I:. lb 7^ ♦r(£0RN^LL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY . Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT OF TWO FRIENDS OF Cornell University 1934 mE DUE J(Si .. , 19':! k 19 '37 JHfr 3 '31 Mr 1 9 '40 MAR 3 im 'c^- "^01 9 i;-JAKL ?!r *^r^. Iaug 8 ^m ^ nmzB% TTig^2Wp "" FRAGILE PAPER Please handle this book with care, as the paper is brittle. F»HASEO PERFORATION ILE DOES NOT IRCULATE ERAGILE DOES NOT CIRCULATE PR6003.E26Y4 19ir''''-'''"^^ Yet again. .rTpSlOB^T\or^ CASP 3 1924 013 583 996 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/cu31924013583996 YET AGAIN BY THE SAME WRITER THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM MORE THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE BY THE SAME PERSON CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN THE poets' CORNER A BOOK OF CARICATURES YET AGAIN BY MAX BEERBOHM NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMX /\U-i.%^f=> Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 1 ! Till I gave myself the task of making a little selection from what I had written since last I formed a book of essays, I had no notion that I had put, as it were, my eggs into so many baskets — The Saturday Review, The New Quarterly, The New Liberal Review, Vanity Fair, The Daily Mail, Literature, The Traveller, The Pall Mall Magazine, The May Book, The Souvenir Book of Charing Cross Hospital Bazaar, The Cornhill Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Anglo-Saxon Review . . . Ouf! But the sigh of relief that I heave at the end of the list is accompanied by a smile of thanks to the various authorities for letting me use here what they were so good as to require. M. B, CONTENTS THE FIRE SEEING PEOPLE OFF . A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS PORRO UNUM A CLUB IN RUINS '273' a study in dejection a pathetic imposture the decline of the graces whistler's writing . ICHABOD GENERAL ELECTIONS . A PARALLEL . A MORRIS FOR MAY-DAY THE HOUSE OF COMMONS MANNER THE NAMING OF STREETS ON Shakespeare's birthday fAGK 3 19 29 41 51 65 75 83 91 105 123 149 157 165 183 197 217 vii Vlll YET AGAIN A HOME-COMING * THE RAGGED REGIMENT ' THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC DULCEDO JUDICIORUM PAGE 227 235 247 265 WORDS FOR PICTURES ' harlequin ' . . . ' the garden of love ' ' ariane et dionyse ' ' peter the dominican ' 'l'oiseau bleu' 'macbeth and the witches ' 'carlotta grisi ' 'ho-tei' . . . ■ 'THE visit' . 283 285 290 295 299 301 307 310 315 THE FIRE THE FIRE IF I were 'seeing over' a house, and found in every room an iron cage let into the wall, and were told by the caretaker that these cages were for me to keep lions in, I think I should open my eyes rather wide. Yet nothing seems to me more natural than a fire in the grate. Doubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and raging behind it; and I dare say I dimly wondered by what blessed dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my nursery. I do not think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the fender. I knew by instinct that the creature within it was dangerous — fiercer still than the cat which had once strayed into the room and scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to wonder at the creature's presence and learned to call it ' the fire,' quite lightly. There are so many queer things in the world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see habitualty. It is not that these things are in 4 YET AGAIN themselves less queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a fleeting moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came within our ken. We are in the habit of saying that ' first impressions are best,' and that we must approach every question ' with an open mind ' ; but we shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we are now. ' Make yourself even as a little child ' we often say, but recommending the process on moral rather than on intellectual grounds, and inwardly preening ourselves all the while on having ' put away childish things,' as though clarity of vision were not one of them. I look around the room I am writing in — a pleasant room, and my own, yet how irresponsive, how smug and Hfeless ! The pattern of the wall- paper blamelessly repeats itself from wainscote to cornice ; and the pictures are immobile and changeless within their glazed frames — faint, flat mimicries of lite. The chairs and tables are just as their carpenter fashioned them, and stand with stiff obedience just where they have been posted. On one side of the room, encased in coverings of cloth and leather, are myriads of words, which to some people, but not to me, are a fair substitute for human company. All around me, in fact, are the products of modern civilisation. But in the THE FIRE 5 whole room there are but three things Uving : myself, my dog, and the fire in my grate. And of these lives the third is very much the most in- tensely vivid. My dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves ; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors, night after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away the ancestors of my dog. And my dog regards it with the old wonder and misgiving. Even in his sleep he opens ever and again one eye to see that we are in no danger. And the fire glowers and roars through its bars at him with the scorn that a wild beast must needs have for a tame one. ' You are free,' it rages, ' and yet you do not spring at that man's throat and tear him limb from limb and make a meal of him ! ' and, gazing at me, it licks its red lips ; and I, laughing good-humouredly, rise and give the monster a shovelful of its proper food, which it leaps at and noisily devom-s. Fire is the only one of the elements that inspires awe. We breathe air, tread earth, bathe in water. Fire alone we approach with deference. And it is the only one of the elements that is always alert, 6 YET AGAIN always good to watch. We do not see the air we breathe — except sometimes in London, and who shall say that the sight is pleasant ? We do not see the earth revolving ; and the trees and other vegetables - that are put forth by it come up so slowly that there is no fun in watching them. One is apt to lose patience with the good earth, and to hanker after a sight of those multitudinous fires whereover it is, after all, but a thin and compara- tively recent crust. Water, when we get it in the form of a river, is pleasant to watch for a minute or so, after which period the regularity of its move- ment becomes as tedious as stagnation. It is only a whole seaful of water that can rival fire in variety and in loveliness. But even the spectacle of sea at its very best — say in an Atlantic storm — is less thrilling than the spectacle of one buUding ablaze. And for the rest, the sea has its hours of dulness and monotony, even when it is not wholly calm. Whereas in the grate even a quite little fire never ceases to be amusing and inspiring until you let it out. As much fire as would correspond with a handful of earth or a tumblerful of water is yet a joy to the eyes, and a lively suggestion of grandeur. The other elements, even as presented in huge samples, impress us as less august than fire. Fire alone, according to the legend, was brought down from Heaven : the rest were here from the dim outset. When we call a thing earthy we impute THE FIRE T cloddishness ; by ' watery ' we imply insipidiiess ; ' airy ' is for something trivial. ' Fiery ' has always a noble significance. It denotes such things as faith, courage, genius. Earth lies heavy, and air is void, and water flows down ; but flames aspire, flying back towards the heaven they came from. They typify for us the spirit of man, as apart from aught that is gross in him. They are the symbol of purity, of triumph over corruption. Water, air, earth, can all harbour corruption ; but where flames are, or have been, there is innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless, from our natural love of destruction for destruction's sake. Fire is savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Natiure is still ' red in tooth and claw,' though she has begun to make fine flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the mild dog on my hearth- rug has been known to behave like a wolf to his own species. Scratch his master and you will find the caveman. But the scratch must be a sharp one : I am thickly veneered. Outwardly, I am as gentle as you, gentle reader. And one reason for our delight in fire is that there is no hiunbug about flames : they are frankly, primaevally savage. But this is not, I am glad to say, the sole reason. We have a sense of good and evil, I do not pretend 8 YET AGAIN that it carries us very far. It is but the tooth- brush and nail-scissors that we flourish. Our innate instincts, not this acquired sense, are what the world really hinges on. But this acquired sense is an integral part of our minds. And we revere fire because we have come to regard it as especially the foe of evil — as a means for destrojdng weeds, not flowers ; a destroyer of wicked cities, not of good ones. The idea of hell, as inculcated in the books given to me when I was a child, never really frightened me at all. I conceived the possibility of a hell in which were eternal flames to destroy every one who had not been good. But a hell whose flames were eternally impotent to destroy these people, a hell where evil was to go on writhing yet thriving for ever and ever, seemed to me, even at that age, too patently absurd to be appalling. Nor indeed do I think that to the more credulous children in England can the idea of eternal burning have ever been quite so forbidding as their nurses meant it to be. Credulity is but a form of incaution. I, as I have said, never had any wish to play with fire ; but most English children are strongly attracted, and are much less afraid of fire than of the dark. Eternal darkness, with a biting east-wind, were to the English fancy a far more fearful prospect than eternal flames. The notion of these flames arose in Italy, where heat is no luxury, and shadows are THE FIRE 9 lurked in, and breezes prayed for. In England the sun, even at its strongest, is a weak vessel. True, we grumble whenever its radiance is a trifle less watery than usual. But that is precisely because we are a people whose nature the sun has not mellowed — a dour people, like all northerners, ever ready to make the worst of things. Inwardly, we love the sun, and long for it to come nearer to us, and to come more often. And it is partly be- cause this craving is unsatisfied that we cower so fondly over our open hearths. Our fires are make- shifts for sunshine. Autumn after autumn, *we see the swallows gathering in the sky, and in the osier-isle we hear their noise,' and our hearts sink. Happy, selfish little birds, gathering so lightly to fly whither we cannot follow you, will you not, this once, forgo the lands of your desire ? ' Shall not the grief of the old time follow ? ' Do winter with us, this once ! We will strew all England, every morning, with bread-crumbs for you, will you but stay and help us to play at summer ! But the delicate cruel rogues pay no heed to us, skim- ming sharplier than ever in pursuit of gnats, as the hour draws near for their long flight over gnatless seas. Only one swallow have I ever known to relent. It had built its nest under the eaves of a cottage that belonged to a friend of mine, a man who loved birds. He had a power of making birds trust him. 10 YET AGAIN They would come at his call, circling round him, perching on his shoulders, eating from his hand. One of the swallows would come too, from his nest under the eaves. As the summer wore on, he grew quite tame. And when summer waned, and the other swallows flew away, this one lingered, day after day, fluttering dubiously over the thresh- old of the cottage. Presently, as the air grew chilly, he built a new nest for himself, under the mantelpiece in my friend's study. And every morning, so soon as the fire burned brightly, he would flutter down to perch on the fender and bask in the light and warmth of the coals. But after a few weeks he began to ail ; possibly be- cause the study was a small one, and he could not get in it the exercise that he needed ; more pro- bably because of the draughts. My friend's wife, who was very clever with her needle, made for the swallow a little jacket of red flannel, and sought to divert his mind by teaching him to perform a few simple tricks. For a while he seemed to regain his spirits. But presently he moped more than ever, crouching nearer than ever to the fire, and, sidelong, blinking dim weak reproaches at his disappointed master and mistress. One swallow, as the adage truly says, does not make a summer. So this one's mistress hurriedly made for him a little overcoat of sealskin, wearing which, in a muffled cage, he was personally conducted by his THE FIRE 11 master straight through to Sicily. There he was nursed back to health, and liberated on a sunny plain. He never returned to his English home ; but the nest he built under the mantelpiece is still preserved in case he should come at last. When the sun's rays slant down upon your grate, then the fire blanches and blenches, cowers, crumbles, and collapses. It cannot compete with its archetype. It cannot suffice a sun-steeped swallow, or ripen a plum, or parch the carpet. Yet, in its modest way, it is to your room what the sun is to the world ; and where, during the greater part of the year, would you be without it ? I do not wonder that the poor, when they have to choose be- tween fuel and food, choose fuel. Food nourishes the body ; but fuel, warming the body, warms the soul too. I do not wonder that the hearth has been regarded from time immemorial as the centre, and used as the symbol, of the home. I like the social tradition that we must not poke a fire in a friend's drawing-room unless our friendship dates back full seven years. It rests evidently, this tradition, on the sentiment that a fire is a thing sacred to the members of the household in which it bums. I dare say the fender has a meaning, as well as a use, and is as the rail round an altar. In ' The New Utopia ' these hearths will all have been rased, of course, as demoralising relics of an age when people went in for privacy and were not 12 YET AGAIN always thinking exclusively about the State. Such heat as may be needed to prevent us from catching colds (whereby our vitality would be lowered, and our usefulness to the State impaired) will be supplied through hot-water pipes (white- enamelled), the supply being strictly regulated from the municipal water- works. Or has Mr. Wells arranged that the sun shall always be shin- ing on us ? I have mislaid my copy of the book. Anyhow, fires and hearths will have to go. Let us make the most of them while we may. Personally, though I appreciate the radiance of a family fire, I give preference to a fire that bums for myself alone. And dearest of all to me is a fire that burns thus in the house of another. I find an inalienable magic in my bedroom fire when I am staying with friends ; and it is at bedtime that the spell is strongest. ' Good night,' says my host, shaking my hand warmly on the threshold ; ' you Ve everjrthing you want ? ' ' Everything,' I assure him ; ' good night. ' ' Good night.'' ' Good night,' and I close my door, close my eyes, heave a long sigh, open my eyes, set down the candle, draw the armchair close to the fire {my fire), sink down, and am at peace, with nothing to mar my happiness except the feeling that it is too good to be true. At such moments I never see in my fije any like- ness to a wild beast. It roars me as gently as a THE FIRE 18 sucking dove, and is as kind and cordial as my host and hostess and the other people in the house. And yet I do not have to say anything to it, I do not have to make myself agreeable to it. It lavishes its warmth on me, asking nothing in return. For fifteen mortal hours or so, with few and brief intervals, I have been making myself agreeable, saying the right thing, asking the apt question, ex- hibiting the proper shade of mild or acute surprise, smiling the appropriate smile or laughing just so long and just so loud as the occasion seemed to demand. If I were naturally a brilliant and copious talker, I suppose that to stay in another's house would be no strain on me. I should be able to impose myself on my host and hostess and their guests without any effort, and at the end of the day retire quite unfatigued, pleasantly flushed with the effect of my own magnetism. Alas, there is no question of my imposing myself. I can repay hospitality only by strict attention to the humble, arduous process of making myself agreeable. When I go up to dress for dinner, I have always a strong impulse to go to bed and sleep off my fatigue ; and it is only by exerting all my will-power that I can array myself for the final labours : to wit, making myself agreeable to some man or woman for a minute or two before dinner, to two women during dinner, to men after dinner, then again to women in the drawing-room, and then once more 14 YET AGAIN to men in the smoking-room. It is a dog's life. But one has to have suffered before one gets the full savour out of joy. And I do not grumble at the price I have to pay for the sensation of basking, at length, in solitude and the glow of my own fire- side. Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than content to watch the noble and ever- changing pageant of the fire. The finest part of this spectacle is surely when the flames sink, and gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat. It is often thus that my fire welcomes me when the long day's task is done. After I have gazed long into its depths, I close my eyes to rest them, opening them again, with a start, whenever a coal shifts its place, or some belated little tongue of flame spurts forth with a hiss. . . . Vaguely I Uken myself to the watchman one sees by night in London, wherever a road is up, huddled half- awake in his tiny cabin of wood, with a cresset of live coal before him. ... I have come down in the world, and am a night-watchman, and I find the life as pleasant as I had always thought it must be, except when I let the fire out, and awake shivering. . . . Shivering I awake, in the twilight of dawn. Ashes, white and grey, some rusty cinders, a crag or so of coal, are all that is left over from last night's splendour. Grey is the lawn THE FIRE 15 beneath my window, and little ghosts of rabbits are nibbling and hobbling there. But anon the east will be red, and, ere I wake, the sky will be blue, and the grass quite green again, and my fire will have arisen from its ashes, a cackling and com- fortable phoenix. 14 YET AGAIN to men in the smoking-room. It is a dog's life. But one has to have suffered before one gets the full savour out of joy. And I do not grumble at the price I have to pay for the sensation of basking, at length, in solitude and the glow of my own fu"e- side. Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than content to watch the noble and ever- changing pageant of the fire. The finest part of this spectacle is surely when the flames sink, and gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat. It is often thus that my fire welcomes me when the long day's task is done. After I have gazed long into its depths, I close my eyes to rest them, opening them again, with a start, whenever a coal shifts its place, or some belated little tongue of flame spurts forth with a hiss. . . . Vaguely I liken myself to the watchman one sees by night in London, wherever a road is up, huddled half- awake in his tiny cabin of wood, with a cresset of live coal before him. ... I have come down in the world, and am a night-watchman, and I find the life as pleasant as I had always thought it must be, except when I let the fire out, and awake shivering. . . . Shivering I awake, in the twilight of dawn. Ashes, white and grey, some rusty cinders, a crag or so of coal, are all that is left over from last night's splendour. Grey is the lawn THE FIRE 15 beneath my window, and little ghosts of rabbits are nibbling and hobbling there. But anon the east will be red, and, ere I wake, the sky will be blue, and the grass quite green again, and my fire will have arisen from its ashes, a cackling and com- fortable phoenix. SEEING PEOPLE OFF SEEING PEOPLE OFF I AM not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too. To see a friend off from Waterloo to Vauxhall were easy enough. But we are never called on to perform that small feat. It is only when a friend is going on a longish journey, and will be absent ' for a longish time, that we turn up at the railway station. The dearer the friend, and the longer the journey, and the longer the likely absence, the earlier do we turn up, and the more lamentably do we fail. Our failure is in exgc+^ ratio to the serious- ness of the occasion, and to tJie depth of our feeling. In a room, or even on a door-step, we can make the farewell quite worthily. We can express in our faces the genuine sorrow we feel. Nor do words fail us. There is no awkwardness, no restraint, on either side. The thread of our in- timacy has not been snapped. The leave-taking is an ideal one. Why not, then, leave the leave- taking at that ? Always, departing friends im- plore us not to bother to come to the railway 19 20 YET AGAIN station next morning. Always, we are deaf to these entreaties, knowing them to be not quite sincere. The departing friends would think it very odd of us if we took them at their word. Besides, they really do want to see us again. And that wish is heartily reciprocated. We duly turn up. And then, oh then, what a gulf yawns ! We stretch our arms vainly across it. We have utterly lost touch. We have nothing at all to say. We gaze at each other as dumb animals gaze at human beings. We • make conversation ' — and such conversation ! We know that these are the friends from whom we parted overnight. They know that we have not aijtCTed. Yet, on the surface, everything is different ; and the tgnsiss is such that we only long for the guard to blow his whistle and put an end to the farce. On a cold grey morning of last week I duly turned up at Euston, to see off an old friend who was starting for America. Overnight, we had given him a farewell dinner, in which sadness was well mingled with festivity. Years probably would elapse before his return. Some of us might never see him again. Not ignoring the shadow of the future, we gaily cele- brated the past. We were as thankful to have known our guest as we were grieved to lose him ; and both these emotions were made evident. It was a perfect farewell. SEEING PEOPLE OFF 21 And now, here we were, stiff and self-conscious on the platform ; and, framed in the window of the railway-carriage, was the face of our friend ; but it was as the face of a stranger — a stranger anxious to please, an appealing stranger, an awk- ward stranger. ' Have you got everything ? ' asked one of us, breaking a silence. ' Yes, every- thing,' said our friend, with a pleasant nod. ' Everything,' he repeated, with the emphasis of an empty brain. ' You '11 be able to lunch on the train,' said I, though this prophecy had already been made more than once. ' Oh yes,' he said with conviction. He added that the train went straight through to Liverpool. This fact seemed to strike us as rather odd. We exchanged glances. ' Doesn't it stop at Crewe ? ' asked one of us. ' No,' said our friend, briefly. He seemed almost dis- agreeable. There was a long pause. One of us, with a nod and a forced smile at the traveller, said ' Well ! ' The nod, the smile, and the unmean- ing monosyllable, were returned conscientiously. Another pause was broken by one of us with a fit of coughing. It was an obviously assumed fit, but it served to pass the time. The bustle of the plat- form was unabated. There was no sign of the train's departure. Release — ours, and our friend's — was not yet. My wandering eye alighted on a rather portly middle-aged man who was talking earnestly from 22 YET AGAIN the platform to a young lady at the next window but one to ours. His fine profile was vaguely familiar to me. The young lady was evidently American, and he was evidently English ; other- wise I should have guessed from his impressive air that he was her father. I wished I could hear what he was saying. I was sure he was giving the very best advice ; and the strong tenderness of his gaze was really beautiful. He seemed magnetic, as he poured out his final injunctions. I could feel something of his magnetism even where I stood. And the magnetism, like the profile, was vaguely familiar to me. Where had I experiaiced it ? In a flash I remembered. The man was Hubert le Ros. But how changed since last I saw him ! That was seven or eight years ago, in the Strand. He was then (as usual) out of an engagement, and borrowed half-a-crown. It seemed a privilege to lend anything to him. He was always magnetic. And why his magnetism had never made him successful on the London stage was always a mystery to me. He was an excellent actor, and a man of sober habit. But, like many others of his kind, Hubert le Ros (I do not, of course, give the actual name by which he was known) drifted seedily away into the provinces ; and I, like every one else, ceased to remember him. It was strange to see him, after all these years, SEEING PEOPLE OFF 23 here on the platform of Euston, looking so prosper- ous and solid. It was not only the flesh that he had put on, but also the clothes, that made him hard to recognise. In the old days, an imitation fur coat had seemed to be as integral a part of him as were his ill-shorn lantern jaws. But now his costume -was a model of rich and sombre modera- tion, drawing, not calling, attention to itself. Ke looked like a banker. Any one would have been proud to be seen off by him. ' Stand back, please.' The train was about to start, and I waved farewell to my friend. Le Ros did not stand back. He stood clasping in both hands the hands of the young American. ' Stand back, sir, please ! ' He obeyed, but quickly darted forward again to whisper some final word. I think there were tears in her eyes. There certainly were tears in his when, at length, having watched the train out of sight, he turned round. He seemed, nevertheless, delighted to see me. He asked me where I had been hiding all these years ; and simultaneously repaid me the half-crown as though it had been borrowed yesterday. He linked his arm in mine, and walked me slowly along the platform, saying with what pleasure he read my dramatic criticisms every Saturday. I told him, in return, how much he was missed on the stage. ' Ah, yes,' he said, ' I never act on the stage nowadays.' He laid some emphasis on the 24 YET AGAIN word ' stage,' and I asked him where, then, he did act. ' On the platform,' he answered. ' You mean,' said I, ' that you redtg at concerts ? ' He smiled. 