediting its logic, to ridi- 
 culing its affectations, and generally criticis- 
 ing its formulae, it was on safe ground ; with 
 ruthless industry it had done idealism the 
 inestimable service of robbing it of all its bad 
 old reasons for itself. Of its divinity and its 
 pseudo-science, it was a competent critic; 
 but there is one science idealism understands 
 better than realism, — the science of human 
 nature. It was when realism began to write 
 novels, and from the criticism of human logic 
 
84 IDEALISM 
 
 and human terminology proceeded to the 
 analysis of the human heart, that idealism 
 awoke with a laugh from the nightmare of 
 despair into which German Biblical criticism 
 and physical science had thrown it, and saw 
 for the first time how shallow was the reason- 
 ing that would rob it of its dreams, saw that 
 it had only been afraid of words all along. 
 
 This human nature ! 
 
 Why, even the old waxworks of sentimen- 
 talism were truer to human nature than this 
 bite humaine, this man, with all that made 
 him man left out. Human nature — without 
 worship, without dreams, without joy, with- 
 out love ! Realism ! Could it be realism — 
 which neglected to count these things among 
 the realities? 
 
 Thus idealism set about examining some 
 of the bogie words that had so alarmed it. 
 Where it had talked of spirit, realism had 
 opposed the word " matter " — and the heart 
 of idealism, one hardly understands why, had 
 incontinently sunk. Examining the word 
 again, and the properties admitted to it, 
 idealism began to understand that there was 
 included amongst them a mysterious some- 
 
IDEALISM 8s 
 
 thing, a mysterious central, vitalizing force, 
 wliich even realism itself could not undertake 
 to explain — and then a light broke in upon 
 it. Why, this was but the spirit again, under 
 another name. Instead of being something 
 external to it, the spirit was perhaps an in- 
 herent property of every particle of matter. 
 
 In every pin-point of dust there might, in- 
 deed, be many other properties inimical to 
 that little spark of soul, but that little spark 
 that loved and dreamed was none the less 
 undeniably there, and stood its eternal chance 
 with the rest. 
 
 Thus it proved with all the words that had 
 frightened it. They were but new words for 
 its old intuitions, and in none of them, nor 
 in any of the sciences or philosophies to 
 which they belonged, was there really any- 
 thing to terrify the soul of man. 
 
 They explained nothing — nor did they 
 explain anything away. There was no science 
 or philosophy, however " realistic," that did 
 not leave the last word to be said by idealism. 
 The universe had, indeed, been more accur- 
 ately classified, but man had not really lost a 
 single dream ; on the contrary, his old dreams 
 
86 IDEALISM 
 
 had been given back to him, augustly en- 
 larged, dignified to a cosmic significance. 
 
 All the denials of materialistic science have 
 but been preparing the way for a new and 
 tremendous affirmation of the ideal, — an af- 
 firmation which must now have a value such as 
 no affirmation of the ideal has ever possessed 
 before. The value of a man's faith depends 
 on the amount of doubt it holds in solution 
 — and, similarly, the value of a man's ideal- 
 ism depends on the amount of ugliness it has 
 been able to look upon and live. Idealism to 
 be of any value to-day must be hard-wrung 
 from the most thorough and uncompromising 
 experience of existence. If you will call 
 yourself an idealist — may I ask how many 
 hard and ugly things have you faced ? How 
 deeply has sorrow wrung you? Have you 
 known the unutterable bitterness of death? 
 Have you looked into the bloody and vulgar 
 face of war? Have you seen the cruel face of 
 the sweater? Have you walked through hos- 
 pitals ? Have you listened without a fear to 
 the last cold words of science? 
 
 Before you declare life good, and the soul 
 of things beautiful, have you realised some- 
 
IDEALISM 87 
 
 thing of these things? In the sweet cup you 
 bring, have you thrown all the sours and 
 bitters of the world, and has it yet remained 
 sweet? 
 
 Only such an idealist is of any use to-day. 
 
 The old idealisms lost their authority be- 
 cause they did not know enough. Though 
 actually based, as all idealisms must be, on 
 little more than the obiter dicta of the human 
 spirit that loves and worships and dreams, 
 they were, as we have said, associated with 
 antiquated theology and bad science. 
 
 Idealism, however, to-day, the ideaHsm that 
 is awakening the round world once more 
 to a rejuvenescence of worship and wonder, 
 romance and song, is well acquainted with the 
 most pitiless biology and the most cynical 
 documents of — French — human-nature. It 
 knows all that realism can teach it — and far 
 more. It is an idealism without illusions, 
 it is an idealism that will wear. 
 
 It is, indeed, a very different thing from 
 what our grandfathers meant by idealism — 
 so different as perhaps hardly to be called 
 by the same name. What our grandfathers 
 meant is perhaps best suggested by that bad 
 
88 IDEALISM 
 
 old verb " idealise." Our grandfathers actu- 
 ally found it necessary to " idealise " life, 
 idealise this wonderful human life. They 
 threw over it rose-lights from the outside. 
 To them poetry and art were to be " improve- 
 ments " upon, rather than pictures of and 
 interpretations of, life, — as if the world was 
 not more beautiful than anything that has 
 ever been written about it. Like a fashion- 
 able photographer, they would smooth out all 
 the wrinkles, touch up the eyes, complete 
 with dimpled corners the cupid's bow of 
 the mouth, and for the wonderful face of 
 man, written over with joys and sorrows, 
 with wistful eyes filled with eternal mean- 
 ings, substitute a foolish image of simpering 
 wax. 
 
 The new idealist, however, instead of throw- 
 ing around life artificial light from the out- 
 side, is bent to reveal the inner shining that 
 radiates for him from every object of human 
 life and experience, however opaque it may at 
 first seem ; to tear away the veils of custom 
 that obscure it ; and to proclaim the essential 
 wonderfulness and beauty — often enough a 
 tragic beauty — of life, simply as life. Not 
 
IDEALISM 89 
 
 life striking attitudes, or merely life heroic, 
 romantic, or sentimental; but life anyhow 
 and everywhere. 
 
 Not to " beautify " life, but to allow it to 
 reveal its own beauty : that is the aim of the 
 modern idealist, whether he be teacher or 
 artist. The courageous and grateful accept- 
 ance, and the impassioned celebration of, the 
 real, not the manufacture of insipid unreal- 
 ities, — that is the mission of the new ideal- 
 ism. It includes moonlight as before, but it 
 has realised in addition the picturesqueness 
 of daylight. 
 
 The new idealism believes literally that 
 miracles never cease ; that the Golden Age is 
 always with us ; that the heroic age is never 
 past ; that human life in London and New 
 York is just as poetical as it was in Rome or 
 Florence; that God not only made the coun- 
 try, but that he also made the town ; and if it 
 cannot give us- back our ancient heaven, it 
 has, at all events, rediscovered for us the 
 Earthly Paradise. 
 
 As an example of the sincerity, the thor- 
 oughness, of the new idealistic approach to 
 life, one might instance the attitude of some 
 
90 IDEALISM 
 
 of our young poets to the life of cities. Lon- 
 don is the grim shepherdess, most in favour 
 with the Tityrus of to-day, and, far from dis- 
 daining the steam-engine as prosaic, the 
 modern poet asks nothing better for a sub- 
 ject. When Mr. Stephen Phillips writes of 
 
 " The moondd terminus through the dark 
 With emerald and ruby spark, 
 The stoker burningly embowered, 
 With fiery roses on him showered," — 
 
 one hardly recognises Mr. Ruskin's abomina- 
 tion of desolation; and 
 
 " Thou, merchant, or thou, clerk, hard driven, urged 
 For ever on bright iron, timed by bells " — 
 
 would hardly know your tragic transfigured 
 selves in Mr. Phillips' poetry. 
 
 Even the beauty of New York has been 
 discovered by Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts, the 
 very title of whose New York Nocturnes is a 
 sign of how much idealism is already pre- 
 pared to dare; while in far San Francisco a 
 bright little Lark was recently heard singing 
 the good news at Golden Gate to this 
 melody : — 
 
IDEALISM 91 
 
 " God, keep my youth and love alive, that I 
 May wonder at this world until I die ; 
 
 Let sea and mountain speak to me, that so, 
 Waking or sleeping, I may fight the lie ; — 
 Romance is dead, say some — but I say no ! " 
 
 These lines I quote but as flowers blown be- 
 fore the breath of the spirit, feathers on the 
 rising tide of the ideal, witnesses slight but 
 significant of the growing tendency to find 
 the ideal in the real, the poetry of life right in 
 the very heart of its prose. 
 
 And this spring-wind of idealism is blow- 
 ing its bird-voices about every land. Far 
 away in Denmark painters are putting Paris 
 behind them, and going back to those legends 
 that are eternal symbols of the heart and lot 
 of man. Germany, too, is once more awaken- 
 ing to a mystical art of strange fascination 
 and significance. From Scotland and Ireland 
 men come bringing fairy news in stories and 
 songs. In Belgium Maeterlinck is seeing 
 visions and clothing poignant realities in 
 the garments of old dreams. Italy has her 
 D'annunzio. Young France is romantic once 
 more; and has not the most notorious of 
 French realists recently proved himself what 
 
92 IDEALISM 
 
 at heart he has always been, one of the noblest 
 of idealists ? 
 
 But this new idealism, we cannot be too 
 careful to insist, is an idealism nourished on 
 realities ; on the real joys and real sorrows of 
 real men and women. It is idealism not 
 because it has shut its eyes to, but because it 
 has faced, the real. 
 
 No doubt in course of time this new ideal- 
 ism will, like the old, ossify into formalism 
 and sentimentalism, and a new era of realism 
 be demanded to rectify its abuses, "and all 
 the trial be gone o'er again." 
 
 Meanwhile, idealism has won one new 
 friend of great importance, and needs to 
 beware of one ancient enemy of great guile. 
 The friend I mean is that tremendous ally — 
 Woman : woman, who is always first to bite 
 the apple of knowledge ; woman the arch- 
 idealist, mysterious harp vibrating ever earli- 
 est to the breath of the unseen. The poets 
 and prophets of old time have had to save the 
 world with but little help from their fellow- 
 men. In future they will have woman to 
 help them ; woman able too to help them, as 
 she has never been qualified to help them 
 
IDEALISM 93 
 
 before; and women, too, by the thousand, 
 thanks to what is significantly called their 
 emancipation. 
 
 The emancipation of woman ! What a his- 
 tory of what a slavery there is in the phrase. 
 At one time a woman's views on life very 
 properly went for little — as admittedly she 
 was allowed to know so little about it ; but 
 to-day her comprehensive education, and the 
 opportunities for reading modern authors 
 afforded by her vast leisure, have changed all 
 that, and the woman to-day who doesn't 
 know as much about life as a man is either a 
 fool or a slave. 
 
 As for that subtle enemy of which I spoke : 
 let me quote first this significant conclusion 
 to a recent, most advanced book of philos- 
 ophy : " Outside of spirit there is not, and 
 there cannot be, any reality, and the more 
 that anything is spiritual, so much the more 
 is it veritably real." 
 
 Such words express the feeling, not only of 
 the writer, but of all who are really thinking 
 progressively to-day. Idealism is but an- 
 other name for a great spiritual revival, one 
 of those re-awakenings to consciousness of 
 
94 , IDEALISM 
 
 the human spirit that seem to come periodi- 
 cally in human history. Man once more 
 grows unaccountably aware of the near pres- 
 ence of the divine, and conscious, with a cer- 
 titude beyond argument, of a sanctity and 
 majesty in his existence. 
 
 There is a wild young soul of faith hover- 
 ing in the air, awaiting embodiment. And 
 there is an ancient church with an enthralling 
 history. It knows many secrets of the soul 
 of man. It is fair to the eye, and sweet to 
 the smell, and ravishing to the ear. It draws 
 by the magic of many memories. Its doors 
 are ever open, and all day long a voice calls 
 out from among the pictures and the incense, 
 
 — a voice very kind and full of rest. It 
 promises an end of heartache, a putting off of 
 burdens, and above all peace to the tortured 
 brain. It demands in return but one offering, 
 
 — the fearless mind of man. 
 
 O, idealists, beware how you enter there ! 
 
 No old church is great enough for this 
 mighty young spirit of faith, no merely imita- 
 tive art. This spirit will make its own new 
 churches, its own new art — only be patient, 
 and fear not. Only give it time. 
 
A DESULTORY NOTE 
 ON VALUES 
 
 To any one who by grace of nature, or by tak- 
 ing thought, is able to regard human life with 
 relatively ingenuous and unsophisticated eyes, 
 nothing is more bewildering and indeed 
 startling than the craziness of the scale of 
 values regulating so-called important and 
 unimportant things. Beginning maybe with 
 a respectful faith that society must have 
 arrived at its present curious method of as- 
 sessment, in obedience to a long series of 
 observations the law of which we have yet 
 to master, and, indeed here and there com- 
 ing upon false values in which we dimly dis- 
 cover the fading traces of values once real 
 but no longer life-giving and long since for- 
 gotten, we, nevertheless, soon realise that it is 
 not law we have to consider but an anarchy 
 in which the active element is vulgarity and 
 the passive superstition. Broadly speaking, 
 
96 A NOTE ON VALUES 
 
 vulgarity has made our prices and supersti- 
 tion keeps them up. 
 
 One of the dreams of the German philoso- 
 pher Nietzsche was to make what he called 
 a Transvaluation of all the Values. Perhaps 
 he was hardly the man to do it, perhaps no 
 one man would be the man to do it, for value, 
 though perhaps mainly a recognition of innate 
 precious qualities in certain objects and mo- 
 ments and activities, is also to a certain 
 degree a social hall-mark — though only to 
 be allowed as such when the society is 
 mainly composed of units capable of appre- 
 hending real and not merely false values. 
 
 What is a real and what is a false value? 
 Without delaying to make all those qualifica- 
 tions which every definition demands, we 
 might hazard that that is a real value which 
 is real to our sincere selves and at the same 
 time accepted as real by the finest spirits of 
 the race. 
 
 Happily society is not without examples of 
 approximately real valuation. It is a prin- 
 ciple of just valuation which makes us pay 
 great musicians and singers at the rate of a 
 fortune a week. Such principle also regulates 
 
A NOTE ON VALUES 97 
 
 the salaries of beautiful actresses, many of 
 whom are very properly paid for nothing but 
 being beautiful and allowing us to look upon 
 them. The compellers of laughter and the 
 drawers of tears of just right are housed in 
 palaces and luxurious castellated flats. In a 
 world so poor in laughter, priceless indeed is 
 the stored mirth in the heart of a Penley. 
 
 It was an approach to just valuation when 
 the other day the manuscript of Keats' Endy- 
 mion was sold for several hundred pounds 
 though it will be observed that the sum was 
 about four times as much as Keats received 
 for his poetry during his lifetime, and that 
 the money went into the pockets of the 
 descendants, not of the poet, but of his pub- 
 lisher. Poetry, one need hardly say, pro- 
 vides the most significant example of false 
 valuation. Poets and prophets are the most 
 important people to a community — after the 
 comedians whom they occasionally rival — and 
 yet curiously enough they are the worst paid. 
 The fact of being poets and prophets is suf- 
 ficient pay in itself, you may say — no doubt, 
 but the same would apply to the beauties and 
 the comedians. 
 
 7 
 
98 A NOTE ON VALUES 
 
 In thus emphasising the value of laughter 
 I have had in my mind a phrase of Stevenson 
 which any of us ambitious to start out upon 
 a Re-valuation of all the values might take 
 with him as an excellent touchstone. It 
 occurs, if I remember aright, in The Amateur 
 Emigrant, in which, describing one of his 
 fellow passengers in his voluntary " second 
 cabin " voyage to America, he tells us of his 
 ambitions for commercial and civic success. 
 He spoke of such success, adds Stevenson, 
 with one of those flashes of reality which 
 make him something like a great writer — 
 " as if it was real like laughter." 
 
 " As if it was real like laughter " ! 
 
 What a profound saying is that ! — how 
 clear-seeing, how purged must have been the 
 vision of the man who could look right 
 through the thousand obscuring veils of cus- 
 tom and sham, to light up with so vivid a 
 phrase the reality behind. 
 
 Well, in that phrase Stevenson laid the 
 foundation stone of a new philosophy which 
 each of his books went to illustrate. And it 
 might be described as the philosophy of know- 
 ing what one really cares about in life, not 
 
A NOTE ON VALUES 99 
 
 what we are told to care about, what we are 
 too apt really to fancy we do care about, — a 
 philosophy of real values based on the actual 
 and not the imaginary desires of human 
 beings. There are a number of dull things 
 we do, a number of dull successes we strive 
 for, with seldom a thought of how dull they 
 are to the real self which dreams and plays 
 in our neglected souls. And I am venturing 
 to speak not merely for a handful of dreamers 
 and idealists, the professors of the emotions and 
 the senses, but for the bulk of men and women. 
 
