"Yours obediently,

"P. LEONARDO MACREADY,

"_Engineer to the Board._"

Amid the cosmopolitan medley of letters on my metropolitan

breakfast-table--the long and formal-looking, the fat and foreign, and

the over-scrawled and the underpaid (the last mainly requests for

autographs)--this delightful home-grown epistle came with refreshing

piquancy. It brought a breath of summer into the grey chillness of a

London winter, a suggestion of rustling foliage about the chandelier, and

the scent of the hay over the gaslights. "My dear!" I exclaimed to the

partner of my bosom (a tame white rat that likes to perch there), "_Have

we any trees?_"

My partner gave a little plaintive squeak. That is her idea of

conversation. She screams at everything. She would scream at the sight of

a mouse.

I pushed away my plate. I had sat down hungry as a hunter, and had had

two helpings of everything; but now I could eat no more. Excitement had

taken away my appetite. The prospect of rural discoveries agitated me. I

hastened to the window and looked at the front garden. To my astonishment

and joy there was vegetation in it. There was a dwarf evergreen bush and

a fragment of vine stretching itself sleepily, and a tall thin tree--they

might all have got comfortably into one bed, but they had been planted in

three far apart, and this gave the garden a desolate Ramsgate-in-winter

air of "Beds to let." The tall thin tree was absolutely naked, without an

inch of foliage to cover its wooden limbs; a mere mass of dry sticks. I

looked hard at the tree to see where it offended, determined to pluck it

out. But it returned my gaze with the stolidity of conscious

innocence--it held up its wooden arms in deprecation. I re-read Mr. P.

Leonardo Macready's letter. "Which now overhang the public footpath"! Ah!

that was what was the matter with my trees. It was raining, but I am an

Englishman and the law is sacred, and I went outside into the public

highway and looked at the tall thin tree from the new point of view. Sure

enough--very far up--there _was_ a bough overhanging the public footpath.

I looked up at it and shook my fist menacingly, but it waved its twigs in

response with an irritating amiability. I began to understand what an

annoyance it must be to have a bough up there that you couldn't flick at

with your stick as you passed by, and that even when weighed down by its

summer greenery would bemock you if you made a casual clutch at its

foliage, and laugh at you in its leaves. I went inside and returned with

a step-ladder and an umbrella and a carving-knife, and I stood on the

summit of the ladder and made abortive slashes at space with my right

hand, while the open umbrella in my left made equally abortive efforts to

soar with me skywards. After nearly stabbing the partner of my bosom I

went in, both of us wet like drowned rats, and as I settled myself again

to coffee and correspondence, I could not help wishing that Chang, the

Chinese giant, had remained alive to triumph over my tantalising trees.

Nor could I help wishing that the activity of the local engineers and

surveyors had been directed by His Gracious Majesty King William IV. into

quite a contrary channel.

William, spare that tree,

Touch not a single bough;

If you had planted three,

They would protect me now.

If, instead of being requested to amputate a beautiful overhanging arm of

foliage, every citizen of London were served with a notice to plant a

tree in front of his demesne, the face of the great stony city would be

transformed. It would become a _rus in urbe_. Why not? Everybody knows

what the late Duke of Devonshire made of Eastbourne; and the beauty of

Bournemouth is mainly an affair of trees. Why should we not walk under

the boughs of Oxford Street? What law of nature or William IV. ordains an

eternal divorce between shops and trees? Why should one not hear the

birds sing in the Strand as well as in the Inns of Court? Let us have

trees instead of lamp-posts--with electric lights twinkling from their

leaves. Already there are London streets quite well-wooded. Even in the

Whitechapel Road it is possible to read--

A book of verses underneath a bough;

but I shall not be content till Matthew Arnold's exquisite quatrain comes

literally true of London--

Roses that down the _alleys_ shine afar,

And open jasmine-muffled lattices,

And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,

And the full moon and the white evening star.

It might be well if we could transplant to our more prosaic city ways the

beautiful old custom of planting a tree on the birth of a child. It is

true that ladies might object to having their age recorded by the growth

of rings on the trunk; but then they could easily pass the tree on to an

elder sister when they got beyond the average wedding-ring age. Besides,

people would quickly forget whose birth it marked, and the town trees

would soon become anonymous. I would therefore suggest the formation of a

tree-planting party, pledged not to support any candidate for Parliament

who would not vote for the ruralisation of the Metropolis. To the Home

Rule of Mr. Gladstone, with his weakness for cutting down trees, must be

opposed Home Ruralisation. What a fine platform cry--"a truly rural

London!"--with the unique advantage of being unpronounceable by

demagogues in drink. The poor would welcome the policy as a boon. They

are not by any means so unpoetical as Gissing would make out. Only the

other day a baby was found buried in a window flower-box; which is

practically the idea of Keats' "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," an idea

which was itself a graft from the stock of Boccaccio.

If the parish dignitaries became thus associated in our minds with the

Beautiful instead of with bills and blue papers, one might be able to

whip up some enthusiasm for the civic life, and contemplate even

income-tax schedules with a Platonic or Aristotelian rapture. It is not

everybody who can rhapsodise with Mr. Bernard Shaw or the Fabian Society

over sewer rates, and find in the contemplation of communal gas and water

something of the inspiration and ecstasy that the late Professor Tyndall

found in the thought of the conservation of energy.

In firing us to local patriotism by the example of provincial cities, the

enthusiast does not allow sufficiently for the size of London. It

swallows us all up; there are twenty provincial cities in its maw: it is

not a city, but a province. We cannot rouse ourselves to an interest in

Brixton and Camberwell, in Poplar and Highbury. There is no glory in

being a dweller in so amorphous a city, whose motley floating population

is alone sufficient to stock a town; there can be no sense of brotherhood

in meeting a Londoner abroad, still less a Middlesex or Surrey man.

Devonians may feast off junkets and cream, in touching fellowship, and

the hearts of Edinburgh men stir with common memories of Princes Street;

but a Cockney, who has far more to be proud of, is overwhelmed into

apathy. It is only in a compact city that one can develop that sense of

special belonging which George Eliot contends is at the root of so many

virtues. I might just as well be taxed to beautify Dublin as Canonbury,

for all the difference it would make in my grumblings. And if our city is

too large to inspire us, our parish is too small. And so to most of us, I

fear, parochialism is a bore. Theoretically, we know that the parish we

live in is greater than many a provincial town. We know that we ought to

take an interest in its history, and be proud of its great men. But

somehow, despite Mr. Frederic Harrison, our suburb leaves us cold. Our

real life does not centre about our own parish at all. We circle about

the great thoroughfares that radiate from Charing Cross, and the pivot of

our lives is Piccadilly. Born to the Metropolis, we cannot narrow our

minds to a district, nor to parish give up what was meant for London. We

refuse to become provincials. We do not even know that we boast of a Town

Hall, till we are compelled to attend and show cause why we have not paid

the rates, or any part thereof, the same having been lawfully demanded.

If there are any other great men in the neighbourhood, we do not know

their addresses. They are shy and retiring. It is only the retired who

are not shy. That sort of great man comes forth in his tens. He _has_

been a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, and he _is_--a bore.

Once he solicited your patronage, to-day he solicits your vote. Having

given up making profits, he now wishes to make by-laws, and finds a gleam

of his old delight in sending out heavy bills to the neighbourhood. You

get a list of him, which policemen announce their intention of calling

for. You are asked to decide among a column of him, uniformly obscure,

but divided invidiously enough into tradesmen and gentlemen. Who compiled

this list or nominated these gentlemen and tradesmen, you have not the

ghost of a notion. They are sprung upon you as imperiously and

mysteriously as their own demand-notes. You look down the column and make

random crosses by the wayside. You select a sanitary engineer in

preference to an undertaker, forgetting that he is the deadlier of the

two, and you vote for your retired wine-dealer to prevent him going back

into business. But most of the names convey nothing to you, and give you

the sensation of a donkey between two heaps of straw, or of a straw

between two heaps of donkeys. And having thus exercised that high English

privilege, for which you would shed your blood if it were taken away, you

are content for the rest of the year to grumble at the doings of your

representatives. It does not occur to you that public duty calls upon you

to comprehend the parochial mysteries and solicit the parochial

dignities. They seem too petty for a man of any stature--a sort of small

beer for babes and sucklings.

May it not be that the voice of public duty, when it calls upon you to be

a citizen and a parishioner, calls with too piping a voice? There is no

rousing note, nothing of the resonance of a clarion call. A suggestion of

poverty and the workhouse clings to everything parochial, something of

drab and joyless. Is there no way of infusing colour into this depressing

greyness, a martial _timbre_ into this anaemic note? If we are to pay the

piper let us hear him. Let the tax-collector go his rounds at the head of

a brass band, playing patriotic airs. Let brocaded standard-bearers raise

aloft a banner with the soul-stirring insignia, "England expects every

man to pay his duty." Let the hollow roll of the drum thrill the dull

suburban street, and animate the areas of semi-detached villas. No longer

shall the devil and General Booth have all the good tunes, and the ragged

rearguard of urchins keeping time with their bare feet shall follow the

drum to the surer and saner goal of civic salvation. The music of the

streets will become a joy instead of a terror, and English performers

will find a new market. See paterfamilias prick up his ears as the

distant strains of national music impinge upon his tympanum, see his

heart heaving his shirt-front with patriotic ardour, while, with a joyous

cry "The Collectors are coming, hurrah, hurrah!" he rushes to his

cheque-book as the soldier rushes to arms. Is he not serving his country

as much as the soldier, and without pay--or even discount? Nay, why

should the idea of patriotic duty be so emphatically connected with the

shedding of blood, and all the pomp and pageantry reserved for the

profession of Destruction? Why should not the lifeboat be launched, or

the coal dug, or the drain-pipe laid, or the taxes paid, to a musical

accompaniment, and under the shadow of the national flag? Great is the

power of the Symbol: for a few inches of rag at elevenpence

three-farthings a yard (warranted not to shrink) men will give their

lives. And greater still is the power of music.

