This prosaic view of poetry is distasteful to many, who like to think

that "Paradise Lost" came out in a jet. But all these grandiose

conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is

popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "to think clear

and see straight." People fancy that the dignity of human life demands

that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the

artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest

art--be it literature, music, or painting--is, after all that inspiration

can do has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest

artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without

pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the

little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular

conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and

looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical

scandal-mongers to tell us what "the real Lord Byron" was like. He was

like "Don Juan," his own poem; shrewd, cynical, worldly, with flashes of

exquisite feeling. The poem which is cut out of young ladies' editions of

Byron is the one that represents him most truly in his blend of

sensualism and idealism, whereas the Brocken figure is but Byron as he

appeared to himself in his stormiest and gloomiest moments, and even that

phantasm artistically draped and limelit by a poet's imagination. If

people realised how much Byron wrote in his pitiable span of thirty-six

years, how much hard labour went to make those cleverly-rhymed stanzas of

"Childe Harold" or "Don Juan," despite Swinburne's accusation of

botchery, they would see that he really had very little time to be

wicked. They would understand that art--even the most decadent--is based

on strenuous labour.

Young, gay,

Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground

Of thought and of austerity within.

Even in poetically declaring himself a decadent, the artist must take as

many pains as fall to the prosiest bourgeois. This is the paradox of the

position. Just as the pyrrhonist in maintaining that there is no truth

asserts one, so the literary pessimist partly contradicts his contention

of the futility of existence by his anxiety to express himself elegantly.

Leopardi's Italian and Schopenhauer's German are far superior to those of

the optimistic philosophers; and one of the most polished poems of our

day is poor Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night." So, too, the poet who

declares himself an idler and a vagabond gives the lie to his pretensions

by the labour he takes to clothe them in unimpeachable verse. The other

morning I looked out of my study window after breakfast and discovered

that the weather was heavenly. I had lingered over the meal, reading the

beautiful political speeches, from which I gathered there was a Crisis at

hand. I knew that Crisis. I had heard about it ever since I learnt to

hear. Nevertheless, the newspapers were still devoting as much space to

it as if it were brand-new, and beguiling me to take interest in it. I

felt quite annoyed when I looked at the blue sky after breakfast and took

deep breaths of ambrosial air, and thought how I had wasted my time.

Thrilled by the sunshine, a cosmic rapture seized me, and I wondered that

men should fritter away their time in politics and other serious

occupations. The inspiration grew and grew, and I felt that my lips had

been touched by the sacred fire, and that I had been called to preach a

great moral lesson to mankind. So I took up my pen and wrote:

Bright the sun this lovely May-day;

Youth and love should have their heyday;

Every day should be a play-day.

Yet mankind will work and worry,

Over trifles fuss and flurry,

Getting hot as Indian curry.

Orators, in such a season,

How unreasonable is reason!

'Gainst the sunshine't is a treason.

What care I for Gladstone's glories?

Hang the Radicals and Tories!

Give me hammocks, pipes and stories!

What's the use of all this wrangling,

Grammar and emotions mangling?

Up the river let's go angling.

Sweet are walks and swimming nice is,

Bring me lemon-squash and ices,

Bother that eternal Crisis!

I was called away to lunch in the middle of the attack of inspiration.

Inspiration is of course very useful, but it has a way of suggesting

words that won't rhyme, and luring you off into all sorts of false

tracks. Moreover, it affords no help whatever in polishing. After lunch I

set to work with renewed zeal, licking the lines into their present

perfection. At last they were finished, and as I lit the gas to enable me

to see to make a fair copy, I realised that the beautiful blue day was

gone.

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

butterfly.

Sims Reeves tells an amusing anecdote of Mario the singer. Being brought

one Thursday night by an eminent composer to sing at a big fashionable

party, he found so great a line of carriages in front of his own that it

was past midnight ere he arrived at the door. The thought that it was

already Friday, and that he was about to sing in a new house, whose

hostess he did not even know, had already dismayed the superstitious

singer. But when he saw the number on the door was 13, no power on earth

and no amount of argument could induce him to enter. "Ah, yes," said the

hostess, smiling pleasantly, when the composer explained, "a very

ingenious excuse, for which Mario ought to be grateful to you. Of course

he was intoxicated, and after a long argumentation you at last persuaded

him to go home."

Poe was doubtless occasionally drunk; but think of the years of sober

labour, of stooping over desks, that must have gone to make those

wonderful tales! Which is the true Poe, the hard drinker or the hard

worker? That the artist must get drunk is, indeed, the belief of certain

schools of young men even to-day; but is it not based on the old eternal

false-logic, that because some artists have got drunk, therefore to get

drunk is to be artistic? It was Murger who invented the Bohemian artist,

poor and gay and of an easy morality. "Musette and Mimi!" says Sarcey.

"The image of those ideal beings shone on every man who was twenty-one

about 1848. 'La Vie de Bohème' was youth's breviary--fifty years ago."

The great dramatic critic goes on to complain of the onslaught made upon

him because he wrote against this "idleness of disposition, this

heedlessness for the morrow, this inclination to look for the day's

tobacco and the quarter's rent from loans and debts rather than from

honest work, this witty contempt for current morality." But this is

scarcely the teaching of the ever delightful book, which catches the

spirit of youth and gaiety and irresponsibility wedded to artistic ardour

as no other book has done before or since, and for which one might put in

the plea that Charles Lamb made for the dramatists of the Restoration.

Its world is only a pleasing fiction, and the ordinary rules of morality

do not carry over into it. It is the East of Suez of literature, "where

there ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man may raise a thirst." The real

Bohemia, as Jules Valdes showed in "Réfractaires," is a world of misery

and discontent. Still more sordid is the English Bohemia expounded by Mr.

Gissing in "New Grub Street." Mr. Robert Buchanan indeed writes as if

there had been a Murgerian Bohemia in England in his young days. "_Et ego

fui in Bohemiâ_. There were inky fellows and bouncing girls, _then_;

_now_ there are only fine ladies, and respectable God-fearing men of

letters." Really! Surely there are plenty of bouncing girls and inky

fellows still, just as there were respectable God-fearing men of letters

and fine ladies even in the roaring forties. I doubt if Bohemia was ever

so amusing as Mr. Buchanan imagines now, and I suspect the bouncing girls

were "gey ill to live with." What is true in the immortal Bohemian myth,

what appeals to the universal human instinct, is the eternal contrast

between the dreams and aspirations of youth and the sobrieties of success

and middle age. As Jeffery Prowse sang:

I dwelt in a city enchanted,

And lonely, indeed, was my lot;

Two guineas a week, all I wanted,

Was certainly all that I got.

Well, somehow I found it was plenty,

Perhaps you may find it the same,

If--_if_ you are just five-and-twenty,

With industry, hope, and an aim;

Though the latitude's rather uncertain,

And the longitude also is vague,

The persons I pity who know not the City,

The beautiful City of Prague!

This Bohemia will never disappear, because every generation of youth

reconstructs it afresh, to migrate from it into the world of

respectability above or the world of shame below. "Qu'on est bien à vingt

ans!" will always be a cry to fill the breast of portly respectability

with tender regret. As Thackeray put it in that delightful poem, which is

almost an improvement on Béranger:

With pensive eyes the little room I view,

Where, in my youth, I weathered it so long;

With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two,

And a light heart still breaking into song;

Making a mock of life and all its cares,

Rich in the glory of my rising sun,

Lightly I vaulted up four pair of stairs

In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality

of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with

youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great

matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who

would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds.

And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a

treachery. Yet will the _grisette_ be ever a gracious memory, and

literature will always embalm the "Mimi Pinson" of De Musset.

She is dead now, _la grisette_, even in Paris, and "hic jacet" may be

written over the bonnet she threw _pardessus les moulins_.

Ah, Clemence! When I saw thee last

Trip down the rue de Seine,

And turning, when thy form had pass'd,

I said, "We meet again,"

I dreamed not in that idle glance

Thy latest image came,

And only left to Memory's trance

A shadow and a name.

That is how she affected even the Puritan Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes,

there is something in the Bohemian tradition that touches the sternest of

us--not the roystering, dissolute, dishonourable, shady Bohemia that is

always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the racecourse, the gambling

club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as

Shakespeare's "desert country near the sea," the land of light purses and

light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on

pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger

than a single virtue, and Charles Surface is always more agreeable than

Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper

as he pretends. And if Tom or Charles is a poet to boot, what can we not

forgive him? The poet must have his experiences--be sure that nine tenths

of them are purely of the imagination. For the other tenth--well, if

Burns had been strictly temperate, "the world had wanted many an idle

song," and we should not have celebrated his centenary so

enthusiastically. The poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose

silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should

have a full and varied life, from which "nihil humanum" is alien. Mr.