 Take the most resoundingly successful of 
 these, and, if you can induce them to be mo- 
 mentarily honest, you will find that to them- 
 selves in their heart of hearts the raison d'etre 
 of their lives is not the exterior achievement 
 of it, not the conquests of their intellect, nor 
 the triumphs of their skill, not the decorations 
 of their success, but just some simple moments 
 of emotion, some few snatched hours of play. 
 
 Indeed, man is at heart a dreamer who has 
 forgotten his dream. Centuries ago he 
 dreamed it, as he dreams it over again in the 
 heart of every young man and woman, 
 dreamed it fervently and longed to build it. 
 
lOO A NOTE ON VALUES 
 
 But the building materials were so costly, so 
 hard to win, the labour of building so great, 
 that soon he became entirely absorbed in 
 these and went on toilfully building, quite 
 forgetting why he built. Then when the 
 dream was built, he moved into it with his 
 wife and children, and dwelt therein in a 
 commonplace way, valuing only the cost of 
 the structure and the furniture of the dream, 
 and forgetting the dream itself. But some- 
 times a poet will come to dinner, and as the 
 bourgeois man looks into his simple eyes 
 suddenly the seales fall from his own and he 
 starts up for a wonderful moment of reality, 
 and a sweet old voice cries in his ears, as he 
 looks on his wife and his home: "This 
 habit, why, it was once a passion — this fact, 
 why, it was once a dream 1 " 
 
 In its heart the world cares for little but 
 play ; but in its life it does hardly anything 
 but work, for the world has forgotten that 
 the reason of its work is — play. The natu- 
 ral man works that he may play — works 
 that he may love and dream, and know while 
 he may the wonders and joys of the strange 
 and lovely world which for a short space he 
 
A NOTE ON VALUES loi 
 
 is allowed to inhabit; the unnatural man 
 plays that he may work. 
 
 So unnatural indeed have we become that 
 not only have we forgotten our dreams, but 
 we have actually grown ashamed of them. 
 Proverbially there is nothing of which an 
 Englishman is so much ashamed as his emo- 
 tions. To suspect him of sentiment is to 
 imply insult, to surprise him in tears is to 
 commit a mortal offence. Laughter he still 
 retains, but too often for the unworthy pur- 
 pose of laughing at other people's emotions, 
 and ridiculing beautiful things he no longer 
 understands. England indeed is the Siberia 
 of the emotions. 
 
 As an example of our attitude toward the 
 emotions, consider the universal treatment 
 of that widespread class, the lovers of a com- 
 munity. As they go by through the streets 
 hand in hand, a dream-fed, flower-crowned 
 company - 
 
 " Speaking evermore among themselves 
 Their heart-remembered names " — 
 
 do we bow the knee and doff our hats as they 
 pass ; do we strew their path with roses ; do 
 
I02 A NOTE ON VALUES 
 
 we clear the way for their beautiful faces ; do 
 we say to ourselves : " Hush ! there go the holy 
 ones, the lovers, the great dreamers, the young 
 priests and priestesses of futurity." 
 
 No. We hunt them with little boys, we 
 startle them in shy corners with lights, we 
 break upon their delicate reveries with ruth- 
 less laughter. Poor harried dreamers — their 
 dream will be short-lived enough at the best. 
 
 So it is we despitefuUy use the very im- 
 portant people who are some day to fill our 
 armies, man our ships, populate our offices ; 
 and who, if they fulfilled no such practical 
 services to the state, would be valuable public 
 servants in that they keep the world young, 
 and by their transcendental antics remind us 
 that man does not live by company-promoting 
 alone. 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 So this is America ! 
 
 No, you say, this is only New York, and as 
 yet your highly Europeanised hotel protects 
 you from America. This is the city to which 
 all the ends of the earth are come. This is 
 Cosmopolis, not America ! 
 
 I suppose every country possesses these 
 pedantic aborigines who will recognise nobody 
 for a Roman who is not a direct descendant 
 of .iEneas, and who limit the representatives of 
 a country to some oligarchic four hundred, 
 or some shaggy and violent primitives of its 
 western mines, — men who recognise nothing 
 later than origins and deny developments. 
 
 Of course we have them in England — men 
 who will tell you that Liverpool and Manches- 
 ter, nay, even London, are not England, and 
 that the true English type is only to be studied 
 in the dreaming quadrangles of Oxford, or the 
 sleeping cloisters of cathedral cities. Simi- 
 
104 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 larly I have met charming old gentlemen who 
 recognise no English literature later than 
 Beowulf, and reserve the term " good Eng- 
 lish " for Saxon words of one syllable. 
 
 It is a curious logic. That a country began 
 in one place would seem to be the best of all 
 reasons for its ending in another. America 
 began in Boston. Since then it has devel- 
 oped into a thousand equally characteristic 
 cities. Some day — being a swift goer — it 
 may even catch up to Chicago. 
 
 Meanwhile, the present writer has arrived 
 at New York, and as he has already met with 
 quite a number of Americans here and en- 
 countered various fashions and modes of 
 being that strike him as being neither Euro- 
 pean, Asiatic, nor African, he must be forgiven 
 for concluding that they are American ; and 
 shall venture to ask : if one cannot say 
 "America is here or nowhere " in New York 
 where must one dare to say it? Whither 
 then, O Goddess of Liberty, must I follow 
 your flying feet? 
 
 No doubt the American eagle has many 
 nests, but surely in New York, too, one may 
 hear its protecting scream, and on Broadway 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 105 
 
 and Fifth Avenue pick up characteristic 
 examples of its feathers. 
 
 I think an American would smile if he 
 could hear the various precautions imposed 
 upon an Englishman who would visit America. 
 They are hardly less nervous and elaborate 
 than in the days when our grandfathers used 
 to make their wills before facing the perils 
 of a fifty-mile coach journey. 
 
 The American customs — the American 
 interviewer — the American winter — the 
 American inconvenience and incivility — 
 the American child — American noise ; these 
 are some of the terrors which appal the 
 stout heart that would make these Lavinian 
 shores. 
 
 Well, I have faced them all — and I still 
 survive to tell the tale. If my experiences are 
 unsensational compared with that of my 
 countrymen, one must not forget that there is 
 a class of travellers who would seem to visit 
 foreign countries for the purpose of complain- 
 ing that they are not at home, who expect to 
 do at Rome what Home does ; then again all 
 nationalities number travelling representa- 
 tives who are neither philosophers nor gentle- 
 
io6 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 men, people who always make the maximum of 
 fuss on the minimum of occasion, fastidious 
 souls who can never find any thing " fit to 
 eat " in any hotel of any kind, men and 
 women who seem to think the world was 
 created as a feather bed for their miserable 
 bodies. 
 
 I met one of these poor ill-used gentry an 
 evening or two ago in the smoking-room of a 
 hotel, in which to my thinking he was the only 
 objectionable thing. In a world so warmly 
 provided with comfortable and friendly hotels, 
 it would be indiscreet and indeed ungrateful 
 to declare it the most comfortable or the most 
 friendly ; but it is certainly to be placed among 
 the first dozen of ideal hotels. Every comfort 
 and convenience of which one can conceive 
 are there — even civility. But my companion 
 complained bitterly of a different experience. 
 For him it was a " beastly hole" — " nothing 
 fit to eat " — " no attention ; " and he was 
 off to-morrow — of all countries — to Spain, 
 which he declared " the only country in which 
 a gentleman could live." For the first time as 
 he spoke I feared the probability of war with 
 Spain. 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 107 
 
 He himself, I was glad to remember, was 
 not an Englishman, belonging as he did to an 
 ancient race of professional wanderers, who 
 so far have been able to make themselves 
 comfortable in any country: a race noble 
 and honourable, but occasionally unfortunate, 
 like any other, in its representatives ; and by 
 the number of times he spoke the word 
 " gentleman " in ten minutes, and his manner 
 of ordering some cigarettes from the waiter, I 
 understood what was the matter with the 
 hotel and with him. 
 
 This is a digression, and yet, I think, not 
 without bearing upon that vexed question, — 
 the writing of American impressions. If the 
 present writer's impressions are for the mo- 
 ment optimistic, he does not forget nor wish 
 it forgotten that they are scarcely a fortnight 
 old. They are, therefore, occupied with the 
 simplest and most elementary matters, those 
 superficial considerations which necessarily 
 first strike a stranger as he lands at a foreign 
 port and treads a foreign shore. I write but 
 of my American matriculation. 
 
 When I have passed the American Custom- 
 House a littler oftener I may revise my opin- 
 
io8 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 ion of the geniality of its officers. Meanwhile 
 I can only record one individual experience of 
 good fortune. Of course things might well 
 have been different, had my wife and I 
 belonged to that criminal class which wear 
 international sealskin. As it was, however, 
 our officer proved an angel and an American 
 humourist combined. He did not strew the 
 cobbles and sawdust of the wharf with my 
 wife's gowns, nor did he make any objection 
 to reasonable changes of raiment. He even 
 added compliment to courtesy. 
 
 My wife had but one new hat — she said. 
 She was sure there could be no need to 
 examine that ? Oh, but our Mark Twain of 
 an exciseman was just dying to see it. " And 
 I'm sure," he said, "you're just longing for 
 a sight of it yourself, after all this time, and 
 your terrible passage across." 
 
 How could one deny him ? 
 
 "Well, it's a bute," he said, "a perfect 
 bute ! Now I 'm sure you 're grateful to me 
 for another look at it." And I 'm sure she 
 was. 
 
 So did we pass the dreaded American cus- 
 toms. 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 109 
 
 From them we passed into the dreaded 
 American winter. This wonderful sunshine — 
 winter ! Free champagne, we ventured to call 
 it. It was true that snow lay all about and it 
 was evidently snow of an arctic stubbornness, 
 though it was but two or three inches deep. 
 I gathered that it had resisted the efforts of 
 the New York scavengers for some three 
 days, and to judge by the way in which it lay 
 about in rutted drifts across the roadway you 
 might have thought it had remained there as 
 it fell. No doubt snow in London melts 
 more quickly — at all events it disappears as 
 it does not seem to disappear in New York. 
 
 Perhaps it was only picture-snow ! The 
 sunshine and the mildness of the air seemed 
 to suggest that explanation. At all events 
 we felt our fur coats a little cowardly, and 
 that was our first impression of American 
 winter. 
 
 But I find I have forgotten the American 
 interviewer. How ungrateful of me ! 
 
 I know that really great people always re- 
 fuse to be interviewed. However, I was con- 
 tent to be an exception. A good old rule of 
 manners is to do in America as the Ameri- 
 
no SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 cans do. Therefore it seemed to me merely 
 courteous to be interviewed. Could I, with 
 politeness, not to speak of humanity, allow 
 these intelligent and charming gentlemen to 
 stand about that draughty and cobbled quay 
 in vain? They were kind enough to be inter- 
 ested in me. Why should I pretend that I 
 did not share their interest ? It would have 
 been the paltriest of affectations. I am inter- 
 ested in myself, as every author born of a 
 publisher is, and I am not only not indiffer- 
 ent, but positively grateful that man born of 
 woman should be interested in me, too. I 
 don't write books for the purpose of hushing 
 them up. I want them heard of, I want 
 them read, I am not above allowing them to 
 be bought. 
 
 If these gentlemen who lie in wait for un- 
 punctual Atlantic liners on draughty quays 
 on wintry mornings will help me to that — 
 why should I, being little, ape greatness by 
 denial of them, or being great, imitate little- 
 ness by turning up my nose at one of the 
 most efficient methods of that publication 
 which any one with any thing to say should 
 not be too proud to welcome ? 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA in 
 
 The gods speak to mortals through many 
 channels ; of old through the oracles of 
 Eleusis, to-day through the American inter- 
 viewer. That the divine messages are liable 
 to fantastic distortion in the process of com- 
 munication is but one of the conditions 
 attaching to all human instruments. The 
 American interviewer does his best, and 
 when you consider the number and variety 
 of phenomena, human and otherwise, on 
 which he must pose as an authority, it is im- 
 possible not to have sympathy for him, how- 
 ever cruelly he may have misunderstood you. 
 
 I now come to American inconvenience 
 and incivility. Well, so far as my week or 
 two's experience goes I would unhesitatingly 
 drop off the prefix in both cases. When my 
 English friends spoke of inconvenience they 
 were, I fancy, mainly thinking of hansoms. 
 
 Certainly one misses those — that is, one 
 misses the London eight-penny fare. Yet if 
 it is true that hansoms here are, say twice as 
 expensive, it is also true that on those occa- 
 sions when in New York you chiefly need 
 them, occasions of pleasure, tete-iL-tite occa- 
 sions, you don't much mind the extra cost ; 
 
112 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 and for the more necessitous purposes of get- 
 ting home, getting about the city, the cable 
 car more than makes up for the high-priced 
 hansom. The cable car terrifies one at the 
 crossings, but when I want to get back to my 
 hotel in half the time I could do it in London 
 I thank heaven for the monopoly which keeps 
 the busiest thoroughfare in New York, a city 
 busier to the square inch of its cramped . situ- 
 ation than London, so remarkably uncon- 
 gested and so conveniently free from merely 
 personal and speculative traffic. That there 
 ought to be more cars and less straps I don't 
 deny, and yet the manner in which the cars 
 are crowded seems to me to bring out a win- 
 ning element of the American character, — its 
 freedom from fussiness, from red-tape, when 
 something has to be done. 
 
 When America — I mean New York — 
 wants to keep an appointment, or when New 
 York wants to get home, it doesn't mind 
 hanging on to a strap for twenty minutes, so 
 long as it gets there in time; and, realising 
 that its neighbour is similarly bent, it does n't 
 frown at him for pushing or crowding a little 
 in his haste. I seem to see here a certain 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 113 
 
 boyishness in the American character, a cer- 
 tain touch of what in England we call " the 
 casual," which appeals to me ; and the man- 
 ner in which a conductor methodically collects 
 fares from passengers hanging on behind the 
 car, who in England would be scared off with 
 an oath or a by-law, is to me one of the con- 
 stant delights of travel by the cable car. Still, 
 a seat once out of every ten journeys would, 
 I grant, appeal to me, too. 
 
 Civility here, I fancy, as in other countries, 
 is the child of courtesy, and as for conve- 
 nience — well, at all events, there is no lack 
 of conveniences. 
 
 The American child ! I made her first 
 acquaintance in this manner: Desiring to 
 use the hotel telephone, I approached the box 
 with the trepidation of a man whose country, 
 shall we say, always waits for the very latest 
 improvements before it adopts a time- or space- 
 saving invention. That is, being an Eng- 
 lishman, I am not accustomed to the tele- 
 phone. Well, the operator said I must wait, 
 as there was one ahead of me for whom he 
 was engaged in making a connection. Meekly 
 I waited, and while doing so became aware of 
 
114 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 a very little girl standing near me, hair down 
 to her waist, frock up to her knees — but, oh, 
 with such cold young eyes ! 
 
 Could it be possible that this uncannily 
 self-possessed little creature was the person 
 to whom the operator referred? 
 
 Indeed it was, for presently the man offered 
 her the tube, and taking it from him with the 
 most imperturbable sangfroid, she closed the 
 door of the box, sat down, and began to talk 
 to her unseen friend. Evidently she was ar- 
 ranging her next dinner party ! No doubt 
 the American will say, "Why not?" and 
 certainly it is better that children should be- 
 gin early to take their own part and find their 
 own way about in the world, instead of blush- 
 ing their way through a gauche and timorous 
 childhood. Nevertheless, I confess that that 
 little girl rather frightened me. Nothing so 
 much as that cold young look of hers has 
 made me feel that I belong to an effete and 
 kindly civilisation. 
 
 American noise ! No doubt New York 
 knows how to be noisy, but I gather that the 
 first youth of its noise has now passed. A 
 more humane method of pavement is gradu- 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 115 
 
 ally driving the dryads and fauns of noise into 
 the side streets and the polyglot quarters. On 
 Fifth Avenue, at all events, you can hardly 
 detect a sound. However, it is not to be 
 hoped, though it is hardly to be feared, that 
 New York will become too quiet; for the 
 noise of a great city is its characteristic voice, 
 which to those who know and love it becomes 
 endeared. At first the noise of a great city 
 is merely noise — bewildering, buffeting, and 
 somewhat menacing. We are as yet ignorant 
 of the meaning of all these unfamiliar sounds, 
 whence and why they come. But presently, 
 as we grow more accustomed to it, this noise 
 is changing into music, — we begin to detect 
 a harmony, and before long can follow the 
 beat of its rhythms. 
 
 Was it not so when first we came to Lon- 
 don, and stood deafened and clutching on to a 
 policeman in some maelstrom of the traffic ? 
 Yet how soon had the noise died down into 
 music, — the siren song of the city that we 
 love. 
 
