I shifted uneasily in my own arm-chair. "What do you mean?" I inquired

baldly.

"Don't you know I write for the unborn?" he counter-queried.

"But they don't read you--yet," I said, trying to smile.

"My dear fellow! Why, I'm the best-read man in Ante-land. The unborn

swear by me! My publishers, Fore and Futurus, are simply rolling in

promissory notes."

"You've become a Theosophist!" I cried in alarm, for that familiar

twinkle in his eye had been replaced by a strange exaltation.

"And what if I have?"

"Theosophy!" I cried scornfully--"Theology for Atheists! The main

contemporary form of the Higher Foolishness."

"The Higher Foolishness!" echoed Marindin indignantly.

"Yes, the Foolishness of the fool with brains. The brainless fool fulfils

himself in low ways--in alcoholic saturnalia, in salvation carnivals, in

freethought hysterics, in political bombs. The Higher Foolishness

expresses itself in aberrations of poetry and art, in table-rapping and

theosophy, in vegetarianism, and in mystic calculations about the Beast."

"It is you who are the fool," he replied shortly. "Theosophy is

true--that is, my form of it. Birth is but the name for the entry upon

this particular form of existence.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

"The unborn pre-exist, even as the dead persist; and instead of

addressing Posterity posthumously and circuitously, I have anticipated

its verdict. I have written for the unborn, direct. I have been the

apostle of the New Ethics among the pre-natal populations, the prophet of

individualism among the unborn."

"What! You have propagated the teaching that free choice must be the

battle-cry of the future, that the only genuine morality is that which is

the spontaneous outcome of an emancipated individuality!"

"Precisely."

"But what has free choice to do with the unborn?"

"What has it to do? Great heavens! Everything. The battle-cry of the

future will be Free Birth."

"Free Birth!" I echoed.

"Yes--this is what I have been preaching to the unborn--the choice of

their parents before consenting to be born! Compulsory birth must be

swept away. What! would you sweep away all checks upon the individuality

of the individual--once he is born would you tear asunder all the

swaddling-bands of our baby civilisation; would you replace the rules of

the nursery by the orderly anarchy of manhood and womanhood, and yet

retain such an incoherent anachronism as compulsory birth--a disability

which often cripples a man upon the very threshold of his career? Without

this initial reform the individualism of your Ibsens and Auberon Herberts

becomes a mere simulacrum, a hollow mockery. If you are to develop your

individuality, it must be your own individuality that you develop, not an

individuality thrust upon you by a couple of outsiders."

"And you have preached this with success?"

"With unheard-of success."

"Unheard-of, indeed!" I muttered sarcastically.

"In _your_ plane of existence!" he retorted. "In Ante-land the movement

has spread widely; scarcely a soul but has become convinced of the evils

of compulsion in this most personal matter, and of the necessity of

having a voice in its own incarnation. And it is I, _moi qui vous parle_,

who have sown the seeds of the revolt against our present social

arrangements. Too long had parents presumed upon the ignorance and

helplessness of the unborn and upon their failure to combine. But now the

great wave of emancipation which is lifting us all off our feet has

reached the coming race. And soon the old ideal will be nothing but a

strangled snake by the cradle of Hercules."

"Why, I never heard of such a thing in all my born days!" I cried

helplessly.

"Of course not; you are more ignorant than the babe unborn. You trouble

yourself about the next world, but as to what may be going on in the last

world, that never enters your head. But for the tyranny of outward social

forms you and I might have deferred our birth till a serener century.

Henceforth the dreamer of dreams will have only himself to blame if he is

born out of his due time and called upon to set the crooked straight. Job

himself would have escaped his misfortunes if he had only had the

patience to wait. In future any one who is born in a hurry will be a born

idiot."

"What! Will the unborn choose the time of birth as well as their

parents?"

"One is implicated in the other. Suppose the soul wished to be the son of

an American Duke, naturally it would have to wait till aristocracy was

developed across the Atlantic, say some time in the next century."

"I see. And is there a public opinion in Ante-land that regulates private

action?"

"Yes, but I have now educated it to the higher ethics. It used to be the

respectable thing to be born of strangers without one's own consent,

though at the bottom of their souls many persons believed this to be

sheer immorality, and cursed the day they were led to the cradle, and

became the mere playthings of the parents who acquired them--pretty toys

to be dandled and caressed, just a larger variety of doll. But all this

is almost over. Henceforth birth will be considered immoral unless it is

spontaneous--the outcome of an intelligent selection of parents, based on

love."

"On love?"

"Yes; should not a child love its father and mother? and how can we

expect it to love people it has never seen, to whom it is tied in the

most brutal way, without a voice in the control of its destinies at the

absolutely most important turning-point of its whole existence?"

"True, a child should love its parents," I conceded. "But is not the

quiet, sober affection that springs up after birth, an affection founded

on mutual association and mutual esteem, better than all the tempestuous

ardours of pre-natal passion that may not survive the christening?"

"Ah, that is the good old orthodox cant!" cried Marindin, puffing out a

great cloud of smoke. "What certainty is there this post-natal love would

spring up? And, at any rate, a man would no longer be able to blame

Providence if he found himself tied for life to a couple for whom he had

nothing but loathing and contempt. Even the adherents of the old

conception of compulsory childship begin to see that the stringency of

the filial tie needs relaxation. Already it is recognised that in cases

of cruelty the child may be divorced from the parent. But there is a

hopeless incompatibility of temper and temperament which is not

necessarily attended with cruelty. Drunkenness, lunacy, and criminality

should also be regarded as valid grounds for divorce, the parent being no

longer allowed to bear the name of the child it has dishonoured."

"But who shall say," I asked sceptically, "that the new self-appointed

generation will be happier than the old? What guarantee is there that the

choice of parents will be made with taste and discretion?"

Marindin shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

"Come and interview the unborn," he said, and fixed his unsmiling eye on

mine, as though to hypnotise me. What happened then I shall never be able

to explain. I was translated into another scale of being, into the last

world in fact; and just as it is impossible to describe a symphony to a

deaf mute or a sunset to a man born blind, so it is impossible for me to

put down in terms of our present consciousness the experiences I went

through in that earlier pre-natal stage of existence. What I perceived in

Ante-land must needs be expressed through the language of this world, to

which in effect it bears as true and constant a relation as the vibration

of a violin string to its music. I soon gathered that, as Marindin had

claimed, his doctrines had made considerable incursions in the last

world, and, what was more surprising, in this. There seemed to be quite a

considerable sect of parents spread all through Europe and America,

pledged to respect the rights of the unborn, and it was in co-operation

with this enlightened minority--destined, no doubt, in time to become the

Universal Church--that the unborn worked. The sect embraced many couples

of wealth and position, and, as was to be expected, at the start there

had been a rush among the unborn for millionaire parents. But it was soon

discovered that birth for money was a mistake, that it too often led to a

spendthrift youth and a bankrupt age, and that there was not seldom a

legacy duty to pay in the shape of hereditary diseases, sometimes

amounting to as much as two pains in the pound; the gold rush was

therefore abating. Birth for beauty had also been popular till experience

demonstrated the insubstantiality of good looks as a panoply throughout

life. Gradually the real conditions of earthly happiness were coming to

be understood. Unborn preachers in their unbuilt churches tried in their

unspoken sermons to lead souls to the higher bodies or to save souls from

precipitate incarnation. Marindin's own unwritten books sustained Paley's

thesis of the essentially equal distribution of happiness among all

classes, and left it for the individual soul to decide between the

realities of toil and the unrealities of prosperity, Marindin took the

opportunity of our presence in Ante-land to pay a visit to his

publishers, Fore and Futurus, of whose honesty and generosity he spoke in

glowing terms. Fore received us; he seemed to be a thorough gentleman,

this unborn publisher. He showed us the design for a cover to a new

"Guide to the Selection of Parents," which he was about to bring out, and

which he hoped would become the standard work on the subject. I gathered

that these "Guides" were very popular as birthday presents, enabling, as

they did, those just about to be born to think once more before making

the final plunge. The feature of the Fore and Futurus "Guide" was the

appendix of contributions from souls already born, whose mistakes might

serve to benefit those still unattached.

"But how can there be a guide to such a frightful labyrinth?" I inquired

curiously. "Japhet in search of a father had a light task before him

compared with the selection of one. And it is not only the selection of a

father, but of a mother! To take the outside variations only: the father

may be handsome, good-looking, plain or ugly; the mother may be

beautiful, pretty, plain or ugly. Any of these types of fathers may be

paired with any of these types of mothers, which makes sixteen

complications. Then there is complexion--fair or dark--which makes

sixty-four, for you know how, by algebraic calculations, every new

possibility multiplies into all the others. If one turns to mental and

moral characteristics, one's brain swims to think of the new

complications incalculably numerous and all multiplying into the old

physical combinations. Multiply furthermore by all the combinations

arising from considerations of health, money, position, nationality,

religion, order of birth--whether as first, second, or thirteenth

child--and the strongest intellect reels and breaks down. Even now I have

not enumerated all the possibilities; for the total would have to be

doubled for the contingency of sex, since I presume birth would not be

absolutely free, unless it included the right of choosing one's sex.