Barry Pain once wrote a subtle story, which only three persons

understood, to show that a great poet might be an elegant egotist, of

unruffled life and linen. If so, I should say that such a poet's genius

would largely consist of hereditary experience; he would, in language

that is not so unscientific as it sounds, be a reincarnation of a soul

that had "sinned and suffered." But as a rule the poet does his own

sinning and suffering, and catches for himself that haunting sense of the

glory and futility of life which is the undertone of the modern poet's

song, and which finds such magical expression in Heine's verses:

I have loved, oh, many a maiden kind,

And many a right good fellow,--

Where are they all? So pipes the wind,

So foams and wanders the billow.

But the poet's morals are maligned. The fierce light which beats upon the

throne of song reveals the nooks and crannies of the singers' lives,

which for the rest they themselves expose rather than conceal. I should

say that the average morality of the poet is much superior to the average

morality of the man of the world who sins in well-bred silence. The poet

gloats over his sins--is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he

hints or exaggerates or invents. That is where the poet's imagination

comes in--to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The

poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the

"poet's licence" is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To

have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability: the

energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme. _Qui

ose tout dire arrive à tout faire_, say the French. Arrives _at_,

perhaps, though even this is doubtful, but certainly does not start from

that platform. Much less questionable were it to say: _Qui ose tout faire

arrive à ne rien dire._

The late M. Verlaine will be cited as a substantiation of the popular

idea of the vagabond poet. The Verlaine legend has now been consecrated

by his death; and for all time, I suppose, Verlaine will rank with Villon

as an impossible person. He may have been all that is said, all that is

hinted, even in Mr. George Moore's famous description of him. "I once saw

Verlaine. I shall not forget the bald prominent forehead (_une tête

glabre_), the cavernous eyes, the macabre expression of burnt-out lust

smouldering upon his face."

But there is another side to him, and it is perhaps because I do not go

about the world with Mr. Moore's "macabresque" eye, which to-day happily

sees things in a soberer colouring, that I saw this other side of

Verlaine when, like Mr. George Moore, I hunted him up on his native

heath. For one thing, I was not prepared to see anything very lurid and

_diabolique_: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew

besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine

anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the "French master," the

poor, despised, "frog-eating Mounseer Jacques" of boys' stories, the butt

of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make

a man _diabolique_! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this

depressing drudgery to our "vagabond's" credit. Think of it! The first

poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions

conjugating the verb _aimer_ in its hideous grammatical reality!

Fumons philosophiquement,

Promenons-nous

Paisiblement:

Rien faire est doux.

So might Verlaine write, though contradicting himself by doing something

in so doing; but in the absurd actual he had to earn his bread and

butter, and man cannot live by poetry alone, unless one sings the joys

and sorrows of the middle classes. It was rather late at night before,

having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the

narrow, poverty-stricken _rue_ in which Verlaine was living a year or so

ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone

stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness.

At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice

called out, "I've gone to bed." I explained my lateness and said I would

call to-morrow.

"No, no! _Attendez!_" I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope

about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened,

and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped _bourgeois_ pulling

on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our

English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded

by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the

vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He

greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse though his face

was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was

bandaged, but not repulsively. No, "homely" is the only impression I

shall ever have of Verlaine, the man. Even in that much maligned

"macabresque" head of his, there was more of the _bonhomme_ than of the

poet or the satyr. The little garret was his all in all; a bed took up

half the space. On the table stood the remains of supper. A few shelves

of books, a sketch or two, and a bird-cage with a canary were the only

attempts at ornament.

Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure

immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child's unshamed acceptance

of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have

made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having

probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud

of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson.

He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own

fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a "crystal goblet." "_Ce

verre-là!_" he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap

glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also

an allusion to a "blue-bird," a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I

fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The "_plumage bleutê de

l'orgueil_" figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at

this "blue-bird" he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle:

"_Cet oiseau-ci._" When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy

stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton

nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah, well!

after the English school-rooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets

and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. _Rien faire est doux_.

In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English

clergyman found immortality by writing one poem,--"The Burial of Sir John

Moore,"--and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole,

he has left three or four lyrics which can die only if the French

language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of

the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. Much of his

verse--especially his later verse--is to me, at least, as obscure as

Mallarmé. But

Il pleut dans mon coeur

Comme il pleut dans la rue

can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless

drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric:

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur

Monotone.

He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French

poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical--in a

word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold

marble urn. It has always lacked "soul," the haunting, elusive magic of

wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the "finer light in

light," that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo

of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual

poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French

literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and

the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. But did not our own

artistic prisoner once sing:

Surely there was a time I might have trod

The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance

Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God?

Was ever more devout Catholic than Benvenuto Cellini, who murdered his

enemies and counted his beads equal gusto?

V

THE INDESTRUCTIBLES

I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity--not to say the

self-contradictoriness--of the constant correspondent. The creature will

enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it,

and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled

from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career I have

followed with interest, will indicate the delicious inconsequence that

has made them for me such grateful reading:

1888.

SIR,--There is nothing in life worth purchasing by pulsations and

respirations. The world is a dank, malarious marsh, with fitful

Will-o'-the-Wisp flashes of false radiance--a vast cemetery waiting

for our corpses. There is no such thing as happiness.

Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravin, shrieks against

the idea. Youth is an illusion, maturity a regret, and old age an

apprehension. Fortunately Providence has sent us a panacea--Universal

Suicide.

I am, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1889.

SIR,--Surely "A Mad Englishman" and "Dorothy X.," who maintain so

glibly that country life is more enjoyable than town life, fail to

realise how much of our pleasure depends on human intercourse. It is

given only to poets to talk with trees. Nor can ordinary mortals find

Sermons in stones,

Books in the running brooks.

We need the cathedrals and the libraries that are to be found only in

the great centres of national life--yes, and also the art galleries

and the theatres. Of course, if people will martyr themselves to keep

up appearances, and want to live in a fashionable neighbourhood, they

will not find town life either cheap or pleasant. But if they are

content to live outside the aristocratic radius, they can find many a

comfortable villa, with baths (hot and cold), and back gardens which

may easily be converted into rustic retreats (I would especially

recommend rhododendrons). If you are also not above omnibuses (taking

a cab only when it rains, and selecting a driver who does not look as

if he would swear), and are satisfied to go to the pit, then I feel

sure London is not only as cheap as the obscurest village, but gives

you a far greater return for your money. Newly-married couples in

especial often make a great mistake in settling in the country for

the sake of economy. It is only in the town that they can really lead

a tranquil, happy life, enriched with all the resources of culture

and civilisation.

I am, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1890.

SIR,--The failure of marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any

longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of

every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this

mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home"

conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is

misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together

like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we know of human nature.

Love, free as air, at sight of human ties

Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.

Away with this effete Pharisaism! Let us realise the infinite

possibilities of happiness latent in the blessing of existence. The

world is longing for freedom to love truly, nobly, wisely, many.

I am, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1891.

SIR,--I can testify by personal experience to the fact that the

manners of our children are deteriorating. Coming up to the

Metropolis for a day's excursion last Bank Holiday, I could not walk

anywhere without overhearing ribald remarks--and, what was worse, at

my own expense--even from respectably dressed children. Let those

look to it who

Teach the young idea how to shoot.

I thank Heaven my lot has always been cast in a sweet Devonshire

village, where the contagion of ill-conduct has not yet spread among

the juvenile population.

I am, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINS.

1892.

SIR,--Have your flippant correspondents, "Polygamist" and "Illegal

Brother-in-Law," any conception of the thousands (ay, tens of

thousands) of hearts that are, languishing in misery because they

cannot marry their deceased sisters' husbands? And all because of a

text which is not to be found in the Bible! Fie upon you, ye

so-called Bishops,

Dressed in a little brief authority.

Abolish this unrighteous law, I say, and let floods of sunshine and

happiness into a million darkened homes.

I am, Sir,

Yours obediently,

AGATHA P. ROBINS.

But, after all, is it fair to juxtaposit Agatha's letters? What if one

were to collect the leaders of any newspaper on any given subject, before

or after any event? I have met Agatha P. Robins in many other places at

many other times. Sometimes she is interested in the best substitute for

shirt-buttons or for Christianity, sometimes in the problem of living on

a thousand a year, sometimes in the abolition of stag-hunting.

SIGNS OF THE SILLY SEASON.

A gooseberry that groweth green and great,

A serpent round the sea serenely curled,

A lonely soul that fails to find a mate,

A boy redundant in a teeming world,

A sister yearning for dead sisters' shoes,

A life that longs for death, or after-life,

A ghost, a mistress whom her maids abuse,

An erring judge, a French or German wife,

A child's long ear or holiday, a slum,

A man gone bald, or drunk, a coin's design--

Should things like these across your paper come,

Conclude the Silly Season will be fine.