Dear to the London housemaid,

The fife of fusilier,

And to the Cockney urchin

The drum of Booth is dear;

Sweet sounds the barrel-organ

Where'er the cits parade;

But the dearest of all music

The Tax-Collectors played.

You will be glad to hear that scarcely had this grumble appeared in print

when I saw a procession that made me think Birnam wood had come to

Dunsinane. Soon either pavement was planted with ready-made trees, all

a-blowing and a-growing. If it had happened in the night, I should have

rubbed my eyes and imagined some good genius had transported me to the

Boulevards. I hastened to place a little _guéridon_ outside the garden

gate, and to decorate it with glasses of absinthe and vermouth; but a

gendarme came along and asked me to move on.

X

OPINIONS OF THE YOUNG FOGEY

When I first met the Young Fogey I thought him very brilliant. His

philosophical pose, too, of combining the caution of age with the daring

of youth was fascinating. "I have evolved," he used to say. "Once I would

not attach sanctity to ideas because they were old: now I attach no

sanctity to ideas because they are new." But I soon discovered that the

Young Fogey was one of that large class of persons who do not evolve but

revolve, whose brilliancy is that of the fixed star. They give out

arrestive thoughts, and you are vastly impressed, but on longer

acquaintance, or on returning to them after an interval, you find that it

is they who have been arrested by their thoughts. Such persons do not

last you more than one or two years: they require a succession of new

audiences to keep up their reputation, like a witty play, which all the

world goes to see in turn, but which it would be deucedly dull to see

night after night, year in, year out. The cleverest of them know this

need of new ears, and of making provincial and foreign tours when they

have exhausted London. But when the Young Fogey chanced upon me drinking

lager beer at the Austrian Derby, during a tedious interval between the

races, he was probably confused by the distance from Piccadilly into a

sense of originality, and perceiving a couple of books on my table:

"What! do you _read_ the books you review?" he asked in feigned

astonishment; adding, with an impromptu air, "I always _write_ the books

_I_ review. Criticism of other people is waste of time. An artist who is

worth his salt knows his value better than anybody else; and an artist

who is not worth his salt is not worth your criticism, and will learn

nothing from it in any case. There is immeasurably too much book-making,

as it is."

"But criticism tends to keep down book-making," I observed meekly.

"Quite the contrary. Criticism encourages it. Most books are not read.

Who can possibly read ninety-nine of the worst hundred books published

every week? If they were not even criticised, the writers would shut up

their inkstands. Publicity is their aim, but publication does not supply

it. Most publishers are rather privateers. It is the critics who supply

fame to fools. It's even worse with plays. Why should every trumpery

farce that can get itself badly produced by a moneyless manager who

decamps the day after, be allotted a space in every morning, evening, and

weekly newspaper, Fame blowing simultaneously a hundred trumps? My

greatest book never got half as much notice as a wretched little

curtain-raiser which took me a morning to knock off, and the news of

which was flashed from China to Peru immediately, whereas the eulogies of

my book were dribbled out in monthly instalments, and belated

testimonials kept straggling in long after its successor had been

published. In those days I belonged to a Press-cutting Agency, and I

discovered that--to measure Fame by the square inch--you may get many

more yards of reputation by the most flippant playlet than by your

literary _magnum opus_; to say nothing of the pictures and interviews of

your actors and actresses. That your silliest player--especially if it be

a pretty she--gets photographed in the papers sixteen times to your once,

goes without saying. The only real recipe for Fame nowadays is to be a

pretty girl and exhibit yourself publicly. The modern editor has got it

into the paste-brush he calls his head that the public is infinitely

greedy for the minutest theatrical details. It is really too idiotic,

this fuss over our parrots. If there were only plays for them to talk!

The decline of the British drama----"

"By which you mean that they decline your plays," I interrupted.

"Granted," said the Young Fogey; "but even when they give us Shakespeare,

they play the patron, and literary critics argue deferentially with them

as to the treatment of the text, and beg them not to put William's head

under the pump. Did you see that monumental headline in the 'Daily

Chronicle,' the paper that poses as the organ of sweetness and light?--

'MR. TREE'S NEW PLAY.

'Henry IV. At The Haymarket.'

"So Mr. Tree 'created' Falstaff in more than the conventional sense of

that arrogant stage-verb! Act? Anybody can act! We're all acting, always,

in every phase of our social life. Every back drawing-room is a theatre

royal. A child can act, and the 'infant phenomenon' cannot be

distinguished from the leading lady or gentleman except by size. But no

child ever wrote a play. Acting is the lowest of the arts. And even if it

were the highest, it would be brought low again by its infinite

self-repetition. Imagine playing one part for a season, a year, a decade.

Actors are not even parrots--they are automatic puppets that move their

limbs in fixed fashions, and make squeaking sounds at prescribed moments.

There was a French Minister of Education who drew up a most rigid

Time-Code, which hung in his bureau; and it was the joy of his life to

take out his watch and say 'Half-past three! Ha! every boy in France is

now learning geography'; or, 'A quarter to twelve! Ha! every French

schoolgirl is now writing in a copy-book.' I have the same sort of

feeling about my actor-acquaintances. 'Half-past nine? Ah! What is

Herbert doing? He is taking poison.' 'A quarter to eleven! Dear me! Rose

is crawling under a table.'

"And these creatures want every privilege, forsooth! Fame, gold,

champagne, the best society and the worst. To be of Bohemia and

Belgravia, to make the best of both worlds. If things don't mend, to sit

in a stall will soon become an index of imbecility. It will be like being

seen at the Academy.

"And, talking of the Academy, did ever any more infantile idea enter the

human brain than that a couple of thousand pictures worth seeing can be

painted every year? Why, since the beginning of the world there haven't

been two thousand pictures painted worth seeing! Imagine two thousand

manuscript novels being scattered around on two thousand desks, a

shilling admission! Do we get one good novel a year? Scarcely. One good

symphony or opera? Of course not. Then why expect to get a picture worth

hanging? And every picture should hang by itself--it's an artistic

entity, self-complete. To crowd it among a lot of others is like

conducting an orchestra every instrument of which is playing a different

tune. 'T isn't even as if the poor painters got anything out of the show.

People won't buy pictures--prices are monstrously inflated to an

artificial point: the artists would take less, only they don't like to

come down from their pedestal, and so they starve up there in dignity.

Artists have played a foolish game. They have gone nap on gentility and

high prices, and gentility has failed them.

"When great prices are given for pictures, it is generally with a view to

selling them again: a dubious compliment to the artist. No man gets a

thousand pounds' worth of pure art joy out of any picture. He can spend

his thousand pounds to much more of aesthetic advantage. But there is no

inherent sacredness in prices. A picture is worth only what it will

fetch. Let our artists be satisfied with a fair day's wage for a fair

day's work, like any other species of craftsman. After all, they were all

craftsmen--Michael Angelo, Titian, Donatello, Canova--wall-decorators,

door-painters, ceiling-colourers, tomb-builders, stone-masons, working to

contract and to measure. When our artists are content with the pay of

manual labourers and the joy of art, taste may be stimulated in the

masses, and original work be going at the price of lithographs. Why

shouldn't artists even paint public-house signs? Beer being the national

religion, why shouldn't it find adequate expression in Art?

"Not that it matters much whether our artists live or die,--Art seems

about over. It seems to be an accident that happened once or twice in the

Past,--among the Greeks, at the Renaissance, in Spain, in Holland,--which

no amount of art-schools and art-publications can coax back. To found

Academies and R.A.-ships is to spur a dead horse. Look at the Greek

sculptures, look at the Italian pictures, and ask yourself what we have

to put beside them after all our endless exhibitions! Modern

improvements! _Plein air!_ Bah! Where can you show me more 'atmosphere'

than in Carpaccio, or in Jacques d'Arthois. Impressionism? Look at that

snow-effect by old Van Valckenborch here! But we do the modern, the

contemporary, you cry----"

"No, I don't," I interrupted feebly, more to let him take breath than for

the jest's sake. But he ignored the opportunity.

"But they've all done the contemporary! Only _their_ contemporary, not

yours. The fallacy almost amounts to an Irish bull. The ancients _were_

the moderns--to themselves--just as we shall be the ancients to our

successors. The Renaissance people all did contemporary work, under

pretence of doing historical: contemporary types for Madonnas, local

landscapes for Oriental scenery, up-to-date dresses for New Testament

episodes, portraits of their patrons for patron-saints and apostles. Did

you ever see a more modern figure than Tintoretto's portrait of himself,

the elderly man in a frock-coat who looks on at his own wonderful picture

of St. Mark descending to rescue a Christian slave? An Academician or a

new English Art Clubbite who had done only one tiny corner of this

picture would so swell as to the head that his laurel-wreath wouldn't fit

him any longer. There's no ambition nowadays--Degas, Whistler, yes. But

for the rest--dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve,

but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life--nobody will ever

paint better than Velasquez, write better than Shakespeare, or pray

better than the Psalmist. Science is the variable--always on the go; and

when we think of progress it is just as well that we foolishly keep our

eye on the machine-room."

"Won't you have a drink?" I broke in, seizing the first opportunity.

"Thanks! What's that book?"

"'Olympia's Journal'! It's all about Olympia's husband, she married him

to write about him--he was such 'good copy.'"

I had unchained a torrent. "Novelists ought never to be introduced into

novels," burst forth the Young Fogey. "The subject-matter of novelists is

real normal life, and novelists are neither real nor normal. They are

monsters whose function in life is to observe other people's lives. For

one novelist to make copy of another is like cannibalism.