'This,' he whispered, striking his stick on the ground, ' is the platform I mean.' Had his mysterious prosperity unhinged him ? He looked quite sane. I begged him to be more explicit. ■ — ^— ~ 'I Suppose,' he said presently, giving me a light for the cigar which he had offered me, ' you have been seeing a friend off ? ' I assented. He asked me what I supposed he had been doing. I said that I had watched him doing the same thing. ' No,' he said gravely. ' That lady was not a friend of mine. I met her for the first time this morning, less than half an hour ago, here,'' and again he struck the platform with his stick. I confessed that I was bewildered. He smiled. ' You may,' he said, ' have heard of the Anglo- American Social Bureau ? ' I had not. He ex- plained to me that of the thousands of Americans who annually pass through England there are many hundreds who have no English friends. In the old days they used to bring letters of intro- duction. But the English are so inhospitable that these letters are hardly worth the paper they are written on. ' Thus,' said Le Ros, '" the A.A.S.B. / supplies a long-felt want. Americans are a sociable ( people, and most of them have plenty of money to SEEING PEOPLE OFF 25 spend. The A.A.S.B. supplies them with EngUsh friends. Fifty per cent, of the fees is paid over to the friends. The other fifty is retained by the A.A.S.B. I am not, alas, a director. If I were, I should be a very rich man indeed. I am only an employe. But even so I do very well. I am one of the seers-off.' Again I asked for enlightenment. ' Many Ameri- cans,' he said, ' cannot afford to keep friends in England. But they can all afford to be seen off. The fee is only five pounds (twenty-five dollars) for a single traveller ; and eight pounds (forty dollars) for a party of two or more. They send that in to the Bureau, giving the date of their departure, and a description by which the seer-off can identify them on the platform. And then — well, then they are seen off.' ' But is it worth it ? ' I exclaimed. ' Of course it is worth it,' said Le Ros. ' It prevents them from feeling " out of it." It earns them the respect of the guard. It saves them from being despised by their fellow-passengers — the people who are going to be on the boat. It gives them a footing for the whole voyage. Besides, it is a great pleasure in itself. You saw me seeing that young lady off. Didn't you think I did it beautifully ? ' ' Beautifully,' I admitted. ' I envied you. There was I — ' ' Yes, I can imagine. There were you, shuffling from foot to foot, staring blankly at 26 YET AGAIN your friend, trying to make conversation. I know. That 's how I used to be myself, before I studied, and went into the thing professionally. I don't say I 'm perfect yet. I 'm still a martyr to plat- form fright. A railway station is the most diffi- cult of all places to act in, as you have discovered for yourself.' ' But,' I said with resentment, ' I ., wasn't trying to act. I really felt.'^ ' So did I, my ^ boy,' said Le Ros. ' You can't act without feeling. I What 's his name, the Frenchman — ^Diderot, yes — -' i said you could ; but what did he know about it ? Didn't you see those tears in my eyes when the train started ? I hadn't forced them. I tell you I was moved. So were you, I dare say. But you couldn't have pumped up a tear to prove it. You can't express your feelings. In other words, you can't act. At any rate,' he added kindly, ' not in a railway station.' ' Teach me ! ' I cried. He looked thoughtfully at me. ' Well,' he said at length, ' the seeing-off season is practically over. Yes, I '11 give you a course. I have a good many pupils on hand already ; but yes,' he said, consult- ing an ornate note-book, ' I could give you an hour on Tuesdays and Fridays.' His terms, I confess, are rather high. But I don't grudge the investment. A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS OFTEN I have presentiments of evil ; but, never having had one of them fulfilled, I am be- ginning to ignore them. I find that I have always walked straight, serenely imprescient, into whatever trap Fate has laid for me. When I think of any horrible thing that has befallen me, the horror is intensified by recollection of its suddenness. ' But a moment before, I had been quite happy, quite secure. A moment later — ' I shudder. Why be thus at Fate's mercy always, when with a little ordinary second sight . . . Yet no ! That is the worst of a presentiment: it never averts evil, it does but unnerve the victim. Best, after all, to have only false presentiments like mine. Bolts that cannot be dodged strike us kindliest from the blue. And so let me be thankful that my sole emotion as I entered an empty compartment at Holyhead was that craving for sleep which, after midnight, overwhelms every traveller — especially the Saxon traveller from tumultuous and quick-witted little 30 YET AGAIN Dublin. Mechanically, comfortably, as I sank into a corner, I rolled my rug round me, laid my feet against the opposite cushions, twitched up my coat collar above my ears, twitched down my cap over my eyes. It was not the jerk of the starting train that half awoke me, but the consciousness that some one had flung himself into the compartment when the train was already in motion. I saw a small man putting something in the rack — a large black hand- bag. Through the haze of my sleep I saw him, vaguely resented him. He had no business to have slammed the door like that, no business to have jumped into a moving train, no business to put that huge hand-bag into a rack which was ' for light baggage only,' and no business to be wearing, at this hour and in this place, a top-hat. These four peevish objections floated sleepily together round my brain. It was not till the man turned round, and I met his eye, that I awoke fully — awoke to danger. I had never seen a murderer, but I knew that the man who was so steadfastly peering at me now ... I shut my eyes. I tried to think. Could I be dreaming ? In books I had read of people pinching themselves to see whether they were really awake. But in actual life there never was any doubt on that score. The great thing was that I should keep all my wits about me. Every- thing might depend on presence of mind. Perhaps A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 31 this murderer was mad. If you fix a lunatic with your eye . . . Screwing up my courage, I fixed the man with my eye. I had never seen such a horrible little eye as his. It was a sane eye, too. It radiated a cold and ruthless sanity. It belonged not to a man who would kill you wantonly, but to one who would not scruple to kill you for a purpose, and who would do the Job quickly and neatly, and not be found out. Was he physically strong ? Though he looked very wiry, he was little and narrow, like his eyes. He could not overpower me by force, I thought (and instinctively I squared my shoulders against the cushions, that he might realise the impossibility of overpowering me), but I felt he had enough ' science ' to make me less chan a match for him. I tried to look cunning and determined. I longed for a moustache like his, to hide my somewhat amiable mouth. I was thankful I could not see his mouth — could not know the worst of the face that was staring at me in the lamplight. And yet what could be worse than his eyes, gleaming from the deep shadow cast by the brim of his top-hat ? What deadlier than that square jaw, with the bone so sharply delineated under the taut skin ? The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of the night. I thought of the unseen series of placid landscapes that we were passing through, of the unconscious cottagers snoring 32 YET AGAIN there in their beds, of the safe people in the next compartment to mine — ^to his. Not moving a muscle, we sat there, we two, watching each other, like two hostile cats. Or rather, I thought, he watched me as a snake watches a rabbit, and I, like a rabbit, could not look away. I seemed to hear my heart beating time to the train. Suddenly my heart was at a standstill, and the double beat of the train receded faintly. The man was point- ing upwards ... I shook my head. He had asked me in a low voice, whether he should pull the hood across the lamp. He was standing now with his back turned towards me, puUing his hand-bag out of the rack. He had a furtive back — the back of a man who, in his day, had borne many an alias. To this day I am ashamed that I did not spring up and pinion him, there and then. Had I possessed one ounce of physical courage, I should have done so. A coward, I let slip the opportunity. I thought of the commimication-cord, but how could I move to it ? He would be too quick for me. He would be very angry with me. I would sit quite still and wait. Every moment was a long reprieve to me now. Something might intervene to save me. There might be a collision on the line. Perhaps he was a quite harmless man ... I caught his eyes, and shuddered . . . His bag was open on his knees. His right hand A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 33 was groping in it. (Thank Heaven he had not pulled the hood over the lamp !) I saw him pull out something — a limp thing, made of black cloth, not unlike the thing which a dentist places over your mouth when laughing-gas is to be adminis- tered. ' Laughing-gas, no laughing matter ' — the irrelevant and idiotic embryo of a pun dangled itself for an instant in my brain. What other horrible thing would come out of the bag ? Per- haps some gleaming instrument ? . . . He closed the bag with A snap, laid it beside him. He took off his top-hat, laid that beside him. I was sur- prised (I know not why) to see that he was bald. There was a gleaming high light on his bald, round head. The limp, black thing was a cap, which he slowly adjusted with both hands, drawing it down over the brow and behind the ears. It seemed to me as though he were, after all, hooding the lamp ; in my feverish fancy the compartment grew darker when the orb of his head was hidden. The shadow of another simile for his action came surging up . . . He had put on the cap so gravely, so judicially. Yes, that was it : he had assumed the black cap, that decent symbol which indemnifies the taker of a life ; and might the Lord have mercy on my soul . . . Already he was addressing me . . . What had he said ? I asked him to repeat it. My voice sounded even further away than his. He repeated that he thought we had met before. 34 YET AGAIN I heard my voice saying politely, somewhere in the distance, that I thought not. He suggested that I had been staying at some hotel in Colchester six years ago. My voice, drawing a little nearer to me, explained that I had never in my life been at Colchester. He begged my pardon and hoped no offence would be taken where none had been meant. My voice, coming right back to its own quarters, reassured him that of course I had taken no offence at all, adding that I myself very often mistook one face for another. He replied, rather inconsequently, that the world was a small place. Evidently he must have prepared this remark to follow my expected admission that I had been at that hotel in Colchester six years ago, and have thought it too striking a remark to be thrown away. A guileless creature evidently, and not a criminal at all. Then I reflected that most of the success- ful criminals succeed rather through the incom- parable guilelessness of the police than through any devilish cunning in themselves. Besides, this man looked the very incarnation of ruthless cunning. Surely, he must but have dissembled. My suspicions of him resxu-ged. But somehow, I was no longer afraid of him. Whatever crimes he might have been committing, and be going to commit, I felt that he meant no harm to me. After all, why should I have imagined myself to be in A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 35 danger ? Meanwhile, I would try to draw the man out, pitting my wits against his. I proceeded to do so. He was very voluble in a quiet way. Before long I was in possession of all the materials for an exhaustive biography of him. And the strange thing was that I could not, with the best will in the world, believe that he was lying to me. I had never heard a man telling so obviously the truth. And the truth about any one, however commonplace, must always be interesting. Indeed, it is the commonplace truth — ^the truth of widest application — that is the most interesting of all truths. I do not now remember many details of this man's story ; I remember merely that he was ' travelling in lace,' that he had been born at Boulogne (this was the one strange feature of the narrative), that some- body had once left him £100 in a will, and that he had a little daughter who was ' as pretty as a pink.' But at the time I was enthralled. Besides, I liked the man immensely. He was a kind and simple soul, utterly belying his appearance. I wondered how I ever could have feared him and hated him. Doubtless, the reaction from my previous state intensified the kindliness of my feelings. Anyhow, my heart went out to him. I felt that we had known each other for many years. While he poured out his recollections I felt that he was an old crony, talking over old days which were mine as 36 YET AGAIN well as his. Little by little, however, the slumber which he had scared from me came hovering back. My eyelids drooped ; my comments on his stories became few and muffled. ' There! ' he said, ' you 're sleepy. I ought to have thought of that.' I pro- tested feebly. He insisted kindly. ' You go to sleep,' he said, rising and drawing the hood over the lamp. It was dawn when I awoke. Some one in a top- hat was standing over me and saying ' Euston.' ' Euston ? ' I repeated. ' Yes, this is Euston. Good day to you.' ' Good day to you,' I repeated mechanically, in the grey dawn. Not till I was driving through the cold empty streets did I remember the episode of the night, and who it was that had awoken me. I wished I could see my friend again. It was horrible to think that perhaps I should never see him again. I had liked him so much, and he had seemed to like me. I should not have said that he was a happy man. There was something melancholy about him. I hoped he would prosper. I had a fore- boding that some great calamity was in store for him, and wished I could avert it. I thought of his little daughter who was ' as pretty as a pink.' Perhaps Fate was going to strike him through her. Perhaps when he got home he would find that she was dead. There were tears in my eyes when I alighted on my doorstep. A MEMORY OF A MIDNIGHT EXPRESS 87 Thus, within a little space of time, did I ex- perience two deep emotions, for neither of which was there any real justification. I experienced terror, though there was nothing to be afraid of, and I experienced sorrow, though there was no- thing at all to be sorry about. And both my terror and my sorrow were, at the time, overwhelming. You have no patience with me ? Examine your- selves. Examine one another. In every one of us the deepest emotions are constantly caused by some absurdly trivial thing, or by nothing at all. Conversely, the great things in our lives — the true occasions for wrath, anguish, rapture, what not — very often leave us quite calm. We never can depend on any right adjustment of emotion to circumstance. That is one of many reasons which prevent the philosopher from taking himself and his fellow-beings quite so seriously as he would wish. PORRO UNUM PORRO UNUM . . . BY graceful custom, every newcomer to a throne in Europe pays a round of visits to his neigh- bom's. When King Edward came back from seeing the Tsar at ReVal, his subjects seemed to think that he had fulfilled the last demand on his civility. That was in the days of Abdul Hamid. None of us wished the King to visit Turkey. Turkey is not internationally powerful, nor had Abdul any Guelph blood in him ; and so we were able to assert, by ignoring her and him, our humanitarian- ism and passion for liberty, quite safely, quite politely. Now that Abdul is deposed from 'his infernal throne,' it is taken as a matter of course that the King will visit his successor. Well, let His Majesty betake himself and his tact and a full cargo of Victorian Orders to Constantinople, by all means. But, on the way, nestling in the very heart of Europe, perfectly civilised and strifeless, jewelled all over with freedom, is another country which he has not visited since his accession — a country which, oddly enough, none but I seems to expect him to visit. Why, I ask, should Switzerland be cold-shouldered ? 41 42 YET AGAIN I admit she does not appeal to the romantic imagination. She never has, as a nation, counted for anything. Physically soaring out of sight, morally and intellectually she has lain low and said nothing. Not one idea, not one deed, has she to her credit. All that is worth knowing of her history can be set forth without compression in a few lines of a guide-book. Her one and only hero — WiUiam Tell — never, as we now know, existed. He has been proved to be a myth. Also, he is the one and only myth that Switzerland has managed to create. He exhausted her poor little stock of imagination. Living as pigmies among the blind excesses of Nature, living on sufferance there, animalculae, her sons have -been overwhelmed from the outset, have had no chance whatsoever of development. Even if they had a language of their own, they would have no litera- ture. Not one painter, not one musician, have they produced ; only couriers, guides, waiters, and other parasites. A smug, tame, sly, dull, mercenary little race of men, they exist by and for the alien tripper. They are the fine flower of commercial civilisation, the shining symbol of international comity, and have never done any- body any harm. I cannot imagine why the King should not give them the incomparable advertise- ment of a visit. Not that they are badly in need of advertisement / I PORRO UNUM ... 43 over here. Every year the British trippers to Switzerland vastly outnumber the British trippers to any other land— a fact which shows how little the romantic imagination tells as against cheapness and comfort of hotels and the notion that a heart strained by climbing is good for the health. And this fact does but make our Sovereign's abstention the more remarkable. Switzerland is not ' smart,' but a King is not the figure-head merely of his entourage : he is the whole nation's figure-head. Switzerland, alone among nations, is a British institution, and King Edward ought not to snub her. That we expect him to do so without protest from us, seems to me a rather grave symptom of flunfceyism. Fiercely resenting that imputation, you proceed to raise difficulties. ' Who,' you ask, ' would there be to receive the King in the name of the Swiss nation ? ' I promptly answer, ' The Pre- sident of the Swiss Republic' You did not ex- pect that. You had quite forgotten, if indeed you had ever heard, that there was any such person. For the life of you, you could not tell me his name. Well, his name is not very widely known even in Switzerland. A friend of mine, who was there lately, tells me that he asked one Swiss after another what was the name of the President, and that they all sought refuge in polite astonishment at such ignorance, and, when 44 YET AGAIN pressed for the name, could only screw up their eyes, snap their fingers, and feverishly declare that they had it on the tips of their tongues. This is just as it should be. In an ideal republic there should be no one whose name might not at any moment slip the memory of his fellows. Some sort of foreman there must be, for the State's convenience ; but the more obscure he be, and the more automatic, the better for the ideal of equality. In the Republics of France and of America the President is of an extrusive kind. His office has been fashioned on the monarchic model, and his whole position is anomalous. He has to try to be ornamental as well as useful, a symbol as well as a pivot. Obviously, it is absurd to single out one man as a symbol of the equality of all men. And not less unreasonable is it to expect him to be inspiring as a patriotic symbol, an incarnation of his country. Only an anointed king, whose forefathers were kings too, can be that. In France, where kings have been, no one can get up the slightest pretence of emotion for the President. If the President is modest and unassuming, and doesn't, as did the late M. Faure, make an ass of himself by behaving in a kingly manner, he is safe from ridicule : the amused smiles that follow him are not unkind. But in no case is any one proud of him. Never does any one see France in him. In America, where no kings have been, they PORRO UNUM ... 45 are able to make a pretence of enthusiasm for a President. But no real chord of national senti- ment is touched by this eminent gentleman who has no past or future eminence, who has been shoved forward for a space and will anon be sent packing in favour of some other upstart. Let some princeling of a foreign State set foot in . America, and lo ! all the inhabitants are tumbling over one another in their desire for a glimpse of him — a desire which is the natural and pathetic outcome of their unsatisfied inner craving for a dynasty of their own. Human nature being what it is, a monarchy is the best expedient, all the world over. But, given a republic, let the thing be done thoroughly, let the appearance be well kept up, as in Switzerland. Let the President be, as there, a furtive creature and insignificant, not merely coming no man knows whence, nor merely passing no man knows whither, but existing no man knows where ; and existing not even as a name — except on the tip of the tongue. National dignity, as well as the republican ideal, is served better thus. Besides, it is less trying for the President. And yet, stronger than all my sense of what is right and proper is the desire in me that the ' President of the Swiss Republic should, just for once, be dragged forth, blinking, from his burrow -y in Berne (Berne is the capital of Switzerland), 46 YET AGAIN into the glare of European publicity, and be driven in a landau to the railway station, there to await the King of England and kiss him on either cheek when he dismounts from the train, while the massed orchestras of all the principal hotels play our national anthem — and also a Swiss national anthem, hastily composed for the occasion. I want him to entertain the King, that evening, at a great banquet, whereat His Majesty will have the President's wife on his right hand, and will make a brief but graceful speech in the Swiss language (English, French, German, and Italian, consecu- tively) referring to the glorious and never-to-be- forgotten name of William Tell (embarrassed silence), and to the vast number of his subjects who annually visit Switzerland (loud and prolonged cheers). Next morning, let there be a review of twenty thousand waiters from all parts of the country, all the head-waiters receiving a modest grade of the Victorian Order. Later in the day, let the King visit the National Gallery — a hall filled with picture post-cards of the most pictur- esque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be conducted to the principal factory of cuckoo- clocks, and, after some of the clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking to the President, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like that of the cuckoo. How the second day of the visit would be filled up, I do not know ; I leave that to the PORRO UNUM ... 