It is difficult to trace exactly when "The Season" ends and "The Silly

Season" begins. It needs the finest discrimination to know when the

adjective comes in--without a worldly training, indeed, you cannot tell

the one from the other. But the past masters of the social art proclaim

that "The Season" is dead, and we bow our heads in reverence. Yes, it is

vanished, that focus of futilities, that wonderful Season, that

phantasmagoria of absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which a

hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and

jubilations and processions--dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's

street. Often have I debated the potency of satire, again and again have

I suggested to learned friends a scientific and historical investigation

of the popular belief that satire moves mountains or even molehills. But

they agree only in shrinking from the task. To take only the last

half-century: we have had one supreme satirist who harped eternally on

the failings of fashion and the vanity of things. In his novels society

saw itself reflected in all its attitudes and postures and posings. Not

one meanness or folly escaped. What Professor Huxley has done for the

crayfish, that Thackeray did for the Snob. He studied him lovingly, he

dissected him, he classified every variety of him. A thousand disciples,

less gifted but equally remorseless, followed in the Master's footsteps.

"Punch" took up the tale, and week by week repeated the joke. It was

heard in drawing-room recitations to the accompaniment of pianos; it even

went on the stage. Ladies rushed into print to expose foibles men never

guessed, and to say of the sex at large what less gifted women say only

of their personal friends. For years we have never ceased for a moment to

hear the lash of the whip, the swish of the birch, the whizz of the

arrow, the ping of the bullet, the thwack of the flail, the thud of the

hammer, the buzzing of the hornet. And what does it all amount to? How

much execution has been done? Is society purer or nobler? Have less

daughters been sold at Vanity Fair, or more invitations been sent to poor

relatives? Has Jones got better manners or champagne? Is Mrs. Ponsonby de

Tomkins more distant to duchesses? Did my Lady Clara Vere de Vere

consider whether Hood's seamstress was at work on her court gown? Is any

one wiser or kinder or honester for all the literary pother? Are the

diplomatic corps less maculate than in the days of Grenville Murray? Have

we not, on the contrary, cast on our own imperfections the complaisance

of an eye educated in the superior imperfections of our neighbours?

Lo, here is a new satirist arisen, Sarah Jeannette Duncan, who, in "The

Simple Adventures of a Memsahib," sketches Anglo-Indian society in a

manner that would not discredit Thackeray--and with something, too, of

Thackeray's haunting sense of the pathos of the dead Past and the flying

Present. But will the memsahib of to-morrow take warning by the fate of

Helen Peachey, who went out to India in all her bridal bravery, in all

her youth and freshness? Will she escape exchanging the placidity of Fra

Angelico's piping cherubim for the petulance and ring-shadowed eyes of

the seasoned matron? Will she be on her guard against shrinking to the

prejudices and flirtations of a coterie, dying to all finer and higher

issues? Will she worship virtue more and viceroys less? Alas, I fear me

not--no more than Pagett, M. P., will leave off talking solar myths, or

foolish things cease to be done under the deodars. Will Hogarth keep

wine-bibbers from the bottle, or can you make men sober by acts of

"L'Assommoir"? Will "Madame Bovary" stay a sister's fall, or "Sapho"

repel an eligible young man? Will "The Dunciad" keep one dunce from

scribbling, or "Le Tartufe" elevate a single ecclesiastic? As well expect

"long firms" to run short, and the moths to avoid the footlights, and the

fool to cease from the land. "How gay they were, and how luxurious, and

how important in their little day! How gorgeous were the attendants of

their circumstances, on the box with a crest upon their turbans!--there

is a firm in Calcutta that supplies beautiful crests. And now, let me

think! some of them in the Circular Road Cemetery--cholera, fever,

heat-apoplexy; some of them under the Christian daisies of

England--probably abscess of the liver." Yes, madam, we know it all, we

recognize the Thackeray touch. "And soon, very soon, our brief day, too,

will have died in a red sunset behind clustering palms, and all its

little doings and graspings and pushings, all its petty scandals and

surmises and sensations, will echo further and further back into the

night." True, most true, and pity 't is 't is true. But meantime we will

go on with our little doings and graspings and pushings--yes, madam, even

you and I who have realised the vanity of all things; for the knowledge

thereof--this, too, is vanity. "And it was all a striving and a striving,

and an ending in nothing, and no one knew what they had lived and worked

for." Yea, so it is, Frau Schreiner. And still we are living on--and oh!

how hard we work (on African farms or otherwhere) to express artistically

our sense of the futility of life!

VANITAS VANITATUM.

A rich voluptuous languor of dim pain,

A dreamy sense of passionate regret,

Delicious tears and some sweet, sad refrain,

Some throbbing, vague, and tender canzonet,

That mourns for life so real and so vain,

Wherein we glory while our eyes are wet.

I am afraid, if I pursue this investigation, I shall end by believing

that satire is simply an aesthetic satisfaction--the last luxury of the

sinful. Ridicule, we are always told, is a tremendous destructive--an

atmosphere in which nothing can live. But is it? Christianity, Kings, and

War are little the worse for the jets of mockery that have been playing

on them for two centuries. In Swift's day the wits at the coffee-houses

regarded religion as a farce that even the Augurs could not keep up any

longer without public winking; yet Diderot and the Encyclopaedia are

dead, and the bishops we have always with us! It was thought War could

not survive Voltaire's remark that a monarch picks up a parcel of men who

have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard,

and marches away with them to glory--but here is our Henley singing a

song of the sword, while all our novelists are looking to their weapons.

Despite Heine's sarcasm, the collection of English kings is as incomplete

as ever. A passing fad can, perhaps, be made to pass along a little

faster, but it only makes room for another. True, "Punch" killed the

craze for sunflowers and long necks; but then "Punch" invented it. It was

merely made to be destroyed brilliantly, like a Chinese cracker or a

Roman candle. Folly is older than "Punch's" jokes, and will survive them.

Snobbery and self-seeking, pettiness and stupidity, envy, hate, and all

uncharitableness, were no secret to the mummies in the British Museum.

"Unto the place whither the rivers go, thither they go again." Are there

not a hundred sayings in Ecclesiastes and Menander, in Horace and

Molière, as apt to-day as though fresh from the typewriter? One of the

learned friends to whom I proposed the thesis contended that Perseus and

Juvenal at least are out of date. But this was merely my learned friend's

ignorance. Is it not the truest piety to conclude that those things which

the ridicule of the ages cannot kill deserve their immortality--that

Kings, War, and Christianity play a part in the scheme of creation, and

that even snobbery and jobbery, folly and fraud, rouge and

respectability, and horse-racing, bounders and politicians, the

prize-ring and the marriage market, are all necessary to the fun of

Vanity Fair! They are thrown up by the flux of things for Honesty to set

his heel on. So houp-la! On with the dance! louder, ye fiddlers! faster,

O merry-go-round! Nay, not so glum, ye moralists and satirists,

philanthropists and preachers; link hands all--_ducdame, ducdame!_--and

thank the gods for keeping you in occupation. What should we do without

our fools? The question seems pat for a Silly Season correspondence.

Come, gather, fools all. Ye could not be better employed than in

answering it. For, mark, brother-satirists mine, you cannot kill the

Silly Season correspondence.

And you cannot kill Ghosts. Perhaps because they do not exist. No other

dead thing is so tenacious of life as your ghost. If ridicule were really

fatal, we should have given up the ghost long since. Consider the fires

of burlesque through which he has passed unscathed. What indignity has

been spared him? Now at last he is to encounter the supreme test--he is

to be taken seriously. The Psychical Society has the matter in hand--or

should one say, the spirit? And Mr. Stead, who believes in himself in a

way that is refreshing in these atheistic times, proposes either to

rehabilitate the ghost or to lay him for ever. But this latter is beyond

the might of man or society.

And you cannot kill Grouse. At least I can't. I sometimes suspect there

are others of the population equally incompetent, and perhaps still less

interested in battues; though the Twelfth figures in everybody's calendar

like a Church festival, and the newspapers devote leaders to it, and the

comic papers have pictures, and sometimes even jokes about it, and you

would think the whole population of these islands struck work and went

a-shooting with gillies and dogs and appropriate costume. But that is the

craftiness of the editors, from Mr. Buckle and Mr. Yates down to the

editor of the _Halfpenny Democrat_--they make the humblest of us feel we

are in the best sets, so we all come up to town for the season, and are

seen at three parties a night, and we ride in the Park, and we go to

Henley and Goodwood to a man; and we yacht at Cowes, and pot grouse in

Scotland--still with the same wonderful unanimity; and we hunt with the

hounds, and run with the salmon, and keep our Christmas in country

houses, and come up smiling for the New Year, ready to recommence the

same old Sisyphean round. I suppose the people who really do these things

could be exhibited in the National Gallery, but the space their doings

fill is incalculable.

And you cannot kill Adelphi Melodrama. But I have a piece of advice to

offer to the Italian gentlemen who have done so much for our stage. It

is, that they run their theatre on a principal of duality befitting their

joint management. Let it be the home of Melodrama and Burlesque, the same

play serving for both _genres_. Let, say, Mr. Sims--who is so clever in

either species--write the pieces--each melodrama being its own burlesque.