"If the psychology of the novelist, who is the student of other people's

psychology, is to be studied, where are you to stop? Why not study the

peculiarities of the novelist who studies the novelist, of the reflector

of life who reflects the reflector of life--nay, of the critic who

reflects upon the reflection of the reflector? This modern mania for

picking ourselves to pieces is only the old childish desire 'to see the

wheels go wound.' People were much better in the old days when they

didn't bother so much how their wheels went round. I always sympathised

with the indignant old lady who came to my schoolmaster when our class

began to take up physiology, and protested that she wasn't going to have

her boy learn what was in his inside--it was indecent. People are not

made healthier by knowing how their functions work; animals never study

physiology, and plants blossom without knowing anything at all about

anything. Knowledge only generates a morbid fussiness, as with Mr.

Jerome's celebrated Cockney who discovered himself to be possessed of

every ailment in the medical dictionary except housemaid's knee. And to

learn what is in your mental inside is equally indecent and equally

discomposing. 'I have never thought about thinking,' said the wise

Goethe. No one can go through a treatise on insanity and come out as sane

as he started. And there is an even more insidious way in which this

human vivisection operates for evil. People now forgive their

friends--they call their eccentricities 'pathological,' and endure

instead of discouraging them. I had two letters this very morning. 'Poor

A!' said B.: 'his vanity has ceased to offend me--I feel it is

pathological.' 'Poor B!' said A.: 'it is impossible to resent his

egotism--it is simply pathological.'

"This scientific Christianity wouldn't be so bad if people didn't condone

their own faults, too. They can't get up early--it's heredity. The early

bird who caught the worm must have had a grandparent who stayed out late.

Are they lazy? Their uncle was a country parson. They are like the man

who refused to give charity because he had such expensive tastes. To

acquiesce in your own weaknesses because they are hereditary, without

making an effort to eradicate them, is bad science as well as bad morals.

Among the items given you by heredity do not forget the potentiality of

self-improvement by inward struggle. No one says, 'I can't speak French,

and I sha'n't try, because my father was an illiterate Irishman.'

Self-knowledge tends to weaken self-discipline, foster self-indulgence,

and corrode character."

"But what of the old Greek maxim 'Know thyself'?"

"Old Greek sophistry! Knowing requires a subject to know and an object to

be known. You can't be subject and object too--introspection is a

self-contradiction. Hasn't every one noticed that everybody else fails to

discover himself in a novel or a sermon, though his lineaments are

painted down to the minutest details of wart and mole? And it's quite

natural. Every soul is to itself the centre of the universe--through

which the infinite panorama passes; nothing exists but in relation to it:

to its standards of beauty, of right and wrong, of humour, of admiration,

everything is brought. There's no man so low or so ridiculous but he

finds somebody else more so, and the London street-boy who sneers at the

long-haired poet is exalted to a sense of superiority. I once met a human

monstrosity--hunch-backed, cross-eyed, palsied, and wooden-legged. My

soul sickened with pity, but his face brightened in a smile of contempt

and his cross-eyes danced with glee. I appealed to his sense of the

ridiculous. Listen to the comments of people upon one another after a

party, and confess that a coterie is often but a mutual contempt society.

That is what makes life livable--every living creature is an amused eye

upon the universe. Terence said as much long ago. We amuse one another,

and exist to gratify one another's sense of superiority, like the

islanders who live by taking in one another's washing. It will be a

thousand pities if the spread of travelling removes the mutual

superiorities of Englishmen and Frenchmen, Chinamen and Hindoos. I went

to a dinner-party the other day. The host and hostess were

impossible--like spiteful studies by Thackeray caricatured by Dickens.

Yet there were they arrogating to themselves every privilege of judgment

and jurisdiction that the most fashionable peers or the sublimest souls

could claim; to their own minds the arbiters of elegance, the patrons of

the arts, the flagellators of vice and snobbery, the gracious laudators

of virtue, the easy fomenters of scandal.

"Prithee, was ever one of us capable of not lecturing on ethics or not

preaching a sermon? Did not Sir Barnes Newcome lecture on the Family? Do

we not all hold forth on the condition of the poor, the morality of the

mining-market; the inferior ethics of the coloured races, and a hundred

other lofty topics, warming our coat-tails at the glow of our own virtue?

'T is the fault of language which enables arrant scoundrels to use fine

words that they have never felt. Humility, self-sacrifice,

noble-mindedness, are phrases easily picked up by people for whom their

only meaning is in the dictionary, and who know it is the correct thing

to admire them. They are like students of chemistry who babble of H2SO4

and NH3 by book without ever having seen a laboratory or a retort, or

tone-deaf people raving over Beethoven. And these lip-servants of virtue

are unconscious that they have never known the real thing. Every

discussion between civilised persons presupposes moral perfection all

round--a common elevated platform from which one surveys the age and its

problems, and considers how to bring the world at large up to one's own

level. You cannot discuss anything with a person who has ever been

publicly imperfect--at any point you may tread on his corns. Has he been

bankrupt? The slightest reference to honesty, finance, or business may

seem an insult. Has he figured in the Divorce Court? How are you to talk

about the last new play without seeming personal? This explains why

exposed persons are cut: they have made conversation impossible by

cutting away the common ground of it, the hypothesis of perfection. Even

with persons who have merely lost relatives one has to be careful to

avoid references to mortality. The complete diner-out has to be equipped

with a knowledge of his fellows to the third and fourth generation, so as

to avoid giving offence. To say that late marriages are a mistake or

second marriages a folly may be to make enemies for life. Which, by the

way, is absurd: all conversation should be regarded as privileged and

impersonal. 'T is brain meeting brain, not foot treading gingerly among

irrelevant personal considerations. And just as we are all willing to

preach, we are all willing to be preached at--it gives us such an

opportunity of gauging the preacher's morality and ability. The Scotch

peasants who denounce their meenister's orthodoxy are an extreme case,

but if we were not really judging our judges we should go to opposition

churches. What we demand from preaching--as from newspapers--is an echo

of our own voices, and when the preacher or the newspaper leads it is

only by pretending to follow. Opportunity makes the politician. Watch the

crowd streaming out of church after a sermon. Do they wear an air of

edification or humiliation? Are they bowed down with the consciousness of

their backslidings? No: they are aesthetes come from a literary and

oratorical performance. They are not thinking of themselves at all, but

of the quality of the sermon. Yes, around each of us the world turns, and

each soul is the hub of the universe. Popular suffrage is the recognition

of this great fact: not one of us but is competent to arrange the affairs

of the country. Every man Jack and woman Jill is a standard, a test, an

imperial weight and measure, and the universe must endure our verdict as

it goes round us. To expect this central standard to turn back on itself

and become aware of its own defects and distortions is like expecting a

pair of scales to weigh itself; or--more absurd still--expecting a false

pair of scales to weigh itself truly. 'All men think all men mortal but

themselves,' and so all men find all men wanting except themselves. If

they ever for a moment suspect that they are not perfect--whether the

suspicion leak in through reflection or reprobation--'t is but for a

moment. We cannot live on bad terms with ourselves, nor with a

consciousness which doubts and despises us--whether it be our own

consciousness or a friend's. Our nature throws up earthworks against a

contemptuous opinion. Just as a bodily wound is repaired by the wonderful

normal processes of circulation and nutrition, so our self-love tends to

repair the wounds of the soul. We feel that even if we are not perfect,

we are as perfect as possible _under the circumstances_. If so-and-so and

so-and-so had had to go through our sufferings or our temptations, he or

she would have acted no better. And even in our wildest remorse we are

self-satisfied with our self-dissatisfaction. Nor is this need of our

nature for self-reconcilement wholly without spiritual significance. It

points to an incurable morality in the human soul, and to the truth that

if we mainly use our ideals to condemn other people by, we are bound to

condemn ourselves by them if we can once be got to perceive that we

_have_ violated them ourselves, though we at once seek peace in

extenuating circumstances. Peace of mind is the homage which vice pays to

virtue. Nor, though it matters immensely to society what ideals people

have, and that they have the right ones, to the people themselves it

matters only that they _have_ ideals, right or wrong. Where there is

honour among thieves, a thief may have a fine sense of self-respect."

"Plato agrees with you," said I. "He points out that if thieves were

utter scoundrels they could not act in concert."

"Ah!" said the Young Fogey, "Plato was a great thinker. In truth, the

only incorrigible rogue is he who is devoid of ideals, who has allowed

his ethical nature to disintegrate. Such a one ceases to be a _person_.

He has lost the integrating factor--the moral--which binds human

personality together. He is a mere aggregation of random impulses. The

last stage of moral decay is impersonality. Impersonality sums up 'the

daughters of joy,' with their indifference to aught but the moment.

"But it is wonderful what shreds of personality, what tags and rags of

the ideal, the most degraded may retain. Was there ever a soul that did

not think some one action beneath its dignity? An absolutely unscrupulous

person is a contradiction in terms. To be unscrupulous were to cease to

be a person, to have become a bundle of instincts and impulses. But no

one is so good or so bad as he appears. The chronicler of the 'Book of

Snobs' was himself a bit of a snob, and the poet who sought for the

spiritual where Thackeray had looked for the snobbish, who bade us note

"All the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount,

was almost as weak as the satirist in that respect for titles and riches

which is the veritable 'last infirmity of noble minds.'

"Still, Browning's is the truer view of human life, and till we see our

neighbours as Omniscience sees them, our kindest and cruellest estimates

will be equally wide of the mark.

"And conversely, unless you develop a personality, you cannot be moral,

or even immoral. You can be social or anti-social--that is, your actions

can make for the good or the ill of society. But moral or immoral it is

not given to everybody to be. For I do not agree with those who would

substitute social and anti-social for those ancient adjectives. We are

concerned with the quality of acts as well as with their effects, with

the soul as well as its environment. And it takes a real live soul to do

good or evil. That is the point of Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson--a mere bundle

of hearsays--who could win neither hell nor heaven. It is also the

teaching of Ibsen. You must not shrink from wrong because you are told it

is wrong, but because you see it is wrong. But few people can expect to

develop a personality of their own. Current morality is the automatic

application of misunderstood principles. And so it must always be. For

the function of the average man is to obey. Was it not Napoleon who said

that men are meant either to lead or to obey, and those who can do

neither should be killed off? Ethics is the conscience of the best

regulating the conduct of the worst. Hence there are no immutable rules

of morality:

"For the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandoo,

And the crimes of Clapham chaste at Martaban.