47 President's discretion. Before his departure ta the frontier, the King will of course be made honorary manager of one of the principal hotels. I hope to be present in Berne during these great days in the President's life. But, if anything happen to keep me here, I shall content myself with the prospect of his visit to London. I long to see him and his wife driving past, with the proper escort of Life Guards, under a vista of quadrilingual mottoes, bowing acknowledgments to us. I wonder what he is like. I picture him as a small spare man, with a slightly grizzled beard, and pleasant though shifty eyes behind a pince-nez. I picture him frock-coated, bowler- hatted, and evidently nervous. His wife I cannot at all imagine. A CLUB IN RUINS A CLUB IN RUINS AN antique ruin has its privileges. The longer the period of its crumbling, the more do the owls build their nests in it, the more do the excur- sionists munch in it their sandwiches. Thus, year by year, its fame increases, till it looks back with contempt on the days when it was a mere upright waterproof. Local guide-books pander more and more slavishly to its pride ; leader-writers in need of a pathetic metaphor are more and more frequently supplied by it. If there be any sordid question of clearing it away to make room for something else, the public outcry is positively deafening. Not that we are still under the sway of that peculiar cult which beset us in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A bad poet or painter can no longer reap the reward of genius merely by turning his attention to ruins under moonlight. Nor does any one cause to be built in his garden a broken turret, for the evocation of sensibility in himself and his guests. There used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but that SI 52 YET AGAIN familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one protesting. Puit the frantic factitious senti- mentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten their hold on Britannia's heart. I do not grudge them their success. But the very fact that they are so successful inclines me to reserve my own personal sentiment rather for those unwept, unsung ruins which so often confront me, here and there, in the streets of this aggressive metropolis. The ruins made, not by Time, but by the ruthless skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old enough to be sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands of a gasping and plethoric community — these are the ruins that move me to tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers lunch in them. In no guide-book or leading-article will you find them mentioned. Their pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to the street, but nor gods nor men hold out a hand to save them. The patterns of bedroom wall-papers, (chosen with what (fare, after how long discussion ! only a few short years or months ago) stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for mercy. And their dumb agony is echoed dumbly by the places where doors have been — doors that lately were tapped at by respectful knuckles ; or the places where staircases have been — staircases down whose A CLUB IN RUINS 53 banisters lately slid little children, laughing. Exposed, humiliated, doomed, the home throws out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling briek. Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them. Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the founda- tions, and are carted away. Soon other walls will be rising — red-brick ' residential ' walls, more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I haunt the door of the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently mistaken for the foreman. A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual emotion, the rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover Square. There were two reasons why this rasure especially affected me. I had known the edifice so well, by sight, ever since I was a small boy, and I had always admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which is the most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed it thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of approval that gaunt and sombre fagade, with its long straight windows, its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must perish. For sake of what they had sheltered, 54 YET AGAIN my heart deplored that they must perish. The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It had been even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It had been a club. Certainly it had not been a particularly dis- tinguished club. Its demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord Melbourne had loved tg doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe, found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club 's a club tho' every one 's in it. The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and there are the news- papers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and the not-to-be-tipped waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If the members of this club had but migrated to some other building, taking their effects and their constitution with them, the ruin would have been pathetic enough. But alas ! the outward wreck was a symbol, a result, of inner dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two pillars of the front door told a sorry tale. Pasted on either of them was a dingy bill, bearing the sinister imprimatur of an auctioneer, and offer- A CLUB IN RUINS 55 ing (in capitals of various sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and Mahogany), Turkey, Indian and Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized Billiard- Tables, a Remington Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof), and other objects not less useful and delightful. The club, then, had gone to smash. The members had been disbanded, driven out of this Eden by the fiery sword of the Law, driven back to their homes. Sighing over the marcesci- bility of human happiness, I peered between the pillars into the excavated and chaotic hall. The porter's hatch was still there, in the wall. There it was, wondering why no inquiries were made through it now, or, may be, why it had not been sold into bondage with the double-door and the rest of the fixtures. A melancholy relic of past glories ! I crossed over to the other side of the road, and passed my eye over the whole ruin. The roof, the ceilings, most of the inner walls, had already fallen. Little remained but the grim, familiar fagade — a thin husk. I noted (that which I had never noted before) two iron grills in the masonry. Miserable travesties of usefulness, ventilating the open air ! Through the gaping windows, against the wall of the next building, I saw in mid-air the greenish Lincrusta Walton of what I guessed to have been the billiard-room — ^the billiard-room that had boasted two full-sized tables. Above it ran a frieze of white and gold. It was inter- 56 YET AGAIN spersed with flat Corinthian columns. The gilding of the capitals was very fresh, and glittered gaily under the summer sunbeams. And hardly a day of the next autumn and winter passed but I was drawn back to the ruin by a kind of lugubrious magnetism. The strangest thing was that the ruin seemed to remain in practi- cally the same state as when first I had come upon it : the fagade stiU stood high. This might have been due to the proverbial laziness of British workmen, but I did not think it could be. The workmen were always plying their pick-axes, with apparent gusto and assiduity, along the top of the building ; bricks and plaster were always crashing down into the depths and sending up clouds of dust. I preferred to think the building renewed itself, by some magical process, every night. I preferred to think it was prepared thus to resist its aggres- sors for so long a time that in the end there would be an intervention from other powers. Perhaps from this site no ' residential ' affair was destined to scrape the sky ? Perhaps that saint to whom the club had dedicated itself would reappear, at length, glorious equestrian, to slay the dragons who had infested and desecrated his premises ? I wondered whether he would then restore the ruins, reinstating the club, and setting it for ever on a sound commercial basis, or would leave them just as they were, a fixed signal to sensibility. A CLUB IN RUINS 57 But, when first I saw the poor fafade being pick- axed, I did not ' give ' it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe and pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinch- ing under every rhythmic blow of those well- wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sun- set should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught myself nodding to it — a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance. Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthrc^^omorphism. I told myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who had been frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the gaping, glassless windows through which they had been wont to watch the human comedy. There they had stood, puffing their smoke and cracking their jests, and tearing women's reputations to shreds. Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman's reputation torn to shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come my way. I am beginning to sus- pect that it never will, and am inchned to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs has been always of a very mild, per- 58 YET AGAIN functory kind. A social club (even though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collec- tion of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any member is regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who looks genial and says nothing at all. Most Englishmen find little difficulty in conforming with this ideal. They belong to a silent race. Social clubs flourish, therefore, in England. Intelligent foreigners, seeing them, recognise their charm, and envy us them, and try to reproduce them at home. But the Continent is too loquacious. On it social clubs quickly degenerate into bear-gardens, and the basic ideal of good-fellowship goes by the board. In Paris, Petersburg, Vienna, the only social clubs that prosper are those which are devoted to games of chance — ^those which induce silence by artificial means. Were I a foreign visitor, taking cursory glances, I should doubtless be delighted with th-e clubs of London. Had I the honour to be an Englishman, I should doubtless love them. But being a foreign resident, I am somewhat oppressed by them. I crave in them a little freedom of speech, even though such freedom were their ruin. I long for their silence to be broken here and there, even though such breakage broke them with it. It is not enough for me to hear a hushed exchange of mild jokes about the weather, or of comparisons A CLUB IN RUINS 59 between what the Times says and what the Standard says. I pine for a little vivacity, a little boldness, a little variety, a few gestures. A London club, as it is conducted, seems to me very like a catacomb. It is tolerable so long as you do not actually belong to it. But when you do belong to it, when you have outlived the fleeting gratification at hav- ing been elected, when you . . . but I ought not to have fallen into the second person plural. You, readers, are free-born Englishmen. These clubs ' come natural ' to you. You love them. To them you slip eagerly from your homes. As for me, poor alien, had I been a member of the club whose demolition has been my theme, I should have grieved for it not one whit the more bitterly. Indeed, my tears would have been a trifle less salt. It was my detachment that en- abled me to be so prodigal of pity. The poor waifs ! Long did I stand, in the sun- shine of that day when first I saw the ruin, wonder- ing and distressed, ruthful, indignant that such things should be. I forgot on what errand I had come out. I recalled it. Once or twice I walked away, bent on its fulfilment. But I could not proceed further than a few yards. I halted, looked over my shoulder, was drawn back to the spot, drawn by the crude, insistent anthem of the pick-axes. The sun slanted towards Notting Hill. Still I loitered, spellbound ... I was aware of 60 YET AGAIN some one at my side, some one asking me a question. ' I beg your pardon ? ' I said. The stranger was a tall man, bronzed and bearded. He repeated his question. In answer, I pointed silently to the ruin. • ThM ? ' he gasped. He stared vacantly. I saw that his face had become pale under its sun- burn. He looked from the ruin to me. ' You 're not joking with me ? ' he said thickly. I assured him that I was not. I assured 'him that this was in- deed the club to which he had asked to be directed. ' But,' he stammered, ' but — ^but — ' ' You were a member ? ' I suggested. ' I am a member,' he cried. ' And what 's more, I 'm going to write to the Committee.' I suggested that there was one fatal objection to such a course. I spoke to him calmly, soothed him with words of reasQB, elicited from him, little by little, his sad story. It appeared that he had been a member of the club for ten years, but had never (except once, as a guest) been inside it. He had been elected on the very day on which (by compulsion of his father) he set sail for Aus- tralia. He was a mere boy at the time. Bitterly he hated leaving old England ; nor did he ever find the life of a squatter coiigenial. The one thing which enabled him to endure those ten years of unpleasant exile was the knowledge that he was a member of a London club. Year by year, it was a keen pleasure to him to send his annual suhsccip- tion. It kept him in touch with civilisation, in A CLUB IN RUINS 61 touch with Home. He loved to know that when, at length, he found himself once again in the city of his birth he would have a firm foothold on socia- iulity. The friends of his youth might die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he would find substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks, all day long, on the arid plains of Central Australia, he used to keep up his spirits by thinking of that first whisky-and-soda which he would order from a respectful waiter as he entered his club. All night long, wrapped in his blanket beneath the stars, he used to dream of that drink to come, that first symbol of an unlost grip on civilisation , . , He had arrived in London this very afternoon. Depositing his luggage at an hotel, he had come straight to his club. ' And now . . .' He filled up his aposio- pesis with an uncouth gesture, signifying ' I may as well get back to Australia.' I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard for him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destined never to cross its threshold. Why, after all, should he not cross its threshold ? I asked him if he would like to. ' What,' he growled, ' would 62 YET AGAIN be the good ? ' I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of his nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained matters to the fore- man ; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he passed with the foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I saw him crossing the excavated hall, crossing it along a plank, slowly and cautiously. His attitude was very like Blondin's, but it had a certain tragic dignity which Blondin's lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I hailed a cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do not know. Often as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered by it, him I never saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight back to Austraha, Or perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him alive in the foundations. His fate, whatever it was, haunts me. '273' '273' THIS is an age of prescriptions. Morning after morning, from the back-page of your news- paper, quick and uncostly cures for every human ill thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past. But I would raise no false hopes of myself. I am no thaumaturgist. Do you awake with a sinking sensation in the stomach ? Have you lost the power of assimilating food ? Are you oppressed with an indescribable lassitude ? Can you no longer follow the simplest train of thought ? Are you troubled throughout the night with a hacking cough ? Are you — in fine, are you but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all the most malignant maladies ancient and modern ? If so, skip this essay, and try Some- body's Elixir. The cure that I offer is but a cure for overwrought nerves — a substitute for the ordinary ' rest-cure.' Nor is it absurdly cheap. Nor is it instant. It will take a week or so of your time. But then, the ' rest-cure ' takes at least a month. The scale of payment for board and lodging may be, per diem, hardly lower than 66 YET AGAIN in the ' rest-cure ' ; but you will save all but a pound or so of the very heavy fees that you would have to pay to your doctor and your nurse (or nurses). And certainly, my cure is the more pleasant of the two. My patient does not have to cease from life. He is not undressed and tucked into bed and forbidden to stir hand or foot during his whole term. He is not forbidden to receive letters, or to read books, or to look on any face but his nurse's (or nurses'). Nor, above all, is he condemned to the loathsome necessity of eating so much food as to make him dread the sight of food. Doubtless, the grim, inexorable process of the ' rest-cure ' is very good for him who is strong enough and brave enough to bear it, and rich enough to pay for it. I address myself to the frailer, cowardlier, needier man. Instead of ceasing from life, and entering purgatory, he need but essay a variation in life. He need but go and stay by himself in one of those vast modern hotels which abound along the South and East coasts. You are disappointed ? All simple ideas are disappointing. And all good cures spring from simple ideas. The right method of treating overwrought nerves is to get the patient away from himself — to make a new man of him ; and this trick can be done only by switching him off from his usual ' 273 ' 67 environment, his usual habits. The ordinary- rest-cure, by its very harshness, intensifies a man's personaUty at first, drives him miserably within himself ; and only by its long duration does it gradually wear him down and build him up anew. There is no harshness in the vast hotels which I have recommended. You may eat there as little as you like, especially if you are en pension. Letters may be forwarded to you there ; though, unless your case is a very mild one, I would advise you not to leave your address at home. There are reading-rooms where you can see all the news- papers ; though I advise you to ignore them. You suffer under no sense of tyranny. And yet, no sooner have you signed your name in the visitors' book, and had your bedroom allotted to you, than you feel that you have surrendered yourself irrepleviably. It is not necessary to this illusion that you should pass under an assunied name, unless you happen to be a very eminent actor, or cricketer, or other idol of the nation, whose presence would flutter the young persons at the bureau. If your nervous breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to merely intellectual distinction, these young persons will mete out to you no more than the bright callous civility which they mete out impartially to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you will be a ntunber, and to yourself you will have suddenly 68 YET AGAIN become a number — the number graven on the huge brass label that depends clajiking from the key put into the hand of the suimmoned chamber- maid- You are merely (let us say) 273. Up you go in the lift, realising, as for the first time, your insignificance in infinity, and rather proud to be even a number. You recognise your double on the door that has been unlocked for you. No prisoner, clapped into his cell, could feel less personal, less important. A notice on the wall, politely requesting you to leave your key at the bureau (as though you were strong enough or capacious enough to carry it about with you) comes as a pleasant reminder of your freedom. You remember joyously that you are even free from yourself. You have begun a new life, have forgotten the old. This mantelpiece, so strangely and brightly bare of photographs or ' knick- knacks,' is meaning in its meaninglessness. And these blank, fresh walls, that you have never seen, and that never were seen by any one whom you know . . . their pattern is of poppies and man- dragora, surely. Poppies and mandragora are woven, too, on the brand-new Axminster beneath your elastic step. ' Come in ! ' A porter bears in your trunk, deposits it on a trestle at the foot of the bed, unstraps it, leaves you alone with it. It seems to be trying to remind you of some- thing or other. You do not listen. You laugh ' 273 ' 69 as you open it. You know that if you examined these shirts you would find them marked ' 273.' Before dressing for dinner, you take a hot bath. There are patent taps, some for fresh water, others for sea water. YoU hesitate. Yet you know that whichever you touch will effuse but the water of Lethe, after all. You dress before your fire. The coals have burnt now to a lovely glow. Once and again, you eye them suspiciously. But no, there are no faces in them. All 's well. Sleek and fresh, you sit down to dinner in the '•lra^^ was thought to be pecuHarly well fitted with his name. Yet had it belonged not to him, but to (say) some gentle and thoughtful ecclesiastic, it would have seemed quite as inevitable. ' Gore ' is quite as taurine as ' Duller,' and yet does it not seem to us the right name for the author of Lux Mundi ? In connection with him, who is struck by its taurinity ? What hint of ovinity would there have been for us if Sir Redvers' surname had happened to be that of him who wrote the Essays of Elia ? Conversely, * Charles BuUer ' seems to us now an impossible nom de vie for Elia ; THE NAMING OF STREETS 207 yet it would have done just as well, really. Even ' Redvers Buller ' would have done just as well. ' Walter Pater ' means for us — ^how perfectly ! — the author of Marius the Epicurean, whilst the author of All Sorts and Conditions of Men was summed up for us, not less absolutely, in ' Walter Besant.' And yet, if the surnames of these two opposite Walters had been changed at birth, what difference would have been made ? ' Walter Besant ' would have signified a prose style sensuous in its severity, an exquisitely patient scholarship, an exquisitely sympathetic way of criticism, ' Walter Pater ' would have signified no style, but an unslakable thirst for information, and a bustling human sympathy, and power of carrying things through. Or take two names often found in conjunction — Johnson and Boswell. Had the dear great oracle been named Boswell, and had the sitter-at-his-feet been named Johnson, would the two names seem to us less appropriate than they do ? Should we suffer any greater loss than if Salmon were Gluckstein, and Gluckstein Salmon ? Finally, take a case in which the same name was borne by two very different characters. What name could seem more descriptive of a certain illustrious Archbishop of Westminster than ' Manning ' ? It seems the very epitome of saintly astuteness. But for ' Cardinal ' substitute ' Mrs.' as its prefix, and, presto ! it is equally descriptive 208 YET AGAIN of that dreadful medio-Victorian murderess who in the dock of the Old Bailey wore a black satin gown, and thereby created against black satin a prejudice which has but lately died. In itself black satin is a beautiful thing. Yet for many years, by force of association, it was accounted loathsome. Conversely, one knows that many quite hideous fashions in costume have been set by beautiful women. Such instances of the subtle power of association will make clear to you how very easily a name (being neither beautiful nor hideous in itself) can be made hideous or beautiful by its bearer — ^how inevitably it becomes for us a symbol of its bearer's most salient qualities or defects, be they physical, moral, or intellectual. Streets are not less characteristic than human beings. ' Look ! ' cried a friend of mine, whom lately I found studying a map of London, ' isn't it appalling ? All these streets — ^thousands of them — in this tiny compass ! Think of the miles and miles of drab monotony this map contains ! ' I pointed out to him (it is a thinker's penalty to be always pointing things out to people) that his words were nonsense. I told him that the streets on this map were no more monotonous than the rivers on the map of England. Just as there were no two rivers alike, every one of them having its own speed, its own windings, depths, and shallows, its own way with the reeds and grasses, so had every THE NAMING OF STREETS 209 street its own claim to an especial nymph, foras- much as no two streets had exactly the same pro- portions, the same habitual traffic, the same type of shops or houses, the same inhabitants. In some cases, of course, the difference between the ' atmosphere ' of two streets is a subtle difference. But it is always there, not less definite to any one who searches for it than the difference between (say) HiU Street and Pont Street, High Street Kensington and High Street Notting Hill, Fleet Street and the Strand. I have here purposely opposed to each other streets that have obvious points of likeness. But what a yawning gulf of difference is between each couple ! Hill Street, with its staid distinction, and Pont Street, with its eager, pushful ' smartness,' its air de 'petit parvenu, its obvious delight in having been ' taken up ' ; High Street Notting HiU, down-at-heels and unashamed, with a placid smile on its broad ugly face, and High Street Kensington, with its traces of former beauty, and its air of neatness and self- respect, as befits one who in her day has been caressed by royalty ; Fleet Street, that seething chaimel of business, and the Strand, that swollen river of business, on whose surface float so many aimless and unsightly objects. In every one of these thoroughfares my mood and my manner are differently affected. In Hill Street, instinctively, I walk very slowly — sometimes, even with a slight 210 YET AGAIN limp, as one recovering from an accident in the hunting-field. I feel very well-bred there, and, though not clever, very proud, and quick to resent any familiarity from those whom elsewhere I should regard as my equals. In Pont Street my demeanour is not so calm and measured. I feel less sure of myself, and adopt a slight swagger. In High Street, Kensington, I find myself dapper and respectable, with a timid leaning to the fine arts. In High Street, Notting Hill, I become frankly common. Fleet Street fills me with a conviction that if I don't make haste I shall be jeopardising the national welfare. The Strand utterly unmans me, leaving me with only two sensations : (1) a regret that I have made such a mess of my life ; (2) a craving for alcohol. These are but a few instances. If I had time, I could show you that every street known to me in London has a definite effect on me, and that no two streets have exactly the same effect. For the most part, these effects differ in kind according only to the different districts and their different modes of life ; but they differ in detail according to such specific little differences as exist between such cognate streets as Bruton Street and Curzon Street, Doughty Street and Great Russell Street. Every one of my readers, doubtless, reahses that he, too, is thus affected by the character of streets. And I doubt not that for him, as for me, the mere sound THE NAMING OF STREETS 211 or sight of a street's name conjures up the sensation he feels when he passes through that street. For him, probably, the name of every street has hitherto seemed to be also its exact, inevitable symbol, a perfect suggestion of its character. He has believed that the grand or beautiful streets have grand or beautiful names, the mean or ugly streets mean or ugly names. Let me assure him that this is a delusion. The name of a street, as of a human being, derives its whole quality from its bearer. ' Oxford Street ' sounds harsh and ugly. ' Manchester Street ' sounds rather charming. Yet 'Oxford' sounds beautiful, and 'Manchester' sounds odious. ' Oxford ' turns our thoughts to that ' adorable dreamer, whispering from her spires the last enchantments of the Middle Age.' An uproarious monster, belching from its factory- chimneys the latest exhalations of Hell — that is the image evoked by ' Manchester.' But neither in ' Manchester Street ' is there for us any hint of that monster, nor in ' Oxford Street ' of that dreamer. The names have become part and parcel of the streets. You see, then, that it matters not whether the name given to a new street be one which in itself suggests beauty, or one which suggests ugliness. In point of fact, it is generally the most pitiable little holes and corners that bear the most ambitiously beautiful 210 YET AGAIN limp, as one recovering from an accident in the hunting-field. I feel very well-bred there, and, though not clever, very proud, and quick to resent any familiarity from those whom elsewhere I should regard as my equals. In Pont Street my demeanour is not so calm and measured. I feel less sure of myself, and adopt a slight swagger. In High Street, Kensington, I find myself dapper and respectable, with a timid leaning to the fine arts. In High Street, Notting Hill, I become frankly common. Fleet Street fills me with a conviction that if I don't make haste I shall be jeopardising the national welfare. The Strand utterly unmans me, leaving me with only two sensations : (1) a regret that I have made such a mess of my life ; (2) a craving for alcohol. These are but a few instances. If I had time, I could show you that every street known to me in London has a definite effect on me, and that no two streets have exactly the same effect. For the most part, these effects differ in kind according only to the different districts and their different modes of Ufe ; but they differ in detail according to such specific little differences as exist between such cognate streets as Bruton Street and Curzon Street, Doughty Street and Great Russell Street. Every one of my readers, doubtless, realises that he, too, is thus affected by the character of streets. And I doubt not that for him, as for me, the mere sound THE NAMING OF STREETS 211 or sight of a street's name conjures up the sensation he feels when he passes through that street. For him, probably, the name of every street has hitherto seemed to be also its exact, inevitable symbol, a perfect suggestion of its character. He has believed that the grand or beautiful streets have grand or beautiful names, the mean or ugly streets mean or ugly names. Let me assure him that this is a delusion. The name of a street, as of a human being, derives its whole quality from its bearer. ' Oxford Street ' sounds harsh and ugly. ' Manchester Street ' sounds rather charming. Yet ' Oxford ' sounds beautiful, and ' Manchester ' sounds odious. ' Oxford ' turns our thoughts to that ' adorable dreamer, whispering from her spires the last enchantments of the Middle Age.' An uproarious monster, belching from its factory- chimneys the latest exhalations of Hell — that is the image evoked by ' Manchester.' But neither in ' Manchester Street ' is there for us any hint of that monster, nor in ' Oxford Street ' of that dreamer. The names have become part and parcel of the streets. You see, then, that it matters not whether the name given to a new street be one which in itself suggests beauty, or one which suggests ugliness. In point of fact, it is generally the most pitiable little holes and corners that bear the most ambitiously beautiful 212 YET AGAIN names. To any one who has studied London, such a title as ' Paradise Court ' conjures up a dark fetid alley, with untidy fat women gossiping in it, untidy thin women quarrelling across it, a host of haggard and shapeless children sprawling in its mud, and one or two drunken men propped against its walls. Thus, were there an official nomenelator of streets, he might be tempted to reject such names as in themselves signify any- thing beautiful. But his main principle would be to bestow whatever name first occurred to him, in order that he might save time for thinking about something that really mattered. I have yet to fulfil the second part of my pro- mise : show the futility of trying to commemorate a hero by making a street his namesake. By implication I have done this already. But, for the benefit of the less nimble among my readers, let me be explicit. Who, passing through the Cromwell Road, ever thinks of Cromwell, except by accident ? What journalist ever thinks of WeUington in Wellington Street ? In Marl- borough Street, what policeman remembers Marl- borough ? In St. James's Street, has any one ever fancied he saw the ghost of a pilgrim wrapped in a cloak, leaning on a staff ? Other ghosts are there in plenty. The phantom chariot of Lord Petersham dashes down the slope nightly. Nightly Mr. Ball Hughes appears in the THE NAMING OF STREETS 213 bow-window of White's. At cock-crow Charles James Fox still emerges from Brooks's. Such men as these were indigenous to the street. No- thing will ever lay their ghosts there. But the ghost of St. James — what should it do in that galley ? ... Of all the streets that have been named after famous men, I know but one whose namesake is suggested by it. In Regent Street you do sometimes think of the Regent ; and that is not because the street is named after him, but because it was conceived by him, and was designed and built under his auspices, and is redolent of his character and his time. When a national hero is to be commemorated by a street, he must be allowed to design the street himself. The mere plastering-up of his name is no mnemonic. ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY MY florist has standing orders to deliver early on the morning of this day a chaplet of laurel. With it in my hand, I reach by a step-ladder the nobly arched embrasure that is above my central book-case, and crown there the marble brow of him whose name is the especial glory of our literature — of all literature. The greater part of the morning is spent by me in contemplation of that brow, and in silent medita- tion. And, year by year, always there intrudes itself into this meditation the hope that Shake- speare's name will, one day, be swept into oblivion. I am not — you will have perceived that I certainly am not — a ' Baconian.' So far as I have examined the evidence in the controversy, I do not feel myself tempted to secede from the side on which (rightly, inasmuch as it is the obviously authoritative side) every ignorant person ranges himself. Even the hottest Baconian, filled with the stubbornest conviction, will, I fancy, admit in confidence that the utmost thing that could, at 217 218 YET AGAIN present, be said for his conclusions by a judicial investigator is that they are ' not proven.' To be convinced of a thing without being able to establish it is the surest recipe for making oneself ridiculous. The Baconians have thus made themselves very ridiculous ; and that alone is reason enough for not wishing to join them. And yet my heart is with them, and my voice urges them to carry on the fight. It is a good fight, in my opinion, and I hope they will win it. I do not at all understand the furious resentment they rouse in the bosoms of the majority. Mis- taken they may be ; but why yell them down as knavish blasphemers ? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets, we give that reverence. But our belief is not such as we give to the proposition that one and two make three. It is a belief that has to be upheld by argument when it is assailed. When a man says to us that one and two make four, we smile and are silent. But when he ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY 219 argues, point by point, that in Bacon's life and writings there is nothing to show that Bacon might not have written the plays and sonnets, and that there is much to show that he did write them, and that in what we know about Shakespeare there is little evidence that Shakespeare wrote those works, and much evidence that he did not write them, then we pull ourselves together, marshalling all our facts and all out literary discernment, so as to convince our interlocutor of his error. But why should we not do our task urbanely ? The cjrphers, certainly, are stupid and tedious things, deserving no patience. But the more intelligent Baconians spurn them as airily as do you or I. Our case is not so strong that the arguments of these gentlemen can be ignored ; and naughty temper does but hamper us in the task of demolition. If Bacon were proved to have written Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, would mankind be robbed of one of those illusions which are necessary to its happiness and welfare ? If so, we have a good excuse for browbeating the poor Baconians. But it isn't so, really and truly. Suppose that one fine morning, Mr. Blank, an ardent Baconian, stmnbled across some long- sought document which proved irrefragably that Bacon was the poet, and Shakespeare an impostor. What would be our sentiments ? For the second- rate actor we should have not a moment's sneaking 220 YET AGAIN kindness or pity. On the other hand, should we not experience an everlasting thrill of pride and gladness in the thought that he who had been the mightiest of our philosophers had been also, by some unimaginable grace of heaven, the mightiest of our poets ? Our pleasure in the plays and sonnets would be, of course, not one whit greater than it is now. But the pleasure of hero-worship for their author would be more than reduplicated. T^e Greeks revelled in reverence of Heracles by reason of his twelve labours. They would have been disappointed had it been proved to them that six of those labours had been performed by some quite obscure person. The divided reverence would have seemed tame. Conversely, it is pleasant to revere Bacon, as we do now, and to revere Shakespeare, as we do now ; but a wildest ecstasy of worship were ours could we concentrate on one of those two demigods all that reverence which now we apportion to each apart. It is for this reason, mainly, that I wish success to the Baconians. But there is another reason, less elevated perhaps, but not less strong for me. I should like to watch the multifarious comedies which would spring from the downfall of an idol to which for three centuries a whole world had been kneeling. Glad fancy makes for me a few extracts from the issue of a morning paper dated a ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY 221 week after the publication of Mr. Blank's dis- covery. This from a column of Literary Notes : From Balham, Sydenham, Lewisham, Clapham, Heme Hill and Peckham comes news that the local Shakespeare Societies have severally met and decided to dissolve. Other suburbs are expeCTed to follow. " This from the same column : Mr. Sidney Lee is now busily engaged on a revised edition of his monumental biography of Shakespeare. Yesterday His Majesty the King"" graciously visited Mr. Lee's library in order to personally inspect the progress of the work, which, in its complete form, is awaited with the deepest interest in all quarters. And this, a leaderette : Yesterday at a meeting of the Parks Committee of the London County Council it was unanimously resolved to recommend at the next meeting of the Council that the statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square should be removed. This decision was arrived at in view of the fact that during the past few days the well-known effigy has been the centre of repeated disturbances, and is already considerably damaged. We are surprised to learn that there are in our midst persons capable of doing violence to a noble work of art merely because its subjjsct is distasteful to them. But even the most civilised com- munities have their fits of vandalism. ' 'Tis true, 'tis pity, rfnd pity 'tis 'tis true.' And this from a page of advertisements : To be let or sold. A commodious and desirable 222 YET AGAIN mansion at Stratford-on-Avon. Delightful flower and kitchen gardens. Hot and cold water on every floor. Within easy drive of station. Hitherto home of Miss Marie Corelli. And this, again from the Literary Notes : Mr. Hall Caine is in town. Yesterday, at the Authors' Club, he passed almost unrecogniied by his many friends, for he has shaved his beard and moustache, and has had his hair cropped quite closely to the head. This measure he has taken, he says, owing to the unusually hot weather prevailing. A sonnet, too, printed in large tj^e on the middle page, entitled ' To Shakespeare,' signed by the latest fashionable poet, and beginning thus : O undetected during so long years, O irreplf^viably inlamous. Stand forth ! A cable, too, from ' Our Own Correspondent ' in New York : This afternoon the Carmania came into harbour. Among the passengers was Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, who had come over in personal charge of Anne Hathaway's Cottage, his purchase of which for £2,000,000 excited so much attention on your side a few weeks ago. Mr. Blank's sensational revelations not having been published to the world till two days after the Carmania left Liver- pool, the millionaire collector had, of course, no cognisance of the same. On disembarking he proceeded straight to ON SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY 223 the Customs Office and inquired how much duty was to be imposed on the cottage. On being courteously in- formed that the article would be passed into the country free of charge, he evinced considerable surprise. I then ventured to approach Mr. Morgan and to hand him a journal containing the cabled summary of Mr. Blank's disclosures, which he proceeded to peruse. His comments I must reserve for the next mail, the cable clerks here demurring to their transmission. Only a dream ? But a sweet one. Bustle about, Baconians, and bring it true. Don't listen to my florist. A HOME-COMING A HOME-COMING BELIKE, returning from a long pilgrimage, in which you have seen many strange men and strange cities, and have had your imagination stirred by marvellous experiences, you have never, at the very end of your journey, almost in sight of your home, felt suddenly that all you had been seeing and learning was as naught — a pack of negligible illusions, faint and forgotten. From me, however, this queer sensation has not been withheld. It befell me a few days ago ; in a cold grey dawn, and in the Buffet of Dover Harbour. I had spent two months far away, wandering and wondering ; and now I had just fulfilled two thirds of the little tripartite journey from Paris to London. I was sleepy, as one always is after that brief and twice broken slumber. I was chilly, for is not the dawn always bleak at Dover, and perforated always with a bleak and drizzling rain ? I was sad, for I had watched from the deck the white cliffs of Albion coming nearer and nearer to me, towering over me, and in the 227 230 YET AGAIN contact with his tweeds, the subtle secret of his own immarcescibility. I remembered now that I had seen him, without realising him, on the platform of the Gare du Nord. ' Gay Paree ' was still written all over him. But evidently he was no repiner. Unaccountable though he was, I had no suspicion of what he was about to do. I think you will hardly believe me when I tell you what he did. ' A traveller's tale ' you will say, with a shrug. Yet I swear to you that it is the plain and solemn truth. If you still doubt me, you have the excuse that I myself hardly believed the evidence of my eyes. In the Buffet of Dover Harbour, in the cold grey dawn, in the brief interval between boat and train, the large young man, shooting his cuffs, strode forward, struck a confidential attitude across the counter, and began to flirt with the barmaid. Open-mouthed, fascinated, appalled, I watched this monstrous and unimaginable procedure. I was not near enough to overhear what was said. But I knew by the respective attitudes that the time-honoured ritual was being observed strictly by both parties. I could see the ice of haughty indifference thawing, little by little, under the fire of gaUant raillery. I could fix the exact moment when 'Indeed? ' became 'I daresay,' and when ' Well, I must say ' gave place to ' Go along,' and A HOME-COMING 231 when ' Oh, / don't mind you — not particularly ' was succeeded by ' Who gave you them flowers ? ' . . . All in the cold grey dawn . . . The cry of ' Take your places, please ! ' startled me into realisation that all the other passengers had vanished. I hurried away, leaving the young man still in the traditional attitude which he had assumed from the first — one elbow sprawling on the counter, one foot cocked over the other. My porter had put my things into a compartment exactly opposite the door of the Buffet, I clambered in. Just as the guard blew his whistle, the young man or monster came hurrying out. He winked at me. I did not return his wink. I suppose I ought really to have raised my hat to him. Pre-eminently, he was one of those who have made England what it is. But they are the very men whom one does not care to meet just after long truancy in preferable lands. He was the backbone of the nation. But ought backbones to be exposed ? Though I would rather not have seen him then and there, I did realise, nevertheless, the overwhelming interest of him. I knew him to be a stranger sight, a more memorable and instructive, than any of the fair sights I had been seeing. He made them all seem nebulous and unreal to me. Beside me lay my despatch-box. I 232 YET AGAIN unlocked it, drew from it all the notes and all the photographs I had brought back with me. These, one by one, methodically, I tore up, throwing their fragments out of the window, not grudging them to the wind. THE RAGGED REGIMENT' 'THE RAGGED REGIMENT' ' commonly called " Longshanks " on account of his great height he was the first king crowned in the Abbey as it now appears and was interred with great pomp on St. Simon's and St. Jude's Day October 28th 1307 in 1774 the tomb was opened when the king's body was found almost entire in the right hand was a richly embossed sceptre and in the left ' So much I gather as I pass one of the tombs on my way to the Chapel of Abbot Islip. Anon the verger will have stepped briskly forward, drawing a deep breath, with his flock well to heel, and will be teUing the secrets of the next tomb on his tragic beat. To be a verger in Westminster Abbey — what life could be more unutterably tragic ? We are, all of us, more or less enslaved to sameness ; but not all of us are saying, every day, hour after hour, exactly the same thing, in exactly the same place, in exactly the same tone of voice, to people who hear it for the first time and receive it with a gasp of respectful interest. In the name of humanity, 235 236 YET AGAIN I suggest to the Dean and Chapter that they should relieve these sad-faced men of their intoler- able mission, and purchase parrots. On every tomb, by every bust or statue, under every memorial window, let a parrot be chained by the ankle to a comfortable perch, therefrom to enlighten the rustic and the foreigner. There can be no objection on the ground of expense ; for parrots live long. Vergers do not, I am sure. It is only the rustic and the foreigner who go to Westminster Abbey for general enlightenment. If you pause beside any one of the verger-led groups, and analyse the murmur emitted whenever the verger has said his say, you wiU find the constituent parts of the sound to be such phrases as ' Lor ! ' ' Ach so ! ' ' Deary me ! ' ' Tiens ! ' and ' My ! ' ' My ! ' preponderates ; for antiquities appeal with greatest force to the one race that has none of them ; and it is ever the Americans who hang the most tenaciously, in the greatest nmnbers, on the vergers' tired lips. We of the elder races are capable of taking antiquities as a matter of course. Certainly, such of us as reside in London take Westminster Abbey as a matter of course. A few of us will be buried in it, but meanwhile we don't go to it, even as we don't go to the Tower, or the Mint, or the Monu- ment. Only for some special purpose do we go — as to hear a sensational bishop preaching, or to see ' THE RAGGED REGIMENT ' 237 a monarch anointed. And on these rare occasions we cast but a casual glance at the Abbey- — that close-packed chaos of beautiful things and worthless vulgar things. That the Abbey should be thus chaotic does not seem strange to us ; for lack of orderliness and discrimination is an essential characteristic of the English genius. But to the Frenchman, with his passion for symmetry and harmony, how very strange it must all seem ! How very whole-hearted a generalising ' Tiens ! ' must he utter when he leaves the edifice ! My own special purpose in coming is to see certain old waxen effigies that are here.