An extra dash of colour here, an ambiguous line there, with a serious

meaning in the melodrama and a droll in the burlesque, will secure the

brothers two audiences, and after eight o'clock I guarantee standing room

only. The simple will come to weep and thrill, the cynics to laugh and

chuckle. And everybody will be happy.

In sooth, is not the world divided into those who take the great cosmic

drama seriously, and those who treat it as farce? On the one hand the

workers and the fighters, on the other the journalists, politicians, and

men about town. Yet have the workers and the fighters the nobler part. A

genuine emotion, an earnest conviction, vitalises life. The day-dreams of

hungry youth are better than the dinners of prosaic maturity, and a

simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred epigrams. I had rather be

an Adelphi god than a smoking-room satyr.

Who shall blame the melodramatist? He writes for those to whom literature

makes no appeal. Literature is a freemasonry of the highest minds, and

that poetry is Greek to the masses I should scarcely have thought a

"Question at Issue" demanding substantiation from Mr. George Gissing. Mr.

Gosse must know that the eclipse which darkened England at the passing of

Alfred Tennyson was invented by the newspapers and the poets who outraced

one another to weep upon his tomb. Look upon Mr. Booth's map of East

London, with its coloured lines showing the swarms of human beings who

live ignobly and die obscurely, and realise for yourself of what import

the cult of beautiful form is to these human ant-heaps. Walk down the

populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday night, or traverse the long slimy

alleys of Rotherhithe among the timber wharves, and discover how many of

your countrymen and contemporaries are living neither in your country nor

in your century. To Mr. Henry James, the dull undertone of pain and

sorrow is part of the music of London--such harmony is in aesthetic

souls. But the dull and the gross, who only suffer and endure, the muddy

vesture of decay closes them in and they cannot hear it.

What shall literature do for these? In a great smoky Midland town, on

dreary pavements, under sloppy skies, I saw a girl who was a greater

argument for melodrama than all the cheques of all the managers. She was

going to her work in the raw dawn, her lunch in a package under her arm;

the back was bent and the face was pale and pinched, but there was a

slumbering fire of romance in the deep-fringed eyes, and suggestions of

poetry lurked in the shadows of her hair; and at once my breast was full

of stirrings to write for her--only for her--a book full of beauty and

happiness and sunshine, and, oh! such false views of life, such

inaccurate pictures of the pleasures of a society she would never know.

The hero should be handsome and brave and good, with a curling moustache;

and the heroine should be beautiful and true, with an extensive wardrobe;

and the clouds would come only to roll by, and the story should die away

in an odour of orange-blossom, and in a music of marriage-bells. And

there should be lots of money for everybody, and any amount of laughter

and gaiety, and I would give dances twice a volume, and see that all the

girls had partners, delightful waltzers with good conversation. And there

would be garden-parties (weather permitting invariably), and picnics

without green spiders, and sails without sea-sickness. And as for truth

and realism--fie on them! We can create a much nicer world than nature's.

Why be plagiarists, when we can make universes of our own?

VI

CONCERNING GENERAL ELECTIONS

Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a

backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great

bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter

at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks

homing at twilight, as though the course of Nature were still the same,

and to see the moonlight rippling over the sombre water at midnight in

unaffected tranquillity. Myself was scarcely better informed of the tidal

flood: stray echoes of speech, odd fragments of newspaper floated down to

me, and at intervals some visitant from the greater deep held, like a

sea-shell, the rumour of its sounding waters.

And, indeed, where shall we find a better metaphor for party-government

than this of the tide, of the ebb and flow of political

power--remorseless, inevitable, regardless of those who, tossed high on

the stream, imagine they direct it? And in this metaphor the People must

play Moon, like the clown in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." But, as Juliet

says:

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

The cause of this inconstancy has not escaped even the philosophers. The

Whig and the Tory, rival lovers of Luna,--moonstruck ravers,--woo her

with honeyed words and dulcet promises, and she inclines her coquettish

ear--most of the month she is all ear--to the highest bidder. But when

she comes to her full--and is all eye--then she perceives her swain

faithless and empty-handed, and straightway she plights her troth to his

clamorous and expostulant fellow, who dangles his untried promises before

her disappointed vision. And the days pass, and she rises and sets; but

lo! the bridal gifts linger still, and the horn of plenty is an empty

trumpet, and, forgetful of her first lover's failure, she turns to him

again. And so for ever, in a fickle quest of fidelity, pathetic enough.

Perhaps she--with the two strings to her bow--shares the just fate of

coquettes, happy with neither; perhaps she were wiser to give herself to

a single lover, and be rid for ever of these hesitancies. And yet, would

she profit by the change? Endymion, the one youth whose beauty drew her

from heaven, remained perpetually asleep. Is there not some profound

significance in the ancient myth, some truth that would have pleased

Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (as the pedants will have us call the man

who did not write Shakespeare).

But the philosophers, who have understood the levity of mind that

underlies changes of Cabinets, have not always understood the numerical

pettiness of the voting power by which the change is effected. Just as

every philosopher is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, so, as Mr.

Gilbert sings, is every Englishman born a little Liberal or a little

Conservative: even if his politics be not original sin, it is early

acquired. Thus, then, the nation consists of two great camps--the

Liberals and the Conservatives--which are practically fixed; standing

armies that may be relied upon. A born Liberal may wax fat and kick at

his ancient principles: a born Conservative may change his coat and turn

Whig. But these exceptions are rare. For the most part men stick to their

party and die as foolish as they were born--which is called consistency.

Convinced sometimes against their will, they are of the same opinion

still. Loyalty and obstinacy will look facts in the face and never

blench, and every one remains truer to his social circle than to his

private judgments. People's politics are their prejudices at a masked

ball, and the Conservatives will vote Conservative and the Liberals

Liberal, through a cannonade of unanswerable cartoons. Apart from these

two great standing armies, there is a shifting body of free-lances,

guerrillas, Jacks-o'-both-sides, call them what you will--waverers who

have too much conscience or too little, who are swayed by their reason or

their pocket, or who are gullible enough to believe that the opposition

will do better, or sportsmen enough to desire fair play and a chance for

the other side, and who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that.

The camps themselves are fairly matched: Rads and Tories--the sexes of

politics--are as evenly created as men and women. They are like ten-pound

weights standing on either scale of a balance. What, then, determines the

oscillation this way or that? Evidently the miserable little half-ounce

weight placed sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In

fine,'tisthe tiny squadron of free-lances that wins general elections,

the voters who think or who don't think, or who veer to be with the

majority. The Jacks-o'-both-sides rule England, even as the Parnell

brigade ruled Parliament. To this floating population is it given to make

or unmake Cabinets; theirs is the righteous indignation that sweeps the

country like a new broom, and sweeps Ministries into limbo; to them is

made the magniloquent "appeal to the country!" _L'état, c'est nous!_

might be the motto of this third party, were it but conscious of itself

as a party.

"The majority is never right," cries Dr. Stockmann in "The Enemy of the

People." "Never, I say. That is one of those conventional lies against

which a free, thoughtful man must rebel. Who are they that make up the

majority of a country? Is it the wise men or the foolish? I think we must

agree that the foolish folk are, at present, in a terribly overwhelming

majority all around and about us the wide world over. But, devil take it,

it can surely never be right that the foolish should rule over the

wise.... The majority has might--unhappily--but right it has not. I and a

few others are right." But how if "I and a few others" organised

themselves after the fashion of the Parnellites? how if the wise men made

up their minds that the world should no longer be governed with the

proverbial minimum of wisdom, and, taking advantage of the natural

balance of parties, resolved that they should be the ones to supply the

principle of movement to the equilibrated social machine? Surely the

Millennium could not long resist the Philosophers' party. But, alas!

would the wise men agree? Would not they also split up into two factions?

And even if philosophers were kings and kings philosophers, _would_ the

kingdom of Plato be at hand?

Popular suffrage is much maligned. "Think," says Bouvard, one of the

tragi-comic twain who serve for title to that saddest of all humorous

books, Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pécuchet," "think of all those who buy

pomades and patent medicines. These blockheads form the electorate and we

submit to their will. Why can't one make three thousand a year by

breeding rabbits? Because too much crowding together is fatal to them. In

like manner, by the mere coming together of a crowd the germs of

stupidity which it contains get developed and the consequences are

incalculable." But popular suffrage does not operate like this at all.

One might almost say that half the stupidity contradicts and annihilates

the other half: in practice the franchise carries its own antidote,--the

"germs of stupidity" do not get developed, but destroyed. The metaphor of

germs would be more appropriate if applied to the ideas of the

party-programmes, for these ideas are introduced by a few wise or foolish

men and disseminated epidemically throughout their respective parties.