But there are immutable _principles_. To spit in a guest's face is with

some savage tribes a mark of respect. But this does not invalidate the

principle that to guests should be shown courtesy. Rules vary with time

and place, principles are eternal; and even if unmentionable things are

done in Africa and Polynesia, if 'the dark places of the earth are full

of cruelty,' that does not invalidate the principles of morality, as our

modern blood-and-thunder young man affects to believe. For that the

principles of right and justice have not yet been discovered in barbarous

countries no more destroys their universality and legitimacy than the

principles of the differential calculus are affected by the primitive

practice of counting on the fingers. And while the ethical geniuses--the

senior wranglers of the soul--are groping towards further truths and

finer shades of feeling, deeper reaches of pity and subtler perceptions

of justice, the rank and file and the wooden spoons must needs apply the

old ethics, even against the new teachers themselves. Every truth has to

fight for recognition, to prove itself not a lie. The brilliant and

impatient young men who scoff at conventions because the people who hold

them are unreal--not persons, feeling and passing moral truths through

their own soul, but parrots--forget that just because the people are

unreal, their maxims are real; that they do not represent the people who

mouth them, but the great moralists and thinkers behind. Against the

brilliant rushlights of contemporary cleverness shine the stars of the

ages. 'T is the immemorial mistake of iconoclasts--even granted they are

taller than their fellow-men--to be ever conscious of the extra inches,

instead of the common feet. Nevertheless" (and here the Young Fogey put

on his most judicial manner) "the extra inches must tell. For because

real ethics resides not in rules but in principles, obedience to the

letter may mean falsity to the spirit, if the circumstances that dictated

the rules have changed. This is not casuistry. 'T is a concept not to be

found in Panaetius or Cicero or the Jesuit Fathers. It means that we are

not to wear our boyhood's waistcoats, but to be measured for manhood's.

Tight-lacing is bad for the spiritual circulation. 'Get rid of the Hebrew

old clo', cried that curious Carlyle, the chief dealer in them. Amen, say

I: but do not let us therefore go naked. And since we have stumbled upon

'Sartor Resartus,' permit me a comparison in keeping. I once saw a tailor

measuring the boys in a charity school. He drew a chalk line five feet up

a wall, and dividing the upper part of the line by horizontal

chalk-marks, stood the boys beside it, one after another, and according

to the chalk-mark which the crown of the unfortunate creature's head

grazed, Master Snip called out 'Fours,' 'Ones,' 'Fives.' Fat boys or lean

boys, big-bodied or big-legged, narrow-chested or broad-shouldered, 't

was all ones--or twos--to him. Did they agree in height, the same

clothes--tight or loose--for all! Thus is it with our moral maxims.

Genius or goose, saint or sinner--your head to the chalk-mark! And

rightly. When one has to deal with great masses one cannot consider

little details. The principles of morality must be broad and simple, and

the world is right to apply them sternly and undiscriminatingly. The

general cannot consider the peculiarities of a particular soldier, though

the corporal of the regiment may make allowances for him. And so with

breaches of morals. The world at large should condemn; but the private

friends, who know the circumstances in every petty involution, who know

the temptations and the extenuating factors, should form as it were a

court of appeal. If they elected to stand by the offender, the world at

large should reconsider its verdict. This is what practically took place

in the George Eliot and Lewes instance. Weighed, not by the steelyard of

general principle, but by the delicate chemical balance of special

detail, they were not found wanting. The Magna Charta is still only a

pious aspiration. 'Every man shall be tried by a jury of his peers.' How

profound! For only our equals can know our travails and temptations. How,

now, if we had to try Shakespeare! which of us would dare sit on the

panel? Yet we 'chatter about Shelley.' He did wrong--granted. But was it

wrong of him to do it? That is another question altogether. Subjective

morality and objective morality are two different things. But the whole

subject of the sexes is wrapped in hypocrisy, and the breaches of

morality are committed less by the celebrated than by the obscure. The

savage sarcasm of Schopenhauer's refusal to discuss monogamy because it

had never yet come within the range of practical politics is still

justified. I remember once reading an anecdote about a besieged town. The

defenders resolved to make a sortie on a certain day, only, in dread of

their plan somehow leaking out beyond the gates, or of their womankind

dissuading some from the perilous enterprise, they administered a solemn

oath to one another that none of them should tell his wife, nor speak of

it again even to another man, till the moment arrived. But each

individual man told the partner of his bosom, only binding her by most

fearsome oaths to say nothing to any other woman or man. All the women

kept their oaths, each going about with the proud sense of being the only

woman in the great secret. And so the women all met in the market-place,

chattering about every subject on earth but that which was nearest their

hearts, and the men moved among them, mutually silent. The whole

community knew the secret whereof no one spoke. You perceive the

parallel? Sex is the secret we are all in. Why shouldn't we talk openly?

Why shouldn't we face facts? The marriage laws should be made as

flexible, not as inflexible, as possible. Why? Because the bad people

will evade everything and the good people endure anything. The bad people

will break the best laws and the good people will respect the worst laws.

Hence, stringency squeezes the saint and lets the sinner slip. Harsh

legislation puts a penalty on virtue: the vicious skirt round it

surreptitiously, or are openly happy in despite of it. The only thing

immutable in sexual morality is the principle of regulating it with a

view to the highest ends of the soul and the state: the regulations

themselves are mutable, and we should not sacrifice too many human beings

to gratify the idealism of the happily married. At the same time do not

suspect me of Hilltopsy-turveydom, which seems to me based on bad

physiology and worse psychology. Mr. Grant Allen, man of science as he is

in his spare moments, is more like Matthew Arnold's Shelley, a beautiful

and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. So

complex is the problem which seems to him so simple, that it is not

improbable that the present monogamy (tempered by polygamy) is the best

of all possible arrangements. This is not to belaud the present system,

any more than it is optimistic to say this is the best of all possible

worlds. It may be so, but it remains a pity that no better was possible.

And Mrs. Grundy herself seems to me as over-abused as marriage. The

celerity with which she became a byword, from the moment she made her

accidental appearance in Tom Morton's 'Speed the Plough,' shows how the

popular instinct needed some such incarnation of our neighbours'

opinions. She stands, the representative of the ethical level of the age,

not of fixed pruderies. She is by no means the staid old soul her

maligners imagine--never was there creature more changeable. As we move

on, so will she move on with us. Once she allowed our squires to get

drunk after dinner, now she is shocked at a one-bottle man. You will

never shake her off, you brilliant young gentlemen. For as you

established your own ethics, she would still be there to see that your

ideas were carried out. Granted she is a scandal-monger. But scandal is

the sewer-system of society: the dirty work must be done somehow. Mrs.

Grundy is your scavenger. Americans don't talk scandal, but I fail to see

how they will keep their homes clean without it. The scandal-mongers may

be inspired by no lofty motives, but they make a wonderful unpaid

detective force. Sheridan was not a philosopher. Ubiquitous and

omniscient, Mrs. Grundy is always with you. Once you might have escaped

her by making the grand tour, but now she has a Cook's circular ticket

and watches you from the Pyramids or the temples of Japan,--especially

if, like myself, you have the misfortune to be a celebrity. The only way

to escape her is to be photographed widely. Wasn't it Adam Smith who said

that conscience was only the reflection in ourselves of our neighbours'

opinions? If we didn't value their opinions there would be no morality.

Foreign travel makes you feel there is something in the idea. Who cares

what a parcel of jabbering strangers think about his actions? The moment

you lose touch with your environment, the moment you cease to vibrate to

its nuances, your morality is in a parlous condition. Better go home and

sit down on the well-known couch of Catullus, and feel once more that

people are real and life is earnest and the horizon is not its goal. What

is this mania for movement? If you travel unintelligently you see nothing

that you couldn't have seen more comfortably in a panorama--the world

going round you. If you travel intelligently, you discover the relativity

of all customs and ideas, you distrust your own beliefs, your backbone is

relaxed, your vitality snapped, and you come home a molluscous

cosmopolitan. It is the same thing that happens if you travel mentally

instead of by mileage--if you go in for that modern curse, 'Culture.' You

are not meant to absorb the art and literature of foreigners and dead

peoples, fluttering like a bee from flower to flower. These things were

made by men for their own race and age; they never thought of you,--you

are an eavesdropper. Cathedrals were built for Christians to pray in, not

for connoisseurs to gloat over. You should develop along your own lines,

strong and simple, not be a many-sided nullity. The true Englishmen are

ploughmen and sailors and shopkeepers, not culture-snobs.

"The greatest poets in every language are those who know only their own

language. Shakespeare and Keats handled English as a million Professors

of Poetry cooperating could never handle it. The greatest Art has always

sprung from the direct pressure of the real world upon the souls of the

artists. To be cultured is to lose that vivid sense of the reality of the

life around you, to see it intellectually rather than to feel it

intuitively. Hence art that is too self-conscious misses the throb of

life. George Eliot failed as soon as she began to substitute intellectual

concepts for the vivid impressions of early memories. The moment people

begin to prate about Art, the day of Art is over, and decadence is set

in. Art should be the natural semi-unconscious enhancement of other

things. The speaker wishing to convince becomes artistically oratorical,

the prophet becomes artistically poetic, the church-builder artistically

architectural, the painter of Madonnas artistically picturesque, the

composer of prayer-chants artistically musical. Art was the child of

Religion, but it has long since abandoned its mother. Portrait and

landscape painting arose as accessories to sacred pictures; the origin of

the opera is to be sought in the Mass; literature developed from

religious writings. But gradually it was discovered that you might paint

noblemen as well as sages, and that scenery could be dissociated from the

backgrounds of Crucifixions and Marriages at Cana. And from seeing that

Art needn't have a religious meaning or content, men came to see that it

needn't have any meaning or content at all. Art, indeed, presents

possibilities of a divorce from intellect and morals of which artists

have eagerly availed themselves. But Art for Art's sake is Dead-Sea

fruit--rosy without, ashes within. Socrates was not perhaps quite right

in saying that the Beautiful was the Useful, but it doesn't follow that

the Beautiful should be the Useless. Even crockery, cutlery, and

furniture should never be Beautiful at the cost of utility. Their Beauty

should be implicated with their natural shapes, inblent with and

inseparable from their uses, not a monstrous accretion from without. The

most artistic knife is the quintessence of knifehood."