"To take a concrete instance of the embarrassment which Free Birth would

bring, and of the invidious distinctions that would have to be made:

which is the better lot?--to be the third daughter of a

nineteenth-century, healthy, ugly, penniless, clever, middle-aged, moral,

free-thinking German Baron by a beautiful, rich, stupid, plebeian Spanish

dancer, with one child by a previous marriage, and a tendency to

consumption; or the second son of a twentieth-century American Duke,

unhealthy, uncultured, handsome, chaste, Ritualist, elderly and poor, by

an English heiress, ugly, low-born, Low Church, ill-bred, intellectual,

with a silly and only semi-detached mother? But this would be a problem

of unreal simplicity, bearing as much relation to actuality as the first

law of motion to the flight of a bird, for your choice would lie not

between one pair and another, but among all possible pairs."

"All existing pairs possible to you," corrected Marindin. "People manage

to choose husbands and wives, though according to your computation the

whole of the opposite sex would have to be examined and selected from. In

practice the choice is narrowed down to a few individuals. So with the

choice of parents--most are already snapped up, monopolised or mortgaged,

or contracted for, and you have either to choose from the leavings or

postpone your birth, and bide your time a century or two. But the problem

is greatly simplified by the P. C."

"What is the P. C.?" I murmured.

"The Parental Certificate, of course. Throughout the terrestrial branch

of our sect no one is eligible for parentage who does not possess it. It

is given only to those who have passed the P. D. or Parents' Degree

examination, and supplements the old P. L. or Parents' Licence, which was

openly bought and sold."

"And the qualifications?"

"Oh, very elementary. The candidate is required to pass an exam, (both

written and oral) in the training of the young, and to be certified of

sound mind in sound body. The P. L. itself has been transformed into a

licence to keep one, two or more children, according to means."

"You see our 'Guide' deals merely with the great typical pairs,"

explained the publisher. "What Aristotle did for Logic our author has

done for Birth. He only pretends to give general categories. Aristotle

could not guarantee a man shall properly reason, nor can any individual

be infallibly inspired to the wisest choice of parentage. Of course the

photographs of parents are of great service to the unborn who are

thinking of settling down."

"How do they get to see them?"

"Oh, as soon as a couple passes the P. D. and receives the P. C. they

appear in the illustrated papers--especially the ladies' papers.

'Graduates of the Week' is the heading. And then there is the P. T.--the

Pathological Tree."

I looked at the publisher in perplexity.

"Gracious! I forget this is your first visit to Ante-land," he said,

apologetically. "Look! Here are some P. Ts. my lawyer has just been

looking over for me, the property of parents whose advertisements for

children I have been answering. My friends are rather anxious I should

incarnate."

I surveyed the parchment roll with curiosity. It was a tree, on the model

of a genealogical tree, but tracing the hygienic record of the family.

"In our sect," said Marindin impressively, "it will become the pride of

the family to have an unblemished pedigree, and any child who gets

himself born into such a family will do so with the responsibility of

carrying on the noble tradition of the house and living up to the

sanitary scutcheon--_santé oblige_. When children begin to be fastidious

about the families they are born into, parents will have to improve, or

die childless. And, as the love of offspring springs eternal in the human

breast, this will have an immense influence upon the evolution of the

race to higher goals. I do not know any force of the future on which we

can count more hopefully than on the refinement resulting from the

struggle for offspring and the survival of the fittest to be parents.

Undesirable families will become extinct. The unborn will subtly mould

the born to higher things. Childlessness will become again what it was in

the Orient--a shame and a reproach."

"Yes," asserted the publisher, smoothing out the P. Ts.; "the old

unreasoned instinct and repugnance will be put on a true basis when it is

seen that childlessness is a proof of unworthiness--a brand of failure."

"As old-maidenhood is, less justly, to-day," I put in.

"Quite so," said Marindin eagerly. "In their anxiety to be worthy of

selection by Posterity, parents will rise to heights of health and

holiness of which our sick generation does not dream. If they do not, woe

to them! They will be remorselessly left to die out without issue.

"The change has begun; our sect is spreading fast. In the course of a

century or two physical and mental deformities will vanish from the

earth." His eye flashed prophetic fire.

"So soon?" I said, with a sceptical smile.

"How could they survive?" Marindin inquired scathingly.

"Is it likely any of us would consent to be born hunchbacks?" broke in

the publisher; "or to enter families with hereditary gout? Would any sane

Antelander put himself under the yoke of animal instincts or tendencies

to drink? Ah, here is a bibulous grandfather!" and he tossed one of the

P. Ts. disdainfully aside, though I observed that the old gentleman in

question had been an English Earl.

"But, Mr. Fore," I protested, "will all the unborn attach such importance

to the pathological pedigree as you do? What power will make them train

up their parents in the way they should go?"

"The greatest power on earth," broke in Marindin; "the power of

selfishness, backed by education. Enlightened selfishness is all that is

needed to bring about the millennium. The selfishness of to-day is so

stupid. Let the unborn care only for their own skins, and they will

improve the parents, and be well brought up themselves by the good

parents they have selected."

"But come now, Mr. Fore," I said; "the new system has been partially at

work, I understand, for some time. Do you assure me, on your word of

honor as an unborn publisher, that the filial franchise has been

invariably exercised wisely and well?"

"Of course not," interrupted Marindin. "Haven't I already told you there

has been much fumbling and experimentation, some souls being born for

money and some for beauty and some for position? But pioneers must always

suffer--for the benefit of those who come after."

"Certainly there have been rash and improvident births," admitted the

publisher. "Hasty births, premature births, secret births, morganatic

births, illegitimate births, and every variety of infelicitous intrusion

upon your planet. The rash are born too early, the cautious too late;

some even repent on the very brink of birth and elect to be stillborn.

But in the majority of cases birth is the outcome of mature deliberation;

a contract entered into with a full sense of the responsibilities of the

situation."

"But what do you understand by illegitimate birth?" I asked.

"The selection of parents not possessing the P. C. There are always

eccentric spirits who would defy the dearest and most sacred institutions

organised by society for its own protection. We are gradually creating a

public opinion to discountenance such breaches of the law, and such

perils to the commonweal, subversive as they are of all our efforts to

promote the general happiness and holiness. Even in your uncivilised

communities," continued the publisher, "these unlicensed and illegitimate

immigrants are stamped with life-long opprobrium and subjected to

degrading disabilities; how much infamy should then attach to them when

the sin they are born in is their own!"

"A lesser degree of illegitimacy," added Marindin, "is to be born into a

family already containing the full number it is licensed for. This

happens particularly in rich families, introductions into which are

naturally most sought after. It is still a moot point whether the birth

should be legitimatised on the death of one of the other children."

"But it is the indirect results that I look forward to most," he went on

after a pause. "For example, the solution of Nihilism in Russia."

"What has that to do with the unborn?" I asked, quite puzzled.

"Don't you see that the czarship will die out?"

"How so?"

"No one will risk being born into the Imperial family. I should say that

birth within four degrees of consanguinity of the Czar would be so rare

that it would come to be regarded as criminal."

"Yes, that and many another question will be solved quite peaceably,"

said the publisher. "You saw me reject a noble grandfather; the growth of

democratic ideals among us must ultimately abolish hereditary

aristocracy. So, too, the question of second marriages and the deceased

wife's sister may be left to the taste and ethical standards of the

unborn, who can easily, if they choose, set their faces against such

unions."

"You see the centre of gravity would be shifted to the pre-natal period,"

explained Marindin, "when the soul is more liable to noble influences.

The moment the human being is born it is definitely moulded; all your

training can only modify the congenital cast. But the real potentialities

are in the unborn. While there is not life there is hope. When you

commence to educate the child it is already too late. But if the great

forces of education are brought to bear upon the unformed, you may bring

all Itigh qualities to birth. Think, for instance, how this will

contribute to the cause of religion. The unborn will simply eliminate the

false religions by refusing to be born into them. Persuade the unborn,

touch _them_, convert _them_! You, I am sure, Mr. Fore," he said, turning

to the worthy publisher, "would never consent to be born into the wrong

religion!"

"Not if hell-fire was the penalty of an unhappy selection," replied Mr.

Fore.

"Of course not," said Marindin. "Missionaries have always flown in the

face of psychology. Henceforward, moreover, Jews will be converted at a

period more convenient for baptism."

"We hope to mould politics, too," added the publisher, "by boycotting

certain races and replenishing others."

"Yes," cried Marindin; "it is my hope that by impregnating the unborn

with a specific set of prejudices, they might be induced to settle in

particular countries, and I cannot help thinking that patriotism would be

more intelligent when it was voluntary; self-imposed from admiration of

the ideals and history of a particular people. Indeed this seems to me

absolutely the only way in which, reason can be brought to bear on the

great war question, for in lieu of that loud eloquence of Woolwich

infants there would be exercised the silent pressure of the unborn, who

could simply annihilate an undesirable nation, or decimate an offensive

district by refusing to be born in it. Surely this would be the most

rational way of settling the ever-menacing Franco-Prussian quarrel."