^ A key grates in the lock of a little door in the wall of (what I am told is) the North Ambulatory ; and up a winding wooden staircase I am ushered into a tiny paven chamber. The light is dim, through the deeply embrased and narrow window, and the space is so obstructed that I must pick my way warily. All around are deep wooden cupboards, faced with glass ; and I become dimly aware that through each glass some one is watching me. Like sentinels in sentry-boxes, they fix me with their eyes, seeming as though they would challenge me. How shall I account to them for my presence ? I slip my note-book into my pocket, and try, in ' In its original form this essay had the good fortune to accompany two very romantic drawings by William Nicholson — one of Queen Elizabeth's effigy, the other of Charles II. 's. 238 YET AGAIN the dim light, to look as unlike a spy as possible. But I cannot, try as I will, acquit myself of impertinence. Who am I that I should review this ' ragged regiment ' ? Who am I that I should come peering in upon this secret conclave of the august dead ? Immobile and dark, very gaunt and withered, these personages peer out at me with a malign dignity, through the ages which separate me from them, through the twilight in which I am so near to them. Their eyes . . . Come, sir, their eyes are made of glass. It is quite absurd to take wax-works seriously. Wax-works are not a serious form of art. The aim of art is so to imitate life as to produce in the spectator an illusion of life. Wax-works, at best, can produce no such illusion. Don't pretend to be illuded. For its power to illude, an art depends on its limitations. Art never can be life, but it may seem to be so if it do but keep far enough away from life. A statue may seem to live. A painting may seem to live. That is because each is so far away from life that you do not apply the test of life to it. A statue is of bronze or marble, than either of which nothing could be less flesh-like. A painting is a thing in two dimensions, whereas man is in three. If sculptor or painter tried to dodge these conventions, his labour would be undone. If a painter swelled his canvas out and in according to the convexities and concavities of ' THE RAGGED REGIMENT ' 239 his model, or if a sculptor overlaid his material with authentic flesh-tints, then you would demand that the painted or sculptured figure should blink, or stroke its chin, or kick its foot in the air. That it could do none of these things would rob it of all power to illude you. An art that challenges life at close quarters is defeated through the simple fact that it is not life. Wax-works, being so near to life, having the exact proportions of men and women, having the exact texture of skin and hair and habiliments, must either be made animate or continue to be grotesque and pitiful failures. Lifelike ? They ? Rather do they give you the illusion of death. They are akin to photographs seen through stereoscopic lenses — those photo- graphs of persons who seem horribly to be corpses, or, at least, catalepts ; and . . . You see, I have failed to cheer myself up. Having taken up a strong academic line, and set bravely out to prove to myself the absurdity of wax- works, I find myself at the point where I started, irrefutably arguing to myself that I have good reason to be frightened, here in the Chapel of Abbot Islip, in the midst of these, the Abbot's glowering and ghastly tenants. Catalepsy ! death ! that is the atmosphere I am breathing. If I were writing in the past tense, I might pause here to consider whether this emotion was a genuine one or a mere figment for literary effect. 240 YET AGAIN As I am writing in the present tense, such a pause would be inartistic, and shall not be made. I must seem not to be writing, but to be actually on the spot, suffering. But then, you may well ask, why should I stay here, to suffer ? why not beat a hasty retreat ? The answer is that my essay would then seem skimpy ; and that you, moreover, would know hardly anything about the wax-works. So I must ask you to imagine me fighting down my fears, and consoling myself with the reflection that here, after all, a sense of awe and oppression is just what one ought to feel — just what one comes for. At Madame Tussaud's exhibition, by which I was similarly afflicted some years ago, I had no such consolation. There my sense of fitness was outraged. The place was meant to be cheerful. It was brilliantly lit. A band was playing popular tunes. Downstairs there was even a restaurant. (Let fancy fondly dwell, for a moment, on the thought of a dinner at Madame Tussaud's : a few carefully-selected guests, and a menu well thought out ; conversation becoming general ; corks popping ; quips flying ; a sense of bien-Hre ; ' thank you for a most deUght- ful evening.') Madame's figures were meant to be agreeable and lively presentments. Her visitors were meant to have a thoroughly good time. But the Islip Chapel has no cheerful intent. It is, indeed, a place set aside, with all reverence, to ' THE RAGGED REGIMENT ' 241 preserve certain relics of a grim, yet not unlovely, old custom. These fearful images are no stock- in-trade of a showman ; we are not invited to ' walk-up ' to them. They were fashioned with a solemn and wistful purpose. The reason of them lies in a sentiment which is as old as the world — lies in man's vain revolt from the prospect of death. If the soul must perish from the body, may not at least the body itself be preserved, somewhat in the semblance of life, and, for at least a while, on the face of the earth ? By subtle art, with far- fetched spices, let the body survive its day and be (even though hidden beneath the earth) for ever. Nay more, since death cause it straightway to dwindle somewhat from the true semblance of life, let cunning artificers fashion it anew — fashion it as it was. Thus, in the earliest days of England, the kings, as they died, were embalmed, and their bodies were borne aloft upon their biers, to a sepulture long delayed after death. In later days, an image of every king that died was forth- with carved in wood, and painted according to his remembered aspect, and decked in his own robes ; and, when they had sealed his tomb, the mourners, humouring, to the best of their power, his hatred of extinction, laid this image upon the tomb's slab, and left it so. In yet later days, the pretence became more realistic. The hands and the face were modelled in wax ; and the figure stood up- 242 YET AGAIN right, in some commanding posture, on a valanced platform above the tomb. Nor were only the kings thus honoured. Every one who was interred in the Abbey, whether in virtue of lineage or of achievements, was honoured thus. It was the fashion for every great lady to write in her will minute instructions as to the posture in which her image was to be modelled, and which of her gowns it was to be clad in, and with what of her jewellery it was to glitter. Men, too, used to indulge in such precautions. Of all the images thus erected in the Abbey, there remain but a few. The images had to take their chance, in days that were without benefit of police. Thieves, we may suppose, stripped the finery from many of them. Rebels, we know, broke in, less ignobly, and tore many of them limb from limb, as a protest against the governing classes. So only a poor remnant, a ' ragged regiment,' has been rallied, at length, into the sanctuary of Islip's Chapel. Perhaps, if they were not so few, these images would not be so fascinating. Yes, I am fascinated by them now. Terror has been toned to wonder. I am filled with a kind of wondering pity. My academic theory about wax- works has broken down utterly. These figures — kings, princes, duchesses, queens — all are real to me now, and all are infinitely pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. ' THE RAGGED REGIMENT ' 243 With what inaUenable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks, flaunting sere ruffles of point -lace, which at a touch now would be shivered like cobwebs ! My heart goes out to them through the glass that divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I think they like me. I am afraid they will miss me. Perhaps it would be better for us never to have met. Even Queen Elizabeth, beholding whom, as she stands here, gaunt and imperious and appalling, I echo the words spoken by Philip's envoy, ' This woman is possessed of a hundred thousand devils ' — even she herself, though she gazes askance into the air, seems to be conscious of my presence, and to be willing me to stay. It is a relief to raeet the friendly bourgeois eye of good Queen Anne. It has restored-flay^-common sense. ' These figures really are most curious, most interesting . . .' and anon I am asking intelligent questions about the contents of a big press, which, by special favour, has been unlocked for me. Perhaps the most romantic thing in the Islip Chapel is this press. Herein, huddled one against another in dark recesses, lie the battered and disjected remains of the earlier effigies — the primitive wooden ones. Edward I. and Eleanor are known to be among them ; and Henry VII. and EHzabeth of York ; and others not less 244, YET AGAIN illustrious. Which is which ? By size and shape you can distinguish the men from the women ; but beyond that is mere guesswork, be you never so expert. Time has broken and shuffled these erst so significant effigies till they have become as unmeaning for us as the bones in one of the old plague-pits. I feel that I ought to be more deeply moved than I am by this sad state of things. But I seem to have exhausted my capacity for senti- ment ; and I cannot rise to the level of my oppor- tunity. Would that I were Thackeray ! Dear gentleman, how promptly and copiously he would have wept and moralised here, in his grandest manner, with that perfect technical mastery which makes even now his tritest and shallowest sermons sound remarkable, his hoUowest sentiment ring true ! What a pity he never came to beat the muffled drum, on which he was so supreme a performer, around the Ishp Chapel ! As I make my way down the stairs, I am trying to imagine what would have been the cadence of the final sentence in this essay by Thackeray. And, as I pass along the North Ambulatory, lo ! there is the same verger with a new party ; and I catch the words ' was interred with great pomp on St. Simon's and St. Jude's Day October 28 1307 in 1774 the tomb was opened when ' THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC THEY often tell me that So-and-so has no sense of humour. Lack of this sense is everywhere held to be a horrid disgrace, nullifying any number of delightful quaUties. Perhaps the most effective means of disparaging an enemy is to lay stress on his integrity, his erudition, his amiability, his courage, the' fineness of his head, the grace of his figiu-e, his strength of pur- pose, which has overleaped all obstacles, his goodness to his parents, the kind word that he has for every one, his musical voice, his freedom from aught that in himian nature is base ; and then to say what a pity it is that he has no sense of humour. The more highly you extol any one, the more eagerly will your audience accept any- thing you may have to say against him. Per- fection is unloved in this imperfect world, but for imperfection comes instant sympathy. Any excuse is good enough for exalting the bad or stupid brother of us, but any stick is a valued weapon against him who has the effrontery to have been by Heaven better graced than we. 2« 248 YET AGAIN And what could match for deadliness the imputa- tion .,of being without sense of humoS ? To convict a man of that lack is to strike him with one blow to a level with the beasts of the field — to kick him, once and for all, outside the human pale. What is it that mainly distinguishes us from the brute creation? That we walk erect? Some brutes are bipeds. That we do not slay one another ? We do. That we build houses ? So do they. That we remember and reason ? So, again, do they. That we converse ? They are chatterboxes, whose lingo we are not sharp enough to master. On no possible point of superiority can we preen ourselves save this : that we can laugh, and that they, with one notable exception, cannot. They (so, at least, we assert) have no sense of humour. We have. Away with any one of us who hasn't ! Belief in the general humorousness of the human race is the more deep-rooted for that every man is certain that he himself is not without sense of humour. A man will admit cheerfully that he does not know one tune from another, or that he cannot discriminate the vintages of wines. The blind beggar does not seek to benumb sym- pathy by telling his patrons how well they are looking. The deaf and dumb do not scruple to converse in signals. ' Have you no sense of beauty ? ' I said to a friend who in the Accademia THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 249 of Florence suggested that we had stood long enough in front of the ' Primavera.' ' No ! ' was his simple, straightforward, quite unanswerable answer. But I have never heard a man assert that he had no sense of himiour. And I take it that no such assertion ever was made. Moreover, wer^ it made, it would be a lie. Every man laughs. Frequently or infrequently, the corners of his mouth are drawn up into his cheeks, and through his parted lips comes his own particular variety, soft or loud, of that noise which is called laughter. Frequently or infrequently, every man is amused by something. Every man has a sense of humour, but not every man the same sense. A may be incapable of smiling at what has convulsed B, and B may stare blankly when he hears what has roUed A off his chair. Jokes are so diverse that no one man can see them all. The very fact that he can see one kind is proof positive that certain other kinds will be invisible to him. And so egoistic in his judgment is the average man that he is apt to suspect of being humourless any one whose sense of humour squares not with his own. But the suspicion is always false, incomparably useful though it is in the form of an accusation. Having no love for the public, I have often accused that body of having no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me with- draw my oft-made imputation, and show its 250 YET AGAIN hollowness by examining with you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the pubUe than I am), what are the main features of that sense of humour which the public does undoubtedly possess. The word ' public ' must, like all collective words, be used with caution. When we speak of our hair, we should remember not only that the hairs on our heads are all munbered, but also that there is a catalogue raisonnS in which every one of those hairs is shown to be in some respect unique. Similarly, let us not forget that * public ' denotes a collection not of identical units, but of units separable and (under close scrutiny) distinguishable one from another. I have said that not every man has the same sense of humour. I might have said truly that no two men have the same sense of humour, for that no two men have the same brain and heart and experience, by which things the sense of humour is formed and directed. One joke may go round the world, tickling myriads, but not two persons will be tickled in precisely the same way, to precisely the same degree. If the vibra- tions of inward or outward laughter could be (as some day, perhaps, they will be) scientifically registered, differences between them all would be made apparent to us. 'Oh,' is your cry, when- ever you hear something that especially amuses you, ' I must tell that to ' whomever you credit THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 251 with a sense of humour most akin to your own. And the chances are that you will be disappointed by his reception of the joke. Either he will laugh less loudly than you hoped, or he will say something which reveals to you that it amuses him and you not in quite the same way. Or perhaps he will laugh so long and loudly that you are irritated by the suspicion that you have not yourself gauged the full beauty of it. In one of his books (I do not remember which, though they, too, I suppose, are all numbered) Mr. Andrew Lang tells a story that has always delighted and always will delight n^e. He was in a railway-carriage, and his travelling-companions were two strangers, two silent ladies, middle-aged. The train stopped at Nuneaton. The two ladies exchanged a glance. One of them sighed, and said, ' Poor Eliza ! She had reason to rem.ember Nuneaton ! ' . . . That is all. But how much ! how deliciously and memorably much ! How infinite a span of con- jecture is in those dots which I have just made ! And yet, would you believe me ? some of my m.ost intimate friends, the people most like to myself, see little or nothing of the loveliness of that pearl of price. Perhaps you would believe me. That is the worst of it : one never knows. The most sensitive intelligence cannot predict how will be appraised its any treasure by its how near soever kin. 252 YET AGAIN This sentence, which I admit to be somewhat mannered, has the merit of bringing me straight to the point at which I have been aiming ; that, though the public is composed of distinct units, it may roughly be regarded as a single entity. Precisely because you and I have sensitive intelli- gences, we cannot postulate certainly anything about each other. The higher an animal be in grade, the more numerous and recondite are the points in which its organism differs from that of its peers. The lower the grade, the more numerous and obvious the points of likeness. By ' the public ' I mean that vast number of human animals who are in the lowest grade of intelligence. (Of course, this classification is made without reference to social ' classes.' The public is recruited from the upper, the middle, and the lower class. That the recruits come mostly from the lower class is because the lower class is still the least well-educated. That they come in as high proportion from the middle class as from the less well-educated upper class, is because the ' young Barbarians,' reared in a more gracious environment, often acquire a grace of mind which serves them as well as would men- tal keenness.) Whereas in the highest grade, to which you and I belong, the fact that a thing affects you in one way is no guarantee that it will not affect me in another, a thing which affects one THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 253 man of the lowest grade in a particular way is likely to affect all the rest very similarly. The public's sense of humour may be regarded roughly as one collective sense. It would be impossible for any one of us to define what are the things that amuse him. For him the wind of humour bloweth where it listeth. He finds his jokes in the unlikeliest places. Indeed, it is only there that he finds them at all. A thing that is labelled ' comic ' chills his sense of humour instantly — perceptibly lengthens his face. A joke that has not a serious background, or some serious connexion, means nothing to him. No- thing to him, the crude jape of the professional jester. Nothing to him, the jangle of the bells in the wagged cap, the thud of the swung bladder. Nothing, the joke that hits him violently in the eye, or pricks him with a sharp point. The jokes that he loves are those quiet jokes which have no apparent point — the jokes which never can surrender their secret, and so can never pall. His humour is an indistinguishable part of his soul, and the things that stir it are indistinguishable from the world around him. But to the primi- tive and untutored public, humour is a harshly definite affair. The public can achieve no deli- cate process of discernment in humour. Unless a joke hits in the eye, drawing forth a shower of illuminative sparks, all is darkness. Unless 254 YET AGAIN a joke be labelled ' Comic. Come ! why don't you laugh ? ' the public is quite silent. Violence and obviousness are thus the essential factors. The surest way of making a thing obvious is to provide it in some special place, at some special time. It is thus that humour is provided for the public, and thus that it is easy for the student to lay his hand on materials for an analysis of the public's sense of humour. The obviously right plan for the student is to visit the music-halls from time to time, and to buy the comic papers. Neither these halls nor these papers will amuse him directly through their art, but he will instruct himself quicklier and soundlier from them than from any other source, for they are the authentic sources of the public's laughter. Let him hasten to patronise them. He will find that I have been there before him. The music-halls I have known for many years. I mean, of course, the real old-fashioned music- halls, not those depressing palaces where you see by grace of a biograph things that you have seen much better, and without a headache, in the street, and pitiable animals being forced to do things which Nature has forbidden them to do — things which we can do so very much better than they, without any trouble. Heaven defend me from those meaningless palaces ! But the little old music-halls have always attracted me by their THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 255 unpretentious raciness, their quaint monotony, the reaUty of the enjojonent on all those stolidly rapt faces in the audience. Without that monotony there would not be the same air of general enjoyment, the same constant guffaws. That monotony is the secret of the success of music-halls. It is not enough for the public to know that everything is meant to be funny, that laughter is craved for every point in every ' turn.' A new kind of humour, however obvious and violent, might take the public unawares, and be received in silence. The public prefers always that the old well-tested and well-seasoned jokes be cracked for it. Or rather, not the same old jokes, but jokes on the same old subjects. The quaUty of the joke is of slight import in com- parison with its subject. It is the matter, rather than the treatment, that counts, in the art of the music-hall. Some subjects have come to be recognised as funny. Two or three of them crop up in every song, and before the close of the evening all of them will have cropped up many times. I speak with authority, as an earnest student of the music-halls. Of comic papers I know less. They have never allured me. They are not set to music — an art for whose cheaper and more primitive forms I have a very real sensibility ; and I am not, as I peruse one of them, privy to the public's delight : my copy cannot be shared 256 YET AGAIN with me by hundreds of people whose mirth is wonderful to see and hear. And the bare contents are not such as to enchant me. How- ever, for the purpose of this essay, I did go to a bookstall and buy as many of these papers as I could see — a terrific number, a terrific burden to stagger away with. I have gone steadily through them, one by one. My main impression is of wonder and horror at the amount of hebdomadal labour implicit in them. Who writes for them ? Who does the drawings for them — those thousands of little drawings, week by week, so neatly executed ? To think that daily and nightly, in so many an English home, in a room sacred to the artist, sits a young man inventing and executing designs for Chippy Snips ! To think how many a proud mother must be boasting to her friends : ' Yes, Edward is doing wonderfully well — more than fulfilling the hopes we always had of him. Did I tell you that the editor of Natty Tips has written asking him to contribute to his paper ? I believe I have the letter on me. Yes, here it is,' etc., etc. ! The awful thing is that many of the drawings in these comic papers are done with very real skill. 