Democracy never escapes aristocracy, for the people never invents ideas;

its whole power is that of choice between the ideas offered by its

would-be leaders, and even these ideas it accepts less as a philosopher

than as a patient, rather as "germs" than as thoughts. And when once it

has accepted its leaders or its representatives, the beautiful

parliamentary system deprives it of all further rights of interference

for a term of years, and the policy of the country is far more dependent

on the intestine rivalries and manoeuvrings of the representatives than

on the desires and demands of the represented. In a really democratic

system there would be a central bureau of statesmen not necessarily

elected by the voice of the people, and this bureau should have for

object not the wrangling over measures, but the mere proposition of them.

These trained thinkers and diplomatists--accepting advice freely from the

great newspapers and the chiefs of factions--would propose whatever

measures seemed necessary from time to time for the preservation, the

elevation, and the dignity of the commonweal, and these propositions

would be submitted officially to every franchise-holder, just as the

inquisitive census-paper or the parochial voting-paper is to-day. The

"Ayes" or "Noes" of the people would have it, not of those who represent

them, save the mark! The details could be drafted by specialists, as

to-day. That this would be a better or even a feasible system I do not

say; but I do maintain that any other democracy than this is a fraud. To

have the ten-thousandth part of a voice in selecting among the varying

policies of sundry ambitious gentlemen, all of whom have been foisted on

me by committees, and of whom the successful one--whose professed views

may be quite antithetical to mine and can at best only roughly represent

them--will have, when he is not absent or manoeuvred into silence, the

six-hundred-and-seventieth part of a voice in accepting or rejecting the

ideas of half a dozen very ambitious gentlemen, whose measures are

themselves liable to be quashed at the eleventh hour by an Upper House

that sits without my will or consent, and which is in its turn legally

liable to be superseded by the Sovereign, whose government is all the

while being really carried on in silence by permanent officials whose

very names I do not know and who have no connection with me beyond

accepting, in ignorance of my existence, my dole towards their

salaries,--this is not a form of democracy that appeals very attractively

to me as an individual member of Demos.

And, moreover, the position of my Member of Parliament is scarcely less

paradoxical than my own rôle of free and independent elector. He is the

mouthpiece of his constituents, and yet he is expected to have a will and

conscience of his own. Why? Why should he be any more honest than a

lawyer or a journalist? Each of these classes is paid to maintain certain

propositions, and the most successful in these lines are those with the

highest powers of persuasion. The constituency wishes certain opinions

and desires put forward in Parliament,--why should the man who offers to

execute the job be presumed to share those opinions and desires? The

point is, can he represent them more forcibly than the rival candidates?

I do not for a moment imagine that the M. P. invariably agrees with the

politics of his electors; I only inquire why he should have to profess

to,--why should he pay this homage of hypocrisy to an illogical ideal?

Theoretically we do not elect our M. P. because _he_ wants to get on, but

because _we_ want to get on or the country to get on; because _we_ want

certain measures carried, not because _he_ wants certain measures

carried. Therefore it is to our interest to get the most skilled advocate

at our command; his personal opinions are no concern of ours. A fig for

his ambitions and aspirations! This may not be a dignified position for

the M. P., but it is the one logically implicated in the democratic

notion of universal suffrage; and when the gentleman honestly asserts

himself and his private ambitions and his private conscience, he is

deucedly dishonest to his constituents.

To be strictly logical, indeed, M. P.'s should confine themselves to

stating the wishes of the people they represent: they might as well be

mechanical dolls, moved through the lobbies by the respective

wire-pullers and fitted with inarticulate noises. Or, for the matter of

that, they might be superseded altogether by written summaries of the

opinions of the winning majority in each constituency on all the points

at issue in the current session. The chiefs of the party could play the

game with markers. But indeed what is the use of dealing the cards at

all, when the Prime Minister holds all the trumps in advance, not up his

sleeve, but openly on the table? As for the speeches in the House, they

have as much effect upon the issue as the conversations at the

card-table. They are an obsolete survival from the times when members

were liable to come to the House with open minds, instead of having them

closed by their constituencies. Indeed, I can suggest a simple device by

which, without any departure from the ancient forms of the House, most of

the evils of Party Government could be swept away. By the system of

"pairing" a Tory may neutralize a Radical, and both go on together

without interfering with the good of the country. Let therefore the

entire minority pair off with members of the opposite party, leaving the

bare majority in possession of the floor. Being agreed on their policy,

these would not want to make speeches, but would simply spend their time

walking through the "Ayes" lobby. A few afternoons of pleasant

promenading would provide the country with enough legislation for a

lifetime. _Solvitur ambulando._ The party leaders would be enabled to

husband their energies for the hustings, since like all the agreeable

members they would easily find "partners." It is only the bores who would

be left to walk the House. It will be observed that this incalculable

gain of time, temper, money, and Acts of Parliament would be secured

without revolution, on constitutional lines, and by a mere extension of

an existing practice. I am convinced the salvation of the country depends

on the universal adoption of the system of Parliamentary "pairing," or

legislation by walking "wall-flowers."

A further advantage of this system deserves to be noted. As it takes

forty members to make a House, should the Governmental majority fall

below this number no business could be transacted. Thus it would become

impossible, when the country was almost equally divided, for one party to

impose its will on the nation by force of a bare majority. Again,

therefore, a very necessary reform would be achieved on strictly

constitutional lines.

In so confused a constitution, or so constitutional a confusion, it ill

becomes one to inquire why pre-eminence in Parliament is attained by

dexterity in the word-duel, and why a John Stuart Mill, who gave his life

to the study of sociological questions, is a failure in the House, while

a Randolph Churchill, who confessedly found politics more exciting than

any other form of sport, including even horse-racing, should be a

success. As in Athens of old, the rhetorician is master of the field.

Does it not seem ridiculous that a man shall be allowed to legislate who

has not passed an examination in political philosophy, political economy,

and universal history? As absurd as that men should be able to set up as

critics merely by purchasing reviews, that they should be permitted to

ply without a license. Still, monstrous as is the mischief wrought by the

quack critic, his sphere of influence is limited. But this question of

government touches us all. No one ought to be allowed in the House who

has not satisfactorily grappled with papers like the following.

1. Explain the use of the following phrases: "Home Rule," "Liberty,"

"Well-being of the Masses," "G. O. M.," "Good of the State," "The

Constitution." What meaning do you attach to them, if any?

2. "The Function of an Opposition Is To Oppose." Criticise this statement

from the point of view of the Party in Power, and trace carefully the

modification in its view produced by a change of government.

3. What is a good electoral address? Is there any relation between it and

its owner's votes in the House?

4. (a) Prove that Female Franchise is demanded not only by the women of

England, but by every consideration of reason and justice.

(b) Disprove the same.

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

(a) What would you think?

(b) What would you say?

(c) How would you vote?

Give no reasons for your answer.

6. If C represents Conscience, and C1 the Constituency, show that C1 will

always be represented by C2[*].

[Transcriber's note: So in original.]

7. What is a working-man? Explain why professional men who work sixteen

hours a day are excluded from this category.

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

victory and a moral victory.

But perhaps the discrepancy is less than meets the eye. The House of

Commons is a _Representative_ Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers

represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has

the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage

against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or

its problems, nor could have studied any question for themselves; pretty

girls withal, but who at the mention of the veteran statesman took on the

avenging aspect of the Eumenides.

It was a girl of quite another temper who replied to me when, talking

over old times and old discussions, I said I had not yet become a

Socialist: "I don't think you ever knew what you were." I winced as at a

just reproach, yet when I had left her the retort occurred to me (as

retorts will, when too late) that there was no particular merit in being

a "what," that men were not necessarily "'ists" or "'ites," that thoughts

did not fit into pigeonholes, and that if there was any merit in the

matter it consisted rather in preserving free play and elasticity of

mind. Because certain men had put certain ideas into the world it did not

follow that every other man had definitely to accept or reject each and

all of them, and to become an "'ite" or an "anti-'ite" in so doing.