 So I conceive it must be with New York. 
 Already I seem to be learning some of the 
 notes, and sometimes as I wake in the small 
 
ii6 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 hours I go to my window just to catch the 
 never-ending song of the cables humming on 
 through the listening night, like the sound of 
 brooks running underground. 
 
 Already, too, I love, while I fear, that other 
 noise, that Chinese " snickersnee " clang of 
 the cable cars. As yet I have not become 
 educated up to the Wagnerian melodies of the 
 Elevated Railroad, — but I must remind you 
 once more of how short a time I have been 
 here. I am convinced that some poet who 
 loves New York, as one or two of our young 
 poets love London, would have no difficulty 
 in compelling even the Elevated to some 
 " utterance of harmony." 
 
 But what about New York buildings ? 
 What of Brooklyn Bridge ? Yes, I have be- 
 held these wonders, — those soaring altitudes 
 of stone, that morning gossamer of iron. 
 Such engineering epics — or rather lyrics — 
 as Brooklyn Bridge I did America the com- 
 pliment of expecting. My mind is simple 
 enough to take merely material marvels for 
 granted — in America, par excellence the 
 Country of Applied Ideas. The real beauty 
 and excellent taste in the buildings surprised 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 117 
 
 me more. I have seen buildings that only 
 need to have been born in Italy to make their 
 fortunes, and everywhere I have been struck 
 with the dignified simplicity in the use of 
 stone and iron and wood. It is seldom that 
 one is offended by cheap and nasty ornament. 
 If American architects have not risked the 
 exuberances of originality, they have known 
 how to keep quiet. They can leave beautiful 
 smooth stone alone, at least leave it still 
 smooth and beautiful. They have learned 
 the lesson of William Morris as it is only just 
 being learned in England, with the result that 
 Fifth Avenue, with the collaboration of the 
 exquisitely vivid atmosphere, is surely a vista 
 of great beauty and nobility, worthy of the 
 wide-browed, calm-eyed, beautiful women 
 who sweep along it, very evidently the 
 imperious daughters of an imperial nation. 
 Yes, in the modern way, I would certainly 
 call New York beautiful; particularly at night, 
 when you stand near Central Park, say about 
 Fifty-seventh Street, and from the rise of the 
 hill watch the theatres and shops and sky- 
 signs of Broadway glittering like a crown of 
 many-coloured jewels. But, indeed, what city 
 
ii8 SO THIS IS AMERICA 
 
 could fail to seem beautiful in such an atmo- 
 sphere ? 
 
 Still more than any external characteristic, 
 as I walk New York streets the impression 
 that mainly arrests me is one entirely unillus- 
 tratable by particulars, an impression of moral 
 seriousness and youthful energy combined. 
 As old cities seem to exhale senility, so this 
 young city seems to exhale a vernal breath. 
 Young blood seems to palpitate through the 
 streets. Indefinably, at every corner, through 
 all its avenues, there comes sweeping about 
 one a certain sense that this is a young nation 
 sternly in earnest. It is a nation that means 
 business, it will stand no nonsense ; it is a 
 nation in which, to borrow a phrase from a 
 certain quack-prophet of Germanity — "the 
 drones must die." 
 
 With this, too, I gain an equally indefinable 
 impression, such as I have never received in 
 countries equally liable to conscription, that 
 this is a nation of soldiers. Many of these 
 busy men about me have been soldiers already, 
 and all are eager at a moment's notice to be- 
 come soldiers — soldiers of the American 
 Idea. The American eagle is indeed very 
 
so THIS IS AMERICA 119 
 
 strong and very young. If I were a popular 
 preacher or a popular actor, I would coura- 
 geously cross my metaphor and declare it the 
 worthy offspring of the British lion. 
 
 But, after all, America, like any other coun- 
 try, is good or bad as thinking makes it so. 
 I confess that I came to it with prejudices of 
 old gratitude, gratitude to a land which had 
 produced some of the books that have best 
 helped me in the difficult business of living. 
 To me it was dear before I saw it, for the sake 
 of Emerson and Thoreau and Walt Whitman, 
 and for the sake, too, of essayists like Wash- 
 ington Irving and William Winter, whose 
 books I have carried so often through War- 
 wickshire lanes. We may respect a country 
 for its battles, we may conquer it for its 
 women, but we can only love it for its books. 
 
POETRY AND THE 
 JUBILEE 
 
 There seems to be no trade or profession in 
 her Majesty's dominions which is not taking 
 new courage, cherishing fantastic hopes, 
 because it chances to be just alive in this 
 year of especial grace, 1897. A great loosen- 
 ing of the heart and the purse-strings is 
 evidently anticipated — indeed, by the cater- 
 ing classes, one might say, expected. All 
 who minister to human comfort or convenience 
 genially expect to be paid fifty times their 
 usual charges for their ministrations — "so 
 hallowed and so gracious is the time." To 
 be alive in this halcyon year is luck, to be 
 born in it a sort of greatness, to die in it 
 sanctification. An officiating clergyman — 
 which is polite for officious — gravely con- 
 gratulated a bride and bridegroom the other 
 day on being married in this honourable year. 
 They were twice blest ; and purchasers of 
 a certain port, one reads with envy, are to be 
 
POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 121 
 
 made happy with special labels stating that 
 the wine was bought in the Diamond, Jubilee 
 year. May not poor poetry, therefore, pre- 
 sume to be " like things of the season gay," 
 and pretend to itself that its long-deferred 
 millennium is at hand ? For as many thousand 
 years as the world has lasted, poetry has 
 picked up a precarious existence, a suspected 
 mendicant art, suffering and suffered, living 
 desperately between kicks and halfpence, a 
 tattered Apollo feeding the pigs — or the 
 public : is it too much to hope that in this 
 blessed year of jubilee it may share in some 
 of the luck of its more important fellows, 
 catch at least a few of the crumbs falling from 
 the table of the wise ? I say wise, because 
 to be wealthy is surely to be wise. To be 
 poor is man's only folly. 
 
 Is it too much to hope ? Too much to hope 
 — that the world which sent blind Homer a 
 beggar-man through its cities, and has starved 
 or silenced every poet since, except those 
 who had inheritances or relations — fortu- 
 nately larger in number than is usually 
 supposed — is going at this time of day to 
 begin keeping its poets ? Too much to hope ! 
 
132 POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 
 
 Why, of course, it is merely absurd, quite 
 stark staring mad even to mention it. But 
 then everyone else seems to have gone stark 
 staring mad in this blessed year of the 
 blessed Jubilee — so why not our poets ? 
 
 Yes, it is a dream, and it will come true — 
 when one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays runs 
 for a hundred nights. Still, dreams are the 
 poet's all ; so let us, for a little, speculate on 
 the poet's wildest hope — to be fed. To be 
 fed, not for idleness, but, like every other 
 worker, for the service he does the community. 
 That is a curious popular error, that of the 
 idleness of poets. As a matter of fact there 
 is no business man, however great his con- 
 cerns, who is a tithe so hard-worked as a 
 responsible poet. The quality of his work 
 entails no such wear and tear of the whole 
 being, no such pitiless waste of all the tissues, 
 no such deadly tension of the nerves, as the 
 work of the poet; work, too, which never 
 ceases, from the tragic moment when the poet 
 first sees the light, to the thankful " it is 
 finished " when he closes for ever his weary 
 smitten eyes. He who works for eternity 
 must waste himself in a word. 
 
POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 123 
 
 But perhaps the reader is inclined to 
 question the value of this " work," to ask, as 
 the landlady asked Mr. Wilson Barrett's 
 " Chatterton," " What 's the use of poetry ? " 
 Of course it is open to any individual to rate 
 that value and use as he pleases ; but of the 
 national opinion on the subject there can be 
 no question. The nation may decline to 
 support its poets, but it is none the less proud 
 of them — perhaps all the more, because they 
 cost so little. Is England prouder of anything 
 than its literature ? Yet how much has it 
 contributed to its support? The English 
 Navy, the English Army, and English Litera- 
 ture — these are the three feathers in the 
 national cap ; but think what England pays 
 for her army and her navy, and look up in 
 " Whitaker's " how much she spends on her 
 literature. Of course literature is not in 
 its nature so expensive a distinction, but, 
 relatively to the necessities of support, will 
 any one contend that it is nationally supported 
 at all } 
 
 Why not disendow the Church, and endow 
 Literature, which is really the Coming 
 Church ? No doubt our literary men all round 
 
124 POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 
 
 would be content to accept a thousand a year 
 from the State, and allow the State to recoup 
 itself out of their profits. 
 
 However, that is a proposal more appropri- 
 ate for the Millennium than the Jubilee. It 
 is wild even for the Diamond Jubilee. There- 
 fore I will address my remarks less to the 
 nation than to the nation's millionaires. On 
 them devolves the glory of fastening in the 
 memory of time, by a variety of monumental 
 beneficence, the honourable characteristics of 
 the longest and most progressive reign in 
 English history. In many directions the 
 Victorian era has surpassed and amassed like 
 no era before it. This is perhaps sufficiently 
 acknowledged. It is acknowledged too, that 
 in nothing has it juster reason to pride itself 
 than in its literature. Well, then, is there to 
 be no adequate " Jubilee " recognition of the 
 fact .' Is that which will remain an honour 
 bright and contemporary when so many 
 honours vaunted to-day lie silent beneath 
 the dust of the antique — is that noble 
 and generous art which not only immortal- 
 ises itself, but immortalises all that has once 
 moved within the circle of its light, gener- 
 
POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 125 
 
 ous even in its lasting youth to the dead 
 and gone prides, the faded pomps, the de- 
 crepit powers that used to put it by; to 
 that alone which honours all the rest — are 
 there to be no honours this most honour- 
 able year ? 
 
 Let us whisper this to the millionaire — 
 the thing you dread most is to be forgotten, 
 your secret hope is to found a house, to leave 
 a name. There are other ways. You may 
 go on living after death associated hospitably 
 with some terrible disease which men shudder 
 to say — cancer, epilepsy, paralysis of the 
 spine; you may give to your native city a 
 park, where greasy loafers will spit all day 
 upon your name; you may eternalise your 
 frock-coat in disagreeable stone ; or you may 
 sink unthanked-for fortunes in raising those 
 towers of desolation called workmen's dwell- 
 ings, in which the workmen refuse to dwell: 
 these and other ways there are to be memor- 
 ably forgotten ; but would you wear a laurel 
 that never fades, would you have your name 
 smell sweet with the myrrh of remembrance, 
 and chime melodiously in the ear of future 
 days, make haste, O millionaire, make haste, 
 
126 POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 
 
 and pray some poet put your name into his 
 song! 
 
 He will do it for so little, for he is a grate- 
 ful heart. For what you carelessly pay for a 
 window to view the procession you could buy 
 his reverberating gratitude through all eternity. 
 Buy ! Why not ? Gratitude must always be 
 bought with something — and what should 
 buy it so fairly as money ? I saw some poor 
 literary man advertising the other day for 
 ;£'ioo to give him a year's rest from Grub- 
 street, that he might devote himself to a piece 
 of real work. I have wondered since if he 
 got it. Does any one suppose for a moment 
 that he did ? And yet I heard, too, the other 
 day that there are ;^900,ooo,ooo in English 
 banks bored with having nothing to do. Our 
 whole civilisation reeks — and rots — with 
 wealth. We can pay a club ;£'6,ooo for its 
 windows, and yet there is no one to risk 
 ;^ioo on a possible genius, who, poor soul, 
 must be no spendthrift if he knows how to 
 buy " a year's rest " — O healing phrase, as 
 of wells and palm trees ! — for a poor ;^ioo. 
 
 Millionaires, O millionaires ! I will not say 
 that the poets of your land are starving in 
 
POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 127 
 
 garrets. No ; but they are driven to play- 
 writing — which is perhaps worse for their 
 genius — to playwriting, and book-reviewing, 
 and the fifty other forms of keeping the herds 
 of Admetus. One of them is simply dying, 
 artistically, because he has never seen Italy ; 
 another has a new Divine Comedy dark and 
 bitter within him — but who can be a Dante 
 in his spare hours ? A third would bring 
 back the muses to Ireland, a fourth has found 
 the lost keys of hope and faith, and there are 
 others with other messages and dreams, very 
 important, even to millionaires. No doubt 
 these men will do their work without your 
 help, will speak in spite of all the iron forces 
 of silence, but, oh 1 your help were sweet ! 
 A year's rest for these men, O miUionaires, a 
 year's rest — to work in. How easy it were 
 for you to give them all five years' rest — to 
 work in, mind ! — a whole life's rest. With 
 the stroke of a pen you could endow all the 
 genius that deserves and needs endowment; 
 you could be the virtual founders of Twentieth 
 Century English Literature ! ;^SO,ooo in- 
 vested at 4 per cent would provide eight poets 
 with ;£'25o a year for life, and it would be easy 
 
128 POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 
 
 to double it, and thus allow them a wife and 
 two children apiece. What is ;£'5o,cxx3, — 
 what even is ;£ 100,000, — seriously speak- 
 ing, to pay for the honour of doing so great 
 a service to your country ? You hesitate ? 
 Yet were you asked for such a contribution 
 towards national sport, you would write the 
 cheque without a word. It is well that you 
 should do something for the national mus- 
 cles, but will you do nothing for the national 
 brains ? 
 
 For the other arts something is done, some- 
 times a good deal. For scholars and philoso- 
 phers there are scholarships and fellowships, 
 for composers and painters there are also 
 scholarships and travelling stipendia. For 
 literary men, except when they have failed, 
 there is practically nothing. The popular 
 literary arts need no assistance ; novelists live 
 in castles, build mansions for themselves, and 
 are generally self-supporting. The one excep- 
 tion to the fate of poets out of all the ages, 
 Tennyson, did the same ; but for the most part 
 poets must either be supported, or, in the 
 process of earning their honest livings, surely 
 and swiftly cease to be poets. The American 
 
POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 129 
 
 philosopher John Fiske has wisely said that 
 " the last thing one should ask a philosopher 
 to do is to support himself." The remark 
 applies with greater force to the poet, whose 
 temperament unfits him even more than the 
 philosopher from practising his art and getting 
 his living at the same time: for you must 
 remember it is not the time for the mere 
 writing that the poet needs — you can always 
 find time to write — it is the time to live in 
 which the poet is so poor, the time to see and 
 feel, to love and hate, to learn men and 
 women, to read wise old books, to see old 
 pictures and new lands, to take solitary walks, 
 to riot in company — time to laugh, to weep; 
 in brief, not merely the time to write, but the 
 time to live something worth writing about. 
 
 Millionaires, it is this time you can buy for 
 your country's poets — buy so easily, if you 
 will, that it makes the heart ache to think of 
 it. This is the blessed year of the Diamond 
 Jubilee; will you not make it originally 
 remarkable beyond any year out of all time 
 by taking the suggestion I ofier.' It has, I 
 know, been made before in vain, but then it 
 was not the year of the Diamond Jubilee. 
 9 
 
130 POETRY AND THE JUBILEE 
 
 The better the year the better the deed. 
 Done this year, the act will shine with a 
 double lustre. It is better than an ugly house 
 in Park-lane, believe me ; and then, of course, 
 you can still have that too. Have you not 
 said that you would spend more on your 
 stables than the sum I ask ? Or if one of 
 you cannot see your way, how about a syndi- 
 cate of Maecenases ? And, at all events, make 
 a beginning by endowing a fund to send a 
 young poet once a year to Italy. Thus alone 
 will you win an easy immortality, and show 
 an originality in the spending of your money 
 which will lift you at once out of the mere 
 rabble of millionaires. Millionaires, O mil- 
 lionaires ! can you not be pioneers as well as 
 millionaires .' 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 I BEGAN to subscribe to a press-cutting agency 
 from an innocent hope of instruction. I have 
 continued my subscription for amusement. 
 It was no doubt boyish to hope that a young 
 writer, who could hardly expect to start his 
 career as an immediate and impeccable mas- 
 ter, but would need, often by humiliating 
 failure, to learn much of his art by the way, 
 might perhaps learn something of that art 
 from such confident and consummate profes- 
 sors of it as his critics were likely to be. 
 
 It is true that the critics of the past did 
 not greatly encourage one in this hope ; but 
 then the critics of the present always learn 
 by the mistakes of the critics of the past, and 
 this was a liberal, experimental age, to which 
 new art was gallantly declared welcome. 
 
 Well, of course, it was love's young dream 
 of literature, and the lesson I was to learn 
 from Romeike was something quite different. 
 Now, when I know so well what to expect, it 
 
132 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 seems so strange that I should ever have 
 thought that critics should love or even know 
 literature ; that they should be eager to give 
 one a helping hand rather than feverishly, if 
 vainly, anxious to stamp one out of existence ; 
 or that they should even observe such a simple 
 law of the game as fair play. I am here, of 
 course, speaking of critics generally ; to this 
 rule of disillusion there are exceptions, as to 
 every other; critics whose praise one can 
 accept, critics for whose censure one can be 
 grateful. 
 