'Nothing is sadder than to see the hand of an artist wasted by alliance to a vacant mind, a common spirit. I look through these drawings, conceived all so tritely and stupidly, so hopelessly THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 257 and helplessly, yet executed — many of them — so very well indeed, and I sigh over the haphazard way in which mankind is made. However, my concern is not with the tragedy of these draughts- men, but with the specific lorms taken by their humour. Some of them deal in a broad spirit with the world-comedy, limiting themselves to no set of funny subjects, finding inspiration in the habits and nianners of men and women at large. ' He Won Her ' is the title appended to a picture of a^oung lady and gentleman seated in a drawing- room, and the libretto runs thus : ' Mabel : Last night I dreamt of a most beautiful woman. Harold : Rather a coincidence. I dreamt of you, too, last night.' I have selected this as a typical example of the larger style. This style, however, occupies but a- small space in the bulk of the papers that lie before me. As in the music-halls, so in these papers, the entertainment consists almost entirely of variations on certain ever- recurring themes. I have been at pains to draw up a list of these themes. I think it is exhaustive. If any fellow-student detect an omission, let him communicate with me. Meanwhile, here is my Ust :— Mothers-in-law Hen-pecked husbands Twins 258 YET AGAIN Old maids Jews Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers {not Rttssians, or other foreigners of any denomination) Fatness Thinness Long hair {worn by a man) Baldness Sea-sickness Stuttering Bad cheese ' Shooting the moon ' {slang expression for leaving a lodging-house without paying the bill). You might argue that one week's budget of comic papers is no real criterion — that the recurrence of these themes may be fortuitous. My aiia,. er to that objection is that this list coincides exactly with a list which (before studying these papers) I had made of the themes commonest, during the past few years, in the music-halls. This twin list, which results from separate study of the two chief forms of public entertainment, may be taken as a sure guide to the goal of our inquiry. Let us try to find some unifying principle, or principles, among the xariegatfid items. Take the first item — Mothers-in-law. Why should the THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 259 public roar, as roar it does, at the mere mention of that relationship ? There is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion of a woman with a married daughter. It is probable that she will sympathise with her daughter in any quarrel that may arise between husband and wife. It is probable, also, that she will, as a mother, demand for her daughter more unselfish devotion than the daughter herself expects. But this does not make her ridiculous. The public laughs not at her, surely. It always respects a tyrant. It laughs at the implied concept of the oppressed son-in-law, who has to wage un- equal warfare against two women. It is amused by the notion of his embarrassment. It is amused by suffering. This explanation covers, of course, the second item on my list — Hen-pecked husbands. It covers, also, the third and fourth items. The public is amused by the notion of a needy man put to double expense, and of a woman who has had no chance of fulfilling her destiny. The laughter at- Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew-baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait the Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which alone can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. 260 YET AGAIN The British public has never got used to them, to their faces and tricks of speech. The only apparent reason why it laughs at the notion of Frenchmen, etc., is that they are unlike itself. (At the mention of Russians and other foreigners it does not laugh, because it has no idea what they are like : it has seen too few samples of them.) h So far, then, we have found two elements in the h public's humour : delight in suffering, contempt ' for the unfamiliar. The former motive is the more potent. It accounts for the popularity of all these other items : extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness, stuttering, and (as entailing distress for the landlady) ' shooting the moon.^ The motive of contempt for the unfamiliar accounts for long hair {worn by a man). Remains one item unexplained. How can mirth possibly be evoked by the notion of bad cheese ? Having racked my brains for the solution, I can but conjecture that it must be the mere ugliness of the thing. Why any ^one should be amused by mere ugliness I cannot ( conceive. Delight in cruelty, contempt for the un- familiar, I can understand, though I cannot admire them. They are invariable elements in children's sense of humour, and it is natural that the public, as being unsophisticated, should laugh as children laugh. But any nurse will tell you that children are frightened by ugliness. Why, then, is the public amused by it ? I know not. The laughter THE HUMOUR OF THE PUBLIC 261 at bad cheese I abandon as a mystery. I pitch it among such other insoluble problems, as Why does the public laugh when an actor and actress in a quite serious play kiss each other? Why does it laugh when a meal is eaten on the stage ? Why does it laugh when any actor has to say ' damn ' ? If they cannot be solved soon, such problems never will be solved. For Mr. Forster's Act will soon have had time to make apparent its effects ; and the public will proudly display a sense of humour as sophisticated as our own. DULCEDO JUDICIORUM DULCEDO JUDICIORUM WHEN a ' sensational ' case is being tried, the court is well filled by lay persons in need of a thrill. Their presence seems to be rather resented as a note of frivolity, a discord in the solemnity of the function, even a possible dis- traction for the judge and jury. I am not a lawyer, nor a professionally solemn person, and I cannot work myself up into a state of indignation against the interlopers. I am, indeed, one of them myself. And I am worse than one of them. I do not merely go to this or that court on this or that special occasion. I frequent the courts whenever I have nothing better to do. And it is rarely that, as one who cares to study his fellow-creatures, I have anything better to do. I greatly wonder that the courts are frequented by so few other people who have no special business there. I can understand the glamour of the theatre. You find yourself in a queerly-shaped place, cut off from the world, with plenty of gilding and red velvet or blue satin. An orchestra plays tunes calculated to promote suppressed excitement. 265 266 YET AGAIN Presently up goes a curtain, revealing to you a mimic world, with ladies and gentlemen painted and padded to appear different from what they are. It is precisely the people most susceptible to the glamour of the theatre who are the greatest hindrances to serious dramatic art. They will stand anything, no matter how silly, in a theatre. Fortunately, there seems to be a decline in the number of people who are acutely susceptible to the theatre's glamour. I rather think the reason for this is that the theatre has been over-exploited by the press. Quite old people will describe to you their early playgoings with a sense of wonder, an enthusiasm, which — ^leaving a wide margin for the charm that past things must always have- will not be possible to us when we babble to our grandchildren. Quite young people, people rang- ing between the ages of four and five, who have seen but one or two pantomimes, still seem to have the glamour of the theatre full on them. But adolescents, and people in the prime of life, do merely, for the most part, grumble about the quality of the plays. Yet the plays of our time are somewhat better than the plays that were written for our elders. Certainly the glamour of the theatre has waned. And so much the better for the drama's future. It is a matter of concern, that future, to me who have for so long a time been a dramatic DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 267 critic. A man soon comes to care, quite un- selfishly, about the welfare of the thing in which he has specialised. Of course, I care selfishly too. For, though it is just as easy for a critic to write interestingly about bad things as about good things, he would rather, for choice, be in contact with good things. It is always nice to combine business and pleasure. But one regrets, even then, the business. If I were a forensic critic, my delight in attending the courts would still be great ; but less than it is in my irresponsibility. In the courts I find satisfied in me just those senses which in the theatre, nearly always, are starved. Nay, I find them satisfied more fully than they ever could be, at best, in any theatre. I do not merely fall back on the courts, in disgust of the theatre as it is. I love the courts better than the theatre as it ideally might be. And, I say again, I marvel that you leave me so much elbow-room there. No artificial light is needed, no scraping of fiddles, to excite or charm me as I pass from the echoing corridor, through the swing-doors, into the well of this or that court. It matters not much to me what case I shall hear, so it be of the human kind, with a jury and with witnesses. I care little for Chancery cases. There is a certain intellectual pleasure in hearing a mass of facts subtly wrangled over. The mind derives therefrom something of 268 YET AGAIN the satisfaction that the eye has in watching acrobats in a music-hall. One wonders at the in- genuity, the ; agility, the perfect training. Like acrobats, these Chancery lawyers are a relief from the average troupe of actors and actresses, by reason of their exquisite alertness, their thorough mastery (seemingly exquisite and thorough, at any rate, to the dazzled layman). And they have a further advantage in their material. The facts they deal with are usually dull, but seldom so dull as facts become through the fancies of the average playwright. It is seldom that an even- ing in a theatre can be so pleasantly and pro- fitably spent as a day in a Chancery court. But it is ever into one or another of the courts of King's Bench that I betake myself, for choice. Criminal trials, of which I have seen a few, I now eschew absolutely. I cannot stomach them. I know that it is necessary for the good of the community that such persons as infringe that community's laws should be punished. But, even were the mode of punishment less barbarous than it is, I should still prefer not to be brought in sight of a prisoner in the dock. Perhaps because I have not a strongly developed imagination, I have little or no public spirit. I cannot see the common- weal. On the other hand, I have plenty of personal feeling. And I have enough knowledge of men and women to know that very often the best people DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 269 are guilty of the worst things. Is the prisoner in the dock guilty or not guilty of the offence with which he is charged ? That is the question in the mind of the court. What sort of man is he ? That is the question in my own mind. And the answer to the other question has no bearing whatsoever on the answer to this one. The English law assumes the prisoner innocent until he shall have been proved guilty. And, seeing him there a prisoner, a man who happens to have been caught, while others (myself included) are pleasantly at large after doing, unbeknown, innumerable deeds worse in the eyes of heaven than the deed with which this man is charged — deeds that do not prevent us from regarding our characters as quite fine really — I cannot but follow in my heart the example of the English law and assume (pending proof, which cannot be forthcoming) that the prisoner in the dock has a character at any rate as fine as my own. The war that this assumption wages in my breast against the fact that the man will perhaps be sentenced is too violent a war not to discommode me. Let justice be done. Or rather, let our rough-and-ready, well-meant endeavours towards justice go on being made. But I won't be there to see, thank you very much. It is the natural wish of every writer to be liked by his readers. But how exasperating, how detestable, the writer who obviously touts for our 270 YET AGAIN affection, arranging himself for us in a mellow light, and inviting us, with gentle persistence, to note how lovable he is ! Many essayists have made themselves quite impossible through their determination to remind us of Charles Lamb — ' St. Charles,' as they invariably call him. And the foregoing paragraph, though not at all would- be-Lamb-like in expression, looks to me horribly like a blatant bid for your love. I hasten to add, therefore, that no absolutely kind-hearted person could bear, as I rejoice, to go and hear cases even in the civil courts. If it be true that the instinct of cruelty is at the root of our pleasure in theatrical drama, how much more is there of savagery in our going to look on at the throes of actual litigation — real men and women struggling not in make-believe, but in dreadful earnest ! I mention this aspect merely as a corrective to what I had written. I do not pretend that I am ever conscious, as I enter a court, that I am come to gratify an evil instinct. I am but conscious of being glad to be there, on tiptoe of anticipation, whether it be to hear tried some particular case of whose matter I know already something, or to hear at hazard whatever case happen to be down for hearing. I never tire of the aspect of a court, the ways of a court. Familiarity does but spice them. I love the cold comfort of the pale oak panelling, the scurrying- in-and-out of lawyers' clerks, the eagerness and DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 271 ominousness of it all, the rustle of silk as a K.C. edges his way to his seat and twists his head round for a quick whispered parley with his junior, while his client, at the solicitors' table, twists his head round to watch feverishly the quick mechani- cal nods of the great man's wig — the wig that covers the skull that contains the brain that so awfidly much depends on. I love the mystery of those dark-green curtains behind the exalted Bench. One of them will anon be plucked aside, with a stentorian ' Silence ! ' Thereat up we jump, all of us as though worked by one spring ; and in shuffles swiftly My Lord, in a robe well- fashioned for sitting in, but not for walking in anjrwhere except to a bath-room. He bows, and we bow ; subsides, and we subside ; and up jumps some grizzled junior — ' My Lord, may I mention to your Lordship the case of " Brown V. Robinson and Another " ? ' It is music to me ever, the cadence of that formula. I watch the judge as he listens to the application, peering over his glasses with the lack-lustre eyes that judges have, eyes that stare dimly out through the mask of wax or parchment that judges wear. My Lord might be the mummy of some high tyrant revitalised after centuries of death and resuming now his sway over men. Impassive he sits, aloof and aloft, ramparted by his desk, ensconced be- tween curtains to keep out the draught — for might 272 YET AGAIN not a puff of wind scatter the animated dust that he consists of ? No creature of flesh and blood could impress us quite as he does, with a sense of puissance quite so dispassionate, so supernal. He crouches over us in such manner that we are all of us levelled one with another, shorn of aught that elsewhere differentiates us. The silk-gowns- men, as soon as he appears, fade to the semblance of juniors, of lawyers' clerks, of jurymen, of one- self. Always, indeed, in any public place devoted to some special purpose, one finds it hard to differentiate the visitors, hard to credit them with any private existence. Cast your eye around the tables of a cafe : how subtly similar all the people seem ! How like a swarm of gregarious insects, in their unity of purpose and of aspect ! Above all, how homeless ! Cast your eye around the tables of a casino's gambling-room. What an uniform and abject herd, huddled together with one despondent impulse ! Here and there, maybe, a person whom we know to be vastly rich ; yet we cannot conceive his cahn as not the calm of inward desperation ; cannot conceive that he has anything to bless himself with except the roll of bank-notes that he has just produced from his breast-pocket. One and aU, the players are levelled by the invisible presence of the goddess they are courting. Well, the visible presence of the judge in a court of law oppresses us with a yet DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 273 keener sense of lowliness and obliteration. He crouches over us, visible symbol of the majesty of the law, and we wilt to nothingness beneath him. And when I say ' him ' I include the whole judicial bench. Judges vary, no doubt. Some are young, others old, by the calendar. But the old ones have an air of physical incorruptibility — are ' well- preserved,' as by swathes and spices ; and the young ones are just as mummified as they. Some of them are pleased to crack jokes ; jokes of the sarcophagus, that twist our lips to obsequious laughter, but send a chill through our souls. There are ' strong ' judges and weak ones (so barristers will tell you). Perhaps — who knows ? — Minos was a strong judge, and Aeacus and Rhadamanthus were weak ones. But all three seem equally terrible to us. And so seem, in virtue of their position, and of the manner and aspect it invests them with, all the judges of our own high courts. I hearken in awe to the toneless murmur in which My Lord comments on the application in the case of ' Brown v. Robinson and Another.' He says something about the Court of Crown Cases Reserved . . . Ah, what place on this earth bears a name so mystically majestic ? Even in the commonest forensic phrases there is often this solemnity of cadence, always a quaintness, that stirs the imagination . . . The grizzled junior dares inter- ject something ' with submission,' and is finally 274 YET AGAIN advised to see ' my learned brother in chambers.' ' As your Lordship pleases.' . . . We pass to the business of the day. I settle myself to enjoy the keenest form of assthetic pleasure that is known to me. .Esthetic, yes. In the law-courts one finds an art-form, as surely as in the theatre. What is drama ? Its theme is the actions of certain opposed persons, historical or imagined, within a certain period of time ; and these actions, these characters, must be shown to us in a succinct manner, must be so arranged that we know just what in them is essential to our understanding of them. Very similar is the art-form practised in the law-courts. The theme of a law-suit is the actions of certain actual opposed persons within a certain period of time ; and these actions, these characters, must be set forth succinctly, in such- wise that we shall know just as much as is essential to our understanding of them. In drama, the presentment is, in a sense, more vivid. It is not — not usually, at least — retrospective. We see the actions being committed, hear the words as they are uttered. But how often do we have an illusion of their reality ? Seldom. It is seldom that a masterpiece in drama is per- formed perfectly by an ideal cast. In a law-court, on the other hand, it is always in perfect form that the matter is presented to us. First the outline of DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 275 the story, in the speech for the plaintiff ; then this outhne filled in by the examination of the plaintiff himself ; then the other side of the story adum- brated by his cross-examination. Think of the various further stages of a law-suit, culminating in the judge's summing up ; and you will agree with me that the whole thing is a perfect art- form. Drama, at its best, is clumsy, arbitrary, unsatisfying, by comparison. But what makes a law-suit the most fascinating, to me, of all art- forms, is that not merely its material, but the chief means of its expression, is life itself. Here, cited before us, are the actual figures in the actual story that has been told to us. Here they are, not as images to be evoked through the medium of printed page, or of painted canvas, or of dis- interested ladies and gentlemen behind footlights. Actual, authentic, they stand before us, one by one, in the harsh light of day, to be made to reveal all that we need to know of them. The most interesting witnesses, I admit, are they who are determined not to accommodate us— not to reveal themselves as they are, but to make us suppose them something quite different. All witnesses are more or less interesting. As I have suggested, there is no such thing as a dull law-suit. Nothing that has happened is negligible. And, even so, every human being repays attention — especially so when he stands forth on his oath. 276 YET AGAIN The strangeness of his position, and his conscious* ness of it, suffice in themselves to make him interest- ing. But it is disingenuousness that makes him delightful. And the greatest of all delights that a law-court can give us is a disingenuous witness who is quick-minded, resourceful, thoroughly master of himself and his story, pitted against a counsel as well endowed as himself. The most vivid and precious of my memories is of a case in which a gentleman, now dead, was sued for breach of promise, and was cross-examined throughout a whole hot day in midsummer by the late Mr. Candy. The lady had averred that she had known him for many years. SKe called various witnesses, who testified to having seen him repeatedly in her company. She produced stacks of letters in a handwriting which no expert could distinguish from his. The defence was that these letters were written by the defendant's secretary, a man who was able to imitate exactly his employer's hand- writing, and who was, moreover, physically a replica of his employer. He was dead now ; and the defendant, though he was a very well-known man, with many friends, was unable to adduce any one who had seen that secretary dead or alive. Not a soul in court believed the story. As it was a complicated story, extending over many years, to demolish it seemed child's play. Mr. Candy was no child. His performance was masterly. DULCEDO JUDICIORUM ^m But it was not so masterly as the defendant's ; and the suit was dismissed. In the light of common sense, the defendant hadn't a leg to stand on. Technically, his case was proved. I doubt whether I shall ever have a day of such acute mental enjoyment as was the day of that cross- examination. I suppose that the most famous cross-examina- tion in our day was Sir Charles Russell's of Pigott. It outstands by reason of the magnitude of the issue, and the flight and suicide of the witness. Had Pigott been of the stuff to stand up to Russell, and make a fight of it, I should regret far more keenly than I do that I was not in court. As it is, my regret is keen enough. I was reading again, only the other day, the verbatim report of Pigott's evidence, in one of the series of little paper volumes published by The Times ; and I was revelling again in the large perfection with which Russell accomplished his too easy task. Especially was I amazed to find how vividly Russell, as I remember him, lived again, and could be seen and heard, through the medium of that little paper volume. It was not merely as though I had been in court, and were now recalling the inflections of that deep, intimidating voice, the steadfast gaze of those dark, intimidating eyes, and were remembering just at what points the snuff-box was produced, and just how long the 678 YEt AGAIN pause was before the pinch was taken and the bandana came into play. It was almost as though these effects were proceeding before my very eyes — these sublime effects of the finest actor I have ever seen. Expressed through a perfect technique, his personality was overwhelming. ' Come, Mr. Pigott,' he is reported as saying, at a crucial moment, ' try to do yourself justice. Remember ! you are face to face with My Lords.' How well do I hear, in that awful hortation, Russell's pause after the word ' remember,' and the lowered voice in which the subsequent words were uttered slowly, and the richness of solemnity that was given to the last word of all, ere the thin lips snapped together — those lips that were so