"I observe already a certain anti-Gallic feeling in Ante-land," put in

the publisher. "A growing disinclination to be born in France, if not a

preference for being made in Germany. But these things belong to _la

haute politique_"

"My own suspicion is," I ventured to suggest, "that there is a growing

disinclination to be born anywhere, and this new privilege of free choice

will simply bring matters to a climax. Your folks, confronted by the

endless problem of choosing their own country and century, their own

family and their own religion, will dilly-dally and shilly-shally and put

off birth so long that they will never change their condition at all.

They will come to the conviction that it is better not to be born; better

to bear the evils that they know than fly to others that they know not

of. What if the immigration of destitute little aliens into our planet

ceased altogether?"

Marindin shrugged his shoulders, and there came into his face that

indescribable look of the hopeless mystic.

"Then humanity would have reached its goal: it would come naturally and

gently to an end. The euthanasia of the race would be accomplished, and

the glorified planet, cleansed of wickedness at last, would take up its

part again in the chorus of the spheres. But like most ideals, I fear

this is but a pleasant dream." Then, as the publisher turned away to

replace the P. Ts. in a safe, he added softly: "Intelligence is never

likely to be so widely diffused in Ante-land that the masses would fight

shy of birth. There would always be a sufficient proportion of unborn

fools left who would prefer the palpabilities of bodily form to the

insubstantialities of pre-natal existence. Between you and me, our friend

the publisher is extremely anxious to be published."

"And yet he seems intelligent enough," I argued.

"Ah, well, it cannot be denied that there are _some_ lives decidedly

worth living, and our friend Fore will probably bring up his parents to

the same profession as himself."

"No doubt there would always be competition for the best _births_," I

observed, smiling.

"Yes," replied Marindin sadly; "the struggle for existence will always

continue among the unborn."

Suddenly a thought set me a-grin. "Why, what difference can the choice of

parents make after all?" I cried. "Suppose you had picked my parents--you

would have been I, and I should be somebody else, and somebody else would

be you. And there would be the three of us, just the same as now," and I

chuckled aloud.

"You seem to have had pleasant dreams, old man," replied Marindin. But

his voice sounded strange and far away.

* * * * *

I opened my eyes wide in astonishment, and saw him buried in an

easy-chair, with a book in his hand and two tears rolling down his

cheeks.

"I've been reading of Tiny Tim while you snoozed," he said

apologetically.

XXIII

PATER AND PROSE

It seems only yesterday--and it is only yesteryear--since Walter Pater

sat by my side in a Club garden, and listened eloquently to my

after-lunch _causerie_, and now he is gone

To where, beyond the Voices, there is Peace.

You grasp that his eloquence was oracular, silent. He had an air. There

was in him--as in his work--a suggestion of aloofness from the homespun

world. I suspect he had never heard Chevalier. I should not wonder if he

had never even heard of him. He was wrapped in the atmosphere of Oxford,

and though "the last enchantments of the Middle Ages" in no wise threw

their glamour over his thought, there was a cloistral distinction in his

attitude. He reminded me of my friend the Cambridge professor, who, when

the O'Shea business was filling eight columns daily of the papers that

deprecate honest art, innocently asked me if there was anything new about

Parnell. Pater did not probably carry detachment from the contemporary so

far as that, but he was in harmony with his hedonistic creed in

permitting only a select fraction of the cosmos to have the entry to his

consciousness. A delightful, elegantly-furnished consciousness it was,

with the latest improvements, and with every justification for

exclusiveness. But there is in men of Mr. Pater's stamp something of what

might be termed the higher Pod-snappery. They put things aside with the

wave of a white-gloved hand: this and that do not exist, Mr. Podsnap

himself--O the irony of it!--among them. Like Mr. Podsnap, though on a

different plane, they take themselves and their view of life too

seriously. When I told Mr. Pater that there was a pun in his "Plato and

Platonism," he asked anxiously for its precise locality, so that he might

remove it. This I could not remember, but I told him I did not see why he

should remove one of the best things in the book. But my assurances that

the pun was excellent did not seem to tranquillise him. Now, why should

not a philosopher make a pun? Shakespeare was an incorrigible punster.

Why should a man's life be divided into little artificial sections, like

the labelled heads in the phrenologist's window? I do not want to see a

man put on his Sunday clothes to talk about religion. But a congenital

inelasticity is fostered in the atmosphere of common-rooms, there where

solemn-footed serving-men present the port with sacerdotal ceremonies,

and where, if the dons are no longer (in the classic phrase of Gibbon)

"sunk in port and superstition," the port is still a superstition. This

absence of humour, this superhuman seriousness bred of heavy traditions

peculiarly English, this sobriety nourished by sacerdotal port, give the

victim quite a wrong sense of values and proportions. He mistakes

University for Universe. His tastes become the measure of a creation of

which he is the centre. Hence an abiding gravity that is ever on the

brink of dulness. The Englishman cannot afford to be grave, the bore is

so close at hand.

And yet, if one did not take oneself seriously, I suppose nothing would

ever be done. A kindly illusion about their importance in the scheme of

things is Nature's instrument for getting work out of men. "Don't you

think Flaubert took himself too seriously?" I heard a lady novelist ask a

gentleman practitioner. Certainly his correspondence with George Sand

reveals an anchorite of letters, who tortured the phrase and sacrificed

sleep to the adjective, and the brothers De Goncourt--themselves very

serious gentlemen--have recorded how he considered his book as good as

finished because he had invented the "dying falls" of the music of his

periods. But if Flaubert had sufficiently contemplated the infinities,

the immense indifference of things, if, like the astronomer in search of

a creed, he had concentrated his vision on the point to which the whole

solar system is drifting, French prose would have lost some of its most

wonderful pages; and had the late Mr. Pater been less troubled by the

rose-leaf of style and more by the thorns of the time, English prose

would have been the poorer by harmonies and felicities unsurpassed and

unsurpassable. This is to ignore Pater the Philosopher and Pater the

Critic. Of these persons there will be varying estimates. They have even

in a sense, through the extravagances of a disciple, been subjected to

the verdict of a British jury--a sufficiently ironic revenge upon the

fastidious shrinker from the Philistines; and though, of course, it was

not theories of art and philosophy that were being "tried by jury," yet

these side-issues contributed to prejudice the twelve good men and true.

But it is only congruous with the trend of democratic thought that

everything should come under the censorship of the crowd, and the only

wonder is that long ere this the vexed questions of our troubled time

have not been solved by _plébiscite_.

A leading New York paper is commended for its patronage of literature,

because it offers large prizes for stories, the prizes to be awarded by

the votes of its readers. If the crowd is capable of appraising

literature, there is no reason why it should not take science and art

similarly into its hands, nor why the counting of heads should not

replace the marshalling of arguments in philosophy and ethics. In

politics the mob has a right to be heard, because it has a right to

express its grievances. Could an aristocracy be trusted to do justly by

Demos, democracy would have no reason to be. But this right of the

many-headed monster to a control of the governmental agencies that affect

its own happiness, does not involve the ability to decide less selfish

problems; and when, as rarely happens, abstract problems find themselves

in the witness-box, then the "Palladium of British liberty" becomes a

mockery of justice. "Legal judgment of his peers," says Magna Charta; but

when an exceptional man blunders into the dock, is he ever accorded a

panel of his equals? Things are no better in France. When Flaubert was

arraigned for his "Madame Bovary," he did not get a box of men of

letters, though there is so much more sense of art in the citizens of

Paris, that even by the bourgeois jury he was acquitted without a stain

on the character of his book. The central figure of our English episode

had nothing so creditable as an immoral book to his charge, but

indirectly the relations of art and morality came into question, and he

declared that he followed Pater, the one critic he recognised, in

believing that there were no relations between art and morality, that a

book could not be immoral, but might be something worse--badly written.

Now, this is the favourite doctrine of Chelsea, and doubtless something

may be said for it; but to put it forth, as the doctrine of Pater is a

libel--almost a criminal libel--on that great writer. These young men who

live for the Beautiful have only understood as much of Pater as would

justify epicurean existence.

Let us examine this pretension of the prophet of the importance of being

flippant, to be a disciple of Pater.

No doubt Pater was something of an Impressionist in his philosophy of

life. An eloquent expounder of the Heracletian flux, [Greek: panta rei],

of the relativity of systems of thought and conduct, and of the duty of

seizing the flying moments--"failure in life is to form habits,"--he did

not omit, like his one-sided disciples, to consider the quality of those

moments. It was the _highest_ quality you were to give to your moments as

they passed; to fail to do this was "on this short day of frost and sun

to sleep before evening." ("The Renaissance.") "Marius the Epicurean" was

not an Epicurean in the sense in which the doctrines of Epicurus have

been travestied through the ages: he turned away sickened from the

barbarities of the gladiatorial combats, longing for the time when the

forces of the future would create a heart that would make it impossible

to be thus pleasured. If "_Carpe diem_" is Pater's motto, the hour is not

to be plucked ignobly; if style is his watchword in art, style alone

cannot make great Art, though it may make good Art. The distinction,

between good Art and great Art depends immediately _not on its form_ but

on its matter. "It is on the quality of the matter it informs or

controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the

depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the

greatness of literary art depends, as 'The Divine Comedy,' 'Paradise

Lost,' 'Les Misérables,' the English Bible, are great art." ("Essay on

Style.") Your Chelsea manikin would never dream of these things as great

art: his whole soul is expressed in ballads and canzonets, in strange

esoteric contes, in nocturnes and colour-symphonies, in the bric-à-brac

of aesthetics. Furthermore let the _soi-disant_ disciples ponder this

explicit statement of the Master: "Given the conditions I haye tried to

explain as constituting good art,--then, if it be devoted further to the

increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the

enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of

new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may

ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with

Dante, to the glory of God, it will also be great Art." Yes, if Pater

protested against "the vulgarity which is dead to form," he was no less

contemptuous of "the stupidity which is dead to the substance."