 But, for the most part, the subscriber to 
 Romeike must expect to pay, not for criticism, 
 but for the most strange and bewildering 
 jumble puzzle of tastes and opinions, and 
 certainly a most fantastic presentment of his 
 own poor self and doings. If you care to 
 hear in the same breath that your writings 
 are the purest and the filthiest ever penned, 
 that they are at once rollicking with merri- 
 ment and entirely devoid of humour, that they 
 are reverent to a fault, and profane beyond 
 belief — by all means subscribe to Romeike. 
 
 If, again, it entertains you to read that you 
 do your writing in a balloon and only come 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 133 
 
 down for meals, wear one side of your hair 
 blue and the other yellow, that you likewise 
 wear corsets, and that your real name is 
 Jones, then again I say by all means subscribe 
 to Romeike. 
 
 These diversities of opinion and distortions 
 of personality do, I confess, entertain me. 
 This figmentary self at once delights and 
 affrights me — this monstrous self no other 
 glass has ever shown me, no friend of mine 
 has ever seen. 
 
 Besides, this imaginary self has its uses. It 
 is one's whipping-boy. While the slings and 
 arrows are at work on the unfortunate phan- 
 tom of oneself, the real self walks in a sunny 
 cloister, unconscious of the clamour; and if 
 sometimes an echo of the tumult reaches 
 there, or if, indeed, blows fall on the cloister 
 door and one's name flies through on oppro- 
 brious breath, the real self smiles and shakes 
 its head, it never dreams that it is meant. 
 " Not here, dear friends," it murmurs ; " it 
 must be the other fellow of the same name." 
 
 We are all more or less agreed that personal 
 temperament and predilection must play an 
 unavoidable part in all criticism ; but it is not 
 
134 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 till you subscribe to Romeike that you realise 
 how great is that part ; that, in fact, the part 
 thus played is practically the whole. At all 
 events, it is no exaggeration to say that liter- 
 ary opinion is formed nine-tenths on consider- 
 ations which have nothing whatever to do 
 with literature, but have to do with a man's 
 milieu, his training, his religion, his family 
 connections, his health, his habits, particu- 
 larly his temper, and fifty other considera- 
 tions, even before we approach relevancy 
 in personal literary antipathies, attractions, 
 tastes, and judgments. 
 
 I am not complaining of this. Literature 
 was made for man, and not man for literature, 
 and man has a right to ask that the chaos of 
 man shall be fully represented in the cosmos 
 of literature. He has a right to ask that his 
 own particular narrowness, among all the 
 other narrownesses that go to make up the 
 abstraction humanity, shall find hearing and 
 expression somewhere in literature ; and it is 
 but natural that he should judge literature 
 according to the faithfulness with which it 
 expresses and regards that narrowness. 
 
 That one might be suspected of complain- 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 135 
 
 ing arises from the involuntary assumption 
 that a good book must of necessity seem a 
 good book to everybody. This, of course, is 
 far from being the case. A classic is not a 
 classic for all classes. Even the Bible is not 
 a good book east of Suez. Indeed, for young 
 readers it is not fit reading in any country. 
 Dickens, perhaps, is no longer a classic west 
 of Trafalgar-square. England still regrets 
 Fielding, and keeps Shakespeare in his place 
 by sheer dint of not reading him. Men still 
 desire to kick Sterne. Lamb is a weariness 
 to many young people, and Tennyson is as a 
 tale that is told. Heine is still the devil in 
 many literary cosmogonies. Shelley, despite 
 his monument, is " bad form " at Oxford to 
 this day, and Keats is still the nasty, mawkish 
 surgeon's apprentice. Thus, and in a thousand 
 other ways, must tastes for ever differ ; and 
 not only must the old tastes differ, but new 
 tastes and distastes must arise with each new 
 generation further to complicate the critical 
 situation. 
 
 The two kinds of change which most 
 fundamentally affect literature are, of course, 
 changes in ethical and political ideals ; and it 
 
136 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 is with regard to the ethical and political con- 
 ditions of the moment, that that tremendous 
 question of the " good taste " of a given book 
 will be decided simultaneously for and against 
 it — for the moment. Perhaps a good general 
 rule of consolation in this matter is that the 
 conventional good taste of the present is the 
 bad taste of the future. It was once in shock- 
 ing taste to say that the earth moved round 
 the sun. It was once the best of form for 
 gentlemen to talk like stable-boys and to be 
 carried to bed drunk each evening. It was 
 once in shocking taste to say that the Book 
 of Genesis is a fairy tale. It was once the 
 best of form for gentlemen to murder each 
 other on the slightest provocation. It is still 
 in shocking taste to criticise the spoliation of 
 the poor by the rich. It is still the best of 
 form for a husband to shoot his wife because 
 she has transferred her affections to another 
 more interesting and more amiable man. In 
 fact, it has always been bad taste to question the 
 current fallacies of the day, however childish 
 and dangerous, and always good form to ob- 
 serve the current attitudes and manners of the 
 day, however disgusting, imbecile, and cruel. 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 13; 
 
 Now, any time since the French Revolution 
 there has been a steady warfare waging be- 
 tween two ethical ideas and two political ideas, 
 between Christian asceticism and modern 
 humanism — the gospel of the joy of life — 
 on the one hand, and between the aristocratic 
 and democratic ideas on the other. 
 
 These ethical and political ideas have 
 mutually interacted beneath the surface, so 
 that what is valuable in Christianity has 
 passed into democracy, and all that was good 
 in aristocracy — those secrets of humanism 
 which it had wealth and leisure to learn — 
 have passed into the humanist gospel ; but on 
 the surface Christianity and aristocracy are 
 still ranged together against democracy and 
 humanism, the dead bodies against the life 
 that once animated them. 
 
 Once upon a time Christianity stood for 
 most of the purity and pity that existed in 
 the world, and aristocracy, perhaps, stood for 
 most of the world's refinement and culture ; 
 but that time has passed, and at the present 
 moment both goodness and good breeding, to 
 state it gently, are quite as likely to be found 
 elsewhere. 
 
138 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 The application of these remarks to the 
 student of Romeike will speedily become ap- 
 parent if he should happen to have written an 
 imaginative book (romance or poem, what- 
 ever it may be) on that cardinal subject of 
 imaginative literature — Love. It chances 
 that just now the ethical situation on this 
 great, serious, beautiful, and humorous sub- 
 ject is divided as it has never been before. 
 With the decay of Christian asceticism Love 
 has dared to speak as it has only dared to 
 think before ; it has, in the most refined and 
 intelligent quarters, come to discard the im- 
 purity of silence for the purity of speech, 
 and to realise what it has long ventured to 
 suspect : that it is not certain facts and mani- 
 festations of its simple nature, but its enforced 
 reticence upon them that is unclean. 
 
 It is to these ideas that any one concerned 
 with a living " good taste " will defer ; but he 
 will not be alarmed or unhappy if the numeri- 
 cally larger party, who by no means think so, 
 but who, indeed, aghast at the emancipation 
 of such ideas, have rushed for safety to reac- 
 tionary extremes of reticence and hypocrisy 
 — if such assail him with irrelevant nouns of 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 139 
 
 abuse, which but rebound upon those — rele- 
 vant nouns — who use them. 
 
 If he is true to himself he will wish for 
 nothing better than such decisive dissociation 
 of his name by the lips of those who still hold 
 to ideals of antique brutality and uncleanness. 
 
 It is obvious that if such a book be written 
 by one who professes that progressive " good 
 taste," and should fall into the hands of a 
 reviewer who holds to a reactionary "good 
 taste," the chances of the book being consid- 
 ered as literature are small. Nor, perhaps, 
 is it necessarily the reviewer's duty to con- 
 sider the book as literature. Its importance 
 as a danger to those ideals of morality sa- 
 cred to the reviewer, may seem such that he 
 feels it his duty to attack it uncompromisingly 
 in that character. One will not object to that, 
 if the man's honest. But if, on the other 
 hand, the man 's a liar, if he wilfully misrepre- 
 sents the book by an exhibition of dead quota- 
 tions, — quotations whose life and character 
 have gone with the atmosphere in which they 
 were created to breathe, and which now 
 merely stink in the putrefying air of the re- 
 viewer's own mind, — what then ? Well, 
 
I40 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 nothing then. The thing is a low personal 
 assault, a criminal defamation of literary 
 character, and the proper place to take it 
 would be the Old Bailey; but unfortunately 
 there is no Old Bailey for the Criminal 
 Reviewer, though, to judge by the amount of 
 mere personal ruffianism and dirty blood 
 which is allowed to pass for criticism, one 
 cannot but think that the ranks of critical 
 journalism are largely recruited from the 
 criminal classes. 
 
 Still, baseness is surely not going to dismay 
 you. The passage of new ideas to acceptance 
 is always attended by much unsavory dislodge- 
 ment of the circumambient air; in the wake 
 of any speed there is always a flutter of dirty 
 paper. Besides, there is a genuine pleasure in 
 thinking of the agreeable excitement or noto- 
 riety which you have been the means of win- 
 ning for some sad little scribbler, who, perhaps, 
 one particularly sad and hopeless morning, 
 wakes up to find himself nine-days famous, 
 just because he has called you — one of the 
 many new names for progressive. 
 
 But such big dishonesty as this is, we will 
 charitably hope, rare. Minor dishonesties, 
 
THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 141 
 
 such as allowing, say, the fact that a man was 
 or was not at your college, and perhaps, 
 indeed, never went to college at all — dear ! 
 dear ! — insensibly to influence your review, 
 are — well, let us be charitable, and call them 
 merely human. Perhaps, too, the reviewer 
 has heard about your blue and yellow hair, 
 and can you blame him if he cannot quite for- 
 get it? A fellow may write as well or badly 
 as you please, but, if he wears his hair blue 
 and yellow, he must take the consequences. 
 Probably it will not be dishonesty, but dul- 
 ness and temperamental incapacity, with a 
 consequent lack of any deep human experi- 
 ence, that will most bewilder you. You write 
 of love, but your reviewer has never loved ; of 
 sorrow, but your reviewer has never known 
 it. Then your book, with the imagination 
 and the humour and the fancy, is all too likely 
 to fall into the hands of a kindly enough 
 fellow with none, or only one, or only two, of 
 these qualities. What then .-' Well, again, 
 nothing. You can soon tell for yourself if the 
 man possesses imagination and humour and 
 fancy, and if you decide not — well, his opin- 
 ion is no affair of yours, and he has only done 
 
142 THE LESSON OF ROMEIKE 
 
 his duty in warning the people without 
 imagination, humour, and fancy for whom he 
 writes that your book is no affair of theirs. 
 Never fear but your book will find its own, at 
 last some day find its way with a little sigh 
 into the hands that were meant to hold it. 
 And you may rely on this, too, that whenever 
 it shall have strayed into wrong hands awhile 
 it will neither get nor give harm ; for no one 
 reads books against his will, and all books 
 that really interest us are good for us. They 
 bring something that we needed to help us 
 grow, or keep us happy. And it is through 
 such readers, who also have their representa- 
 tives on the press, that you will learn the only 
 lesson finally worth learning from Romeike: 
 " in the scorn of circumstance " to be your- 
 self and write for your own. 
 
CONCERNING A DEFINI- 
 TION OF POETRY 
 
 I HAVE just fallen a victim to the prevailing 
 fashion and gone in for a Times reprint of 
 the EncyclopcBdia Britannica, following the 
 friendly recommendation of the publishers 
 and choosing the half-morocco bound form, 
 which, on comparison with a friend's cloth- 
 bound copy, I find unquestionably superior 
 and relatively cheaper. I have also gone in 
 for a bookcase, and the whole investment is 
 impregnating my bedroom with an essence 
 of learning from which I am hopefully antici- 
 pating the most encouraging results. The 
 other day I read in the papers the curious 
 story of some sailors who had crossed the sea 
 with a cargo of arsenic. For many weeks 
 they had slept near to the arsenic, and the 
 air they breathed was so full of it that these 
 — possibly American — sailors grew fatter 
 and fatter, till at length, on their arrival in 
 
144 A DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 port, their friends hardly knew them — they 
 were so changed. 
 
 Now I am wondering if a similar intellec- 
 tual fattening might not result from sleeping 
 night after night in a room impregnated with 
 Encyclopcedia Britannica, and that is why I 
 have had my copy placed in my bedroom. 
 Then, apart from this unconscious method of 
 assimilation, the little bookcase has a small 
 reading-desk at its side, which is just about 
 the right height for reading in bed ; and the 
 Encyclopcedia may thus be used as an ad- 
 mirable " dormitive " for those who go to bed 
 — but not to sleep. If, however, you desire 
 a soporific you must not choose the article 
 which has just stimulated me to a most en- 
 joyable sleepless night. I should, of course, 
 have read it long ago. That I did not was 
 no fault of mine, for it was but natural that 
 I tired at last of vain visits to the British 
 Museum, to read an article in which I had 
 heard would be found the very arcana of the 
 greatest of all arts. The volume PHY — PRO 
 was invariably in use, and it was evident that 
 I was far from being the only one eager to 
 read Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton's famous 
 
A DEFINITION OF POETRY 145 
 
 article on poetry. So at last I gave it up, and 
 was compelled to write of poetry instructed 
 only by my own instincts, a few ancient 
 guides, and those admirable Athenceum. re- 
 views which, now that Mr. Watts-Dunton is 
 vowed to romance, will, I suppose, grow even 
 less frequent than they have been during the 
 last five or six years. When, however, I saw 
 the Times announcement of their reprint, I 
 saw that my old desire might be fulfilled at 
 last ; and so, as some men marry an expen- 
 sive wife for her smile, I have bought the 
 Encyclopcedia Britannica for Mr. Watts-Dun- 
 ton's sake ! 
 
 The article is worth the money. Its suc- 
 cess is various, and it is a success such as an 
 article of the kind can but rarely exemplify, 
 a personal success. It is evidently the work 
 of a poet, and, finally, no one who is not at 
 least something of a poet himself has any 
 authority as a critic of poetry. How dry-as- 
 dust treatises on poetry usually are, how 
 laboriously informing upon the superficiali- 
 ties, and how ignorant of the spiritual and 
 sensuous springs deep down in the poet's 
 nature ! It has always been characteristic of 
 
146 A DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 Mr. Watts-Dunton's Athenceum articles that 
 he understands not only the psychology, but 
 also the physiology of the poet, better than any 
 other living English critic ; and also that, while 
 remaining a learned and even severe upholder 
 of metrical laws, he has at the same time rec- 
 ognised that still higher law of instinct which 
 in art is always liable to surprise us with in- 
 calculable and even forbidden successes. In 
 regard to the ultimate basis of metre, I must 
 allow myself quotation of this fine passage : — 
 
 " The rh)i:hm of verse at its highest — such, for 
 instance, as that of Shakespeare's greatest writings 
 — is nothing more and nothing less than the metre 
 of that energy of the spirit which surges within the 
 bosom of him who speaks, whether he speak in 
 verse or in impassioned prose. Being rhythm, it is, 
 of course, governed by law, but it is a law which 
 transcends in subtlety the conscious art of the 
 metricist, and is only caught by the poet in his 
 most inspired moods, — a law which, being part 
 of nature's own sanctions, can of course never be 
 formulated but only expressed, as it is expressed in 
 the melody of the bird, in the inscrutable harmony 
 of the entire bird-chorus of a thicket, in the whis- 
 per of the leaves of the tree, or in the song or wail 
 of wind or sea." 
 
A DEFINITION OF POETRY 147 
 
 It will 'be seen that those arbitrary distinc- 
 tions which are often made between what one 
 might call the Higher Prose and Poetry — 
 and to which Mr. Watts-Dunton seems to 
 subscribe in other parts of his article — are 
 practically discountenanced in this passage. 
 
 In his definition of poetry : " Absolute 
 poetry is the concrete and artistic expres- 
 sion of the human mind in emotional and 
 rhythmical language," Mr. Watts-Dunton is 
 perhaps more exact than his predecessors in 
 that difficult experiment of definition. Yet 
 should not a good definition possess, or sug- 
 gest, some of the quality of the thing defined ? 
 And I am inclined to think that, compared 
 with some earlier definitions, Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton's definition loses in suggestiveness 
 what it gains in exactitude. Not for a mo- 
 ment thinking to better so veritable an 
 authority, but just throwing the phrase out 
 as it chances to occur to me, I would venture 
 to add this to the cairn of the definitions of 
 poetry : Poetry is that impassioned arrange- 
 ment of words {whether in verse or prose) 
 which embodies the exaltation, the beauty, the 
 rhythm, and the pathetic truth of life. 
 