"But that is my idea of Art for Art's sake," I interrupted, for he had

now got his second wind. "Art has always to express the quintessence of

something--be it a street, a life, a national movement, a----"

"Art for Art's sake means making beautiful knives that won't cut and

beautiful glasses that won't hold water, and beautiful pictures and poems

that say nothing. The people who want their Art dissociated from their

morals are in danger of spiritual blight, and inhabiting a universe of

empty nothings. Too much self-consciousness is as sterile as too little.

Look at these modern Renaissances! They all----"

"Yes, I know: I have written about that," I said. "And now there is

another one, the Jewish. Have you read the plan for 'A Jewish State,' by

Dr. Herzl, of Vienna? No dreamer he, but wonderfully sane, despite his

lofty conception of a moralised, rationalised, modern State. Too

'modern,' indeed, this idea of Messiah as a joint-stock company! I

predicted years ago we should come to that. But methinks the Doctor----"

"They are starting the Grand Prix," hastily interrupted the Young Fogey.

"Good-bye! Such a delightful talk!" And turning his back on the horses,

he hurried off the field to lose himself and perhaps find a new pair of

English ears among the parasols and equipages of the sunlit Prater.

XI

CRITICS AND PEOPLE

What is the critic's duty at the play? Does he represent Art, or does he

represent the Public? If he represent Art, then he is but a refracting

medium between the purveyor and the public, which will therefore be

wofully mistaken if it seek in his critiques a guide to its play-going,

as it to some extent does. For while people do not always like a play

because they are told it is good, they often refrain from going to see

one because they are told it is bad. When I was a dramatic critic--a

phrase that merely means I did not pay for my seat--nothing struck me

more forcibly than the frequent discrepancy between the opinions of the

audience at a _première_ and the opinions of the papers. Again and again

have I seen an audience moved to laughter and cheers and tears by a play

which the great outside public would be informed the next morning was

indifferent or worse. The discrepancy was sometimes explicable by

_claques_, which are almost as discreditable to managements as the

keeping of tame critics, who eat food out of their hand. Sometimes it was

not professional _claques_, but amateurs come to see a friend's play _en

masse_, and applauding out of all proportion to its merits, not so much

perhaps from friendship as from simple astonishment at finding any

merits. But putting aside _claques_, it remains true that an audience

will often heartily enjoy what a critic will heartily damn--sometimes in

half a dozen papers, your capable critic being like a six-barrelled

revolver. And so--often enough--the piece, after futile efforts to

masquerade in the advertisement columns in a turned garment of favourable

phrases, dies in an odour of burnt paper; the treasury is robbed of its

due returns; and numerous worthy persons to whom it would have given

boundless pleasure are deprived of their just enjoyment. The obvious

truth is that the public and the critics--the people who pay to see plays

and the people who are paid to see plays--have different canons of

criticism. Sometimes their judgments coincide, but quite as frequently

they disagree. It is the same with popular books. And the reason of this

is not far to seek. The critic is not only more cultured than the average

playgoer, he is more _blasé_. He knows the stock situations, the stage

tricks, the farcical misunderstandings, the machine-made pathos, the dull

mechanic round of repartee, the innocent infant who intervenes in a

divorce suit (like the Queen's Proctor), the misprised mother-in-law, the

bearded spinster sighing like a furnace, the ingenuous and slangy young

person of fifteen with the well-known cheek, and the even more

stereotyped personages preserved in Mr. Jerome's "Stage-land." They all

come, if not from Sheffield, from a perpetual tour in the provinces. The

critic knows, too, which plays are taken from the French and which from

the English, where the actor is gagging and when he is "fluffy." A good

deal of the disillusionment of the scene is also his: he knows that the

hero is not young nor the heroine beautiful, nor the villain as vicious

as either.

How different the attitude of the occasional playgoer! Seeing only a

tithe of the plays of the day, he neither knows nor cares whether they

repeat one another. The most hackneyed device may seem brilliantly

original to him, the stalest stage trick as fresh as if just hot from the

brain; and jokes that deterred the dove from returning to the ark arride

him vastly. _Per contra_, for his unjaded imagination absolutely new

scenes and dialogues have no more novelty than the comparatively aged.

Probability or truth to life he demands not, perfection of form were

thrown away upon him. His soul melts before the simplest pathos, he is

made happy by a happy ending, and when Momus sits on a hat "he openeth

his mouth and saith Ha! ha!" He is a flute upon which you may play what

false notes you will. In some versions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" he placidly

accepts two Topsies. I s'pec's one growed out of t' other. He hath a

passion for the real as well as the ideal, and in order to see a

fire-engine, or Westminster Bridge, or a snow-storm, he will perspire you

two hours at the pit's mouth. He could see them any day in the street,

but it gives him wondrous joy to see them in their wrong places. How

absurd, then, for the average critic to be play-taster to the occasional

playgoer! He no more represents him than an M. P. represents the baby he

kisses. As well might one ask a connoisseur to choose the claret for a

back-parlour supper-party. Thus the critic cannot honestly represent the

Public. That he cannot represent Art without injuring the Theatre as well

as the Public, has already been shown. The conclusion one is driven to is

that the critic has no _raison d'être_ at all in the topical press. There

he should be replaced by the reporter. The influence of cultivated

criticism should be brought to bear on the drama only from the columns of

high-class magazines or books.

Nor am I more certain of the use of the art critic. He is far too

conflicting to be of any practical value, and he as often contradicts

himself as his fellows. He hides his ignorance in elegant English,

sometimes illuminated by epigram, and from his dogmatic verdicts there is

no appeal. Not infrequently he is resolved to be a critic "in spite of

nature," as Sir Joshua has it in a delicious phrase which was possibly

given him by his friend "the great lexicographer." In a letter to the

"Idler," the painter recommends those devoid of eye or taste, and with no

great disposition to reading and study, to "assume the character of a

connoisseur, which may be purchased at a much cheaper rate than that of a

critic in poetry." "The remembrance of a few names of painters, with

their general characters," says Sir Joshua, "and a few rules of the

Academy, which they may pick up among the Painters, will go a great way

towards making a very notable Connoisseur." He goes on to describe a

gentleman of this cast, whose mouth was full of the cant of Criticism,

"which he emitted with that volubility which generally those orators have

who annex no ideas to their words."

When I once expressed to Mr. Whistler my conviction that, with the single

exception of religion, more nonsense was talked on the subject of art

than on any other topic in the world, that great authority refused to

allow religion any such precedence. Certainly during the season when, for

the middle-class Londoner, art "happens," the claims of art to that proud

pre-eminence become overwhelming, if only temporarily so. Everybody gives

his opinion freely, and it is worth the price. To criticise painting is

only less difficult than to execute it. Fifty per cent. of art is sheer

science, the rigid, accurate science of form and perspective, I do not

say that accuracy is necessary to art. Still it is what most people

presume to judge. But does one person in a hundred know the true

proportions of things, or possess the eye to gauge the anatomy of a

figure? Owing to the neglect in schools of the rudiments of drawing, our

eyes barely note the commonest objects; we remark just enough of their

characteristics to identify them. "Consider!" as Mr. John Davidson writes

in his "Random Itinerary": "did you ever see a sparrow? You have heard

and read about sparrows. The streets are full of them; you know they

exist. But you could not describe one, or say what like is its note. You

have never seen a sparrow, any more than you have seen the

thousand-and-one men and women you passed in Fleet street the last time

you walked through it. _Did_ you ever see a sparrow?" And then there is

colour. Do you really know what the colour of that landscape is, or what

complex hues mantle the surface of yonder all-mirroring pool? Do you know

that, the appearance of nature is constantly varying with every change of

light and every passing cloud? Do you know how Primrose Hill looks at

night? Perhaps you think you know how a haystack looks in the sunlight;

yet across the Channel the illustrious Monet devoted months to painting

one haystack, making fresh discoveries daily. I do not believe you know

how many Roman figures there are on your watch-dial. You probably think

there are twelve. But what is far more important, you may be quite devoid

of artistic sensibility. Yet you would not hesitate to criticise the

Academy or even to be paid for it. I had occasion to buy a doll the other

day. It was a she-doll. There seems, by the way, a tremendous

preponderance of the fair sex in dolls: what difficult social problems

must agitate the Dolls' Houses! This was a pretty doll, with wide blue

eyes, and a wealth of golden tow, and an expression of aristocratic

innocence on its waxen cheek, faintly flushed with paint, and I bore it

home with pride. But when I came to examine it, I found it was but a

sawdust abomination. Oh the modelling of the arm, oh the anatomy of the

leg, oh the patella proximate to the ankle! I felt that if I gave that

doll to the expectant infant, she might grow up to be an art critic.

Thus, then, mused I sorrowfully, is the nation's taste made in Germany.

We are corrupted from the cradle, even as upon our tombs badly carved

angels balance themselves dolefully. Let me make a nation's dolls: I care

not who makes its pictures. Was it of these dolls a late President of the

Royal Academy was thinking, when he said that the German genius did not

find its best expression in plastic art? The Academy will not be

permanently improved until we improve our dolls.