small, yet so significant, a feature of that large, white, luminous and inauspicious face. It is an hortation which, by whomsoever delivered, would tend to dispirit the bravest and most honest of witnesses. The presence of a judge is always, as I have said, oppressive. The presence of three is trebly so. Yet not a score of them serried along the bench could have outdone in oppressiveness Sir Charles Russell. He alone, among the counsel I have seen, was an exception to the rule that by a judge every one in court is levelled. On the bench, in his last years, he was not notably more predominant than he ever had been. And the reason of his predominance at the Bar was not so DULCEDO JUDICIORUM 279 much in the fact that he had no rival in swiftness, in subtlety, in grasp, as in the passionate strength of his nature, the intensity that in him was at the root of the grand manner. In the courts, as in parliament and in the theatre, the grand manner is a thing of the past. Mr. Lloyd-George is not, in style and method, more remote from Gladstone, nor Mr. George Alexander from Macready, than is Mr. Rufus Isaacs, the type of modern advocate, from Russell. Strength, passion, sonorousness, magnificence of phrasing, are things which the present generation vaguely approves in retrospect ; but it would titter at a contemporary demonstration of them. While I was reading Pigott's cross-examination, an idea struck me ; why do not the managers of our theatres, always querulous about the dearth of plays, fall back on scenes from famous trials ? A trial-scene in a play, though usually absurd, is almost always popular. Why not give us actual trial-scenes ? They could not, of course, be nearly so exciting as the originals, for the simple reason that they would not be real ; but they would certainly be more exciting than the average play. Thus I mused, hopefully. But I was brought up sharp by the reflection that it were hopeless to look for an actor who could impersonate Russell — could fit his manner to Russell's words, or indeed to the words of any of those orotund 280 YET AGAIN advocates. To reproduce recent trials would be a hardly warrantable thing. The actual partici- pators in them would have a right to object (delighted though many of them would be). Vain, then, is my dream of theatres invigorated by the leavings of the law-courts. On the other hand, for the profit of the law-courts, I have a quite practicable notion. They provide the finest amusement in London, for nothing. Why for nothing ? Let some scale of prices for admission be drawn up — half-a-guinea, say, for a seat in the well of the court, a shilling for a seat in the gallery, five pounds for a seat on the bench. Then, I dare swear, people would begin to realise how fine the amusement is. WORDS FOR PICTURES ' HARLEQUIN ' A SIGN-BOARD, PAINTED ON COPPEK, SIGNED 'W. EVANS, LONDON.' CIRCA 1820 HARLEQUIN dances, and, over the park he dances in, surely there is thunder brooding. His figure stands out, bright, large, and fantastic. But all around him is sultry twiUght, and the clouds, pregnant with thunder, lower over him as he dances, and the elms are dim with unusual shadow. There is a tiny river in the dim distance. Under one of the nearest elms you may descry a square tomb, topped with an urn. What lord or lady underlies it ? I know not. Harlequin dances. Sheathed in his gay suit of red and green and yellow lozenges, he ambles lightly over the gravel. At his feet lie a tambourine and a mask. Brown ferns fringe his pathway. With one hand he clasps the baton to his hip, with the other he points mis- chievously to his forehead. He wears a flat, loose cap of yellow. There is a ruff about his neck, and a pair of fine buckles to his shoes, and he 284 YET AGAIN always dances. He has his back to the thunder- clouds, but there is that in his eyes which tells us that he has seen them, and that he knows their presage. He is afraid. Yet he dances. Never, howsoever slightly, swerves he, see ! from his right posture, nor fail his feet in their pirouette. All a merveille ! Nor fades the smUe from his face, though he smiles through the tarnished air of a sultry twilight, under the shadow of iinjiindiiig storm. ♦THE GARDEN OF LOVE' A PAINTING BY RUBENS, IN THE PRADO HERE they are met. Here, by the balustrade, these lords and lusty ladies are met to romp and wanton in the fulness of love, under the solstice of a noon in midsummer. Water gushes' in fantastic arcs from the grotto, making a cold music to the emblazoned air, while a breeze swells the sun-shot satin of every lady's skirt, and tosses the ringlets that hang like bunches of yellow grapes on either side of her brow, and stirs the plumes of her gallant. But the very breeze is laden with heat, and the fountain's noise does but whet the thirst of the grass, the flowers, the trees. The earth sulks under the burden of the unmerciful sun. Love itself, one had said, would be languid here, pale and supine, and, faintly sighing for things past or for future things, would sink into siesta. But behold ! these are no ordinary lovers. The gushing fountains are likelier to run dry there in the grotto than they to falter in their redundant 2S5 286 YET AGAIN energy. These sanguine lords and ladies crave not an instant's surcease. They are tyrants and termagants of love. If they are thus at noon, here under the sun's rays, what, one wonders, must be their manner in the banqueting hall, when the tapers gleam adown the long tables, and the fruits are stripped of their rinds, and the wine brims over the goblets, aU to the music of the viols ? Somehow, one cannot imagine them anywhere but in this sunhght. To it they belong. They are creatures of Nature, pagans untamed, lawless and unabashed. For all they are robed in crimson and saffron, and are with such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from their exuberant bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple era; but for the ease of their deportment in their frippery, they might be Maenads in masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that civilisation fosters in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as men. A ' wooing ' were wasted on them, for they have no sense of antagonism, and seek not by any means to elude men. They meet men even as rivers meet the sea. Even as, when fresh water meets salt water in the estuary, the two tides revolve in eddies and leap up in foam, so do these men and women laugh and wrestle in the rapture of con- currence. How different from the first embrace which marks the close of a wooing ! that moment ' THE GARDEN OF LOVE ' 287 when the man seeks to conceal his triumph under a semblance of humility, and the woman her humiliation under a pretty air of patronage. Here, in the Garden of Love, they have none of those spiritual reservations and pretences. Nor is here any savour of fine romance. Nothing is here but the joy of satisfying a physical instinct — a joy that expresses itself not in any exaltation of words or thoughts, but in mere romping. See I Some of the women are chasing one another through the grotto. They are rushing headlong under the fountain. What though their finery be soaked ? Anon they will come out and throw themselves on the grass, and the sun will quickly dry them. Leave them, then, to their riot. Look upon these others who sit and stand here in a voluptuous bevy, hand in hand under the brazen sun, or flaunt to and fro, lolling in one another's arms and laughing in one another's faces. And see how closely above them hover the winged loves ! One, upside down in the air, sprinkles them with rose- leaves ; another waves over them a blazing torch ; another tries to frighten them with his unarrowed bow. Another yet has dared to descend into the group ; he nestles his fat cheek on a lady's lap, and is not rebuked. These little chubby Cythar- eans know they are privileged to play any pranks here. Doubtless they love to be on duty in this garden, for here they are patted and petted, and 288 YET AGAIN have no real work to do. At close of day, when they fly back to their mother, there is never an unmated name in the report they bring her ; and she, belike, being pleased with them, allows them to sit up late, and to have each a slice of ambrosia and a sip of nectar. But elsewhere they have hard work, and often fly back in dread of Venus' anger. At that other balustrade, where Watteau, remembering this one, painted for us the ' Plaisirs du Bal,' how often they have lain in ambush, knowing that were one of them to show but the tip of his wings those sedate and migniard masqueraders would faint for very shame ; yet ever hoping that they might, by their unseen presence, turn that punctilio of flirtation into love. And always they have flown back from Dulwich unrequited for all the pains they had taken, and pouting that Venus should ever send them on so hard an errand. But a day in this garden is always for them a dear holiday. They live in dread lest Venus discover how supei-fluous they are here. And so, knowing that the hypocrite's first dupe must be himself, they are always pre- tending to themselves that they are of some use. See that child yonder, perched on the balustrade, reading aloud from a scroll the praise of love as earnestly as though his congregation were of infidels. And that other, to the side, pushing two lovers along as though they were the veriest ' THE GARDEN OF LOVE ' 289 laggarts. The torch-bearer, too, and the archer, and the sprinkler of the rose-leaves — they are all, after their kind, trying to persuade themselves that they are needed. All but he who leans over and nestles his fat cheek on a lady's lap, as fondly and confidingly as though she were his mother . . . And truly, the lady is very like his mother. So, indeed, are all the other ladies. Strange ! In all their faces is an uniformity of divine splendour. Can it be that Venus, impatient of mere sequences of lovers, has obtained leave of Jove to multiply herself, and that to-day by a wild coincidence her every incarnation has trysted an adorer to this same garden ? Look closely ! It must be so Hush ! Let us keep her secret. 'ARIANE ET DIONYSE' A PAINTING BY PAUL BERGERON, 1740 pATJVBETTE! no wonder she is startled. All came on her so suddenly. A moment since, she was alone on this island. Theseus had left her. Her lover had crept from her couch as she lay sleeping, and had sailed away with his comrades, noiselessly, before the sun rose and woke her. From the top of yonder hillock she had seen the last sail of his argosy fading over the sea-line. Vainly she had waved her arms, and vainly her cries had echoed through all the island. She had run distraught through the valleys, the goats scampering before her to their own rocks. She had strayed, wildly weeping, along the shore, and the very sky had seemed to mock her. At length, spent with sorrow and wan with her tears, she had lain upon the sand. Above her the cliff sloped gently down to the shore, and all around her was the hot noontide, and no sound save the rustling of the sea over the sand. Theseus had left her. The sea had taken him from her. Let ' ARIANE ET DIONYSE ' 291 the sea take her in its tide. . . . Suddenly — what was that ? — she leapt up and listened. Voices, voices, the loud clash of cymbals ! She looked round for some place to hide in. Too late ! Some man (goat or man) came bounding towards her down the cliff. Another came after him. Then others, a whole company, and with them many naked, abominable women, laughing and shrieking and waving leafy wands, as they rushed down towards her. And in their midst, in a brazen chariot drawn by panthers, sped one whose yellow hair streamed far behind him in the wind. And froni his chariot he sprang and stood before her. But she shrinks from his smile. She shrinks from the riot and ribaldry that encompass her. She is but a young bride whom the bridegroom has betrayed, and she would fain be alone in the bitterness of her anguish and her humiliation. Why have they come, these creatures who are stamping and reeling round her, these flushed women who clap the cymbals, and these wild men with the hoofs and the horns of goats ? How should they comfort her ? She is not of their race ; no ! nor even of their time. She stands among them, just as Bergeron saw her, a delicate, timid figurine du dix-huitieme siecle. With her powdered hair and her hooped skirt and her stiff bodice of rose silk, she seems more fit for the consolations of some old Monsignore than for the 292 YET AGAIN homage of these frenzied Pagans and the amorous regard of their master. At him, pressing her shut fan to her Hps, she is gazing across her shoulder. With one hand she seems to ward him from her. Her whole body is bent to flight, but she is ' affear'd of her own feet.' She is well enough educated to know that he who smiles at her is no mortal, but Bacchus himself, the very lord of Naxos. He stands before her, the divine debauchee racemiferis frontem circumdatus uvis ; and all around her, a waif on his territory, are the sjTnbols of his majesty and his power. It is in his honour that the ivy trails down the cliff, and are not the yews and the firs and the fig-trees that overshadow the cliff's edge all sacred to him ? and the vines beyond, are they not all his ? His four panthers are clawing the sand, and four tipsy Satyrs hold them, the impatient beasts, by their bridles. Another Satyr drags to execution a goat that he has caught cropping the vine ; and in his slanted eyes one can see thirst for the blood of his poor cousin. The Maenads are dancing in one another's arms, and their tresses are coiled and crowned with tiny serpents. One of them kneels apart, sucking a great wine-skin. And yonder, that old cupster, Silenus, that horrible old favourite, wobbles along on a donkey, and would tumble off, you may be sure, were he not upheld by two fairly sober Satyrs. But the eyes of Ariadne are fixed ' ARIANE ET DIONYSE ' 293 only on the smooth-faced god. See how he smiles back at her with that lascivious condescension which is all that a god's love can be for a mortal girl ! In his hand he holds a long thyrsus. Behind him is borne aloft a chaplet of seven gold stars. Ariadne is but a little waif in the god's power. Not Theseus himself could protect her. One tap of the god's wand, and, lo ! she, too, would be filled with the frenzy of worship, and, with a wild cry, would join the dancers, his for ever. But the god is not unscrupulous. He would fain win her by gentle and fair means, even by wedlock. That chaplet of seven stars is his bridal offering. Why should not she accept it ? Why should she be coy of his desire ? It is true that he drinks. But in time, may be, a wife might be able to wean him from the wine-skin, and from the low company he affects. That will be for time to show. And, meanwhile, how brilliant a match ! Not even Pasiphae, her mother, ever contemplated for her such splendour. In her great love, Ariadne risked her whole future by eloping with Theseus. For her — ^the daughter of a far mightier king than Mgeus, and, on the distaff side, the granddaughter of Apollo — even marriage with Theseus would have been a misalliance. And now, here is a chance, a chance most marvellous, of covering her silly escapade. She will be sensible, I think, though she is still a little frightened. She will accept this 294 YET AGAIN god's suit, if only to pique Theseus — ^Theseus, who, for all his long, tedious anecdotes of how he slew Procrustes and the bull of Marathon and the sow of Cromyon, would even now lie slain or starving in her father's labyrinth, had she not taken pity on him. Yes, it was pity she felt for him. She never loved him. And then, to think that he, a mere mortal, dared to cast her off — oh, it is too absurd, it is too monstrous ! 'PETER THE DOMINICAN' A PAINTING BY GIOVANNI BELLINI, IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY '/^REDO in Dominum' were the words this monk wrote in the dust of the high- road, as he lay a-djdng there of Cavina's dagger ; and they, according to the Dominican record, were presently washed away by his own blood — ' rapida profusio sui sanguinis delevit professionem suce fidei.^ Yet they had not been written in vain. On Cavina himself their impression was less delible, for did he not submit himself to the Church, and was he not, after absolution, received into that monastery which his own victim had founded ? Here, before this picture by Bellini, one looks instinctively for the three words in the dust. They are not yet written there ; for scarcely, indeed, has the dagger been planted in the Saint's breast. But here, to the right, on this little scroll of parch- ment that hangs from a fence of osiers, there are some words written, and one stoops to decipher them . . . JOANNES bellinus fecit. 29S 296 YET AGAIN Now, had the Saint and his brother Dominican not been waylaid on their journey, they would have passed by this very fence, and would have stooped, as we do, to decipher the scroll, and would have very much wondered who was Bellinus, and what it was that he had done. The woodmen and the shepherd in the olive-grove by the roadside, the cowherds by the well, yonder — they have seen the scroll, I dare say, but they are not scholars enough to have read its letters. Cavina and his comrade in jarms, lying in wait here, pro- bably did not observe it, so intent were they for that pious and terrible Inquisitor who was to pass by. How their hearts must have leapt when they saw him, at length, with his companion, coming across that little arched bridge from the town — a conspicuous, unmistakable figure, clad in the pied frock of his brotherhood and wearing the familiar halo above his closely-shorn pate. Cavina stands now over the fallen Saint, plant- ing the short dagger in his heart. The other Dominican is being chased by Cavina's comrade, his face wreathed in a bland smile, his hands stretched childishly before him. Evidently he is quite unconscious how grave his situation is. He seems to think that this pursuit is merely a game, and that if he touch the wood of the olive-trees first, he will have won, and that then it will be his turn to run after this man in the helmet. Or does he ' PETER THE DOMINICAN ' 297 know perhaps that this is but a painting, and that his pursuer will never be able to strike him, though the chase be kept up for many centuries ? In any case, his smile is not at all seemly or dramatic. And even more extraordinary is the behaviour of the woodmen and the shepherd and the cowherds. Murder is being done within a yard or two of them, and they pay absolutely no attention. How Tacitus would have delighted in this example of the ' inertia rusticorum ' ! It is a great mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the contrary, the very absence of ' sensations ' produces an atrophy of the senses. It is the constant supply of ' sensations ' which creates a real demand for them in cities. Suppose that in our day some specially unpopular clergyman were martyred ' at the corner of Fen- church Street,' how the ' same old crush ' would be intensified ! But here, in this quiet glade 'twixt Milan and Como, on this quiet, sun-steeped after- noon in early Spring, with a horrible outrage being committed under their very eyes, these callous clowns pursue their absurd avocations, without so much as resting for one moment to see what is going on. Cavina plants the dagger methodically, and the Inquisitor himself is evidently filled with that intense self-consciousness which sustains all 298 YET AGAIN inart3rrs in their supreme hour and makes them, it may be, insensible to actual pain. One feels that this martyr will write his motto in the dust with a firm hand. His whole comportment is quite exemplary. What irony that he should be unobserved ! Even we, posterity, think far less of St. Peter than of Bellini when we see this picture ; St. Peter is no more to us than the blue harmony of those little hills beyond, or than that little sparrow perched on a twig in the foreground. After all, there have been so many martyrs — and so many martyrs named Peter — ^but so few great painters. The little screed on the fence is no mere vain anachronism. It is a sly, rather malicious symbol, pebiit petbus : bellinus fecit, as who should say. 'L'OISEAU BLEU' A PAINTING ON SILK BY CHARLES CONDER OVER them, ever over them, floats the Blue Bird ; and they, the ennuySes and the ennuyants, the ennuyantes and the ennuySs, these Parisians of 1830, are lolling in a charmed, charming circle, whilst two of their order, the young Due de Belhabit et Profil-Perdu with the girl to whom he has but recently been married, move hither or thither vaguely, their faces upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and aU their lovers with them, have tried to catch 299 300 YET AGAIN this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come fluttering down to them at last. Now they are tired of trying, knowing that to try were foolish and of no avail. Yet it is pleasant for them to see, as here, others intent on the old pas- time. Perhaps — who knows ? — some day the bird will be trapped . . . Ah, look ! Monsieur Le Due almost touched its wing ! Well for him, after all, that he did not more than that ! Had he caught it and caged it, and hung the gilt cage in the boudoir of Madame la Duchesse, doubtless the bird would have turned out to be but a moping, drooping, moulting creature, with not a song to its little throat ; doubtless the blue colour is but dye, and would soon have faded from wings and breast. And see ! Madame la Duchesse looks a shade fatigued. She must not exert herself too much. Also, the magic hour is aU but over. Soon there will be sunbeams to dispel the dawn's vapour ; and the Blue Bird, with the sun sparkling on its wings, will have soared away out of sight. Allons ! The little rogue is still at large. 