148 A DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 The article, of course, covers too much 
 ground for one even to begin adequately to 
 discuss it in a brief paper. I know not 
 whether Mr. Watts-Dunton should be de- 
 scribed as learned. I suppose in the pedantic 
 jargon of the day, he would be discriminated 
 from " a scholar " as a man, however, " of re- 
 markably wide reading " — ■ the word " scholar " 
 apparently being reserved either for men who 
 accumulate useless "learning," or for those 
 who are unable to make any human use of 
 their stores of really valuable knowledge. A 
 wide reader, a deep thinker, a richly endowed 
 humanist in the best sense, Mr. Watts-Dun- 
 ton's article certainly proves him to be, and 
 the manner in which he airily quotes Hindu 
 writings " from memory " is calculated to dis- 
 may a generation more indolently nourished. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting section of his 
 article is that in which he discusses the two 
 kinds of poetic imagination, or vision — 
 " absolute vision," and " relative vision," or 
 " dramatic imagination " and " egoistic " (or 
 say, lyrical) " imagination." On this point I 
 cannot help asking what always occurs to me 
 in these discussions: Is dramatic imagina- 
 
A DEFINITION OF POETRY 149 
 
 tion (however great and, indeed, pre-eminent, 
 if you like) properly a branch of poetic imag- 
 ination at all ? Is not the coupling of them 
 together merely a relic of the old association 
 of drama with verse, an association finally 
 dissolved in our day by the practice of at 
 least one great master ? Are not the poetic 
 imagination and the dramatic imagination as 
 essentially different from each other as, say, 
 each is from the scientific imagination, to 
 which, indeed, the dramatic imagination has 
 perhaps greater affinity ? When Homer and 
 Shakespeare achieved those triumphs of ab- 
 solute imaginative sight of their heroes at 
 certain moments which Mr. Watts-Dunton 
 adduces, they were not, I venture to submit, 
 poets, but dramatists. A dramatist may be 
 greater than a poet, but a dramatist and a 
 poet are not the same thing, nor are they 
 essentially related. They each see, as the 
 scientist sees, but the three see such different 
 things and in such different ways. I would 
 ask, too, whether critics have not been in the 
 habit of overrating this objective dramatic 
 vision by forgetting what a comparatively 
 common endowment it is. It is, of course, 
 
ISO A DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 a great and wonderful quality, but some great 
 modern novels surely possess it as remarkably 
 as any of the ancient poets, and I would even 
 go so far as to say, without any unworthy 
 intention of flattery, that there are examples 
 of it in Mr. Watts-Dunton's romance of 
 " Aylwin " positively startling in their sense 
 of absolute clairvoyance. That, indeed, is 
 the quality which sets the book apart from 
 the fiction of the day. But, great examples 
 aside, is not the dramatic imagination — 
 otherwise perhaps to be described as the 
 realistic imagination — the gift sometimes of 
 comparatively small, or at all events prosaic, 
 writers ? Few writers have surpassed Jane 
 Austen in its possession, yet was there ever 
 a more essentially prosaic writer ? 
 
THE DETHRONING OF 
 STEVENSON 
 
 The dethroning of Stevenson has begun. 
 Though Stevenson almost accomplished the 
 miracle of pleasing everybody, there was al- 
 ways — as in the case of Tennyson, and 
 probably for a similar reason — a small party 
 of depreciation. It was composed mainly of 
 those whom we might call the secularists 
 of literature, people in whom the reasoning 
 and observing faculties of the intellect are 
 angrily keen — the little " thinkers " and the 
 little " realists " — and in whom such higher 
 faculties of the intellect as imagination and 
 the sense of beauty stertorously sleep. 
 
 During his lifetime these critics remained 
 singularly voiceless. It was as though Stev- 
 enson had laid a charm upon them also. 
 But Stevenson being dead — Mr. George 
 Moore speaketh. Concerning the dead at 
 all events let us have the truth — is Mr. 
 Moore's version of de mortuis, and it is a 
 
152 STEVENSON DETHRONED 
 
 version which one readily accepts, if only 
 the truth be told with some of the gentle- 
 ness which dictated the older, perhaps more 
 human, version. Mr. Moore speaks a little 
 disrespectfully of death — almost as disre- 
 spectfully as of Stevenson. One sees him a 
 sort of Loki, who, when all the world is 
 weeping for Stevenson, sits sulkily in his 
 cavern and says : " No ! I will not weep ; I 
 have wept for Balzac, but I will not weep 
 for Stevenson. He could n't think, and he 
 was no novelist. He could n't even write." 
 Happily, Mr. Moore is a Loki whose criti- 
 cism will keep no one out of Valhalla, least 
 of all Stevenson ; for Mr. Moore is always too 
 angry when he differs for his criticisms to 
 carry authority, though for Mr. W. B. Yeats' 
 sake I shall hope that his praise is more 
 important than his depreciation. 
 
 One will not deny that Mr. Moore had 
 some reason to be a little out of temper. He 
 cannot be the only one who is heartily sick 
 of hearing every other new writer that comes 
 along hailed as a new Stevenson, though his 
 style and literary aims may be dissimilar to 
 Stevenson's in every possible way. It is hard, 
 
STEVENSON DETHRONED 153 
 
 too, on the writers thus distinguished. It 
 handicaps them in the same way as the 
 sobriquet oi "the Belgian Shakespeare" has 
 handicapped M. Maeterlinck. Besides, they 
 may be humbly hoping some day to be them- 
 selves — not Stevenson nor another. We 
 need go no further to illustrate the disad- 
 vantage of such irrelevant comparison than 
 Mr. Moore's strictures on Stevenson a propos 
 Mr. W. B. Yeats. No one had thought of 
 comparing Mr. Yeats to Stevenson, however 
 much they may have admired him. The genius 
 of the one, a specialised imagination of delicate 
 magic, a haunted fountain rising beneath the 
 moon in fairyland, is so entirely unlike, either 
 iii quality or volume, to that of Stevenson. 
 Yet when Mr. Moore, taking a descriptive 
 passage from Mr. Yeats, challenges us to pro- 
 duce the like from Stevenson, the mere correc- 
 tion of the irrelevancy of the comparison has 
 the look, unintentionally indeed, of deprecia- 
 tion towards the younger writer, not to speak 
 of the risk of such a challenge being taken 
 up. If Stevenson did one thing better than 
 another it was his descriptions of night and 
 early morning out of doors. The challenge 
 
154 STEVENSON DETHRONED 
 
 is scarcely out of Mr. Moore's mouth before 
 we have thought at least of the Princess's 
 midnight flight through the woods in Prince 
 Otto, with that magnificent mounting dawn 
 — such pomp, such simplicity ; and, of course, 
 that unmatched night-piece in Travels with 
 a Donkey. We so soon forget our old fa- 
 vourites in the new ones that Mr. Moore's 
 excited blasphemies may possibly set some 
 who have not read the donkey-book just 
 lately wondering if Stevenson was really 
 such a great writer after all. Let me, there- 
 fore, presume to refer them once again to 
 a page I am thinking of. 
 
 But first let us quote the beautiful little 
 passage from Mr. Yeats which Mr. Moore 
 has somewhat cruelly subjected to so trying 
 a comparison : — 
 
 " It was one of those warm, beautiful nights, 
 when everything seems carved of precious stones. 
 The woods of the Sleuth Hound away to the 
 south looked as though cut out of green beryl, 
 and the waters that mirrored them shone like 
 opal. The roses he was gathering were like glow- 
 ing rubies, and the lilies had the dull lustre of 
 pearl. Everything had taken upon itself the look 
 
STEVENSON DETHRONED 155 
 
 of something imperishable, except a glow-worm, 
 whose faint flame burned on steadily among the 
 shadows, moving hither and thither, the only thing 
 that seemed alive, the only thing that seemed per- 
 ishable as mortal hope." 
 
 Here is Stevenson : — 
 
 " Night is a dead, monotonous period under a 
 roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with 
 its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are 
 marked by changes in the face of Nature. What 
 seems a kind of temporal death to people choked 
 between walls and curtains is only a light and 
 living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All 
 night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply 
 and fi-eely ; even as she takes her rest she turns 
 and smiles ; and there is one stirring hour un- 
 known to those who dwell in houses, when a 
 wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping 
 hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their 
 feet. It is then that the cock first crows, not this 
 time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful 
 watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle 
 awake on the meadows ; sheep break their fast on 
 dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among 
 the ferns ; and houseless men, who have lain down 
 with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold 
 the beauty of the night. . . . When that hour came 
 
156 STEVENSON DETHRONED 
 
 to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My 
 tin was standing by me half full of water. I 
 emptied it at a draught, and, feeling broad awake 
 after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to 
 make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, 
 and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery 
 vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me 
 the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. 
 By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see 
 Modestine walking round and round at the length 
 of her tether ; I could hear her steadily munching 
 at the sward ; but there was not another sound, 
 save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over 
 the stones." 
 
 Surely this is made out of silence. It is 
 not so much writing as night itself. The 
 difference between these two passages is 
 simply that between a shell and a sea. How- 
 ever, it is a difference that one cannot well 
 discuss without the risk, as I have said, of 
 seeming to depreciate Mr. Yeats, — a risk 
 which so true an admirer of his work as my- 
 self will not do himself the injustice of run- 
 ning. So fairy a thing as Mr. Yeats' genius 
 should never have been storm-tossed on the 
 angry breath of Mr. George Moore. 
 
STEVENSON DETHRONED 157 
 
 But Mr. Moore's is not the only voice that 
 is raised against Stevenson, though indeed 
 it is in a very much milder spirit that Mr. St. 
 Loe Strachey begs leave to put a question 
 in some recently re-published essays. Mr. 
 Strachey has discovered that there is some- 
 thing "that makes Mr. Stevenson's literary 
 work never wholly satisfying," and is much 
 concerned as to what it may be. He is 
 evidently a great admirer of Stevenson all 
 the same; there is quite an emotional ring 
 about the more appreciative parts of his writ- 
 ing, and yet he cannot be content. There is 
 a crumpled rose-leaf somewhere in his pleas- 
 ure, and, like a true English critic, he can 
 think of nothing but that. Faults first, 
 merits afterwards ! Such is our uncomfort- 
 able critical habit. 
 
 One is sorry for Mr. Strachey's sake that 
 he never quite finds the offending rose-leaf 
 to his own satisfaction. He is very confident 
 at first that he has got hold of it, with the 
 discovery that somehow or other Stevenson 
 does not " edify." " We are finely touched " 
 in Stevenson's writings, " but somehow not 
 to fine issues ! " Certainly this is the very 
 
IS8 STEVENSON DETHRONED 
 
 last charge that we expected to be brought 
 against Stevenson. Stevenson not good for 
 the soul ! Well, certainly this is a new 
 Stevenson indeed. One had thought that if 
 any writer had truly edified our younger 
 generation it had been Stevenson. Certainly 
 his was not a philosophy for old women or 
 young ladies. No doubt it was a case of 
 " port for men, brandy for heroes." But 
 then neither men nor heroes are suckled on 
 milk and soda. Then Mr. Strachey thinks 
 that something " never wholly satisfying " 
 may be, as Mr. George Moore thinks too, in 
 his alleged incapacity to create living human 
 beings. Yet for a bloodless puppet " Pinker- 
 ton " seems to have made a great impression 
 on Mr. Strachey's quotations. 
 
 However, suppose one were to admit, what 
 indeed the present writer was one of the first 
 to say, that Stevenson has been overrated as 
 a novelist — is there no other way of being 
 a great writer than the way of Esther 
 Waters? That Stevenson could tell certain 
 stories and create certain characters is unde- 
 niable, but it is in his numerous other writings 
 that his highest significance is to be found. 
 
STEVENSON DETHRONED 159 
 
 And that significance is that of a poet using 
 the medium of prose — a poet, and one of the 
 most original philosophers of his time. 
 
 A philosopher ! " Why, Stevenson could n't 
 even think ! " exclaim all the little " thinkers," 
 who call a man a thinker only so long as his 
 thoughts are hopelessly black or hopelessly 
 tangled. To gain the reputation of profund- 
 ity you must see, not with a clear, but with 
 a troubled vision ; you must not look through 
 the veils, but lose yourself and your readers 
 among them, crowding your page with subtle 
 little studies of the various conflicting obfus- 
 cations that move smokily across the face of 
 truth. When, however, a poet is able to 
 transmute the crude materials of his philoso- 
 phising into a lucent mysticism, minds unable 
 to realise that there should be mystery in 
 clearness mistake the profound azure of his 
 thought for shallowness. Stevenson paid the 
 penalty of thinking profoundly — that is, 
 simply and hopefully — by being called shal- 
 low. More than any of our recent writers, 
 he realised the unspeakable wonder of simpli- 
 city, " the mysterious face of common things." 
 When a man like Maeterlinck makes just the 
 
i6o STEVENSON DETHRONED 
 
 same discoveries, but in a more oracular and 
 much less brilliant style, he is saluted with 
 awe as a mystic. Stevenson is only a charm- 
 ing essayist, with a pretty gift of fancy, but 
 sadly thin in his ideas. Yet Stevenson was 
 really a completer and more valuable mystic 
 than any such men as Maeterlinck, valuable as 
 M. Maeterlinck's beautiful writings are, for 
 he added humour to his vision, and his mysti- 
 cism was as all-embracing as his humanity. 
 It was a daylight, not a moonlight mysticism, 
 and was linked to no childish cult of fairies 
 or Parisian sorcery, or to the neurasthenia 
 of a dying Church. But I 've said more than 
 enough, I'm sure, to prove that Stevenson 
 was no " thinker " ! 
 
A NEW WOMAN POET 
 
 Not unaware of the wickedness of praising 
 the new-born, and far from unaware of the 
 perils of the praiser, I venture humbly to 
 suggest to those interested in such matters 
 that Miss Olive Custance's little volume of 
 Opals contains the best poetry written by 
 a woman for quite a long time. No one 
 who knows the woman-poetry of the day can 
 call this extravagant praise. Comparisons 
 here are more than usually dangerous, and I 
 shall venture on them no further than to 
 express the opinion that the poetry written 
 by women at the moment is full of talent 
 but singularly lacking in temperament. It is 
 profusely intellectual, definitely emotional, 
 and infinitely spiritual. The expression of 
 one's feelings in exact rhetoric is what, of 
 course, many mistake for poetry, and women 
 particularly make the mistake of supposing 
 that there is nothing so easy as to put your 
 heart on paper. The result is good love-let- 
 
i62 A NEW WOMAN POET 
 
 ter, but mediocre poetry. To unlock the 
 heart one needs a golden key, and the women 
 are fewer than the men who sufificiently un- 
 derstand the mystery of words — understand 
 that to put a thing into words, as we say, is 
 not to rob it of its original mystery by a 
 superficial clearness of statement, but actu- 
 ally to recreate it in another medium; and 
 that, whatsoever qualities of mystery and in- 
 definable suggestiveness belonged to the 
 thing itself, must be repeated in its literary 
 embodiment. Is it of spring we would write, 
 there are words that were once violets, words 
 as sad as the voice of the cuckoo; is it of 
 woman — no woman was ever so beautiful as 
 some words. 
 
 The face-value of words is but their least 
 important value. Far more important is 
 what we might call the nervous system of 
 words : all that associated significance which 
 thrills and vibrates beneath the printed sur- 
 face. It is not what a line means, but what 
 it suggests, that makes it poetry. However 
 many meanings it may possess, the only 
 meaning that really matters is the meaning 
 of beauty — and what that is who shall say? 
 
A NEW WOMAN POET 163 
 
 It must mean no more, but must mean no 
 less, than the droop of an eyelid, the colour 
 of a flower, or the sound of running water. 
 
 I am afraid that Miss Custance does not 
 much trouble her head about literature and 
 " the moral idea ; " what is more to the purpose 
 is that she instinctively understands some of 
 the secrets of the use of words. The impor- 
 tance of her own moods, the exquisiteness 
 and strangeness of living, the mystic beauty 
 of the world, and all the glory and pathos 
 it seems to mean in certain hours: music 
 played at twilight, the sound of the rain, 
 friends, and flowers (the friends as flowers, 
 the flowers as friends), the sudden wonderful 
 face of love, fair as a shooting star, her own 
 beauty and the beauty of the morning sky, 
 beautiful pain and all the mysterious sadness 
 of joy — of such is the kingdom of earth for 
 this young poet. And the words she finds 
 for these moments are as rich and subtle, and 
 yet as simple, as the moments themselves. 
 Of one rare quality Miss Custance's poetry 
 immediately asserts the possession, — the 
 power of enrichment. Certain quite simple 
 flowers and colours and textures possess this 
 
i64 A NEW WOMAN POET 
 
 quality, but words possess it too seldom, for it 
 is a sensuous quality ; and though poetry that 
 is simple and passionate is of not uncommon 
 occurrence, poetry which fulfils the third 
 Miltonic condition is rare. I have an idea 
 that some critics believe this sensuous charm 
 a common snare of the moment. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, however, it is just the quality in 
 which the literature of the moment is singu- 
 larly poor. Cleverness is everywhere, but 
 where is enchantment? Are there half-a- 
 dozen living English writers who possess this 
 charm ? It would be rash to say that there 
 are, and no doubt it will sound still more rash 
 to claim it for a little book by a very young 
 poet. Yet, is it so rash after all to claim it 
 for poetry such as this " Dreamed Tryst " ? 
 