Plague take great men! What right had they to force one into the

jury-box? Still less was it compulsory to return a verdict if, as the

vulgar were apt to think, the acceptance of any one "'ism" precluded the

acceptance of another, so that to be an Ibsenite was synonymous with

detesting the dramas of Sardou, and to be a Wagnerite involved a horror

of Mendelssohn. It was only the uncultured who held their artistic and

political creeds with the narrowness of Little Bethel, importing into

thought and aesthetics the zealotry they had lost in religion. The book

of Experience, thought I, is not an Encyclopaedia, with every possible

topic neatly ranged in alphabetical order; 'tis no A B C Time Table, with

the trains docketed for the enlightenment of the simple,'t is rather an

Encyclopaedia torn into a million million fragments by kittens and pasted

together again by infants, so that all possible things are inextricably

interfused, every one with every other; 't is a Bradshaw edited by a

maniac, where the trains that start but don't arrive are not even

distinguished from the trains that arrive but don't start. Wherever

persons are conscious of the infinite complexities of things, they will

be found cautious of creed and timid of assertion. You have probably

noted that at Waterloo Station, in London, no porter will ever bind

himself to a definite statement concerning any train. It is only the

inartistic who hold that black is black and white is white,

unconditionally, irretrievably; and who have invented the proverb "He'd

say black's white" to express the Sophist _in excelsis_. It must be true,

as Ruskin contends, that not one man in fifteen thousand has ever

observed anything, else how account for this wide-spread fallacy? The

"wit of one," instead of crystallising this "wisdom of the many," should

have flatly contradicted it. For, take two blackboards and place them at

right angles to each other: let a ray of bright sunlight fall upon them,

so that one cast a shadow on the other. The portion of blackboard

overshadowed will indeed be blackish, but the portion illuminated by full

sunlight will be comparatively white, although it is still thought of as

a "_black_-board." So, too, ask the man in the street for the colour of

trees, and he will reply "green." If I may permit myself a vulgar

locution, the green is in his eye. Trees are, of course, all colours of

the rainbow, according to kind and season; and grass, too, is by no means

always so green as people think it. We start in our childhood with

prejudices on these subjects--what is education but the systematic

imparting of prejudice?--and we rarely recover. Even the primitive rhymes

of childhood fix ideas unalterably in our minds:

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

Sugar is sweet and so are you.

Tea-roses are not red nor Neapolitan violets blue; sugar is only sweet to

those unversed in metaphysics, and sugar of lead not even to them. As for

the compliment to the juvenile petticoat, let it remain. But the

blackness of black is a superstition that deserves no such courteous

concessions. There is, in fact, no black and no white at all, as any

black-and-white artist will tell you. Black is not a colour: it is merely

the negation of light. By day nothing is ever black--it always contains

reflected light from some surrounding object or objects: if you look at a

"black" thing by day, you see its details, which convincingly proves that

light is not absent. If there were such a thing as a black object, it

could only prove its existence by being seen; but if it is seen it is no

longer black, and if it is black it is no longer seen. The mourners at a

funeral no more wear black than the bridesmaids at a wedding wear white.

To be white, a thing would have to escape all reflected light; and even

if this were possible, the sunlight itself, the source of all light and

colour, would tinge it with yellow, or red, or pink, according to the

time of day. "What!" the injudicious reader will cry, "is not snow white?

Does not the Dictionary boast even a double-barreled epithet

'snow-white'! How about the 'great white sea' that stretches round the

Pole?" I cannot help it: these adjectives, these expressions were

invented before artists had taught men to see: hastily, as by men falling

in love at first sight, who are destined to make many discoveries

concerning their idol later on. Snow is never white, any more than the

beloved is absolutely blameless. For snow to be "snow-white," the sky

would have to be white, whereas in those arctic circles it should be

either blue or grey. Moreover, the snow being only semi-opaque must be

tinctured by the shadow of the darkness of its own depths; as for

icebergs, well, you may see green, brown, and even deep-grey ice, whilst

the whitest have pinnacles and crags that must break the light like

prisms into all the colours of the spectrum, and all these hues, again,

do not fail to tint the snow. Nor will the white bear improve the

situation, for, to judge by the specimen in our London Zoological

Gardens, white bears are dirty yellow, just as black bears are dirty

brown.

But, so far from realising that black may be white, your average voter

seems to imagine that neither is ever even tempered: that his party is

purest white, and the opposition party impurest black. That the other

side reverses this colouring does not trouble him: it is merely due to

the aforesaid sophistical faculty of proving black white. I once knew a

man--no average voter he--who owned two comic papers, the one Radical,

the other Conservative. How he must have chuckled as he planned the

cartoons and settled the chiaroscuro! What blacks for the Tories to be

answered by counter-blacks for the Radicals! Beaconsfield as a sweep,

Gladstone as an Angel of Light; Beaconsfield as Ormuzd, Gladstone as

Ahriman; each in turn Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and Satan, the

discomfited demon. I tremble to think what would have happened if, by one

of those _contretemps_ which sometimes occur even in real life, the

cartoons had got interchanged. And caricatures such as these influence

the elections! The most childish nonsense, written in the

picture-language so dear to children! And on such ineptitudes the

destinies of the nation are supposed to turn! 'T is a comforting

reflection, then, that the whole thing is so largely a farce, that the

real axis of events is elsewhere--by no means a thing to grieve over. If

the British Constitution is a paradox not to be fathomed by human

intellect, why, that is a quality which it shares with Space and Time and

all deep and elemental things. Your deep thinker is invariably a

paradox-monger, because everything when probed to its bottom proves

illusive, and is found to contain its own contradiction. Truth is not a

dead butterfly, to be transfixed with a pin and labelled, but a living,

airy, evasive butterfly. Perhaps that is the inner meaning of the

Whistlerian motto. The Hegelian self-contradictoriness of the British

Constitution will not, therefore, affright us. To Tennyson the fact that

it is a "crowned republic" seemed a source of security. The English have

abolished the Crown, though they are too loyal to inform the Sovereign of

his deposition; in like manner they have evaded Democracy by conceding

universal suffrage. The strength of the British Constitution lies in its

inherent absurdity, its audacious paradoxicalness. It exists by force of

not being carried out. And the reason of this illogicality is clear: our

Constitution, like Topsy, was not made but "growed," and that which grows

is never logically perfect; it is like an old tree, strangely gnarled,

with countless abrasions and mutilations, and sometimes even curious

grafts. Here the lightning struck it, and yonder branch was snapped in

the great gale. Machine-made schemes may be theoretically perfect, but

they will never suit human nature, which is a soil for living growths,

not a concrete foundation for elegant architecture. This is the truth

which trips up Comte, and Fourier, and St. Simon, and all the

system-makers and utopia-builders. Perfect things are dead things: the

law of life is imperfection and movement. Life is never logical, it is

only alive. If man had been made by machinery his body would not have

been erratically hairy; his toes would long since have been improved away

or welded together by an American patentee; nor would there have

remained, for our humiliation, those traces of a caudal appendage which

some osteologists have thought to perceive in our distinguished anatomy;

our brotherhood to the beasts would have been betrayed only by our

behaviour.

So that, though Politics be as absurd as the Constitution, God bless her,

it may yet fulfil as useful a function. Who would deprive the hosts of

working-men of their generous enthusiasms, even though these be to the

profit of the professional politician? Who would narrow their horizon

back to the public-house and the workshop or the clerical desk and the

music-hall, by assuring them that all these great national and

international questions will be no penny the worse or the better for

their interest in them? For it is they, not the State, that will be

benefited. Politics is a great educative force: it teaches history,

geography, and the art of debate, and is not without relation to

Shakespeare and the musical glasses. The flies on the wheel are not

moving the wheel, but they are travelling and seeing the world, whereas

they might otherwise be buzzing around the dust-bin. Politics sets the

humblest at the centre of great cross-roads of history: it promotes clubs

and all manner of fellowship, and enables the poorest--on polling-day at

least--to know himself the equal of the greatest. Even the most

illiterate is spared the mortification of being reminded that he cannot

sign his name. And finally, and most of all, it preserves among us the

lost art of fighting. The long and oft-vaunted immunity of England from

the foot of a foreign foe has its drawbacks: we have forgotten what war

really means, we have delegated our courage and patriotism to an army of

mercenaries, who represent us in the field as a nobleman's carriage

represents him at a funeral; we are valiant vicariously and sublime by

deputy; we take the war-fever in its pleasant heats, and contract out the

chills and the blood-letting. And so the blood-letting fails to purge us

as before: the evil humours are still in the system. All those seething,

restless spirits which generate in the blood of a once warlike race clog

us up and turn to bile and dyspeptic distempers. Our militant instincts,

suppressed by a too-secure civilization, break out in sordid maladies of

the social organism. As a vent-hole for the envy, hatred and

uncharitableness of mankind, politics cannot be overestimated. In the

absence of real battles on our soil these sham fights of the

polling-booth--sham because they determine nothing, because the great

silent forces are working behind all the noises--are the national purge

for "our present discontents"; no more truly efficacious than that

ancient therapeutics of the lancet, a General Election yet comforts the

patient, he takes a lease of fresh hope, the sun leaps out, the clouds

pack, the sky is blue, the grass is dew-pearled, God's in his heaven, and

all's right with the world. Even the beaten party feels that it has won a

moral victory, and confidently looks forward to victory without morality

at the next turn of the wheel. And so all these diseased humours of the

body politic pass harmlessly off.