("Postscript to Appreciations.") If he fought shy of the Absolute, if he

denied "fixed principles," and repudiated "every formula less living and

flexible than life" ("Essay on Coleridge"), he could still sympathise

passionately with Coleridge's hunger for the Eternal.

So much for the literary art. But even in painting, where the

self-sufficiency of style is proclaimed somewhat more speciously, the

purveyor of Chelsea ware will find scant countenance in the adored

Master. Nowhere can I find him preaching "Art for Art's sake," in the

jejune sense of the empty-headed acolytes of the aesthetic. With him the

formula was for the _spectator_ of art; it has been misapplied to the

_maker_ of art. Pater's studies of the great pictures of the Renaissance

are, if anything, rather too much taken up with their intellectual

content, and their latent revelation of the temper of the time and the

artist. No, these young men are no disciples of Pater. In their

resoluteness to live in the Beautiful (which is not always

distinguishable from the Bestial), they have forgotten the other items of

the trinity of Goethe, they have lost sight of the True and the Whole. It

is Whistler who is the prophet of the divorce of Art from Life, of the

antithesis of Art and Nature. When Whistler said, "Another foolish

sunset," he spake the word that called into being all these "degenerate"

paradoxes, though I am not sure but what Mr. Sydney Grundy was before him

in creating a stage-manager who thinks meanly of the moons and the scenic

backgrounds of real life. It is a good joke, this of Nature paling before

Art, or reduced to plagiarising Art,--"Where, if not from the

Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping

down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into

monstrous shadows?"--but as the basis of a philosophy of Art it palls.

The germ of truth in it is that metaphysically these effects may be said

not to have existed till artists taught us to see and to look for them.

But, after all, wise old Shakespeare has the last word:

Nature is made better by no mean

But Nature makes that mean: so o'er that Art,

Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art

That Nature makes.

But these things are not for the British jury. Pater, the literary

artist, however, one is more driven to praise than to appraise. This

exquisite care for words has something of moral purity--as well as

physical daintiness in it. There is indeed something priestly in this

consecration of language, in this reverent ablution of the counters of

thought, those poor counters so overcrusted with the dirt of travel, so

loosely interchangeable among the vulgar; the figure of the stooping

devotee shows sublime in a garrulous world. What a heap of mischief M.

Jourdain has done by his discovery that he was talking prose all his

life! Prose, indeed! Moliere has much to answer for. The rough,

shuffling, slipshod, down-at-heel, clipped, frayed talk of every-day life

bears as much relation to prose as a music-hall ditty to poetry. The name

"prose" must be reserved for the fine art of language--that fine art

whose other branch is poetry. It is a grammarians' term, "prose," and

belongs not to the herd. They do not need it, and it would never have

come into M. Jourdain's head or out of his mouth, had he not taken a

tutor. And yet the delusion is common enough--even with those to whom

Moliere is Greek--that prose is anything which is not poetry. As well say

that poetry is anything which is not prose. Of the two branches of the

art of language, prose is the more difficult. This is not the opinion of

those who know nothing about it. They fancy a difficulty about rhymes and

metres. 'T is all the other way. Rhymes are the rudders of thought; they

steer the poet's bark. He cannot get to Heaven itself without striking

"seven," or mixing up his meaning with foreign "leaven." His shifts to

avoid these shifts are pathetic to a degree. He flounders about twixt

"given" and "levin," and has been known to snatch desperately at

"reaven." Of all fraudulent crafts commend me to the poet's. He is a

paragon of deceit and quackery, a jingling knave. 'T is a game of _bouts

rimés_, and he calls it "inspiration." No wonder Plato would have none of

him in his Republic, even though Plato's poets were guiltless of rhyme

and slaves only to metre. But the metre of verse, too, is a friend to

thought, and its enemy. It is like wheels to a cart; not unsagaciously is

Pegasus figured with wings. He flies away with you, and you are lulled by

the regular flap, flap of his pinions, and his goal concerns you little.

The swing and the rush of the verse compensate for reason, and it is

wonderful how far a little sense will fly when tricked out with fine

feathers. Even in stately, rhymeless decasyllabics the march and music of

the verse help a limping thought along like a sore-footed soldier

striding to the band. But the prose-writer has none of these advantages.

He is like an actor without properties. His thoughts do not go along with

a flutter of flags and a blare of trombones. Nor do they glide upon

castors. They must needs lumber on after a fashion of their own, and if

there is a music to their ambulation it must be individual, neither in

common nor in three-eight time, but winding and quickening at will, with

no strait symmetry of antiphonal bars. There is nothing to tell you the

writer has made "prose"--as the spacing and the capital letters invite

you to look for poetry. He has to depend only upon himself. This is why

blank verse--which approaches prose most nearly--is so much more

difficult to write than rhymed verse, though it looks so much easier and

more tempting to the amateur. Are we not justified, then, in taking the

logical step further, and saying that prose, which strips itself of the

last rags of adventitious ornament, and which tempts the amateur most of

all, is the highest of all literary forms, the most difficult of all to

handle triumphantly? May we not compare the music of it--that music which

we get in Ruskin and in Pater--to the larger rhythms to which the savage

drum-beat has developed? Rhythm is undoubtedly an instinct, but

civilisation brings complexity. From the tom-tom to the tune, from the

tune to the symphony. In the vaster reaches and sweeps of the rhythm of

prose there is a massive music as of Wagnerian orchestras. Anybody can

enjoy the castanet-play of rhymes; half your popular proverbs clash at

the ends; "the jigging of our rhyming mother-wits" is on everybody's

lips. But for the blank verse of "Paradise Lost" there is only "audience

fit, though few"; and as for the music of prose, so little is it

understood that critics vaguely aware of it had to invent the term "prose

poet" when they found the stress of passion and imagination effervescing

into resonant utterance. On the other hand, there are those who do not

acknowledge Pope as a poet. The essence of the long-standing quarrel is a

confusion. From the point of view of form there is only one kind of

writer to be recognised--the artist in words. Of him there are two

varieties: the artist who uses rhyme and metre, and the artist

who--wilfully or through impotence--dispenses with them. From the point

of view of matter there is the artist with "soul" and the artist without

"soul." "Soul" is shorthand for that mysterious something the absence of

which urges people to deny Pope the title of poet. They feel the

intangible something is not there, "the consecration and the poet's

dream." But with the conventional distinctions, there is no name left for

Pope, if he is not a poet. The truth is that he was an artist in

words--as masterly as the Mantuan himself, though without that golden

cadence and charm which keep Virgil a poet by any classification. On the

other hand, Carlyle, who had such scorn of the rhyming crew, was himself

a poet to the popular imagination, though to us he will be an artist in

prose _plus_ soul. There are, thus, really two classes of writers:

I. Prose-Artists.

II. Verse-Artists.

Each of these splits up into two kinds, according as the writer has or

lacks "soul." Or, if you think "soul" the more important differentia, we

will say there are artists with "soul" and artists without "soul," and

that some of each sort work in prose and some in verse. But the

classification is a crass one, and the English language unfortunately

does not possess words to express the distinctions, while the ambiguous

associations of the word "prose" increase the difficulty of inventing

them. We do not even possess any equivalent of the French "prosateur,"

though I see no reason why "prosator" should not be used. Without

neologisms, and avoiding the ambiguous adjective "prosaic," and using

"poetic" to express "soulfulness" and not the handling of metres, we get

1. Poetic Verse-Artists. (Poets.)

2. Non-Poetic Verse-Artists. (Verse-Writers.)

3. Poetic Prose-Artists. (Prose Poets.)

4. Non-Poetic Prose-Artists. (Prose Writers.)

Keats is a verse poet, Pope a verse writer, Buskin a prose poet, and

Hallam a prose writer.

* * * * *

The two great writers of our day who have sinned most against the laws of

writing are Browning and Meredith, the one in verse, the other in prose.

I speak not merely of obscurities, to perpetrate which is in

every sense to stand in one's own light, but of sheer fatuities,

tweakings-of-the-nose to our reverend mother-tongue, as either might have

expressed it. But what I am most concerned to suggest here is that the

distinction between prose and poetry (using prose to mean artistically

wrought language) will not survive investigation. The popular instinct

has long ago seen that the vital thing is the _matter_--that it is

profanity to call that "poetry" which is only verse; it remains to be

recognised that even the distinction of form rests only on the

non-recognition of the rhythm of "prose,"--a rhythm that is not metre in

so far as metre has the sense of regular measure, but may for all that

have laws of its own, which await the discoverer and the systematiser.