 " Beloved one ! when the shy Dawn flower-sweet, 
 
 In her white sleeping-gown of mist and pearl, 
 Sees the great Sun, and from her cloud-hung bed 
 
 Slips softly, flushing like a startled girl. 
 And stands up-right on fair rose-coloured feet 
 
 While all the golden light is round her shed . . . 
 'T is then that yearning, severed souls may meet . . . 
 
 Slowly the glory widens in the sky 
 And in the meadows thick with folded flowers 
 
 The daisies stir already in their sleep . . . 
 
A NEW WOMAN POET 165 
 
 My soul lay waiting all the long night hours, 
 But now thy promised presence hovers nigh, 
 
 In this still room I seem to hear the sweep 
 
 Of thy soul's wings . . . O ! Whither shall we fly ? " 
 
 Or this — " A Pause " ; 
 
 " O ! do you hear the rain 
 Beat on the glass in vain ? 
 So my tears beat against fate's feet 
 In vain ... in vain ... in vain . . . 
 
 " O ! do you see the skies 
 As gray as your grave eyes ? 
 O ! do you hear tlie wind, my dear, 
 That sighs and sighs and sighs . . . 
 
 "... Tired as this twilight seems. 
 My soul droops sad with dreams . . , 
 You cannot know where we two go 
 In dreams ... in dreams ... in dreams . . . 
 
 " You only watch the light, 
 Sinking away from night . . . 
 In silver mail all shadowy pale, 
 The moon shines white, so white . . • 
 
 " . . . O ! if we two were wise 
 Your eyes would leave the skies 
 And look into my eyes ! 
 And I who wistful stand . . . 
 One foot in fairy land, 
 Would catch Love by the hand. . . ." 
 
166 A NEW WOMAN POET 
 
 Among many reasons one might give for 
 one's delight in these two poems, the reader 
 must have noticed one, — the great beauty 
 and truth of the Nature pictures. For de- 
 scriptive magic alone Miss Custance's poems 
 should rank high. And, like all her effects, 
 this magic is won by such apparent simpli- 
 city of means. There is no sense of straining 
 the eye upon the object. Just the flash of a 
 phrase, and the miracle has happened. The 
 picture is there, as though Nature had writ- 
 ten her name in dewdrops. Who by taking 
 thought could better give the beauty of rain 
 than in these six simple words, — 
 
 " A silver net of sudden rain " ? 
 
 Miss Custance, like Verlaine, is a lover of the 
 rain. Here are other rain pictures : 
 
 "In the gray west a faint gold stain . . . 
 Dusk and the darkness, sisters twain, 
 Kiss through a silver veil of rain." 
 
 " The gray west full of rain." 
 
 " We catch stray scents from sweet drenched primrose 
 stars — 
 . . . And then the shower is over and rose-bars 
 Bridge the sun's western garden and gold lake." 
 
A NEW WOMAN POET 167 
 
 " Full of rain crystals, the asparagus 
 A jewelled tangle seems of strange green hair ! " 
 
 In further illustration of Miss Custance's gift 
 of beautiful and forcible phrase, particularly 
 as applied to nature, I quote the following 
 scattered lines and passages: 
 
 " Stars grow thick round the amber moon." 
 
 ". . . . sun-soft summer air." 
 
 " Spirit of Twilight, in the golden gloom 
 
 Of dreamland dim, I sought for you and found 
 
 A woman weeping in a silent room 
 
 Full of white flowers that moved and made no sound." 
 
 " The hedges glimmer vaguely with wild fruits." 
 
 " The sky folds over like a flower, 
 Whose petal tips of purple gray 
 Flush flame-like at the sunset hour." 
 
 " Flushes of lingering colour, from afar 
 Reflect themselves in the round silver moon, 
 And in the blue burns flower-like one white star." 
 
 " Night lifts nearer luminous with stars." 
 
 " The wet trees toss their weight of tumbled green." 
 
 " Star-sandalled memories moving slow." 
 
i68 A NEW WOMAN POET 
 
 " the red sun reels 
 To other risings." 
 
 "In her blue 
 Bed-chamber, Morning loiters yet ! " 
 
 And for a certain " large utterance " seldom 
 heard in the poetry of women I would in- 
 stance this beautiful river-picture : — 
 
 ". . . In shadow of bent branches, let us go 
 
 Down to the river side where rocks our boat 
 
 Beneath the whispering willows. I will row 
 
 And you shall steer . . . nay ! rather let us float 
 
 Tide-talcen past the patient marigolds 
 
 Whose dew-filled cups to Phoebus' self remote 
 
 Are lifted up at Dawn. See ! Day unfolds 
 
 Her sunset robes refulgent in the West. 
 
 Night's heavy lids that Light's strong hand upholds 
 
 Droop low and hide the splendour. . . . Let us rest ! " 
 
 One pleasant characteristic distinguishes 
 Miss Custance from the typical woman poet, 
 — she does n't pretend to be a man, but is 
 quite consciously charmed with her own girl- 
 hood ; though maybe one should not assume 
 that the "frail girl in whom God's glories 
 meet" of "The Poet's Picture" is necessarily 
 the poet we are enjoying. Indeed her book, 
 so to say, is a girl, a girl-poet, almost cruelly 
 
A NEW WOMAN POET 169 
 
 alive, experimentally passionate, tremulously 
 sensitive to every sound straying across the 
 ^olian harp of life. The little book seems 
 to flush and tremble in one's hand. It is so 
 exquisitely a girl. 
 
 It is girlish in its sadness, a luxurious sad- 
 ness which is only a form of music, a way of 
 dressing the hair, a wearing of " opals." 
 " Opals " indeed describes these poems with 
 an imaginative accuracy rare in titles : beau- 
 tiful, troubled, distinguished, sad, fated, as 
 opals. Girlish, yes — in everything but its 
 art. One notes a very occasional careless- 
 ness, an extravagant and not always intelli- 
 gible use of the French dot-and-dash . . . 
 pause and suggestion. " Shimmerous " is a 
 word you can use too often — perhaps once 
 even is too often. But, after all such criti- 
 cisms are made, the spontaneous original 
 charm, even power, of these " Opals " is un- 
 deniable. It has seldom happened that a 
 young poet's first volume has been at once so 
 full of beauty realised and so rich in promise 
 of beauty to come. 
 
MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS'S 
 POEMS 
 
 Mr. Stephen Phillips's poetry almost 
 prompts one to the indiscretion of exclaim- 
 ing, " A great poet at last ! " At all events 
 it is significant to note that he alone, of all 
 the young poets at present qualifying for the 
 great mantles thrown aside by their great 
 predecessors of two generations ago, has been 
 spared the impertinent label of " minor poet ; " 
 a nomination opprobrious because, as I have 
 said before, it is used to-day in the sense of 
 poetaster. So far as I have observed, no 
 minor critic has yet dared to call Mr. Stephen 
 Phillips a minor poet. Indeed, there seems 
 to be a general sense abroad that here at all 
 events is a poet who has got to be taken seri- 
 ously, and whom it will be more than usually 
 silly to deride. Therefore, in so fair a mood 
 of the critical atmosphere, one may perhaps 
 dare to whisper that in Mr. Stephen Phillips 
 we have the first poet of his generation who 
 
PHILLIPS'S POEMS 171 
 
 gives promise of work which shall some day 
 class him with the great Victorian poets. 
 One who without presumption may perhaps 
 claim to be an enthusiastic admirer of the 
 poets of his own generation, may perhaps also 
 be permitted the criticism upon them that 
 they fall short, in comparison with such poets, 
 say, as Keats, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, 
 less in imagination and literary faculty than 
 in humanity, and another power, which no 
 doubt sounds very humble, and indeed per- 
 haps hardly worthy, — the power to be inter- 
 esting. I would not have them, like certain 
 novelists, write for the great heart of the 
 public, but I do regret that their distinguished, 
 tuneful, charming, and even forcible numbers, 
 should so seldom speak for the great heart of 
 humanity — which is quite another matter. 
 On all themes save the greatest and simplest 
 they write with true inspiration. They have 
 sung wonderfully of Wordsworth's poetry, 
 of Irish fairies, of Catholic mysticism ; but 
 how often have they sung, say, even love, 
 that stock-theme, with mastery or haunting 
 magic .'' With the exception, perhaps, of 
 "The Ballad of a Nun," " Mandalay," and 
 
1/2 PHILLIPS'S POEMS 
 
 Mr. Dowson's less-known " Cynara," have 
 they written one love-poem that it is impos- 
 sible to forget, or even possible to remember ? 
 Nothing if not erotic, and yet not a genuine 
 cri du coeur among them ! 
 Where is their 
 
 " O that 't were possible," 
 Or, 
 
 " He kissed 
 My soul out in a burning mist." 
 
 Ashamed of their feelings, lest some of Mr. 
 Henley's prematurely aged young men should 
 call them sentimental, and alarmed at their 
 passions, in love-poetry at all events they have 
 not prevailed. 
 
 But perhaps this is even too special a criti- 
 cism, and a still more general test would be 
 the test of beauty. The first duty of poetry 
 is to be beautiful, and poetry is never 
 supremely beautiful without being many 
 other things too. This test our young poets 
 bear somewhat better. Mr. Watson, at all 
 events, has written some passages, such as 
 the definition of peace in " Wordsworth's 
 Grave," of noble and even haunting beauty. 
 
PHILLIPS'S POEMS 173 
 
 Yet for the most part the beauty of our young 
 poets' poetry is a rather special and literary 
 beauty. Even their love of beauty is not 
 quite a passion. Indeed, nothing is quite a 
 passion with these young poets. 
 
 Not only do they lack passion, but they are 
 also curiously lacking in pity and incapable 
 of tenderness. In short, as I have said, they 
 are, broadly speaking, lacking in humanity. 
 Now, in this quality at its simplest and 
 humanest Mr. Phillips's poetry is deeply 
 rooted. However apparently remote his 
 themes, whether they be a vision of Christ 
 descending into hell, or a dream of Apollo 
 contending in promises with the shepherd 
 Idas for the maid Marpessa, they are imme- 
 diately turned to a most poignantly human 
 account. Take an example from the newer 
 poem, these lines in which, with a charming 
 womanliness, Marpessa gives one of the 
 reasons for her rejection of the god: — 
 
 "0 1 
 Should ail beside thee, Apollo, and should note 
 With eyes that would not be, but yet are dim, 
 Ever so slight a change from day to day 
 In thee my husband ; watch thee nudge thyself 
 
174 PHILLIPS'S POEMS 
 
 To little offices that once were sweet : 
 
 Slow where thou once was swift, remembering 
 
 To kiss those lips which once thou could not leave. 
 
 I should expect thee by the Western ray, 
 
 Faded, not sure of thee, with desperate smiles, 
 
 And pitiful devices of my dress 
 
 Or fashion of my hair : thou wouldst grow kind ; 
 
 Most bitter to a woman that was loved. 
 
 I must ensnare thee to my arms, and touch 
 
 Thy pity, to but hold thee to my heart." 
 
 This might have been just "any wife to 
 any husband." Then, too, her motherhood 
 desires — 
 
 " Passionate children, not 
 Some radiant god that will despise me quite, 
 But clambering limbs and little hearts that err.'' 
 
 Mr. Phillips feels in need of no subtle 
 nuance or far-sought complexity in his sub- 
 ject-matter. Human life at its simplest is 
 matter moving enough for him, and it is of 
 the old truths of human feeling and experi- 
 ence that he makes his new beauty. For the 
 storing of such experience he has a remark- 
 ably receptive and sympathetic eye, and it is 
 perhaps rather the truth than the beauty of 
 his poetry that first arrests one — or should 
 one say that most of the beauty of his poetry 
 
PHILLIPS'S POEMS 175 
 
 comes of its truth, which is another way of 
 saying that it is very fine poetry indeed ? 
 This is certainly notable of the two most 
 original poems in his volume, " The Woman 
 with the Dead Soul," and " The Wife," whose 
 somewhat forbidding beauty, if one may be 
 allowed the term, almost entirely comes of 
 their union of accuracy and pity. By these 
 Stevenson's dictum, that the only realism 
 is that of the poets, is once more justified. 
 No prose realist with all the potent methods 
 of impressionism — not even Hubert Crackan- 
 thorpe — has given us such real pictures 
 of the London Inferno as Mr. Phillips 
 in the old-fashioned medium of the heroic 
 couplet. For the very detachment which 
 your professional realist attempts or affects 
 protects him from the reality. His failure is 
 to see that pity is part of the reality. In the 
 accuracy of his method Mr. Phillips reminds 
 one of Crabbe ; in the mood of it, of Dante. 
 When one says that, it will be understood 
 that London has at last found a poet to sing 
 her seriously as a whole — not merely a poet 
 of her brothels. As an example of Mr. 
 Phillips's method at its best, one can only 
 
176 PHILLIPS'S POEMS 
 
 quote once more this now oft-quoted passage 
 from " The Wife " : 
 
 " But at the door a moment did she quail, 
 Hearing her little son behind her wail ; 
 Who, waking, stretched his arms out to her wide, 
 And softly, ' Mother, take me with you ! ' cried ; 
 For he would run beside her, clasping tight 
 Her hand, and lag at every window bright. 
 Or near some stall beneath the wild gas-flare. 
 At the dim fruit in ghostly bloom would stare. 
 Toward him she turned, and felt her bosom swell 
 Wildly : he was so young almost she fell 
 Yet took him up, and to allay his cries 
 Smiled at him with her lips, not with her eyes. 
 Then laid him down ; away her hand she snatched. 
 And now with streaming face the door unlatched, 
 When lo, the long uproar of feet. 
 The huge dim fury of the street I 
 While she into the wild night goes. 
 That in her eyes a light shower blows. 
 Faces like moths against her fly, 
 Lured by some brilliance to die : 
 The clerk with spirit lately dead. 
 The decent clothes above him spread ; 
 The joyous cruel face of boys ; 
 Those dreadful shadows proffering toys ; 
 The constable with gesture bland 
 Conducting the orchestral Strand ; 
 A woman secretly distrest, 
 And staidly weeping, dimly drest ; 
 
PHILLIPS'S POEMS 177 
 
 A girl, as in some torment, stands, 
 Offering flowers that burn her hands ; 
 A blind man passes, that dotli sound 
 With shaking head the hollow ground. 
 In showering air, the mystic damp, 
 The dim balm blown from lamp to lamp, 
 A strange look from a shredded shawl, 
 A casual voice with thrilling fall ! " 
 
 Contributing to this reality of impression, if 
 not indeed of the essence of it throughout Mr. 
 PhiUips's poetry, is his rare dramatic imagina- 
 tion, as apart from that mere specially poetic 
 imagination which makes " the little word big 
 with eternity." Mr. Phillips seems to possess 
 the psychological insight of a novelist, and 
 perhaps the most marked example of this 
 power is a lyric, before printed in the Christ 
 in Hades volume, but in some danger of 
 being missed among its more ambitious fel- 
 lows, the lyric beginning with such poignant 
 and masterly simplicity : — 
 
 " I in the greyness rose ; 
 I could not sleep for thinking of one dead. 
 Then to the chest I went. 
 Where lie the things of my beloved spread." 
 
 It is difficult to reahse that a man could 
 have written this poem without having under- 
 
178 PHILLIPS'S POEMS 
 
 gone the experience it describes ; and one of 
 the closing lines, "A little jest, too slight for 
 one so dead," is a wonderful revelation of the 
 very heart of sorrow. 
 
 From the same power of the imagination 
 which, as I have before said, is little short of 
 clairvoyance, proceeds Mr. Phillips's power 
 of picture-making — such pictures as — 
 
 " Lonely antagonists of destiny 
 
 That went down scornful before many spears ; " 
 or 
 
 " The bright glory of after-battle wine. 
 
 The flushed recounting faces, the stern hum 
 
 Of burnished armies. . . ." 
 