No one but a confirmed cynic would wish to do away with all this harmless

dissipation, all the innocent fun of electioneering, the speeches,

riotings, mud-throwings, everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a

great day that was--Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial

town--when the Blues and the Reds meant broken heads, and the flowing

tide of beer, and spruce carriages with beribboned horses, and jocund

waggonettes, and bands and banners, and "hoorays," and shuttered shops,

and an outpour of citizens; a day festive, yet solemn, pregnant with

mysterious dooms and destinies, fatal, ineluctable, if victory fell to

the wrong-coloured ribbons. I remember when my father went to poll his

vote--a strange, weird article that had to be carried carefully concealed

on the person, lest the roughs of the opposition should catch a glimpse

of the tip of it and bash in the holder's head--with what awed

imagination we followed his course, as of a hero gone to storm a redoubt

or lead a forlorn hope! with what anxiety we waited at home with the

bandages! For the civil war, which our constitution foments, was less of

a sham then than now, and the polling-booths vied with the playing-fields

of Eton as the nursery of England's heroes. Ah, the brave old times! An

anaemic age languishes for want of you, and finds its solace in "bluggy"

tales. For just as politics supplies the shadow, the simulacrum of

fighting, so art supplies the shadows of life to those who lack the

substance. We herd in towns, and take the country in dashes of

water-colour framed in gilt. We marry for money, and satiate our baulked

sense of romance with concoctions from Mudie's. We lie and haggle and

cheat only the better to apprehend the subtleties of spiritual discourse

in fashionable churches, and our generous appreciation of the consummate

chivalry of the hero of melodrama is the reward we owe ourselves for the

pain it gave us to kick our wives. Practical joking is banished from

reputable circles--even Bob Sawyer is ranging himself; and so this

primitive appetite seeks its satisfaction in farcical comedies. Poetic

tragedies owe their attraction to the dominance in real life of the drab

and the unlovely, and the overstrain of the intellect in modern life

gives a peculiar flavour to the ineptitudes of Gaiety burlesque. All the

primal instincts and passions are still in us, though distorted,

exaggerated, diminished, modified, applied to different objects and

purposes. The man with vagabond instincts becomes an explorer, Ishmael

writes social dramas, the happier son of a defalcating cashier rises to

be a minister of finance, the born liar turns novelist, the man with

murder in his soul hunts big game in foreign lands or settles down at

home as a critic. And so, too, the born warrior becomes a political

leader; and politics, if it does not do any of the things it professes to

do, plays yet an invaluable part in modern life, bridging over,

perchance, the transition from the bellicose ages to those belauded days

when the war-drum shall throb no longer, "and the kindly earth shall

slumber, lapt in universal law."

That this is confusedly and sub-consciously understood, even by

politicians, is shown by their very vocabulary. The Salvation Army itself

boasts no more militant a phraseology than the profession whose business

it is to administer peacefully the affairs of the realm. That which

should be, and sometimes is, expressed by nautical metaphors--the ship of

state, guiding the helm, and the rest of it--is much more frequently

expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils"

of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music

is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning

glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately

regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which

positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old,

and, as in the days of Joshua, victory is achieved by walking round the

town and blowing your own trumpets. Great organs shamelessly lament that

their side has no good grievance to go to the country with,--as if the

absence of grievances were not the very object of government! A stirring

war-cry--that is the indispensable. If good government were really the

object of a General Election, it would all be over and done with in a

day. Election day would everywhere be as simultaneous as Christmas, and

votes would be polled with the punctuality with which puddings are eaten.

But this would be to contract a campaign into a battle--to make a short

story out of a great military serial, peppered with exciting incidents,

to be continued in our next. We want our vicissitudes, our sharpshooting,

our skirmishing, our days of triumph for the Whigs, and our days of

triumph for the Tories. What we like best of all is when the fighting is

so level that the Election progresses as breathlessly as a good

University boat race. Failing that, we like to see one side swamping the

other, like a great flood, the stream rising daily higher and higher,

with a crescendo roar, till the vanquished are swept away in a thunderous

mountain of waters. So for a full moon the waters rage, the noise of

battle roars, till our suppressed fighting instincts have been deluded

into repose and satisfaction, till the champing war-horses have been

quieted by being allowed to snort and cry "Ha! ha!" to see the glitter of

stage spears, and to hear the noise of the supers and the shouting. This

is the real end masked beneath all those interminable phrases. And it is

achieved at any and every cost. For does not everybody complain that a

General Election upsets everything? The publishers groan, the theatrical

managers tear their wigs. Englishmen cannot think of two things at once;

they are like heavy, solid craft, sound of timber but slow of turning.

"One thing at a time" is a national proverb. They cannot even read two

books at once, and if two classics should be published on the same day

one would be a failure. There is the book of the week, and the book of

the season, and the book of the year. This applies even to our

appreciation of past periods, and because Shakespeare is the first of the

Elizabethan dramatists, the rest are nowhere. Wherefore one would suppose

that everybody would make haste to get the Election out of the way; but,

on the contrary, it is allowed to linger on, till sometimes our

overstrained suspense snaps, and the Election dribbles out in unregarded

issues. No, the fight's the thing! War, if not dead, is banished from our

shores; the duello has been laughed to death; cock-fighting and

bull-baiting have ceased to charm: politics alone remains to gratify the

pugnacity and cruelty that civilisation has robbed of their due objects.

How we brighten up again at a bye-election, when duels which passed

unregarded in the big battle, when towns scarcely noted at the fag-end of

the great campaign, become the cynosure of every eye. Through Slocum or

Eatonswill the hub of the universe temporarily passes: to its population

of four thousand, mostly fools, are entrusted the destinies of the

Empire; it is theirs to make or mar. The duel is watched by a breathless

nation. The party leaders on each side cheer on their men; their careers

and claims and countenances fill up the papers, and they cross swords in

a shower of telegrams. Advice to those about to enter Parliament: Elect

for a bye-election. Why be a nonentity, a mere M.P., when by a little

patience you may hold the centre of the stage, if only for a week? Better

almost to be beaten at a bye-election than to be successful at a General.

In case I should ever seek the suffrages of electors myself, I would

venture to remind opposition agents and private secretaries that these

random criticisms of the glorious constitution (hear, hear!) of that

great Empire on which the sun never sets (cheers), over which the Union

Jack waves (loud cheers)--a thousand years the battle and the

breeze--hem!--I--I--ahem!--Lord Salisbury (loud and prolonged cheers)--I

mean that I trust they will not forget that all this is set down without

prejudice.

VII

THE REALISTIC NOVEL

The realistic novel, we know from Zola, that apostle of insufficient

insight, is based on "human documents," and "human documents" are made up

of "facts." _But in human life there are no facts._

This is not a paradox, but a "fact." Life is in the eye of the observer.

The humour or the pity of it belongs entirely to the spectator, and

depends upon the gift of vision he brings. There are no facts, like

bricks, to build stories with. What, pray, in the realm of human life

_is_ a fact? By no means a stubborn thing, as the proverb pretends. On

the contrary, a most pliant, shifting, chameleon-coloured thing, as

flexible as figures in the hands of the statistician. What is commonly

called a fact is merely a one-sided piece of information, a dead thing,

not the series of complex, mutually inter-working relations that

constitutes a fact as it exhibits itself to the literary vivisectionist.

I walked with a friend in a shabby district of central London, a region

that had once been genteel, but was now broken up into apartments.

Squalid babies, with wan, pathetic faces, pullulated on the doorsteps;

they showed from behind dingy windows at the breasts of haggard women.

The fronts of the houses were black, the plaster had crumbled away, the

paint had peeled off. It was the ruins of a minor Carthage, and, like

Marius, I was lost in mournful reverie; my companion remarked, "These

houses are going up; they now pay 7 per cent." He was perfectly

justified. There are a hundred ways of looking at any fact. The

historian, the scientist, the economist, the poet, the philanthropist,

the novelist, the anarchist, the intelligent foreigner,--each would take

away a different impression from the street, and all these impressions

would be facts, all equally valid, all equally true, and all equally

false. Life, I repeat, is in the eye of the observer. What is farce to

you is often tragedy to the actual performer. The man who slips over a

piece of orange peel, or chases his hat along the muddy pavement, is

rarely conscious of the humour of the situation. On the other hand, you

shall see persons involved in heartrending tragedies to whom the thing

shows as farce, like little children playing in churchyards or riding

tombstones astride. To the little imps of comedy, who, according to Mr.