The affinity of prose-rhythms is, I have hinted, with the higher

developments of music, which, compared with the simple tunes of the

street, are as apparently lawless and unlicensed as is prose compared to

verse. And as it is not poets who follow laws, but precede them--as

trochee and iambic, alcaic and hexameter, are the inventions of

grammarians following on the trail of genius--so it behoves the Aristotle

who would discover the laws of the rhythm of prose to study the masters

of the art, masters by instinct and a faultless ear and the grace of God,

and endeavour by patient induction to wrest from their sentences the

secrets of their harmonies. Who will write the prosody of prose?

It is sad to have to declare that the bulk of contemporary writers lie

outside all these classifications. They are artists neither in prose nor

verse, and though they may have "soul," they cannot make it visible. For

"soul" may be expressed equally through painting and sculpture and music

and acting, audits dimly discerned presence can scarcely convert slipshod

writing into literature. No one would accept as art a picture in which a

gleam of imagination struggled against the draughtsmanship of the

schoolboy to whom arms are toasting-forks, or applaud an actor who might

be brimming over with sensibility but could command neither his voice nor

his face. No one has any business to come before the public who has not

studied the medium through which he proposes to exhibit his "soul":

unfortunately this is the age and England is the country of the amateur,

and in every department we are deluged with the crude. The fault lies

less with the amateur than with the public before which he presents

himself, and which, incompetent to distinguish art from amateurishness,

is as likely to bless the one as the other. Of all forms of art

literature suffers most; for the pity is, and pity'tis't is true,

everybody learns to talk and write at an early age. This makes the

transition to literature so fatally easy. _Facilis descensus Averni!_ To

paint, one must at least know how to mix colours and handle a brush; to

compose, one must be familiar with the meaning of strayed spiders' legs

on curious parallel bars, and there are strange disconcerting rumours of

"orchestration." But to produce literature you have simply to dip pen in

ink or open your mouth and see what God will give you. Hence particularly

the flood of novels, hence the low position of the novel; although, as

Theodore Watts has pointed out, it is practically the modern Epic. I have

met distinguished students of Greek texts who have never conceived of the

novel as a work of art, or as anything beyond the amusement of an idle

hour--something for the women and the children. One such told me he would

not read "The Mill on the Floss" because it ended unhappily. I must

conclude he has only read Aeschylus for his examinations. Acting stands

next to literature in its seductiveness. The actor's instrument is his

body, and everybody has a body. If, in addition to a "body," the creature

conceives himself to possess a "soul," the odds are there will be

laughter for the "gods." I tremble for the time when the popular

educationist shall have had his way and every child be seised of the

rudiments of drawing. We shall see sights then. At present, despite the

horrors of the galleries and the widespread ignorance of art, painting

cannot compete with literature as a misunderstood art. For the

public--which is the only critic that counts in the long run--does not

demand grammar, much less style; and the novel of the season may bristle

with passages that could be set for correction at examinations in

English. It is a little thing, but it seems to me significant, that the

announcement of terms of the local branch of Mudie's, in the little town

at which I am writing these lines, runs thus:

The subscription for one set entitles the subscriber to one complete

work at a time, whether in one, two, or three volumes, and can be

exchanged as often as desired.

XXIV

THE INFLUENCE OF NAMES

Far-fetched as the idea seems that names and characters have any

interconnection, yet no great writer but has felt that one name, and one

alone, would suit each particular creation. The tortures and travels that

Balzac went through till he found "Z. Marcas" are well known. So is the

agony of Flaubert on hearing that Zola was anticipating him in the name

of Bouvard, which it had cost Flaubert six years' search to find. Zola's

magnanimity in parting with it deserves a _fauteuil_. Somebody in the

provinces told me that his minister had preached upon the subject of

names, laying it down that in every name lurked a subtle virtue,--or

vice; the former the bearer of the name was in duty bound to cultivate,

the latter to root out. Fantastic as this speculation be, even for a

minister, no one doubts that people's names may have an influence upon

their lives; and, in the case of the Christian name at least, children

ought to be protected by the State against the bad taste and the cruelty

of their parents. More certainly than the stars our names control our

destinies, for they are no meaningless collocation of syllables, but have

deep-rooted relations with the history and manner of life of our

ancestors. The Smiths were once smiths, the Browns dark in complexion;

and so, if we could only trace it, every name would reveal some inner

significance, from Adam (red earth) downwards. Why do publishers tend to

"n" in their names'? Some of the chief London publishers run to a final

"n"--Macmillan, Longman, Chapman; Hodder & Stoughton; Hutchinson & Co.;

Sampson Low, Marston & Co.; Lawrence & Bullen; Fisher Unwin; Heinemann.

The last, indeed, is nothing but "n" sounds; such a name could not escape

taking to publishing. I find also in the publishers' lists T. Nelson &

Co.; Eden, Remington & Co.; Henry Sotheran; John Lane; Effingham Wilson;

Innes & Co. (as fatal as Heinemann); George Allen & Co.; Osgood,

McIlvaine & Co.; Gardner, Darton & Co. Sometimes the "n" is prominent at

the beginning or in the middle, as in Henry & Co.; Ward & Downey;

Constable & Co.; Digby, Long & Co.; Arnold; G. P. Putnam's Sons; Kegan

Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. (wherein each partner boasts his separate

"n"); Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier (wherein there are at least three

"n"s); John C. Nimmo; Edward Stanford; Gibbings & Co.; Chatto & Windus;

Nisbet & Co. When the "n" is not in the surname, at least the Christian

contains the indispensable letter, as John Murray, Elkin Matthew.

Even when it can find refuge nowhere else the "n" creeps into the "and"

of the firm or into the "Sons." The very Clarendon Press has the

trademark. Who is the stock publisher of the eighteenth century? Tonson!

Who were the first publishers of Shakespeare? Condell & Heminge.

And while publishers run mysteriously to "n," authors run with equal

persistency to "r"--in their surnames for the most part, but at least

somehow or somewhere.

Who are our professors of fiction to-day? Hardy, Meredith, Blackmore,

Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Besant (and James Rice), George Moore,

Frankfort Moore, Olive Schreiner, George Fleming, Henry James, Hamlin

Garland, Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Frank Harris, Marion Crawford,

Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Miss Braddon, Sarah Grand, Mrs. Parr,

George Egerton, Rhoda Broughton, H. D. Traill, Jerome K. Jerome, Barry

Pain, W. E. Norris, Crockett, Ian Maclaren, Robert Barr, Ashby Sterry,

Morley Roberts, Mabel Robinson, F. W. Robinson, John Strange Winter, Du

Maurier (late but not least to follow his lucky "r"), Helen Mathers,

Henry Seton Merriman, etc., etc.

Who were the giants of the last generation? Thackeray, Charles Dickens,

Charles Reade, George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Brontë, Trollope,

Disraeli.

Who are our prophets and thinkers? Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Darwin, John

Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Froude, Freeman.

Who are the poets of the Victorian era? Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson,

Algernon Charles Swinburne ("r"-ed throughout), D. Gabriel Rossetti,

Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Robert Buchanan,

Andrew Lang, Robert Bridges, Lewis Morris, Edwin Arnold, Alfred Austin,

Norman Gale, Richard Le Gallienne, Philip Bourke Marston, Mary F.

Robinson, Theodore Watts, etc., etc.

Who are the dramatists of to-day? Grundy, Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, W.

S. Gilbert, Haddon Chambers, Comyns Carr, Carton, Raleigh, George E. Sims

(mark the virtue of that long-mysterious "r").

And who in the past have done anything for our prose dramatic literature?

Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, and, earlier still, Congreve, Wycherley,

Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. Nay, which are the mighty names in our

literature? Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Herrick, Dryden,

Alexander Pope, Butler, Sterne, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Walter

Scott, Robert Burns.

You may even look at the greatest names in the world's literature. Homer,

Virgil (Maro), Horace, Firdusi, Omar Khayyam, Cervantes, Calderon,

Petrarch, Rabelais, Dante Alighieri, Schiller, Voltaire, Rousseau,

Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Honore de Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo,

Verlaine, Heinrich Heine.

Of course there are not a few minus the "r," as Milton, Keats, Goethe,

Swift, etc., etc.

There seems indeed to be a sub-species of "sons"--Ben Jonson, Dr.

Johnson, William Watson, John Davidson, Austin Dobson. Nevertheless there

is an overwhelming preponderance of "r" sounds in the names of the

world's authors. What is the underlying reason? Is there a certain rugged

virility in the letter, which made it somehow expressive of the nature of

the original owners? "N" is certainly suave and plausible in comparison,

and might well produce a posterity of publishers. What adds some colour

to the suspicion is that, when writers have chosen _noms de guerre_, they

have frequently--though all unconsciously--taken names in "r." This

explains why all the lady novelists run to "George." Publisher _versus_

author may now be expressed symbolically as N/R, N over R, the N of money

over the R of art.