 Talk of impressionism ! What can the most 
 skilful and curious of French impressionists 
 do more victoriously vivid than two such 
 pictures as are contained in the last ten 
 words ? Keats used to say that poetry was 
 mainly an affair of adjectives. For poetry 
 following Latin models the dictum certainly 
 holds, and Mr. Phillips's is obviously made 
 exclusively on Latin models. But, if some 
 poetry be mainly an affair of adjectives, and 
 some an affair of feeling, Mr. Phillips is 
 
PHILLIPS'S POEMS 179 
 
 equally happy in his gifts. I have spoken of 
 that beauty in Mr. Phillips's poetry which is 
 truth to piteous things, but it must not be 
 thought that Mr. Phillips is less sensitive to 
 the beauty of the joy and the bounty and the 
 magnificence of life. If to transmute those 
 piteous things into beauty is one of the great 
 offices of the poet, it is no less his privilege 
 to be the mirror of that fair face of the world 
 which asks no added beauty from any poet — 
 and to that face no other poet of his genera- 
 tion has held up so lovely a mirror as " Mar- 
 pessa." By this time the love-speech of Idas 
 is already a classic by much quotation, and 
 hardly less familiar is the splendid flash and 
 thunder of the passage in which Apollo 
 pictures " We two in heaven running ; " 
 therefore, I will quote instead this no less 
 memorable passage, in which Marpessa 
 answers Apollo: — 
 
 " Then, thou speak'st of joy, 
 Of immortality without one sigh, 
 Existence without tears for evermore. 
 Thou would'st preserve me from the anguish, lest 
 This holy face into the dark return. 
 Yet I, being human, human sorrow miss. 
 
i8o PHILLIPS'S POEMS 
 
 The half of music, I have heard men say, 
 
 Is to have grieved ; when comes the lovely wail 
 
 Over the mind ; old men have told it me 
 
 Subdued after long life by simple sounds. 
 
 The mourner is the favourite of the moon. 
 
 And the departing sun his glory owes 
 
 To the eternal thoughts of creatures brief, 
 
 Who think the thing that they shall never see. 
 
 Since we must die, how bright the starry track ! 
 
 How wonderful in a bereaved ear 
 
 The Northern wind ; how strange the summer night, 
 
 The exhaling earth to those who vainly love. 
 
 Out of our sadness have we made this world 
 
 So beautiful; the sea sighs in our brain, 
 
 And in our heart that yearning of the moon. ■ 
 
 To all this sorrow was I born, and since 
 
 Out of a human womb I came, I am 
 
 Not eager to forego it ; I would scorn 
 
 To elude the heaviness and take the joy. 
 
 For pain came with the sap, pangs with the bloom : 
 
 This is the sting, the wonder.'' 
 
 It is not too much to say that no such poem 
 as " Marpessa " has been written since Keats 
 abandoned " Hyperion " — for a reason that, 
 evidently, would not dismay Mr. Phillips. 
 
TRAGEDY AND MR. WILLIAM 
 WATSON 
 
 (A Prof OS Mr. William Watson on " Tragedy and Mr. 
 Stephen Phillips" in The Fortnightly Review.) 
 
 There is, I hope, and certainly Mr. Watson 
 knows, no need for me to preface my remarks 
 with any such confession of delight in poeti- 
 cal gifts which all acknowledge, as that which 
 makes such a graceful exordium to Mr. Wat- 
 son's criticism of Mr. PhilHps. Still I may be 
 permitted to record a reminiscence similar in 
 shape to his of a night, I fear almost ten years 
 ago, when I too sat with a distinguished 
 friend, he and I " talking about our beloved 
 poets until far into the waning night " and 
 " how at last I managed to make the dis- 
 covery that," while he knew most poets worth 
 knowing, if indeed he did n't quite know 
 " everything under the sun " — it is admitted 
 that no reader but Mr. Churton Collins knows 
 that — " he was ignorant of the name and work 
 of " — Mr. William Watson. 
 
i82 TRAGEDY 
 
 It chanced that that very day I had picked 
 up a copy of the National Review, contain- 
 ing " Wordsworth's Grave," and the poem had 
 heen singing in my head all evening. So we 
 shared the new-found treasure on the spot. 
 If I had a sovereign for all the times I have 
 recited some of the stanzas since then, I 
 should be a rich man. 
 
 To admire Mr. Watson as a poet is, from 
 the nature of the material which he knows 
 best how to employ, to respect him as a critic 
 too. No better literary criticism than "Words- 
 worth's Grave " has been written in England 
 for a long while. Excursions in Criticism 
 confirmed this, though here the prose was 
 perhaps better than the criticism, which had 
 a tendency to be academic, and to rely too 
 much on eighteenth-century canons of form 
 and taste. Mr. Watson seemed to consider 
 that literary criticism ended with Dr. John- 
 son. What would the good doctor think of 
 Rossetti? he asked — as if there could be 
 the smallest critical profit in measuring the 
 work of one man by the taste of another so 
 radically dissimilar. Dr. Johnson was, of 
 course, — Dr. Johnson; but for that very 
 
TRAGEDY 183 
 
 delightful reason he is entirely inadequate as 
 a critic of nineteenth century poetry. Un- 
 less literature of all human things is to 
 be doomed to unprogressive imitation of the 
 masters, we must have critics who keep pace 
 with its developments ; and whoever thinks 
 that art stopped short in the cultivated court 
 of the Empress Josephine, or at any other 
 point of its history, may make delightful 
 prose out of his anachronistic prepossessions, 
 but must not complain if we regard him as 
 a blind guide of much accomplishment and 
 charm. 
 
 Now Mr. Watson's criticism of Mr. Stephen 
 Phillips is distinctly Johnsonian. Mr. Phil- 
 lips' poetical powers are not in the balance, — 
 of those Mr. Watson makes a most generous 
 recognition. It is in Mr. Phillips' conception 
 of, and Mr. Watson's definition of, tragedy 
 that the Johnsonian character of Mr. Wat- 
 son's mind is revealed with startling clearness. 
 Mr. Watson is all the time thinking of 
 tragedy as a form, Mr. Phillips as an essence 
 — and just in that lies the difference between 
 the old and the new conceptions of tragedy. 
 Actually Mr. Watson's objection to the appli- 
 
i84 TRAGEDY 
 
 cation of the word tragedy to Mr. Phillips' 
 grim London poems, " The Woman with the 
 Dead Soul" and "The Wife" are no more 
 radically pertinent than if he had declared 
 them no tragedies because they were not 
 written in five acts, and paid no proper regard 
 to the unities. 
 
 Mr. Watson, with specious plausibility, de- 
 clares that " the very essence of tragedy " 
 lies in " the overthrow of something great," 
 proceeding to Instance as examples of " some- 
 thing great," certain spectacular Shakespear- 
 ean kings, and to object against Mr. Phillips' 
 poor tragediennes of the gutter, with a curious 
 shallowness of sympathy, and cynicism of re- 
 gard for a poet, that there was originally noth- 
 ing great in them to overthrow. " In these 
 insignificant and immemorable human lives," 
 he says in a passage which perhaps hardly 
 needs the italics I give it, "no material of 
 tragedy exists; these trivial and microscopical 
 individualities do not provide the theatre in 
 which alotie may tragedy be enacted." How 
 strangely that sounds in a modern ear ! One 
 wonders what the dramatist of Ghosts would 
 think of the statement, and of this which 
 
TRAGEDY 185 
 
 complements it : "Tragedy demands as the 
 prime condition of its presentment, a moral 
 stage of some grandeur and amplitude. A 
 great or splendid spirit is wrecked, or over- 
 borne, or gradually disintegrated, and in 
 the terror of such a spectacle there is 
 sublimity and awe. If a palace or a for- 
 tress fall, we tremble ; we do not stand 
 aghast at the collapse of a mud hut." How 
 feudal and generally reactionary is the tem- 
 per of Mr. Watson's mind, his imagery alone 
 bears witness. Surely it depends entirely 
 on the spectator, the human issues involved, 
 and the power of the dramatist, that relative 
 tragedy of palace, fortress, or mud hut. If 
 Ibsen undertook the tragedy of the mud hut 
 we should tremble fast enough, as were he 
 to undertake the tragedy of the castle and 
 fortress, so impressive from the outside, he 
 would be able to show, as likely as not, 
 the essential meanness and unsublimity, too 
 squalid for tragedy, of their crashing and 
 picturesque fall. 
 
 Mr. Watson has failed to see that such 
 stories as that of Macbeth are not specially 
 tragic material, but have only come to seem 
 
i86 TRAGEDY 
 
 so through the power of the great poet who 
 so piercingly saw and picturesquely embodied 
 their tragedy. Essentially Macbeth and his 
 wife were no more significant and memorable 
 lives than those which Mr. Phillips sings. 
 Had we read of them elsewhere than in 
 Shakespeare, we should have seen in them 
 little more than two middle-class murderers 
 for mean objects, as virtually they were. 
 Such a story as theirs is, essentially, less 
 tragic than the story of such a sacrifice as 
 that told by Mr. Phillips in « The Wife," less 
 tragic if for no other reason than that it is 
 more vulgar. A pure woman who in great 
 agony of soul, and with a terrible conscious- 
 ness of moral degradation, sells her body to 
 buy food for her dying husband ! Surely 
 there is a tragic enough world for Mr. Wat- 
 son's theatre, a sufficiently crushing sense 
 of the overthrow of something great. To 
 murder an old king for his money — virtu- 
 ally, call it his kingdom if you prefer — and 
 then walk in your sleep with horror, and be 
 executed in battle for your vulgar crime by 
 one of his relations, is almost too bloody 
 to be tragic. I confess that to me no crimes 
 
TRAGEDY 187 
 
 of those ancient capitalists of stolen cattle 
 we call kings, can compare in tragic, or even 
 merely dramatic, significance with such a 
 story. 
 
 It is true they are more spectacular, and if 
 tragedy were a matter of blood and drums, 
 Mr. Watson would be right, but latterly 
 tragedy begins to convince just in propor- 
 tion as it is less spectacular and more spirit- 
 ual. To certain people the " death of a peer " 
 on the placard of some evening paper seems 
 to lend death an impressiveness they had for- 
 gotten for it awhile, and the doings of the rich 
 must from the material conditions of life re- 
 ceive a momentary notoriety ; but this is all 
 snobbery and vulgarity of spirit, and finally it 
 is neither station nor wealth that makes the 
 tragic theatre or the tragic figure, but the 
 intensity of the vital, not necessarily moral, 
 issue, involved in any given situation of how- 
 soever socially insignificant human beings. 
 
 " These insignificant and immemorable hu- 
 man lives ! " " These trivial and microscopi- 
 cal individualities " ! Surely this is not the 
 poet of Armenia that is talking. It sounds 
 much more like his favourite Sultan ! Cer- 
 
i88 TRAGEDY 
 
 tainly it was in a moment of deeper insight 
 that Mr. Watson once wrote : 
 
 " Momentous to himself as I to me 
 
 Hath each man been that ever woman bore ; 
 Once, in a lightning-flash of sympathy, 
 \felt this truth an instant, and no more." 
 
 Evidently that instant is over, and it must 
 have been in another moment of singular in- 
 sensitiveness to the mysterious spiritual signi- 
 ficance and destiny of human life, not merely 
 in its conspicuous action, sunlit or lightning- 
 struck, but en masse, that Mr. Watson per- 
 mitted himself to write so contemptuously of 
 the unlaurelled, inglorious majority. 
 
 Who is he, or I, or anyone, that we should 
 talk of " these insignificant and immemorable 
 human lives ! These trivial and microscopi- 
 cal individualities " ! It is true, of course, as 
 he says, that there are great things and little 
 things in this world, and that all men and 
 women are not equally important, but it needs 
 an insight no more profound than that of any 
 Christian, to realise that the least " important " 
 human soul is a being of entirely mysterious 
 responsibilities and destinies, and that on the 
 
TRAGEDY 189 
 
 smallest needle-point of personality there is 
 room for one knows not what angels and 
 devils to dance. 
 
 No, Mr. Stephen Phillips has heard the 
 " still sad music of humanity," as even Words- 
 worth's laureate seems not to have heard 
 it; and it is just that humanity, in which, 
 as I have said before, lies his superiority to 
 his contemporaries. In "Marpessa" even it 
 is the humanity more than the beauty that 
 impresses one, and it is just his almost pain- 
 ful sensitiveness to the strange joy and sorrow 
 of human life which made him realise the 
 spiritual terror of a soul, any soul — what 
 matter whose ! — that could slowly die to all 
 the wonder of the world — 
 
 " all the dew, 
 Tremble, and suddenness of earth." 
 
 A common woman, materialised out of all 
 her spiritual instincts, deaf and blind to the im- 
 mortal singing and shining of existence, may 
 not seem to every one a tragic figure ; perhaps 
 it depends on how alive one is oneself, how 
 keenly one feels the tragedy of such a death- 
 in-life. That Mr. Phillips with his spiritual 
 
190 TRAGEDY 
 
 vision, his rich senses, and his warm pity, 
 should feel such a tragedy with a personal 
 keenness was to be expected. We shall feel 
 it with him in proportion as we feel anything, 
 and realise with him the " something great " 
 overthrown in proportion as we value the 
 individual human soul. Any human soul in 
 agony, or in stupor — that for some of us 
 seems a sufficiently tragic spectacle. 
 
A PROPOS THE BROWNING 
 LOVE-LETTERS 
 
 One is thankful for the spirit in which these 
 letters have been generally received by the 
 critics. When poor Mr. Buxton Forman ven- 
 tured to publish the much less intimate and 
 less passionate letters of Keats, the reception 
 of his '' indiscretion " was very different. In 
 fact he has never, I fancy, heard the last of 
 it. There has, however, been a general dis- 
 position gratefully to condone Mr. Browning's 
 gift to the nation of the cor cordium en- 
 trusted to him by his great parents, — or 
 rather, more strictly speaking by his great 
 father. Robert Browning had kept these 
 letters, carefully numbered and in order, in an 
 inlaid box, and not long before his death, 
 having destroyed all the rest of his corres- 
 pondence, he spoke to his son, referring to 
 them : " There they are, do with them as 
 you please when I am dead and gone ! " It 
 is evident that Browning loved his love-story, 
 
192 LOVE-LETTERS 
 
 and loved the world to love it too. All 
 natural, unconventionalised men do. The 
 man who has grown a rose, or discovered a 
 star, does not hasten to hide the fact as a 
 rule ; on the contrary, he calls in his friends 
 to festival and says : " Rejoice with me." 
 There is at least so much generosity in human 
 nature. He does not say : " This rose is too 
 sacred, or this star too sacred for other eyes 
 to look upon ; " but on the contrary : " This 
 rose, this star, is so sacred that I must not 
 keep it for my selfish eyes alone. Rather is 
 it my duty to reveal it to the whole world, 
 that the eyes of all men may be blessed by 
 this wonder, and their hearts purified." The 
 holy sacraments are not profaned by being 
 lifted up in the eyes of the people. It is the 
 people who are sanctified. Beautiful holy 
 things can never be profaned from without. 
 If the great love-stories of the world had been 
 kept "private," as some smug old-maidish 
 critics would, no doubt, prefer, how impover- 
 ished the world would be. 
 
 One has often heard on these occasions 
 that great writers do not, by the accident of 
 
LOVE-LETTERS 193 
 
 fame, forfeit their rights as private persons. 
 Of course, within certain obvious limitations 
 they do not. We do not expect to watch 
 them eating their every meal in a glass-house 
 in Trafalgar Square. Nor do we expect them 
 to sleep in public. And, of course, if they 
 like to insist upon them, all such remaining 
 rights of private persons as they can retain 
 are theirs. But this does not alter the fact 
 that a great writer is not a private person, 
 no more or no less so than her Majesty the 
 Queen. Certain critics love to affect the 
 " Mr. " before great names. Mr. Lang, I 
 fancy, still speaks of " Mr. Arnold," meaning 
 Matthew Arnold, as he would name any other 
 private gentleman. But then Matthew Ar- 
 nold is no longer a private gentleman, and 
 never will be any more. You might as well 
 say " Mr. Burns " or " Herr Heinrich Heine." 
 Matthew Arnold and Burns and Heine and 
 the two Brownings are no longer mere men 
 and women, but types of the human spirit, 
 and as much public property as the Venus of 
 Milo, or the portrait of Andrea del Sarto by 
 himself. It is sheer snobbish affectation to 
 deem otherwise. 
 
 13 
 
194 LOVE-LETTERS 
 
 It is the duty of every great man to be- 
 queath his love-letters to the British Museum, 
 and Robert Browning, through his son, has 
 beautifully fulfilled that duty. That Mrs. 
 Browning does not appear to have been con- 
 sulted, — though there is no reason to suppose 
 that her husband was without knowledge of 
 what her wishes would be in such an event — 
 need not, it seems to me, make us uncomfort- 
 able. It is true that she herself, though the 
 most impulsive and open-hearted of poets, was 
 paradoxically so reticent of her own personal 
 feelings as not to be able to reveal her " Por- 
 tuguese " sonnets to her husband till after her 
 marriage, as too for a long while she was 
 unable to endure the thought of their appear- 
 ance in print. At the same time it must be re- 
 membered that her ill-health, and the cloistered 
 circumstances of her home, had made her 
 morbidly sensitive in social life. She shrank 
 from meeting new faces, and we read in 
 these letters how long it took her to brace 
 herself to receive face to face one who already 
 before their first meeting had become an in- 
 timate correspondent. Perhaps, similarly, it 
 was her invalid life that accounts for her 
 
LOVE-LETTERS 195 
 
 timorous attitude towards the absurd tyranny 
 of her father, who, though she was a woman 
 already in the thirties, pecuniarily indepen- 
 dent of him, and world-famous, restricted her 
 liberty in selfish petty ways difficult to con- 
 ceive. Then too love had come late to 
 her, and there is no one so maidenly as a 
 woman on the borders of old maidenhood. 
 Often in reading her letters one wonders how 
 Browning had " patience " with her — partic- 
 ularly in her submission towards her father. 
 One longs to see him, like Mr. Meredith's 
 Alvan, carry her off " on the back of a cen- 
 taur." For, it must have been evident to 
 him almost from the beginning that she loved 
 him all the time. In any case, therefore, I 
 should hold that Mrs. Browning's scruples, 
 supposing her to have had any, might have 
 been reverently and affectionately disregarded, 
 in favour of the robuster, more natural will of 
 her husband. Even here too father and son 
 have done well. 
 