XII

TABLE-TALK

Now that the world is so full of free dinners for the well-fed, it

behoves hostesses to reconsider their methods. With so many dinner-tables

open to the lion, or even to the cub, they must do their spiriting

dexterously if they would feed him. In these days when seven hostesses

pluck hold of the swallow-tails of one man, and the form of grace before

meals must be, "For those we are about to receive, Lord make us truly

thankful," something more than the average attraction is needed to induce

the noble animal to dine at your expense. There is one improvement in the

great dinner function for which I would respectfully solicit the

attention of ladies who entertain but do not amuse. "It is a great point

in a gallery how you hang your pictures," says the sage of Concord, "and

not less in society how you seat your party. When a man meets his

accurate mate, Society begins and life is delicious." Yes, but how rarely

does a man meet his accurate mate in these minor marriages of the

dinner-table! How often is he chained for hours to an unsympathetic soul

he has not even made the mistake of selecting. The terrible length of the

modern dinner makes the grievance very real, and in a society already

vibrant with the demand for easier divorce it is curious that there has

arisen no Sarah Grand of the dining-room to protest against this diurnal

evil. Suppose that at a dance you were told off to one perpetual partner,

who would ever don pumps? Is it not obvious that at a dinner you should

have the same privilege as at a dance--the privilege of choosing your

partner for each course? It could be done during the drawing-room wait. I

give an example of an ordinary menu, marked after the fashion of a

gentleman's dance programme, from which it will the seen at a glance how

much more delightful a dinner would become if you could change your

partner as often as your plate.

MENU, JUNE 15th, 1894.

Plats. Engagements.

1. Hors d'oeuvres . . . . S. S.

2. Soup . . . . . . . . . A. P. S.

3. Poisson . . . . . . . Pinky.

4. Poisson . . . . . . . L. R.

5. Entrée . . . . . . . . Blue Bow.

6. Entrée . . . . . . . . Red Hair.

7. Joint . . . . . . . . W.

8. Sweet . . . . . . . . Minnie.

9. Sweet . . . . . . . . Minnie.

10. Cheese . . . . . . . Long Arms.

11. Dessert . . . . . . . I. V.

(Interval before ladies rise.)

Extra Entrée . . . . . . Agnes.

Extra Joint . . . . . . . Eyeglasses.

Extra Sweet . . . . . . . Minnie.

You perceive at once that you would always put your idol _pro tem_, down

for the sweets, which would become as fertile a source of flirtation as

"love" in tennis. Of course the same tact and discretion would be needed

in filling your menu as in filling your programme. Some ladies who are

excellent at the entrée may be inadvisable for the joint, which they may

sit out, expecting to monopolise your attention to the detriment of your

meal. Others who are dull at the soup may be agreeably vivacious towards

the later items. A new series of formulae would be added to the language:

"May I have the pleasure of seeing your menu?"

"Will you give me one sweet?"

"Can you spare me the joint?"

"I am so sorry: I have just given it away."

"See me eat the poisson, as Grossmith says."

"Will you put me down for a fish?"

"This is our entrée, I think."

"May I have my dessert, Minnie?"

"Are you engaged for the cheese?"

"Yes; but you can have the second entrée."

"Don't forget to keep the soup for me!"

"If you don't mind sitting it out!"

"Are you open for the extra joint?"

"Thank you: I am full up."

For hostesses who shrink from such a revolution, a beginning might be

made by an automatic change of seats by the gentlemen, say one to the

right as in the _chassé-croisé_ of the Caledonians. Failing this, the

only remaining method of avoiding monotony and the chilling separation of

the extremes of the board is to follow the example of King Arthur and

employ a round table. The round dinner-table is the only way of making

both ends meet.

Having got your round table, what are you to eat upon it? There is hardly

any edible known to the menu which some sect or other would not banish

from the kitchen, while if you were to follow the "Lancet" you would eat

nothing at all, starving like Tantalus amid a wealth of provisions. Of

these sects of the stomach I was aware of many. But it is only recently

that the claims of "natural food" have been brought within my heathen

ken. The apostle of the new creed is an American lady doctor, whose

gospel, however, is somewhat vitiated by her championship of Mrs.

Maybrick, so that one cannot resist the temptation of suspecting that she

thinks the jury would never have found that interesting lady guilty if

they had fed upon starchless food. For this is the creed of the new

teaching. All starch foods are chiefly digested in the intestines instead

of in the main stomach, and hence are unnatural and morbiferous, and the

chief cause of the nervous prostration and broken-down health that abound

on all sides. (Herr Nordau gives quite a different explanation of the

general breakdown, but no matter.) "The 'Natural Food Society,'" says its

official organ, "is founded in the belief that the food of primeval man

consisted of fruit and nuts of sub-tropical climes, spontaneously

produced; that on these foods man was, and may again become, at least as

free from disease as the animals are in a state of nature." How curiously

apposite seem Dryden's lines, written in a very different connection!

This was the fruit the private spirit brought,

Occasioned by great zeal and little thought.

While crowds unlearned, with rude devotion warm,

About the sacred viands buzz and swarm.

And this couplet of his, too, might be commended to the devotees:

A thousand daily sects rise up and die;

A thousand more the perished race supply.

What does it matter what primeval man ate? It is not even certain that he

was a member of the Natural Food Society. The savage, as we know him,

lives on the game he hunts and shoots, and prefers his fellow-man to

vegetarianism. No one ever accused the red Indian of nervous prostration,

"when wild in woods the noble savage ran"; nor are leopards and tigers

usually in broken-down health. But, in justice to the Natural Food

Society, I must admit that it displays a pleasant absence of fanaticism,

for there is a proviso in italics: "_All persons about to experiment with

the non-starch food system are urged at first not to use nuts, but to use

instead whatever animal food they have been accustomed to._" The central

feature of the system is abstention from bread, cereals, pulses, and

starchy vegetables, for which food fruits are to be substituted. All this

seems a mighty poor excuse for the formation of a new sect. Fortunately

the Society uses up its superfluous energies "in working for the higher

life," and in its coupling of health and holiness is sound in its

psychology, whatever it may be in its physiology.

You never heard of Peterkin's pudding, by the way, but there is a fine

moral baked in it. Johannes came to his wife one day and said, "_Liebes_

Gretchen, could you not make me a pudding such as Peterkin is always

boasting his wife makes him? I am dying of envy to taste it. Every time

he talks of it my chops water." "It is not impossible I could make you

one," said Gretchen good-naturedly; "I will go and ask Frau Peterkin how

she makes it." When Johannes returned that evening from the workshop,

where Peterkin had been raving more than ever over his wife's pudding,

Gretchen said gleefully, "I have been to Frau Peterkin: she has a good

heart, and she gave me the whole recipe for Peterkin's pudding." Johannes

rubbed his hands, and his mouth watered already in anticipation. "It is

made with raisins," began Gretchen. Johannes's jaw fell. "We can scarcely

afford raisins," he interrupted: "couldn't you manage without raisins?"

"Oh, I dare say," said Gretchen, doubtfully. "There is also candied

lemon-peel." Johannes whistled. "Ach, we can't run to that," he said.

"No, indeed," assented Gretchen; "but we must have suet and yeast." "I

don't see the necessity," quoth Johannes. "A good cook like you"--here he

gave her a sounding kiss--"can get along without such trifles as those."

"Well, I will try," said the good Gretchen, as cheerfully as she could;

and so next morning Johannes went to work light-hearted and gay. When he

returned home, lo! the long-desired dainty stood on the supper-table,

beautifully brown. He ran to embrace his wife in gratitude and joy; then

he tremblingly broke off a hunch of pudding and took a huge bite. His

wife, anxiously watching his face, saw it assume a look of perplexity,

followed by one of disgust. Johannes gave a great snort of contempt.

"_Lieber Gott!_" he cried, "and _this_ is what Peterkin is always

bragging about!"

XIII

THE ABOLITION OF MONEY

The Cynic was very old and very wise and very unpopular. I was the only

person at his "At Home" that afternoon. I gave him my views on

Bi-metallism, having just read the leader in the "Times." He yawned

obtrusively, and growled, "Bi-metallism, indeed! The only remedy for

modern civilisation is A-metallism. Money must be abolished. The root of

all evil must be pulled up."

"Money abolished!" I echoed in amaze. "Why, any student of political

economy will tell you we could not live without it. Lacking a common

measure of value, we----"

"So it has always been held by students when answering political-economy

papers," he interrupted impatiently. "Yet I dreamt once of a land where

the currency was called in, and the morning stars sang together."

"But the exchange of commodities----" I began.

"Was effected by the sublime simplicity of barter. At one sweep were

swept away all that monstrous credit system which had created an army of

accountants and a Court of bankruptcy; all that chaos of single and

double-faced entry--all that sleight-of-hand abracadabra of

signatures--all those paper phantoms of capital. The Stock Exchange and

other gambling-hells shrivelled up. There was a vast saving of clerical

labour, and there were few loopholes for fraud. Everything was too

simple. Swift retribution overtook the man who shirked his obligations to

his fellows. Nobody could juggle with bits of paper at the North Pole and

ruin people at the South. The windows of human Society were cleared of

the gigantic complex cobweb full of dead flies. One could look inside and

see what was going on. 'Gentlemen' could not flourish in the light. They

were like the fungi that grew in cellars. Every man became both a worker

and a trader."

"Not an unmixed gain, that," I protested.