With our artists I find a less strong tendency to "l's" as well as to

"r's," and it is therefore only appropriate that a Leighton should long

preside over the Royal Academy, a Millais be its chief ornament, and

finally its head, and a Whistler its chief omission; that constable and

Walker should be the glory of English art, that Reynolds should be our

national portrait-painter, and Landseer our animal-painter, and Wilkie

our domestic painter. Turner made up for his surname by the superfluity

of "l's" in his William Mallord, Raphael starts as an R. A., while

Michael Angelo, with his predominance in "l's," is rightly king of art.

The absence of "l" in Hogarth's name and the strong presence of "r" of

course denotes that the satirist was more of a literary man than an

artist. The "r" in Whistler, on the other hand, clearly indicates the

literary faculty of the author of "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies." And

if Du Maurier's real future was hinted in his orthography, Leech and

Tenniel and Phil May and Linley Sambourne have vindicated their "l's." So

have Luke Fildes, Alma Tadema, H. T. Wells, G. D. Leslie, John Collier,

Val Prinsep, Solomon J. Solomon, Frank Bramley, Phil Morris, Calderon,

Leader, Nettleship, Seymour Lucas, Waterlow, William Strutt, Albert

Moore, W. W. Ouless, C. W. Wyllie, Sir John Gilbert, Louise Jopling,

Onslow Ford, and even W. C. Horsley. There are only three foreign

Academicians at the time of writing, but they all boast the "l."

With musicians there is a tendency to "m's" and "n's," which sounds

harmonious enough, Mendelssohn, Massenet, Mascagni, Mackenzie, Schumann,

have both letters; Mozart but one. Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Saint-Saëns,

Sullivan, Charles Salaman, Edward Solomon, Frederic Cowen, run "n"-wards

with the unanimity of publishers, while Gounod, Stanford, Audran,

Sebastian Bach, Donizetti, work in the "n" otherwise, and Wagner has the

librettist's "r" in addition. Would you play the piano? You must have the

"n" of the piano, like Pachmann, Rubinstein, Rosenthal, Hofmann,

Frederick Dawson, Madame Schumann, Fanny Davies, Agnes Zimmermann,

Leonard Borwick, Nathalie Janotha, Sapellnikoff, Sophie Menter. Even for

other instruments, including the human voice divine, the "n" is

advisable. Paganini, Jenny Lind, Norman Néruda, Christine Nilsson--all

patronized it largely. Adelina Patti, Johannes Wolf, and many others make

a "Christian" use of it. If, on the other hand, you wish to manufacture

pianos your chance of founding a first-class firm will be largely

enhanced if your name begins with "b."

Actors, like authors, roll their "r's"; and if their names are

pseudonyms, so much the greater proof that some occult instinct makes

them elect for that virile letter. Who are our leading actors and

actor-managers? The double-r's: Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree (two

pairs), Forbes-Robertson, George Alexander, Arthur Roberts, Edward S.

Willard, Edward Terry, Charles Brookfield, Wilson Barrett, Fred Terry,

Fred Kerr, Charles Warner, W. Terriss, George Grossmith, Charles Hawtrey,

Arthur Bourchier (two pairs). Scarcely any leading actor lacks one "r,"

as Charles Wyndham, Cyril Maude, Louis Waller, etc., etc. Those without

any "r's" may console themselves with the memory of Edmund Kean, though

Garrick--a name almost wholly compact of "r"--is the patron saint of the

stage.

The ladies follow the gentlemen. From Ellen Terry and Winifred Emery to

Ada Rehan and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, from Rose Leclercq and Marie

Bancroft to Marion Terry and Irene Vanbrugh, few dare dispense with the

"r."

But I have said enough. I have opened up new perspectives for the curious

and the philosophic, which they may follow up for themselves. Here is a

fresh field for faddists and mystagogues. Already I have proved as much

as many systems of mediaeval philosophy which strove to extract the

essence of things from the study of words and letters. Already I have

collected more evidence than the sectarians of the Shakespeare-Bacon.

Bacon write Shakespeare, indeed! A man without an "r" to his name,

pointed out by his "n" for a publisher, and, indeed, not without some of

the characteristics of the class. Seriously, the truth is that l, m, n,

and r are the leading letters in name-making; but still there does seem

to be more in the coincidence to which I have drawn attention than mere

accident explains.

XXV

AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS

It is done. The publishers have formed a League. The poor sweated victims

of the author's greed have at last turned upon the oppressor. Mr. Gosse,

on a memorable occasion, confusedly blending the tones of the prophet of

righteousness with the accents of the political economist, admonished the

greedy author that he was killing the goose with the golden eggs. And now

the goose has resolved to be a goose no longer. The Authors' Society, a

sort of trade union, has been answered by the creation of a Publishers'

Union, with all the delightful potentialities of a literary lock-out. It

is time, therefore, for a person without prejudice to say a word to both

sides.

With the spirit which prompted the creation of the Authors' Society,

Literature has nothing to do. To define Literature exactly is not easy.

To say at what point words become or cease to be literature is a problem

similar in kind to the sophistical Greek puzzle of saying at what point

the few become many. Perhaps we shall find a solution by looking at the

genesis and history of written words. Literature, we find, began as

religion. The earliest books of every nation are sacred books. Herbert

Spencer dwells on the veneration which the average person feels for the

printed word, his almost touching belief in books and newspapers. "I read

it in a book" is equivalent to saying "It is certainly true." The great

philosopher has failed to see that this instinct is a survival from the

times when the only books were holy books. The first book published in

Europe, as soon as printing was invented, was the Latin Bible--the

Mazarin Bible as it is called; and it is the Bible which is responsible

for the belief in print. Despite the degradation of the printed word

to-day, there is something fine in this tenacious popular instinct, as

there is something ignoble in all Literature which palters with it. The

Literature of every country is still sacred. The books of its sages and

seers should still be holy books to it. The true man of letters always

was and must always be a lay priest, even though he seem neither to

preach nor to be religious in the popular sense of those terms. The

qualities to be sought for in Literature are therefore inspiration and

sincerity. The man of letters is born, not made. His place is in the

Temple, and it is not his fault that the moneychangers have set up their

stalls there. But, in addition to these few chosen spirits, born in every

age to be its teachers, there is an overwhelming multitude of writers

called into being by the conditions of the time. These are the artists

whom Stevenson likened to the "Daughters of Joy." They are cunning

craftsmen, turning out what the public demands, without any priestly

consciousness, and sometimes even without conscience, mere tradesmen

with--at bottom--the souls of tradesmen. Their work has charm, but lacks

significance. They write essays which are merely amusing, histories which

are only facts, and stories which are only lies.

The capacity of the world for reading the uninspired is truly

astonishing, and the hundred worst books may be found in every

bookseller's window. Would that it were of books that Occam had written:

"Non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem"! The men who produce these

unnecessary books perform a necessary function, as things are. Why should

they be less well treated than bootmakers or tailors, butchers or bakers

or candlestick makers? Why should they not get as much as possible for

their labours? Why should they not, like every other kind of working-man,

found a Labour Union? Indeed, instead of censuring these authors for

trying to obtain a fair wage, I feel rather inclined to reproach them for

not having more closely imitated the methods of Trades-Unionism, for not

having welded the whole writing body into a strong association for the

enforcement of fair prices and the suppression of sweating, which is more

monstrous and wide-spread in the literary than in any other profession

whatever. Such an organisation would be met by many difficulties, for

writing differs from other species of skilled labour by the immense

differences of individual talent, while from professions in which there

are parallel variations of skill, _e.g._, law and medicine, it differs by

the fact that there is no initial qualification (by examination)

attesting a minimum amount of skill. Not even grammar is necessary for

authorship, or even for successful authorship. Besides which, writing is

done by innumerable persons in their spare time--Literature is a world of

inky-fingered blacklegs. Thus, writing admits neither of the union-fixed

minimum wage of the manual labourer, nor of the etiquette-fixed fee of

the professional; so that the methods of the trade union are only

partially applicable to the ink-horny-handed sons of toil. But even the

possible has not yet been achieved, so that the current idea of an

organization of the writing classes, against which publishers have had to

gird up their loins to fight, has very little foundation. There is

nothing but a registered disorganisation. What the publishers are really

afraid of is not a Society, but a man, and that man a middle-man? no

other than that terrible bogey, the agent, who drinks champagne out of

their skulls.

So much for the author-craftsman. But what of the author-priest? Do the

commercial conditions apply to him? Certainly they do--with this

important modification, that, while with the author-craftsman the

commercial conditions may justly regulate the matter and manner of his

work, with the author-priest the commercial conditions do not begin until

he has completed his work. The state of the market, the condition of the

public mind--these will have no influence on the work itself. Not a comma

nor a syllable will he alter for all the gold of Afric[*]. But, the

manuscript once finished, the commercial considerations begin. The

prophet has written his message, but the world has yet to hear it. Now,

we cannot easily conceive Isaiah or Jeremiah hawking round his prophecies

at the houses of publishers, or permitting a smart Yankee to syndicate

them through the world, or even allowing popular magazines to dribble

them out by monthly instalments. But the modern prophet has no housetop,

and it is as difficult to imagine him moving his nation by voice alone as

arranging with a local brother-seer to trumpet forth the great tidings

simultaneously at New York in order to obtain the American copyright.