'MACBETH AND THE WITCHES' A PAINTING BY COROT, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION LOOK ! Across the plain yonder, those three ^ figures, dark and gaunt against the sky. . . . Who are they ? What are they ? One of them is pointing with rigid arm towards the gnarled trees that from the hillside stretch out their storm-broken boughs and ragged leaves against the sky. Shifting thither, my eye discerns through the shadows two horsemen, riding slowly down the incline. Hush ! I hold up a warning finger to my companion, lest he move. On what strange and secret tryst have we stumbled ? They must not know they are observed. Could we creep closer up to them ? Nay, the plain is so silent : they would hear us ; and so barren : they would surely see us. Here, under cover of this rock, we can crouch and watch them. . . . We discern now more clearly those three expectants. One of them has a cloak of faded blue ; it is 301 302 YET AGAIN fluttering in the wind. Women or men are they ? Scarcely human they seem : inauspicious beings from some world of shadows, magically arisen through that platform of broken rock whereon they stand. The air around, even the fair sky above, is fraught by them with I know not what of subtle bale. One would say they had been waiting here for many days, motionless, eager but not impatient, knowing that at this hour the two horsemen would come. And we — it is strange — have we not ere now beheld them waiting ? In some waking dream, surely, we have seen them, and now dimly recognise them. And the two horsemen, forcing their steeds down the slope — them, too, we have seen, even so. The light through a break in the trees faintly reveals them to us. They are accoutred in black armour. They seem not to be yet aware of the weird figures confronting them across the plain. But the horses, with some sharper instinct, are aware and afraid, straining, quivering. One of them throws back its head, but dares not whinny. As though under some evil spell, all nature seems to be holding its breath. Stealthily, noiselessly, I turn the leaves of my catalogue . . . ' Macbeth and the Witches.' Why, of course ! Of the two horsemen, which is Macbeth, which Banquo ? Though we peer intently, we cannot in those distant shadows distinguish which is he ' MACBETH AND THE WITCHES ' 303 that shall be king hereafter, which is he that shall merely beget kings. It is mainly in virtue of this very vagueness and mystery of manner that the picture is so impressive. An illustration should stir our fancy, leaving it scope and freedom. Most illustrations, being definite, do but affront us. Usually, Shakespeare is illustrated by some English- man overawed by the poet's repute, and incapable of treating him, as did Corot, vaguely and oft- hand. Shakespeare expressed himself through human and superhuman characters ; therefore in England none but a painter of figures would dare illustrate him. Had Corot been an Englishman, this landscape would have had nothing to do with Shakespeare. Luckily, as an alien, he was un- trammelled by piety to the poet. He could turn Shakespeare to his own account. In this picture, obviously, he was creating, and only in a secondary sense illustrating. For him the landscape was the thing. Indeed, the five little figures may have been inserted by him as an afterthought, to point and balance the composition. Vaguely he remem- bered hearing of Macbeth, or reading it in some translation. Ce Sac-espere . . . un beau talent . . . ne romantique. Hugo he would not have attempted to illustrate. But Sac-espere — why not ? And so the little figures came upon the canvas, dim sketches. Charles Lamb disliked theatrical pro- ductions of Shakespeare's plays, because of the 304 YET AGAIN constraint thus laid on his imagination. But in the theatre, at least, we are diverted by movement, recompensed by the sound of the poet's words and (may be) by human intelligence interpreting his thoughts ; whereas from a definite painting of Shakespearean figures we get nothing but an equivalent for the mimes' appearance : nothing but the painter's bare notion (probably quite incongruous with our notion) of what these figures ought to look like. Take Macbeth as an instance. From a definite painting of him what do we get ? At worst, the impression of a kilted man with a red beard and red knees, brandishing a claymore. At best, a sombre barbarian doing nothing in particular. In either case, all the atmosphere, all the character, all the poetry, all that makes Macbeth live for us, is lost utterly. If these defi- nite illustrations of Shakespeare's human figures affront us, how much worse is it when an artist tries his hand at the figures that are superhuman ! Imagine an English illustrator's projection of the weird sisters — with long grey beards duly growing on their chins, and belike one of them duly holding in her hand a pilot's thumb. It is because Corot had no reverence for Shakespeare's text — ^because he was able to create in his own way, with scarcely a thought of Shakespeare, an independent master- piece — that this picture is worthy of its theme. The largeness of the landscape in proportion to the ' MACBETH AND THE WITCHES ' 305 figures seems to show us the tragedy in its essential relation to the universe. We see the heath lying under infinity, under true sky and winds. No hint of the theatre is there. All is as the poet may have conceived it in his soul. And for us Corot's brush-work fills the place of Shakespeare's music. Time has tessellated the surface of the canvas ; but beauty, intangible and immortal, dwells in its depths safely — dwells there even as it dwells in the works of Shakespeare, though the folios be foxed and seared. The longer we gaze, the more surely does the picture illude us and enthral us, steeping us in that tragedy of ' the fruitless crown and barren sceptre.' We forget all else, watching the unkind witches as they await him whom they shall undo, driving him to deeds he dreams not of, and beguiling him, at length, to his doom. Against ' the set of sun ' they stand forth, while he who shall be king here- after, with the comrade whom he shall murder, rides down to them, guileless of aught that shall be. Privy to his fate, we experience a strange compassion. Anon the fateful colloquy will begin. ' All hail, Macbeth ' the unearthly voices will be crjdng across the heath. Can nothing be done ? Can we stand quietly here while . . . Nay, hush ! We are powerless. These witches, if we tried to thwart them, would swiftly blast us. There are things with which no mortal must meddle. There 306 YET AGAIN are things which no mortal must behold. Come away ! So, casting one last backward look across the heath, we, under cover of the rock, steal fearfully away across the parquet floor of the gallery. 'CARLOTTA GRISI' A COLOURED PRINT IT is not among the cardboard glades of the King's Theatre, nor, indeed, behind any footUghts, but in a real and twilit garden that Grisi, gimp-waisted sylphid, here skips for posterity. To her right, the roses on the trellis are not paper roses — one guesses them quite fragrant. And that is a real lake in the distance ; and those delicate pale trees around it, they too are quite real. Yes ! surely this is the garden of Grisi's villa at Uxbridge ; and her guests, quoting Lord Byron's ' al fresco, nothing more delicious,' have tempted her to a daring by-show of her genius. To her left there is a stone cross, which has been draped by one of the guests with a scarf bearing the legend Giselle. It is Sxmday evening, I fancy, after dinner. Cannot one see the guests, a group entranced by its privi- lege — ^the ladies with bandeaux and with little shawls to ward the dew from their shoulders ; the gentlemen, D'Orsayesque all, forgetting to puff the cigars which the ladies, ' this once,' have 307 308 YET AGAIN suffered them to light ? One sees them there ; but they are only transparent phantoms between us and Grisi, not interrupting our vision. As she dances — the peerless Grisi ! — one fancies that she is looking through them at us, looking across the ages to us who stand looking back at her. Her smile is but the formal Cupid's-bow of the ballerina ; but I think there is a clairvoyance of posterity in the large eyes, and, in the pose, a self-consciousness subtler than merely that of one who, dancing, leads all men by the heart-strings. A something is there which is almost shyness. Clearly, she knows it to be thus that she will be remembered ; feels this to be the moment of her immortality. Her form is all but in profile, swaying far forward, but her face is full-turned to us. Her arms float upon the air. Below the stark ruff of muslin about her waist, her legs are as a tilted pair of compasses ; one point in the air, the other impinging the ground. One tiptoe poised ever so lightly upon the earth, as though the muslin wings at her shoulders were not quite strong enough to bear her up into the sky ! So she remains, hovering betwixt two elements ; a creature exquisitely ambiguous, being neither aerial nor of the earth. She knows that she is mortal, yet is conscious of apotheosis. She knows that she, though herself must perish, is imperishable ; for she sees us, her posterity, gazing fondly back at her. She is ' CARLOTTA GRISI ' 309 touched. And we, a little envious of those who did once see Grisi plain, always shall find solace in this pretty picture of her ; holding it to be, for all the artificiality of its convention, as much more real as it is prettier than the stringent ballet-girls of Degas. ' HO-TEI ' A COLOURED DRAWING BY HOKUSAI WHAT monster have we here ? Who is he that sprawls thus, ventrirotund, against the huge oozing wine-skin ? Wide his*n^e^ narrowly-slit his eyes, and with little teeth he smiles at us through a beard of bright russet — a beard soft as the russet coat of a squirrel, and sprouting in several tiers according to the several chins that ascend behind it from his chest. Nude he is but for a few dark twists of drapery. One dimpled foot is tucked under him, the other cocked before him. With a bifurcated fist (such is his hand) he pillows the bald dome of his head. He seems to be very happy, sprawling here in the twilight. The wine oozes from the wine-skin ; but he, replete, takes no heed of it. On the ground before him are a few almond-blossoms, blown there by the wind. He is snuffing their fragrance, I think. Who is he ? ' Ho-Tei,' you tell me ; ' god of increase, god of the corn-fields and rice-fields, 310 ' HO-TEI ' 311 patron of all little children in Japan — a blend of Dionysus and Santa Claus.' So ? Then his look belies him. He is far too fat to care for humanity, too gross to be divine. I suspect he is but some self-centred sage, whom Hokusai beheld with his own eyes in a devious corner of Yedo. A hermit he is, surely ; one not more affable than Diogenes, yet wiser than he, being at peace with himself and finding (as it were) the honest man without emerging from his own tub ; a complacent Diogenes ; a Diogenes who has put on flesh. Looking at him, one is reminded of that over- swollen monster gourd which to young Nevil Beauchamp and his Marquise, as they saw it from their river-boat, ' hanging heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in prolonged con- templation of its image in the mirror below,' so sinisterly recalled Monsieur le Marquis. But to us this ' self-adored, gross bald Cupid ' has no such symbolism, and we revel as whole-heartedly as he in his monstrous contours. ' I am very beautiful,' he seems to murmur. And we endorse the boast. At the same time, we transfer to Hokusai the credit which this glutton takes all to himself. It is Hokusai who made him, delineating his paunch in that one soft summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loath- some for words ; but here, thanks to Hokusai, 312 YET AGAIN he is not less admirable than Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes ! Swathed in his abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of astricted god or athlete that would suffer not by incarnation . . . Presently, we forget again that he is unreal. He seems alive to us, and somehow he is still beautiful. ' It is a beauty,' like that of Mona Lisa, ' wrought out from within upon the flesh, the ' adipose ' deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.' It is the beauty of real fatness — ^that fatness which comes from within, and reacts on the soul that made it, until soul and body are one deep harmony of fat ; that fatness which gave us the geniality of Silenus, of the late Major O 'Gorman ; which soothes all nerves in its owner, and creates the earthy, truistic wisdom of Sancho Panza, of Frangisque Sarcey ; which makes a man selfish, because there is so much of him, and venerable because he seems to be a knoll of the very globe we live on, and lazy inasmuch as the form of government under which he lives is an absolute gastrocracy — ^the belly tyrannising over the mem- bers whom it used to serve, and wielding its power as unscrupulously as none but a promoted slave could. Such is the true fatness. It is not to be con- founded with mere stoutness. Contrast with this ' HO-TEI ' 318 Japanese sage that orgulous hidalgo who, in black velvet, defies modern Prussia from one of Velasquez's canvases in Berlin. Huge is that other, and gross ; and, so puffed his cheeks are that the light, cast up from below, strives vainly to creep over them to his eyes, like a tourist vainly striving to creep over a boulder on a mountain- side. Yet is he not of the hierarchy of true fat- ness. He bears his bulk proudly, and would sit well any charger that were strong enough to bear him, and, if such a steed were not in stables, would walk the distance swingingly. He is a man of action, a fighter, an insolent dominator of men and women. In fact, he is merely a stout man — uniform with Porthos, and Arthur Orton, and Sir John Falstaff ; spiced, like them, with charla- tanism and braggadocio, and not the less a fine fellow for that. Indeed, such bulk as his and theirs is in the same kind as that bulk which, lesser in degree, is indispensable to greatness in practical affairs. No man, as Prince Bismarck declared, is to be trusted in state-craft until he can show a stomach. A lack of stomach betokens lack of mental solidity, of humanity, of capacity for going through with things ; and these three qualities are essential to statesmanship. Poets and philosophers can afford to be thin — cannot, indeed, afford to be otherwise ; inasmuch as poetry and philosophy thrive but in the clouds aloft, and 314 YET AGAIN a stomach ballasts you to earth. Such ballast the statesman must have. Thin statesmen may- destroy, but construct they cannot ; have achieved chaos, but cosmos never. But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can gaze on this exquisitely concrete thing — ^this glad and simple creature of Hokusai ? Let us emulate his cahn, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls before us — pinguis, iners, placidus — in the pale twilight. Let us not seek to identify him as god or mortal, nor guess his character from his form. Rather, let us take him as he is ; for all time the perfect type of fat- ness. Lovely and excessive monster ! Monster im- mensurable ! What belt could inclip you ? What blade were long enough to prick the heart of you ? 'THE VISIT' A PAINTING BY GEORGE MORLAND, IN THE HERTFORD HOUSE COLLECTION NEVER, I suppose, was a painter less maladif in his work than Morland, that lover of simple and sun-bright English scenes. Probably, this picture of his is all cheerful in intention. Yet the effect of it is saddening. Superficially, the scene is cheerful enough. Our first impression is of a happy English home, of childish high-spirits and pretty manners. We note how genial a lady is the visitor, and how eager the children are to please. One of them trips respectfully forward — a wave of yellow curls fresh and crisp from the brush, a rustle of white muslin fresh and crisp from the wash. She is supported on one side by her grown-up sister, on the other by her little brother, who displays the nectarine already given to him by the kind lady. Splendid in far-reaching furbelows, that kind lady holds out both her hands, beaming encourage- ment. On her ample lap is a little open basket 316 316 YET AGAIN with other ripe nectarines in it — one for every child. Modest, demure, the girl trips forward as though she were dancing a quadrille. In the garden, just beyond the threshold, stand two smaller sisters, shyly awaiting their turn. They, too, are in their Sunday-best, and on the tiptoe of excitement — infant coryphSes, in whom, as they stand at the wings, stage-fright is overborne by the desire to be seen and approved. I fancy they are rehearsing under their breath the ' Yes, ma'am,' and the ' No, ma'am,' and the ' I thank you, ma'am, very much,' which their grown-up sister has been drilling into them during the hurried toilet they have just been put through in honour of this sudden caU. How anxious their mother is during the ceremony of introduction ! How keenly, as she sits there, she keeps her eyes fixed on the visitor's face ! Maternal anxiety, in that gaze, seems to be intensi- fied by social humility. For this is no ordinary visitor. It is some great lady of the county, very rich, of high fashion, come from a great mansion in a great park, bringing fruit from one of her own many hot-houses. That she has come at all is an act of no slight condescension, and the mother feels it. Even so did homely Mrs. Fairchild look up to Lady Noble. Indeed, I suspect that this visitor is Lady Noble herself, and that the Fairchilds themselves are neighbours of this family. These ' THE VISIT ' 317 children have been coached to say ' Yes, my lady,' and ' No, my lady,' and ' I thank you, my lady, very much ' ; and their mother has already been hoping that Mrs. Fairchild will haply pass through the lane and see the emblazoned yellow chariot at the wicket. But just now she is all maternal — ' These be my jewels.' See with what pride she fingers the sampler embroidered by one of her girls, knowing well that ' spoilt ' Miss Augusta Noble could not do such embroidery to save her life — ^that life which, through her Promethean naughtiness in playing with fire, she was so soon to lose. Other exemplary samplers hang on the wall yonder. On the mantelshelf stands a slate, with an ink-pot and a row of tattered books, and other tokens of industry. The schoolroom, beyond a doubt. Lady Noble has expressed a wish to see the children here, in their own haunt, and her hostess has led the way hither, somewhat flustered, gasping many apologies for the plainness of the apartment. A plain apartment it is : dark, bare- boarded, dingy- walled. And not merely a material gloom pervades it. There is a spiritual gloom, also — the subtly oppressive atmosphere of a room where life has not been lived happily. Though these children are cheerful now, it is borne in on us by the atmosphere (as preserved for us by Morland's master-hand) that their life is a life of 318 YET AGAIN appalling dismalness. Even if we had nothing else to go on, this evidence of our senses were enough. But we have other things to go on. We know well the way in which children of this period were brought up. We remember the life of ' The Fair- child Family,' those putative neighbours of this family— in any case, its obvious contemporaries ; and we know that the life of those hapless little prigs was t3^ical of child-life in the dawn of the nineteenth century. Depend on it, this family (whatever its name may be : the Thompsons, I conjecture) is no exception to the dismal rule. In this schoolroom, every day is a day of oppression, of forced endeavour to reach an impossible standard of piety and good conduct — a day of tears and texts, of texts quoted and tears shed, incessantly, from morning unto evening prayers. After morn- ing prayers (read by Papa), breakfast. The bread-and-butter, of which, for the children, this meal consists, must be eaten (slowly) in a silence by them unbroken except with prompt answers to such scriptural questions as their parents (who have ham-and-eggs) may, now and again, address to them. After breakfast, the Catechism (heard by Mamma). After the Catechism, a hymn to be learnt. After the repetition of this hymn, arith- metic, caligraphy, the use of the globes. At noon, a decorous walk with Papa, who for their benefit discourses on the General Depravity of Mankind ' THE VISIT ' 319 in all Countries after the Fall, occasionally pausing by the way to point for them some moral of Nature. After a silent dinner, the little girls sew, under the supervision of Mamma, or of the grown- up sister, or of both these authorities, till the hour in which (if they have sewn well) they reap per- mission to play (quietly) with their doll. A silent supper, after which they work samplers. Another hymn to be learnt and repeated. Evening prayers. Bedtime : ' Good-night, dear Papa ; good-night, dear Mamma.' Such, depend on it, is the Thompsons' curriculum. What a painful sequence of pictures a genre-painter might have made of it ! Let us be thankful that we see the Thompsons only in this brief interlude of their life, tearless and unpinafored, in this hour of strange excitement, glorying in that Sunday- best which on Sundays is to them but a symbol of intenser gloom. But their very joy is in itself tragic. It reveals to us, in a flash, the tragedy of their whole exist- ence. That so much joy should result from mere suspension of the usual rigime, the sight of Lady Noble, the anticipation of a nectarine ! For us there is no comfort in the knowledge that their present degree of joy is proportionate to their usual degree of gloom, that for them the Law of Compensation drops into the scale of these few moments an exact counter- weight of joy to the 320 YET AGAIN misery accumulated in the scale of all their other moments. We, who do not live their life, who regard Lady Noble as a mere Hecuba, and who would accept one of her nectarines only in sheer politeness, cannot rejoice with them that do rejoice thus, can but pity them for all that has led up to their joy. We may reflect that the harsh system on which they are reared will enable them to enjoy life with infinite gusto when they are grown up, and that it is, therefore, a better system than the indulgent modern one. We may reflect, further, that it produces a finer type of man or woman, less selfish, better-mannered, more capable and useful. The pretty grown-up daughter here, leading her little sister by the hand, so gracious and modest in her mien, so sunny and affectionate, so obviously wholesome and high-principled — is she not a walk- ing testimonial to the system ? Yet to us the system is not the less repulsive in itself. Its results may be what you please, but its practice were impossible. We are too tender, too senti- mental. We have not the nerve to do our duty to children, nor can we bear to think of any one else doing it. To children we can do nothing but ' spoil ' them, nothing but bless their hearts and coddle their souls, taking no thought for their future welfare. And we are justified, maybe, in our flight to this opposite extreme. Nobody can read one line ahead in the book of fate. No child ' THE VISIT ' 321 is guaranteed to become an adult. Any child may die to-morrow. How much greater for us the sting of its death if its life shall not have been made as pleasant as possible ! What if its short life shall have been made as unpleasant as possible ? Conceive the remorse of Mrs. Thompson here if one- of her children were to die untimely — if one of them were stricken down now, before her eyes, by this surfeit of too sudden joy ! However, we do not fancy that Mrs. Thompson, is going to be thus afflicted. We believe that there is a saving antidote in the cup of her children's- joy. There is something, we feel, that even now prevents them from utter ecstasy. Some shadow, even now, hovers over them. What is it ? It is not the mere atmosphere of the room, so oppres- sive to us. It is something more definite than that, and even more sinister. It looms aloft, monstrously, like one of those grotesque actual shadows which a candle may cast athwart walls- and ceiling. Whose shadow is it ? we wonder, and, wondering, become sure that it is Mr. Thompson's — ^Papa's. The papa of Georgian children ! We know him well, that awfully massive and mysterious person- age, who seemed ever to his offspring so remote when they were in his presence, so frighteningly near when they were out of it. In Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories in Verse he occurs again and S22 YET AGAIN again. Mr, Fairchild was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet, when the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been another perfect type : we can reconstruct him as he was then from the many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the girls had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the lines of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster about him. He, however, is disqualified as a type by the fact that he was ' an entirely honest merchant.' For one of the most salient peculiarities in the true Georgian Papa was his having apparently no occupation whatever — his being simply and solely a Papa. Even in social life he bore no part : we never hear of him calling on a neighbour or being called on. Even in his own household he was seldom visible. Except at their meals, and when he took them for their walk, and when they were sent to him to be reprimanded, his children never beheld him in the flesh. Mamma, poor lady, careful of many other things, superin- tended her children unremittingly, to keep them in the thorny way they should go. Hers the burden and heat of every day, hers to double the roles of Martha and Cornelia, that her husband might be left ever calmly aloof in that darkened room, the Study. There, in a high armchair, with one stout calf crossed over the other, immobile throughout the long hours sate he, propping a ' THE VISIT ' 323 marble brow on a dexter finger of the same material. On the table beside him was a vase of flowers, daily replenished by the children, and a closed volume. It is remarkable that in none of the many woodcuts in which he has been handed down to us do we see him reading ; he is always medi- tating on something he has just read. Occasion- ally, he is fingering a portfolio of engravings, or leaning aside to examine severely a globe of the world. That is the nearest he ever gets to physical activity. In him we see the static embodiment of perfect wisdom and perfect righteousness. We take him at his own valuation, humbly. Yet we have a queer instinct that there was a time when he did not diffuse all this cold radiance of good example. Something tells us that he has been a sinner in his day — a rattler of the ivories at Almack's, and an ogler of wenches in the gardens of Vauxhall, a sanguine backer of the Negro against the Suffolk Bantam, and a devil of a fellow at boxing the watch and wrenching the knockers when Bow Bells were chiming the small hours. Nor do we feel that he is a penitent. He is too Olympian for that. He has merely put these things behind him — ^has calmly, as a matter of business, transferred his account from the worldly bank to the heavenly. He has seen fit to become ' Papa.' As such, strong in the consciousness of his own perfection, he has acquired, gradually. 324 YET AGAIN HASED dWCTVATlON 1»4 DETERIORATtON a|iiiiiilipi|li^ !li