"I grant you," said the Cynic. "Some of the finer shades of fine

gentlemanliness were lost: the honourable feeling of cheating one's

tradesmen, the noble scorn of tailors, the lofty despisal of duns. When

all men were tradesmen, these higher class distinctions fused into one

another. There arose a clannish feeling which prevented the tradesman

from defrauding one of his own class. But there was an even graver evil

to be placed to the debit side of the new system. For the professors of

political economy (who had thrown up their posts as a conscientious

protest against the abolition of money and of salaries) proved to be

right. So clumsy was the mechanism of exchange that men were actually

driven to doing more than one kind of work. All those advantages of

specialisation which Adam Smith, supplemented by Babbage, had so

laboriously pointed out were completely lost to a wasteful world. Rather

than be without certain luxuries and necessaries men gave up moving their

legs all day up and down in time with iron treadles, or feeding machines

with bits of material exactly alike, or remaining doubled up underground,

or making marks from hour to hour and from year to year on pieces of

ruled paper. The waste by friction became enormous. Some of the least

thrifty even made their own furniture, and wove their own clothes, and

carved out rude ornaments for themselves. Whether from a natural want of

economy, or from an unwillingness to encounter the difficulties of

traffic, or from a mere spirit of independence, these men deliberately

reverted to the condition from which mankind had so painfully emerged.

"Some even pretended to enjoy it, and, rather paradoxically, asserted

that the abolition of gold had brought about the golden age of primitive

legend. Others who felt keenly the falling-off in production, and the

absence of those huge stores of unsold commodities which glutted the

ancient markets, and gave a nation a sense of wealth in the midst of

poverty; the aesthetic spirits who lamented the disappearance of the

ancient mansions and palaces, which, although they were empty three parts

of the year, yet afforded men the consolation of knowing that they were

ample enough to shelter the majority of the homeless--men of this stamp

were chagrined by the cumbersome mechanism of exchange, which made these

glories of the past impracticable, and they were for introducing

counters. But counters, although they had the advantage of lacking

intrinsic value, would be quite as bad as actual coins if men could

entirely trust one another never to repudiate their obligations.

Unfortunately Society had grown so honest under the new _régime_ that

this condition was fulfilled, and the operation of counters would have

been identical with that of money. Moreover, counters would have brought

back card-playing, horse-racing, fire and life assurance, and other forms

of gambling, which without them involved such complex calculations and

valuations of loaves and fishes that all the pleasure was spoilt. When

these things were pointed out to the aesthetic and the economical, they

were convinced and remained of the same opinion.

"But even with all these deficits, the balance in favour of the _status

quo_ was eminently satisfactory. It was rediscovered that man really

wanted very little here below, and that it was better for all to get it

than for some to continue to want it; and, taking into account also the

general freedom from war, newspapers, and other evils of a moneyed

civilisation, it must be conceded that the common people had very little

to grumble at."

"But what of the uncommon people?" I interrupted at last. "They must have

been martyred."

"Certainly, for the good of the common people. You see, everything was

topsy-turvey. Besides, they suffered only during the earlier stages of

transition. There was, for instance, the poet who went round among the

workmen to chaffer verses. But there were few willing to barter solid

goods for poetry. Here and there an intelligent artisan in love purchased

a serenade, and an occasional lunatic (for Nature hath her aberrations

under any system) became the proprietor of an epic. But the sons of toil

drove few bargains or hard with the sons of the Muses. The best poets

fared worst, for the crowd sympathised not with their temper, nor with

their diction, and they were like to die of starvation and so achieve

speedy recognition. But the minor poets, too, were in sore strait. The

market was exceedingly limited. Sellers were many and buyers few.

Rondeaux were hawked about from butcher to baker, at ten to the joint, or

three to the four-pound loaf, and triolets were going at a

hollow-toothful of brandy. A ballade-worth of butter would hardly cover a

luncheon biscuit, while a five-act blank-verse tragedy was given away for

a pound of tea, and that only when the characters were incestuous and the

caesuras irreproachable. A famous female poet was reduced to pawning her

best sonnet for a glass of lemonade and a bun.

"Times were no less hard for the comic writer. Hitherto he had only to

outrage his mother-tongue, or to debase the moral currency, to find the

land ready to accord him of the fat thereof. He used to sit in a room in

Fleet street and make or steal jokes in return for gold. By the wonderful

mechanism of the old Society other men and women, in whatever part of the

world he might stray, would rush to feed and clothe and house him, and

play and sing and dance to him, and physic him, and drive him about in

carriages, and tell him the news and shave him, and press upon him

aromatic mixtures to smoke, and love him, and kowtow to him, and beg of

him, and even laugh at his jokes, all in return for making or stealing

jokes in Fleet street. Some of these men and women would detest jokes, or

have a blindness to their points; nevertheless, not one but would be

eager to express in the most practical form his or her sense of the

services rendered to Society by the joker. But now that people saw with

open eyes through the transparent mechanism of exchange, they were

extremely loth to part with their tangible commodities in return for mere

flashes of wit or vulgarity. Previously they had only half realised that

they were soberly and seriously making coats, or working machines, or

smelting iron, while these jesters were merely cudgelling their brains or

consulting back files. The complexity of the thing had disguised the

facts. But now that they saw exactly what was going on, they became

suddenly callous to numerous vested interests, and their new-found desire

to know why they should give up the fruits of their labour pressed very

cruelly upon innocent individuals. The comic writer found it no joke to

live with 'I'd Rajah not's' going at seventy-five to the cigarette, or

mockeries of the mother-in-law yielding but a ton of coals to the

thousand. Puns were barely vendible, and even comic pictures could only

be sold at a great sacrifice of decency.

"The heir was a type of sufferer. When he came around asking for

champagne and chicken, the working-man said, 'What are you offering us in

exchange?' and he replied, 'My relationship to my father.' But they would

not buy.

"Antiquarians and scholars, too, found it a hard task to live. No one

needed the things they raked up from the dust-heap of the past. Critics

were in an exceptionally critical condition. No one cared to exchange his

productions with a man who in return had to offer only his opinion of

somebody else's! As this opinion was usually worthless even under the old

_régime_, people soon began to turn up their noses at it, and nobody

would give a rusk for the information that Turner was a better artist

than Nature, or that hanging was too good for Whistler. Remarks about the

Italian Renaissance were accounted paltry equivalents for green peas,

invidious comparisons among the Lake poets were not easily negotiable for

alpaca umbrellas, and the subtlest misreadings of Shakespeare were

considered trivial substitutes for small-clothes. The artists were

reduced to borrowing half-rolls from their models, partly because people

had gone back to Nature and liked their scenery free from oil, and drank

in the Spirit of Beauty without water, and partly because it was so

difficult to assess the value of a picture now that critics had been

starved out and speculation had died away. Allegorical painters continued

a much-misunderstood race, and the fusion of classes had reacted fatally

on the brisk trade in 'Portraits of a Gentleman.' People who, in their

celestial aspirations after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, had

forgotten that they ate and drank and required food, warmth, and shelter

to hatch all these sublime things with Capital Letters--people who had

heretofore poured lofty scorn on those who could not forget that a man

was a being with a body--these were now the most clamant demanders of the

material. Only by the withdrawal of physical necessaries and luxuries did

they come to realise how much they had depended on such, or to perceive

the impossibility of the Worship of Truth on an empty stomach. Alas!

under this crude system of barter the most ardent expression of their

sentiments concerning the ideal and the _Kalokagathon_ would not keep

them in cigars. The professional paradoxist went about with holes in his

boots. Epigrams in hand, sickness at heart, and emptiness at stomach, he

crawled through the town in search of a buyer. He offered a dozen of the

choicest apothegms for a pair of hob-nailed boots, conjuring the cobbler

like the veriest 'commercial' to note the superiority of the manufacture.

He pointed out that he travelled with the latest novelties in

Impressionist Ethics, perfect unfitness guaranteed. He even offered to

make a reduction if the cobbler would take a quantity. The worthy

craftsman, stung by the prospect of a cheap job lot of epigrams, was

prevailed upon to look at the goods. But when he read that 'Vice is the

foundation of all virtue,' that 'Self-sacrifice is the quintessence of

selfishness,' and that 'The Good of Evil outweighs the Evil of Good,' he

felt that he could do much better with his boots, even if he only

employed them to kick the epigrammatist. The poor wretch thought himself

lucky when he succeeded in purchasing two epigramsworth of tobacco and a

paradoxworth of potatoes. To cap his misfortunes, the nation suffered

from a sudden invasion of immigrant epigrammatists, so that cynicisms

went a-begging at ten for a sausage-roll. Nor was the dull but moral

maxim at less discount than the witty but improper epigram. Essays

inculcating the most superior virtues failed to counterbalance a day's

charing, and the finest spiritualistic soft soap would not wash clothes.

Even the washerwoman deemed her work more real and valuable than the

manufacture of moralities too fine for use, and the deliberate effusion

of sentiments too good to be true.

"In those days, too, a complete political platform, comprising a score of

first-class articles of faith, sold at a pair of second-hand

slop-trousers, and a speech of three hours and three hundred parentheses

could not fetch more than a pot of jam in the open market. The workhouses

were crowded with politicians, critics, poets, novelists, bishops,

sporting tipsters, scholars, heirs, soldiers, dudes, painters,

journalists, peers, bookmakers, landlords, punsters, idealists, and other

incorrigible persons. Nothing was more curious and heartrending in the

history of this transition to a new stage than the rapidity with which

those who had been most exigent towards life bated their terms. Men who,

in their aspirations after the Good and the Beautiful and the True, had

unwittingly wasted an intolerable deal of the world's substance in

riotous idealising,--men who had so long breathed the atmosphere of

ottomans and rose-leaves that they were barely conscious of their

privileges,--now found themselves clamouring for bread wherewith to stay

the cravings of their inner selves, and accounted themselves happy if

they found a roof to shelter them. The pathos of it was that they felt it

all too intensely to see the pathos of it, or to express it in poem,

picture, or song.

"It was, of course, the current political economy to which was due this

immense depreciation in the exchange value of the higher kinds of

intellectual and artistic work. In the old Socialistic system which had

been swept away by the abolition of money, men had purchased literary and

musical commodities in common, each consumer paying his quota for his

share of an unconsumable and infinitely divisible whole. But now few

individuals cared or could afford to purchase whole works for their

private edification; and so it came to pass that men of talent suffered

as much as men of genius in the olden days. And when it began to be

understood of the people that the times were other, and that Art and

Letters and Apostleship would not pay, men turned in resignation to work

with their hands, and they made all kinds of useful things.