Even if he should try to teach the people by word of mouth, there will be

bare benches unless he charges for admission, as all lecturers will tell

you. People value at nothing what they can get for nothing; and, as

Stevenson suggested, "if we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or

if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came in flower, what a work

should we not make about their beauty!" No, the prophet cannot escape the

commercial question. For, in order that his message may reach his age, it

must be published, and publication cannot be achieved without expense.

[* Transcriber's note: So in original.]

Tolstoï himself, who gives his books freely to the world, cannot really

save the public the expense of buying them. All he sacrifices is that

comparatively small proportion of the returns which is claimed by the

author in royalties; he cannot eliminate the profits of the publisher,

the bookseller, etc., etc. For between the message and its hearers come a

great number of intermediaries, many of them inevitable. We will assume

for the purposes of our analysis that our prophet is already popular. The

hearers are waiting eagerly. Here is the manuscript, there are the

readers. Problem--to bring them together. This is the task of the

publisher. Incidentally, the publisher employs the printer, bookbinder,

etc.; but this part of the business, though usually undertaken by the

publisher, does not necessarily belong to him. He is essentially only the

distributor. In return for this function of distribution, whether it

includes supervising mechanical production or not, the publisher is

entitled to his payment. How much? Evidently, exactly as much as is made

by capital and personal service in business generally. The shillings of

the public are the gross returns for the book. These have to be divided

between all the agents employed in producing the book--author, printer,

binder, publisher, bookseller, etc. This is not literally what happens,

but it is arithmetically true in the long run. How much for each?

Evidently just as much as they can each get, for there is no right but

might and nothing but tug-of-war. There is nothing absolute in the

partition of profits: infinite action and reaction. While the costs of

the mechanical part are comparatively stable, the relation of author and

publisher oscillates ceaselessly; and while the cautious publisher by the

multiplicity of his transactions may rely upon an average of profits,

like all business men plucking stability out of the heart of vicissitude,

the author has no such surety. Between merit and reward there is in

literature no relation. Just as the music-hall singer may earn a larger

income than the statesman, so may the tawdry tale-teller drive the

thinker and artist out of the market.

The artistic value of a book is therefore absolutely unrelated to the

commercial value; but such commercial value as there is--to whom should

it fall if not to the author? Like the other parties, he has a right to

all he can get. You will say it is very sordid to think of money; you

will speak of divine inspiration; you would rather see him go on the

rates; to save him from base reward you even borrow his books instead of

buying them; you cannot understand why he should prefer an honest

Copyright Act to a halo. Good! Put it that I agree with you. It is sordid

to sell one's muse. One should be like Mr. Harold Skimpole, and let the

butcher and the baker go howl. The thought of money sullies the fairest

manuscript. The touch of a cheque taints. Good again! _Only_, when the

great poem is written, when the great novel is done, _there is money in

it_! Who is to have this money? The author? Certainly not. We are agreed

his soul must be kept virgin. _But why the publisher?_ (Above all, why

the American publisher?) Why not the printer? Why not the binder or the

bookseller? Why not the deserving poor? None of these will be defiled by

the profits. Why should the money not be used to found a Lying-in

Hospital, or an Asylum for Decayed Authors, or a Museum to keep Honest

Publishers in? Why should not authors have the _kudos_ of paying off the

National Debt? If they are to be the only Socialists in a world of

individualists, let them at least have the satisfaction of knowing their

money is applied to worthy public purposes.

But I do _not_ agree with you. "The best work at the best prices" is no

unworthy motto. The Authors' Society, indeed, tries to put this non-moral

principle of valuation upon an ethical basis. It says, for instance, that

if the publisher reckons his office expenses in the cost of production,

then the author has a right to reckon his, even including any journeys or

researches he may have had to make in order to write his book. But this

right is not only an ethical fallacy: it is a politico-economical one,

because the economical question is only concerned with the _distribution_

of the work, and the money or the heart's blood that went to make it has

nothing to do with the question, while the publisher's office expenses

are of the essence of the question. Some authors also claim that the

publisher has no right to make successful books pay for unsuccessful. But

here again he has every right. The publisher is not a piece-worker; he

has to keep a large organization going, involving ramifications in every

town. It is the existence of this network, of this distributive

mechanism, that enables the successful book to be sold everywhere; and

the publisher, like every business man, must allow percentages for bad

debts and unprofitable speculations. Publishers have a right to capture

the bulk of the profits of authors' first books, because they largely

supply the author with his public. It is surprising how even good books

have to be pressed on an unwilling world, much as cards are forced by

conjurers. The number of people that select their books by their own

free-will is incredibly small. On the other hand, when a popular author

brings a publisher a book, it is he who improves the publisher's

distributing agency, by bringing him new clients, and even sometimes

strengthening his position with booksellers and libraries, by enabling

him, armed with a book universally in demand, to fight against deductions

and discounts throughout his business generally. And, just as the

publisher may rightly depress the profits of an unknown author, so the

popular author has a moral right to larger royalties--which right,

however, would avail him nothing were it not backed by might. It is in

the competition of rival publishers that his strength lies.

And here comes in the question of the agent. Publishers may rave as they

will, but authors have every right to employ agents to save them from the

unpleasant task of chaffering and of speaking highly of themselves. And

it is the author who pays the agent, not the publishers, their whinings

notwithstanding. The agent may indeed squeeze out larger sums than

publishers like to disgorge, but how can he obtain more than the

market-value? Political economy is dead against the possibility. He

cannot, in fact, obtain more than the author may and frequently does

obtain for himself. If a competing publisher offers a larger sum than

will pay him in coin, at any rate he will not offer more than will pay

him in reputation, or in the extension of his _clientèle_ on the lines

indicated above. It is still only the market-value. If the reputation

honourably built up by the labours of years comes to have a monetary

value outside the monetary value of the particular book--a sort of

goodwill value, in fact,--why should the author or his agent be abused

for obtaining it? Will not the publisher in his turn grind down the

unknown man to the lowest possible penny? The prostration of the

publisher before the celebrity is only equalled by his insolence toward

the obscure. Is there any author who has not suffered in his beginnings

from the greed of publishers? Far from making money at the start, how

many authors have got a hearing without having had to pay for it out of

their own pockets? "The wrongs of publishers" is a good red-herring to

draw across the track, a smart counter-cry. But publishers have still the

game in their hands all along the line. Not a few still keep their

accounts secret, still recklessly supply themselves with that opportunity

which, the proverb says, makes even honest men thieves. As for

America--what goes on across that week of ocean who dares conjecture? And

now, what with rumors of wars and free silver--ah me!

In forming a Masters' Union, the publishers have at last abandoned the

pretence of being swayed by any but pecuniary considerations in the

exercise of their high function. There is something refreshing in this

clearing of the air, in this abandonment of the Joseph Surface manner.

And yet, I confess, my heart shelters a regret for the old style of

publisher, as for the old style of author. Something of picturesque

clings even to Jacob Tonson, with "his two left legs." The publisher as

the patron of genius, the nurser of young talent, the re-inspirer of old,

the scholar and gentleman, at once the friend and the banker of his

authors, makes a pleasing figure. It was perhaps more ideal than real,

for even of Murray we read in "Lord Beaconsfield's Letters ": "Washington

Irving demanded a large price. Murray murmured. Irving talked of

posterity and the badness of the public taste, and Murray said that

authors who wrote for posterity must publish on their own account."

Still, if the publisher would live up to this ideal, his would remain an

honorable profession, instead of sinking to a trade. He would rank with

the rare theatrical manager to whom art is dearer than profit--if such a

one still survives. But the trail of business is over the age: the

theatrical manager is a shameless tradesman, and more and more the

publisher will become the mere distributer, if indeed he be not

eliminated by a mechanical organisation. The popular author needs only a

central store to supply the trade with his printed writings, the cost of

production of which is covered by the first day's sales. This is, of

course, to ignore the publisher in his aspect of initiator of series, art

books and encyclopaedias. But to originate is to depart from publishing

proper and to become entitled to the profits of the inventor; nay, almost

to step over into the province of authorship and the dignity thereof.

But if we can forgive the publisher for succumbing to the business spirit

of the age, we cannot as readily acquiesce in the huckstering spirit that

has crept over literature. The "battle of the books" has become one of

account-books, and the literary columns of the newspapers bristle with

pecuniary paragraphs. Even the "chatter about Shelley" was better than

the contemporary gossip about the takings of authors, for the most part

vastly exaggerated. A paragraph which must have inflated him with pride

led to a friend of mine being haled up before the Income Tax

Commissioners. "How long have you been an author?" he was asked in

addition. "Six years," he replied. "And you have only paid income tax for

five!" was the horrified exclamation. Here is the nemesis of all this

foolish fuss about _L. S. D._ The British mind now supposes authorship to

be a trade, like any other. You go into it, and you at once begin to make

a regular income; and, once successful, you go on steadily earning large

sums, automatically. The thing works itself. You are never ill or

uninspired; you are never to let your mind lie fallow, never to travel

and gather new inspiration, never to shut up shop and loaf. You simply go

on making so much a year--for do not the papers say so? And that you

should cherish the immoral sentiments contained in the following stanzas,

as at least two authors of my acquaintance do, is simply incredible to

the envious Philistine.