 It has, I see, been objected that virtually 
 these letters add nothing to the Browning 
 love-story as already known to us. The 
 poetry on each side had already told us all. 
 
196 LOVE-LETTERS 
 
 That is in a sense true ; but, on the other 
 hand, while poetry tells us everything, it 
 tells us nothing. Even in its most intimate 
 moments it becomes generalised. In its 
 application it is always " any man to any 
 woman," rather than the particular man to a 
 particular woman. An advantage, of course, 
 in some ways ; but in a sense a loss in 
 humanity. However real words may be in 
 themselves, they seem more real when we 
 know them to be the real utterances of real 
 people. The world in general especially feels 
 this, and is apt to distrust the sincerity of 
 verse. Therefore, a volume of prose letters 
 is in its eyes better evidence of a great love 
 than the most wonderful series of sonnets 
 (poets have such a way of exaggerating their 
 feelings ! ) — and it is very important, allow- 
 ing the importance of any thing, that the 
 world should be convinced of such matters. 
 In the poetry we hear the two poets in love. 
 It is the loves of the angels. It is the morn- 
 ing stars singing together. But here in 
 plain — though often obscure — prose, we 
 hear the man and woman in love, in love like 
 mere men and women, in spite of all their 
 
LOVE-LETTERS 197 
 
 references to the Agamemnon and the Pro- 
 metheus — for surely these are the most 
 learned lovers that ever loved. The world 
 thrills at: "How do I love thee, let me 
 count the ways," but, almost terrible in its 
 pathetic sincerity as that cry is, perhaps the 
 world is more convinced by such simple 
 prose as this which simple and unknown 
 women have written over and over again 
 from the beginning : " My own dearest, — 
 what would become of me indeed, if I could 
 not see you on Wednesday, nor on Thursday, 
 nor on Friday? — no breath I have for going 
 on. No breath I should have, for living on. 
 I do kiss you through the distance — since 
 you tell me. I love you with my soul. Your 
 own I am." Or again : " It seems to me 
 still a dream how you came here at all, . . . the 
 very machinery of it seems miraculous. Why 
 did I receive you and only you ? Can I tell ? 
 No, not a word." Or once more : " And for 
 the rest, you need not fear any fear of mine 
 — my fear will not cross a wish of yours, be 
 sure ! Neither does it prevent your being all 
 to me . . . all : more than I used to take for 
 all when I looked round the world . . . al- 
 
198 LOVE-LETTERS 
 
 most more than I took for all in my earliest 
 dreams. You stand in between me and not 
 merely the living who stood closest, but 
 between me and the closer graves , . , and I 
 reproach myself for this sometimes, and, so, 
 ask you not to blame me for a different 
 thing.'' 
 
A PROPOS "THE ABSENT- 
 MINDED BEGGAR" 
 
 "The Absent-Minded Beggar," that won- 
 der-working capitalised lyric has no warmer 
 admirer in England than the present writer. 
 I hum it in season and out of season. I have 
 risked the displeasure of near and dear rela- 
 tives for my love of it. " And yet — " as Mr. 
 Stephen Phillips says in one of his lyrics, 
 "and yet — " Well, you see, one's own per- 
 sonal unregenerate dehght is one thing ; what 
 I have been pondering is another. Person- 
 ally, I have rejoiced in Mr. Kipling's ballad 
 as I have rejoiced — and the whole of Eng- 
 land with me — in any other preposterously 
 fascinating catch from the music hall, say, 
 "The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte 
 Carlo," or " Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay." But the 
 very nature of my delight leads me to ask what 
 I conceive to be a pertinent question. Eng- 
 land, we must remember, is not only an old 
 and rich country, but it is the most " distin- 
 
200 ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 
 
 guished" country in the world. So far as 
 one can generalise on such matters, England 
 — and certainly France no longer — is the 
 gentleman among the nations. It is not 
 merely the wealth of England that has caused 
 its manners to be lovingly copied all over 
 the world. Well, taking the great distinction 
 of England for granted, is it at a great 
 national crisis adequately represented by — 
 the music hall? And when England goes 
 forth to battle, is it seemly that her war song 
 should be written in the dialect of Cockney 
 coster-mongers ? Truly national poetry is 
 not written in the slang of a nation's slums. 
 When France needs a new national song 
 it will not commission Aristide Bruant to 
 write it. 
 
 For, of course, Cockney is not to be con- 
 sidered on the same plane of dialect as 
 Scotch dialect. Scotch dialect represents a 
 nation. Every Scotchman is born to it, and 
 he is seldom able to sell his birthright. A 
 Scotch national song written in plain English 
 would be as inappropriate — as an English 
 national song written in Cockney. Eng- 
 lish is a noble and beautiful language. We 
 
ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 201 
 
 have still amongst us poets who can use it 
 nobly and beautifully. We don't send Mr. 
 Arthur Roberts to represent us at interna- 
 tional conventions ; why, then, in front of our 
 armies should we send a Cockney Taillefer? 
 Let Whitechapel have its "Absent-Minded 
 Beggar" by all means — but Whitechapel is 
 only a small corner of the English constitu- 
 tion, and Mr. Kipling's genius is not great 
 enough to elevate a gutter-slang into a national 
 speech. 
 
 That we are willing at the moment to 
 accept a music-hall song in lieu of a really 
 national poem is a fact, I fear, of no good im- 
 port. Remembering Tennyson's noble and 
 dignified ballads and odes on such occasions, 
 one cannot be altogether happy that Eng- 
 land, with the echo of such distinguished 
 music in its ears, can rest content with " The 
 Absent-Minded Beggar." A fact, I said, of 
 no good import, — indeed, of discouraging 
 import on many sides ! Those of us who 
 have believed in democracy cannot but ask 
 ourselves: Is this what democracy means? 
 Many wise heads have prophesied that de- 
 mocracy would mean just this : brutalisation 
 
202 ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 
 
 of the national conscience, vulgarisation of 
 the noble arts. We have hesitated to believe 
 it — and perhaps even yet we need not be- 
 lieve it true. Democracy, like an army, has 
 a way of persuading aristocrats to lead it. 
 To take one example : William Morris, in 
 spite of all his abstract "equality," was by 
 temperament an aristocrat; and maybe we 
 have been too apt to interpret the democratic 
 movement by such leaders, forgetting that 
 democracy above all should be read not by 
 its few illuminated letters, but by the general 
 purport of its average page. It is something 
 of a paradox that a so-called aristocratic, 
 "Tory" movement, such as our latest "im- 
 perialism," should come to be led by a man 
 who is not, in any sense of the word, an aris- 
 tocrat; neither by birth, temperament, taste, 
 nor achievement, — and that its most forcible 
 expression of itself should be made in the 
 plebeian dialect of the lowest classes. If it 
 is important that "gentlemen" — using the 
 word in its full sense — lead us in battle, it 
 is even more important that "gentlemen" 
 should decide for what reasons, or to what 
 issues, those battles should be fought; and 
 
ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 203 
 
 also that "gentlemen" — that is, the select 
 natures of literary art — should sing our 
 battle songs. If the coster is to make Eng- 
 land's wars — that is, if England is to be 
 managed by its most common and least in- 
 structed citizens — then, and only then, is it 
 appropriate that its poets should voice the 
 national feeling in coster dialect. It is to 
 be feared that, for all his Tory sentiments, 
 Mr. Kipling does indeed represent in litera- 
 ture the "average, sensual" elector, whose 
 comprehension of a national crisis depends 
 on its effect upon his particular industry. 
 What a humiliation for poetry ! Of old 
 the poet sat high above the herd upon the 
 sacred hill, and the herd looked up to him, 
 as a vessel of the divine meanings. Clum- 
 sily it strove to attain comprehension of 
 his universal prophetic outlook upon the 
 world. But with Mr. Kipling, the poet has 
 changed all that. No longer he sits aloof, an 
 intermediary between God and the mob ; but, 
 instead, he runs eagerly down the hill, the 
 willing phonograph of the greatest number. 
 
 The mob has found a man of genius will- 
 ing to voice its prejudice and rapacity. This 
 
204 ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 
 
 is bad for England, and very humiliating for 
 poetry. It almost makes one wish that poetry 
 were constituted as a faculty, like medicine, 
 and that there were certain unprofessional 
 things clearly defined which a poet might 
 not do. Of course, if England is satisfied 
 to be represented by the " Absent-Minded 
 Beggar," all the worse for England; it only 
 means that its finer minds are withdrawing 
 themselves from the direction of the national 
 destiny. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, all this is not to 
 say that the "Absent-Minded Beggar" is 
 anything but a fascinating human jingle. 
 There are those who consider it a slur upon 
 the English soldier. He is not an absent- 
 minded beggar — say some. Of course, that 
 is absurd. And there is underneath the 
 surface cynicism of Mr. • Kipling's poem a 
 frank acceptance of humanity as it is, which 
 is in itself humanising. Yet I maintain 
 that, whatever its secondary charm, however, 
 individually, one may delight in it, the 
 "Absent-Minded Beggar" is unworthy to 
 represent so great and so distinguished a 
 country as England at such a moment. 
 
ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 205 
 
 There are those, I know, who consider 
 such doggerel an indication of the future of 
 English literature. The poetry of the twen- 
 tieth century is to be just Kipling — only 
 more so. Of course, one cannot deny or 
 affirm. One can only hope not — and look 
 to the past for consolation. This, of course, 
 is not the first time that English national 
 feeling has expressed itself in plebeian jingle. 
 There was, for instance, a certain "Lillibul- 
 lero," which every duke's son and cook's son 
 in eighteenth-century England hummed in a 
 sort of possession. It hums now only in the 
 dry heads of antiquaries. And there is the 
 sadness of Mr. Kipling's talent ; or, perhaps, 
 rather the use to which he has chosen to 
 dedicate that talent. Think of " Mandalay " 
 as the dusty property of literary dry-as-dusts. 
 Yet, what else can it become .' Mr. Kipling 
 has chosen to make the clay jig, instead of 
 compelling the marble to sing ; and he has 
 his reward. To-night as, all unexpectedly, 
 I caught my train, I noticed a gentleman 
 walking about the well-covered railway station 
 with his umbrella up. It was raining outside, 
 and he had forgotten to put the umbrella 
 
2o6 ABSENT-MINDED BEGGAR 
 
 down. Said a porter to me : " There goes an 
 absent-minded beggar," and for a moment I 
 thought to myself: "What a fame is that 
 which is breathed upon the lips of railway 
 porters ! " — till I remembered the fame of 
 prize-fighters and pantomime songs; and 
 thought, too, of Keats ! " What think you 
 of Keats ? " I might have said to my porter. 
 Yes ! if Mr. Kipling troubles himself about 
 " immortality " — as every real artist should 
 — he must turn pale at the thought of Keats. 
 Of course, it is impossible to imagine the 
 "Ode to a Grecian Urn" making fifty thousand 
 pounds for our widows and orphans ; — " and 
 yet . . ." 
 
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 
 
 In Memoriam. 
 
 For a little while, no doubt, idle conjecture 
 will still busy itself with the mysterious fate 
 of Hubert Crackanthorpe, but for those who 
 knew and loved him, that mystery is now 
 merged in a greater, which "this side the 
 stars " no man may read. We ask no longer 
 why and how he died — we can only say over 
 to ourselves that he is surely dead. A little 
 urn, which faith and love would fain hide 
 from us with symbolic flowers of resurrec- 
 tion, and three little books are all that is left 
 to us of one who but yesterday was so vividly 
 and endearingly alive. That he has left us 
 thus of his free will, without a word of adieu, 
 without a wave of the hand, is hard to think : 
 for that were indeed " all unlike his great 
 and gracious ways." A gentleman so gentle, 
 a man so human, a heart so tender, a nature 
 so noble and true — it was so we spoke of 
 him day by day as he lived. May one who 
 
208 HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 
 
 loved him, and to whom he was so rare a 
 friend, say it once more now that he is dead ? 
 I have spoken of him " so vividly and endear- 
 ingly alive," and it is just this which for him, 
 and such as he, adds bitterness even to the 
 bitterness of death — he loved life so well, 
 and it was so good a sight to see him alive, 
 so eagerly, so passionately, and with so vast 
 and sympathetic a humanity. 
 
 " I must 
 Remember young men dead in their hot bloom. 
 The sweetness of the world edged like a sword." 
 
 Humanity. It was that word which signifi- 
 cantly he wrote in the forefront of his first 
 book with the terrible title of Wreckage, 
 and humanity was ever the motto of Hubert 
 Crackanthorpe's life. He was inexhaustibly 
 interested in men and women, and the pity 
 of their terrible destinies, and perhaps hardly 
 another writer of his generation had so 
 thoroughly equipped himself for his calling of 
 novelist by so adventurous a study of human 
 life. Like Browning's poet, his dreams were 
 of 
 " Marts, theatres, and wharfs — aU fiUed with men ! 
 Men everywhere ! " 
 
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 209 
 
 But the study was always first for its own 
 sake, for the love and the pity of it, and only 
 secondarily for the making of books. In- 
 deed, that was far from being first among his 
 interests, and I well remember from our last 
 talk his eloquent protestation that always in 
 literature the man was so much more to him 
 than the book. His estimation of his own 
 writings was more than modest, it was un- 
 affectedly indifferent. When he wrote, he 
 wrote with all his might and skill ; but, for all 
 the praise and expectancy which his work had 
 won for him, he remained true to that "pur- 
 suit of experience" which, half pathetically 
 and half ironically maybe, he has declared 
 " the refuge of the unimaginative ; " and flat- 
 tery, that left his ambitions as it found them, 
 left, too, his nature sincere and unspoiled. 
 
 To him, of all men, it would seem trivial in 
 such an hour of parting to attempt estimate 
 of the value of his contributions to literature, 
 or of the loss to literature by his death ; and 
 surely I propose no such attempt here ; but 
 though he might think so little of them him- 
 self, we shall know how to value the three 
 volumes where alone henceforth we may meet 
 14 
 
2IO HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 
 
 his gentle and heroic spirit. And I think it 
 is not friendship that Winds me when I ven- 
 ture to believe that posterity will deem the 
 youth who could write Wreckage at the 
 age of twenty-two something like the Chat- 
 terton of the English novel. It is seldom 
 that so young a man is so objective in his 
 method, so capable of getting outside himself, 
 of seeing with so faithful a vision, and re- 
 cording with so minute a reality, the psy- 
 chology of temperaments different from his 
 own. " Unimaginative," indeed, the writer 
 of that wonderful story, A Dead Woman, 
 was far from being; indeed, the dramatic 
 imagination necessary to the writing of such 
 a story might almost seem to transcend 
 imagination and become actual clairvoyance. 
 The hearts of the tragic, of the desperate 
 ones, have seldom found a more understand- 
 ing . and sympathetic interpreter ; and now 
 among the histories of those for whom he 
 had so vast a pity his own sad history has 
 come to be written. Memories not un- 
 acquainted with sorrow will scarcely recall so 
 pitiless an ending of so promising a life, but 
 among the treasures of such memories there 
 
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 211 
 
 will not be a memory more dear and beautiful 
 than that of Hubert Crackanthorpe. I said 
 he had left us no farewell, and yet as one 
 reads the closing words of his last book, does 
 it not seem as though, unconsciously, he was 
 already bidding us good-bye? 
 
 "Have you never longed to wander there, in 
 that wonderful cloudland beyond the sea, where, 
 like droves of monstrous cattle, close-huddled and 
 drowsy, they lie the day through — the comely, 
 milk-white summer clouds, slow and sleek and 
 swelling ; . . . sometimes, at evenfall, when the 
 sea lies calm in her opal tints, you may discern 
 the distant lines of their strange, fantastic home, 
 vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage beyond the 
 horizon. 
 
 " Perhaps, after death, we may linger there, and 
 watch them silently sail away towards the lands we 
 have loved long ago ! . . ." 
 
 Perhaps, who knows ? 
 
M'.l 
 
 liiiiiiliis