Meredith, sit up aloft, holding their sides at the spectacle of mankind,

to the

Spirit of the world,

Beholding the absurdities of men,

Their vaunts, their feats, ...

human life must be a very different matter from what we poor players on

the scene imagine it; we are cutting a very different figure, not only

from that which faces us from the mirror of vanity, but from that which

is "as ithers see us." Not only, then, may our tragedy be comedy; our

comedy may be tragedy. The play of humour at least suggests these

alternatives. Life is Janus-faced, and the humourist invests his

characters with a double mask; they stand for comedy as well as for

tragedy; Don Quixote wears the buskin as well as the sock. Humour, whose

definition has always eluded analysis, may, perhaps (to attempt a

definition _currente calamo_), be that subtle flashing from one aspect to

another, that turning the coin so rapidly that one seems to see

simultaneously the face and the reverse, the pity and the humour of life,

and knows not whether to laugh or weep. Humour is, then, the simultaneous

revelation of the dual aspects of life; the synthetical fusion of

opposites; the gift of writing with a double pen, of saying two things in

one, of showing shine and shadow together. This is why the humourist has

always the gift of pathos; though the gift of pathos does not equally

imply the gift of humour. The tragic writer must always produce one-sided

work, so must the "funnyman" who were only a "funny man" and not a

humourist (though this is rarer). Each can only show one side of life at

a time; the humourist alone can show both. Great novels of romance and

adventure, great works of imagination, great poems, may be written by

persons without humour; but only the humourist can reproduce life. Milton

is great; but the poet of life is Shakespeare. Thus the whole case of

"realism" falls to the ground. There being no "facts," Zola's laborious

series is futile; it may be true to art, but it is not true to life. His

vision is incomplete, is inexhaustive; it lacks humour, and to the

scientific novelist the lack of humour is fatal. He is the one novelist

who cannot succeed without it. Leave out humour, and you may get art and

many other fine things, but you do not get the lights and shadows or the

"values" of life.

All novels are written from the novelist's point of view. They are his

vision of the world. They are not life, but individual refractions of it.

The ironical pessimism of Thomas Hardy is as false as the sentimental

optimism of Walter Besant or the miso-androus meliorism of Sarah Grand.

What Hall Caine happily calls "the scenic view of life" of Dickens is no

more true than the philosophic view of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Each is

existence viewing itself through a single medium. "Tess of the

D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the

Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a

formula, peeps at itself through the brain of each artist, but eludes

photography. This is the true inwardness of the Proteus myth. The

humourist alone, by presenting life in its own eternal contradictoriness,

by not being tied down to one point of view, like his less gifted

brother, comes nearest to expressing its elusive essence. The great

novelists are Fielding, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thackeray. But all the

novelists supplement one another, and relatively-true single impressions

of life go to make up a true picture of

Life, like a dome of many coloured glass.

It is because there are all novels and every aspect of existence in

Shakespeare that he sits supreme, the throned sovereign of the literature

of life.

All this is writ to console those who suffer too poignantly from

book-tragedies and "pictures of life." The artist selects, he studies

tone and composition, whereas in real life tragedies are often

accompanied by "extenuating circumstances." The unloved girl temporarily

forgets her sorrow in the last new novel, or a picnic up the river; the

broken-hearted hero betakes himself to billiards and brandy-and-soda, or

toys with a beefsteak. Again, many pathetic tales are the outcome of

imperfect insight. The novelist imagines how he would feel in the shoes

of his characters, and cries out with the pain of hypothetic bunions.

This mistake better deserves the name of "the pathetic fallacy" than the

poetic misreading of Nature to which Buskin has annexed it. A good novel

may be made of bad psychology; indeed, this is what most novels are made

of. Yet the gentle reader, misled by the simulation of life, makes

himself miserable over dabs of black ink on white paper. The failure of

two imaginary beings to unite their lives in wedlock brings unhappiness

into myriad homes. How delicious is that story of the German novelist

who, having failed to unite his leading couple at the conclusion of a

newspaper serial, saw no way of appeasing the grief and indignation of

his vast audience save by inserting in the advertisement columns of a

later issue of the journal an announcement of their union under the usual

head of "Marriages"!

VIII

IN DEFENCE OF GAMBLING

Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The

humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this

creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite

enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon.

Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the

result, the exultation of winning. And the beauty of gambling is that you

cannot lose. Gambling is really a disguised system of purchase. One buys

excitement, a most valuable emotion, for which even the members of the

Anti-Gambling League are prepared to pay heavily in other forms! And the

advantage of gambling over all these other forms is the possibility that

you may not be called upon to pay for your purchase after all--nay, that

_you_ may even be paid instead! You get not only excitement, but a

possible bonus. Is there any earthly transaction that offers such

advantages? Why, 't is always "heads I win, tails you lose." Who speaks

of losing at cards? As well speak of losing at play-going or

novel-reading; what is called loss is simply payment for excitement. You

cannot lose at cards, though you may win; unless it be in games where

skill preponderates, and then loss means penalty for lack of skill. The

mere transfer of money from hand to hand leaves the wealth of the world

what it was before. 'T is redistribution, not destruction. It is scarcely

relevant to look for the evils of gambling in its effects--to point to

ruined reputations and ruined homes. Everything is capable of abuse, from

love to religion. The evil of gambling lies in the fact that it is an

unworthy form of excitement--that it is possible to colour life more

intellectually. The Anti-Gambling League, for all its recent prospectus,

will not put down gambling among the poorer classes, except by widening

their outlook otherwise, by creating other interests outside the dull

daily groove. For the well-to-do classes there is less excuse. With all

the arts and amenities of life at their command, it is degrading to use

up time and nervous energy in so brainless a pursuit. The gambling that

is inherent in the constitution of modern civilization is another affair:

that is pursued for the sake of gain; or for a livelihood. The Stock

Exchange is an unhappy consequence of the joint-stock company; credit in

business is an equally inevitable outcome of the ramified mechanism of

exchange. We are all gamblers to-day, insomuch as there is no stable

relation between work and reward, and the failure of a bank in Calcutta

may impoverish a shopkeeper in Camden Town. Our investments may rise or

fall in value through the obscure machinations of unknown millionaires.

And even the Anti-Gambling League has no word to say against those great

gambling concerns, Life and Fire Assurance Societies, which bet you that

you will not die or be burnt out within a certain number of years, or

those journals which offer you large odds that you won't be smashed up

while reading them. The prudential considerations behind these forms of

gambling seem quite to moralise them: indeed, to refuse to accept the bet

of the Life Assurance Companies is now considered immoral; a man is

expected to amend on his marriage at the very latest.

There is a form of gambling to which I must myself plead guilty. A

forlorn, shabby creature, pathetically spruced up, arrives from a

ten-mile tramp. He has been a journalist or a poet, but owing to this or

that he is on his beam-ends. He has eaten nothing for two days. His wife

is dying, his children are weeping for food. His voice breaks beautifully

as he tells me I am his last hope. What is to be done? According to

Charles Lamb, the solution is to give, to give always. For either the man

is in need and speaks truth, or he is a liar and therefore a consummate

actor. We pay for stage representations: why deny our obolus to the

histrionics of the beggar? So artistic a make up, an elocution with such

moving notes of pathos, surely deserve our tribute. Nay (and this Elia

forgot to note), the beggar-actor is frequently the author of his own

piece; that consistent argument, those tragical episodes, those touches

of nature, that minute detail, all are his. For my part, this view does

not touch me; I scarcely ever pay for the play, so I expect even the

beggar to perform to me as to one of "the press." If I give to beggars,

it is purely from the gambling spirit. What are the odds against the man

being a scamp? If they are short, or if the betting is level, I incline

to the side of mercy. The money is of so much more consequence to him

than to me, if the beggar is genuine, that the speculation is well

warranted. I know how wrong it is from the point of view of the Charity

Organization Society, but I am a man, not a bureau of beneficence. Few of

us, I fancy, escape this godly gambling.

How ill Society is ordered! We pay poor rates and support hospitals and

orphan asylums; but is there any thinking man who can banquet with the

assurance that nobody is starving? It spoils the dinner of Dives to

meditate on the longings of Lazarus, and this is the true skeleton at the

feast. The business of philanthropy seems but a mockery, and Government

takes charitable toll from us without pacifying our consciences. There is

something rotten in the state of Denmark. Cannot the intellect of man

devise a means of guaranteeing the deserving poor against starvation?

Novel-reading is the woman's substitute for gambling--the thing that

takes her outside her narrow circle of interests. Her ravenous appetite

for new novels is amazing; children are not so gluttonous of cream-tarts.

To supply this demand sequestered spinsters in suburban or rustic bowens

sit spinning the woof and warp of life as it never was on sea or land.

Bound goes the wheel, to and fro glides the shuttle, and the long,

endless pattern unwinds itself in all its wealth of imaginative device

and all its glory of fanciful colour. Poor things! What are they to do?

They have not the means to study the life they depict; they cannot mix in

the circles they describe. Fortunately their ignorance is their

salvation; the pretty patterns please the young ladies, the brave notes

of colour set them a-dreaming. And now in the revolt against the

three-volume novel these simple scribblers are to be swept away; the

country parcels will know them no more, and the three-deckers they built

of yore will be dismantled in the dry dock of the fourpenny box. Poor

creatures! Some will take to typewriting and some to drink, some will be

driven to the workhouse and some to literature.

IX

TRULY RURAL

"ENGINEER AND SURVEYOR'S DEPARTMENT.

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

"SIR,

"I am directed to call your attention to the present condition of

trees within your premises, which now overhang the public footpath

adjoining, and thereby cause considerable inconvenience to the

public. I shall be glad if you will kindly give the matter your best

attention, with a view to lopping or cutting the trees in such a

manner as to obviate the inconvenience at present complained of.