"And the bookmakers returned not to their pens, nor the pot-boiling

painters to their palettes, nor the apostles to their prophesying, being

otherwise engaged and not thereto driven by inward necessity.

"And the Society of Authors perished!

"But the great poets, and the prophets, and the workers in colour and

form, upon whom the spirit rested, these wrought on when their daily

labour for a livelihood was at an end, for joy of their art and for the

religious fire that was in them, giving freely of their best to their

fellow-men, and exempt for evermore from all taint of trade."

The Cynic paused, and I sat silent, deeply impressed by what he had said,

and striving to imprint every word of it upon my memory, so that I might

sell it to a magazine.

XIV

MODERN MYTH-MAKING

So far as I can gather from the publications of the Folklore Society, the

science of Folklore is in a promising condition. The doctors seem to be

agreed neither about the facts nor the methods nor the conclusions, but

otherwise their unanimity is wonderful. Originally the science was made

in Germany, where it still flourishes, like all sciences that require

infinite pains and inexhaustible dulness. All that can be done with any

fruitfulness is apparently the collection and classification of stories,

songs and superstitions. Hypotheses and theories are mainly bricks

without straw, and the only certain conclusion that may be drawn from the

prevalence of folk-tales all over the world is that all men are liars.

This was the first contribution to the science, and the Psalmist may be

regarded as the founder of Folklore. Herder made an advance when he

collected the folk-songs of many nations; and Grimm as a collector was

truly scientific, but when he brought in his mythological explanations he

brought in mythology. Benfey's celebrated theory that European folk-tales

are Oriental in origin and comparatively recent in date seems to be

bearing up well.

But no one seems to study the mythopoetic instinct as it manifests itself

in modern life, in the daily refraction of fact through the medium of

imagination (a medium whose power of refraction is far greater than that

of water). Because we no longer create gods and goddesses, or people the

woods and brooks with fairies and nymphs, and the forest with gnomes and

the hills with hobgoblins--because we do not soften our lives with an

atmosphere of gracious supernaturalism, and fresco our azure ceiling with

angels--it is assumed that the mythopoetic instinct is dead. Far from it!

It is as lively as ever, and we may watch it at play in the building up

of legends, in the creation of mythical figures; in the shaping of the

Boulanger legend, the Napoleonic legend, the Beaconsfield legend with its

poetical machinery of the primrose, the Booth legend, the Blavatsky

legend; in the fathering of epigrams upon typical wits like Sheridan, or

the attribution of all jokes to "Punch"; in the creation of non-existent

bodies like the Æsthetes, and in the private circulation of scandals

about public personages; in the perpetual revival of the Blood Accusation

against the Jews, or the pathetic clinging to the miracles of exposed

Spiritualists and Theosophists; in the Gladstone of Tory imaginations and

the Balfour of Radical; in the Irish patriot of oratory; in the

big-footed Englishwoman of French fancy, and the English conception of

the Scotchman who cannot see a joke; in the persistence of traditional

beliefs or prejudices that would be destroyed by one inspection.

Apotheosis is still with us, and diabolification (if I may coin a word).

We canonise as prodigally as in the mediaeval ages, and are as keen as

ever about relics. We are still looking out for dead King Arthur: he will

return by way of the County Council. _Plus ça change plus c'est la

méme[*] chose_--probably the profoundest observation ever made by a

Frenchman. Our mythopoetic instinct is as active as of yore, only the

mode of its expression is changed. It works on modern lines, has taken to

prose instead of poetry, and only occasionally unfurls wings. Why does

not the Folklore Society investigate the origin of our modern myths? Why

not seize on the instinct as it is seen at play in our midst, moulding

movements and fashioning faiths? Why not catch it in the act--employ

vivisection, so to speak, instead of dissecting dead remains? Why not try

to extract from the living present the laws of the creation and

development of myths and the conditions of their persistence, so that by

applying these laws retrospectively we may come to understand our

heritage of tradition? Ah! but this would require insight into life,

which your scientist has no mind for. Besides, dry-as-dust

work--collation and classification--may be distributed among the members

of a society; but how require of them fresh vision? There is dispute as

to how folklore arose: one school talks vaguely of creation by the clan,

the community, the race; another insists that the germ at least must

always have sprung from some one individual mind, just as a proverb may

be the wisdom of many but must be the wit of one; that ideas that are "in

the air," like a tree whose branches are everywhere and whose trunk

nowhere, had a single root once; and that every _on dit_ was literally

"_one says_" originally. But if we watch the process of mythopoetising in

our daily life, we shall see both theories illustrated. Consider the myth

of Lord Randolph's small stature: it may be traced easily enough to Mr.

Furaiss's pencil. Many people who have the impression forget whence they

derived it; and many who never saw Punch had the idea conveyed to them by

London letter-writing journalists who never saw Churchill. Yet there is

no doubt that the myth is the creation of a single man. In this instance

the genesis is clear, and it makes for the one-man theory. In other

instances, I can quite imagine myths arising from a spectacle witnessed

in common by a multitude, or an incident developing itself under the eyes

of many. No single reporter of the doings in Sherwood Forest built up the

Robin Hood legend.

[* Transcriber's note: So in original. One would rather expect an accent

circonflexe on the first 'e', not an accent aigu.]

Doubtless every ballad was the work of an individual; crowds do not

spontaneously burst out into identical remarks, except on the stage. But

the crowd was ready for the individual's ballad; it furnished him with

his theme and his inspiration, so that he "gave back in rain what he

received in mist." Thus, most folklore would owe its birth to the

co-operation of the individual and the community--the former the creative

or male factor, the latter the receptive or feminine factor. The one man

launches his jest, his caricature, his story, his melody, into a

sympathetic but inarticulate environment. Then it is taken up, it is

transformed, it grows mighty. The "Times" is something very different

from the total of the contributors' manuscripts.

Perhaps the most interesting field of folklore work, from the point of

view of mere literature, was that opened up by Von Hahn's classification

of the stories of the world according to their original elements, their

bare plots. There are about seventy main types of stories to which all

the wandering tales of the world may be reduced. As thus:

GRATEFUL BEASTS' TYPE

1. A man saves some beasts and a man from a pit.

2. The beasts somehow make him rich, and the man somehow tries to ruin

him.

I have little doubt that these might be fined down to seventeen on a very

broad basis of classification. I should like to see an analysis of the

world's novels similar to that which Polti has made for the drama.

Probably it would need a Society to do it, though it would be easy enough

to keep pace with the output when once the arrears were cleared off.

There are only twenty novels published every week in England, omitting

serials, and probably only two or three hundred in the whole world. By a

division of labour these could be easily taken to pieces and their plots

dissected. In time this might lead to a copyright in incidents as well as

in words and titles, and the stock situations would be stocked no more,

and the conventional novelists would be killed off. Even if Parliament

did not see its way to copyrighting incidents, for fear good ideas

spoiled by weak writers should be lost to use by the strong, the

publication of a catalogue of the motives of fiction already treated

would deter all but the most shameless from changing infants at nurse, or

rescuing young ladies from bulls, or mistaking brother and sister for

lovers, or having to do with wills lost, stolen, or strayed. Colossal as

the task looks, a first rough analysis would sweep away half the new

novels of the month and include three-fourths of the fiction of the past.

Here is the broadest and most general formula of English fiction as she

is wrote for the young person: _A young man meets a young woman under

unpropitious conditions which delay their union._

Nine-tenths of the novels of the day may be dissected under the following

heads: (_a_) Description of Hero; (_b_) Of Heroine; (_c_) How they first

met; (_d_) Why they did not marry till the last chapter.

There! Quite unintentionally I have given away the secret of

novel-writing. It is, for all the world, like the parlour game of

Consequences, wherein each person fills up a form unknown to the others.

The muscular John Jones met the beautiful Princess of Portman Square in

the Old Kent Road, and said to her, "Oh, 'Arriet, I'm waitin' for you,"

and she replied, "You must wait till the end of the third volume," and

the consequences were that they got married, and the world said, "We must

get this from Mudie's." After this lesson in fiction any one may rival

the masters, provided he can hold a pen and doesn't mind leaving the

spelling to the compositors. You may perhaps think that the real value of

a book lies in the accessories before the marriage, in the pictures of

life and character; but I can assure you, unless you turn everything

round this axis, the critics will tell you you can't construct. For my

part, I would rather have "The Story of an African Farm," two-storied as

it really is, than a hundred bungalow romances. Better genius without art

than art without genius.

For French fiction the formula would have to be varied. It would run:

(_a_)Hero; (_b_)Heroine; (_c_)How they first loved; (_d_)What the hero's

wife or the heroine's husband did; (_e_)Who died?

Another piece of work I should like to see done is a census of the

population of novels. Then we should see clearly how far they are a

reflection of life. In England I warrant the professional men would

outnumber all others; the aristocracy would come next, and the urban

working-man would be swamped by the villagers. The nation of shopkeepers

would be poorly represented, and artisans would be few in the land. There

would be more perfectly beautiful English girls than there are girls in

England, more American millionaires than even the States can raise, and

more penniless lords than if Debrett were a charity list of paupers; more

satanic guardsmen than ever wore "the widow's uniform," more briefless

barristers than all the men who have eaten dinners in vegetarian

restaurants, and more murderers than have ever been caught since the days

of Jonathan Wild. Indeed, I am not certain but what the population of

English novels would come out thirteen millions, mostly criminals. The

relative proportions of blondes and brunettes would also be brought out,

and whether there is a run on any especial colour of hair. Plain heroines

came in with Jane Eyre. It would be interesting to ascertain if they are

still worn or still weary.