THE AUTHOR TO THE SYNDICATOR.

Thou lord, of bloated syndicates,

Thou master of the mint,

Who payest at the highest rates

And takest without stint,

Go back, go back to wild New York,

Go back across the sea;

Go, corners make in beans and pork,

No corners make in me.

For thou art 'cute and thou art smart,

No dead flies hang on thee;

Thou carest not one jot for Art,

But only _L. S. D._

Go 'back, go back, etc.

Thy aims are low, thy profits high;

Thy mind is only bent,

Whatever live, whatever die,

To scoop in cent per cent.

Go back, go back, etc.

To thee the greatest authors are

Those who most greatly sell;

But he whose soul is as a Star--

Why, he may go to H-ll!

Go back, go back to wild New York,

Go back across the sea;

Go, corners make in beans and pork,

No corners make in me.

An author's income must be indeed difficult to adjudge. He is the

manufacturer of a patent article--which only he can turn out. But he is

also the vendor thereof, and his transactions involve sales of serial--as

well as of book-rights synchronised in two or more countries--a tedious

and delicate task. And a great part of his business--"the tributes that

take up his time," the MSS. he has to read, etc., etc.--must be conducted

entirely without profit, or rather must be run at a loss. Who can

determine what are the working expenses of so complex an industrial

enterprise? An artist subtracts the cost of his models: may an author

subtract the cost of the experiences which supply him with his material,

and, if so, how are they to be estimated? Mr. Conan Doyle and Mr. Anthony

Hope both write historical novels; but while the former buys and studies

large quantities of books, and travels to see castles and battlefields,

the latter professedly works from intuition. Are both these men's incomes

to be treated alike? Goethe deliberately fell in love so as to write

poems when the passion had subsided: how much should be deducted from his

gross returns to cover the working expenses of his love-affairs? And even

when we do not go about it in such cold blood, our art--is it not woven

of our pain and our passion, our "emotions recollected in tranquility"?

Do these emotions cost us nothing? Do they not "wear and tear" our

system, justifying us in writing off 5 per cent. for depreciation in our

machinery? Countless are the problems that arise out of this new view of

authorship as an exact trade. Scientifically speaking, the author is a

pieceworker, whose productiveness is fitful and temporary. However widely

the fame of his business extend, he cannot extend it; he cannot increase

his output by adding new clerks or new branches: every order received

means work for his own brain and his own hands. If he keep other hands

they are called ghosts, and such ghosts are frowned upon even by the

Psychical Society.

No, the more I think of it, the more it is borne in upon me that authors

should be exempted from income tax altogether--if, indeed, the income

itself should not rather be provided for them (free of duty) by a

grateful Government. Carlyle is said to have claimed exemption on the

ground that the earnings of a writer are incalculable: it seems to me

that it is rather the working expenses which are incalculable. "I

sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the shape of an income that would

come in," wrote poor sick Stevenson on a languorous summer afternoon,--by

the way, I hope his doctors' expenses were deducted from his gross

returns, as incurred in order to keep the writing machinery going; or did

he perchance fly to Samoa to escape the tax altogether?--"Mine has all

got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. What I want

is the income that really comes in of itself, while all you have to do is

just to blossom and exist, and sit on chairs." Poor R. L. S.!--does it

not make you think of "mighty poets in their misery dead"? Does it

not--if you are more prosaic--bring home to you the absurdity of taxing

professional incomes as though they were akin to those which "come in" to

the happy folk who have but "to blossom and exist and sit on chairs"? And

will you not, whoever you are, rejoice that the work done with so much

art and conscience and suffering, obtained, in Stevenson's latter days,

its highest possible money-reward through the much-abhorred Agent? Why do

not millionaires hear of the woes of authors and send them anonymous

bank-notes? Why do not "national testimonials" happen in the author's

lifetime in the shape of purses of gold? They are more digestible than

posthumous stones. Alas! the author's path is thorny enough. And it is

against this jaded, unhappy creature that the publishers have had to make

a Union! Well, well, there will soon be no Authors' Union except the

Workhouse.

XXVI

THE PENALTIES OF FAME

There is one form of persecution to which celebrity or notoriety is

subject, which Ouida has omitted in her impassioned protest. It is

interviewing carried one step further--from the ridiculous to the sublime

of audacity. The auto-interview, one might christen it, if the

officiating purist would pass the hybrid name. Yon are asked to supply

information about yourself by post, prepaid. The ordinary interview,

whatever may be said against it, is at least painless; and, annoying as

it is to after-reflection to have had your brain picked of its ideas by a

stranger who gets paid for them, still the mechanical vexations of

literature are entirely taken over by the journalist who hangs on your

lips; though, if I may betray the secrets of the prison-house, he often

expects you to supply the questions as well as the answers. But when you

are asked to write your life for a biographical dictionary, or to

communicate particulars about yourself to a newspaper, it is difficult,

however equable your temperament, not to feel a modicum of irritation. It

is not only the labour of writing and the cost of stamps that anger you.

Your innate modesty is outraged. How is it possible for you to say all

those nice things about yourself which you know to be your due, and which

a third person might even exaggerate? What business have editors to

expose you to such inner conflict? A scholar I knew suffered agonies from

this source. He was constantly making learned discoveries which nobody

understood but himself, and so editors were always pestering him to write

leaderettes about them. He got over the difficulty by leaving blanks for

the eulogistic adjectives, which the editors had to fill in. As thus:

"Mr. Theophilus Rogers, the ---- savant, has unearthed another papyrus in

Asia Minor which throws a flood of light on the primitive seismology of

Syria." Once a careless editor forgot to fill in the lacuna, and the

paper lost a lot of subscribers by reason of its improper language,

whilst the friends of Theophilus wanted him to bring an action for libel,

unconscious that it would lie against himself.

But perhaps the climax of irritation is reached when, having troubled to

write down autobiographical details, having wrestled with your modesty

and overthrown it, having posted your letter and prepaid it, the ----

editor rejects your contribution without thanks. This hard fate overtook

me--_moi qui vous parle_--not very long ago. The conductor of a penny

journal, not unconnected with literary tit-bits, honoured me with a

triple interrogatory. This professional Rosa Dartle wanted to know--

(1) The conditions under which you write your novels.

(2) How you get your plots and characters.

(3) How you find your titles.

I was very busy. I was very modest. But the accompanying assurance that

an anxious world was on the _qui vive_ for the information appealed to my

higher self, and I took up my pen and wrote:--

(1) The conditions under which I write my novels can be better

imagined than described.

(2) My plots and characters I get from the MSS, submitted to me by

young authors, whose clever but crude ideas I hate to see wasted. I

always read everything sent to me, and would advise young authors to

encourage younger authors to send them their efforts.

(3) As for my titles, they are the only things I work out myself, and

you will therefore excuse me if I preserve a measure of reticence as

to the method by which I get them.

"What is being interviewed like?" a young lady once asked me, unconscious

she was subjecting me to the process. "It is being asked what you

drink--and not getting it," I explained to her. The curiosity of the

interviewer is indeed boundless. He even asks which is your favourite

author, so that you are forced to advertise some other fellow. And yet

there is another side to the question, which Ouida ignores. There are two

periods in the life of successful persons--the first when they are

anxious to be interviewed, the second when people are anxious to

interview them. With some there thus arrives a third period, in which

they are anxious not to be interviewed, but this is rare. Doubtless there

are superior persons who never craved for fame even in their callow

youth, and possibly Ouida herself may have taken to authorship as an

elaborate means of diverting attention from herself. But the majority of

mortals, being fools by edict of Puck and Carlyle, are pleased to fly

through the lips of men. Even Tennyson, whose horror of the interviewer

almost reached insanity, whose later life was one long "We are observed:

let us dissemble," is said to have been disappointed when the casual

pedestrian took no notice of him at all. A lady in the Isle of Wight told

me that the great poet was wont to put his handkerchief over his face if

he met anybody. Naturally this would make the most illiterate person stop

and gaze and wonder who this merry-andrew might be. Assuredly this is not

the fine simplicity of manners one expects from a great man. "Earl, do

you wear one of these?" asked an American democrat of an English peer at

his table, as he produced a coronet from a cupboard and stuck the

pudding-dish upon the inverted spikes. Tennyson seemed to be always

conscious of his laurel crown. The nobler course had been to deck his

puddings with the sprigs.

Kind hearts are more than laurel crowns,

And simple mien than Saxon song.

Ouida does a public service by insisting that it is presumptuous of the

crowd to judge the conduct of men of genius, whose life is pitched in

quite a different key, and runs very frequently in the melancholy minor

mode. The travail of soul, the workings of the mind, the agonies and the

raptures of genius must be so remote from the common ken, that it is

unjust to apply to it the vulgar meteyard; and so, far be it from me to

blame the inspired singer of "Crossing the Bar," or to imagine that he

could have been other than he was! All the same, it is permissible to

regret that he should have throughout his life pandered to the popular

conception of a poet. There was something of a robuster quality in

Browning, who managed to be a seer and a mystic in despite of afternoon

teas. Ouida beats the tom-tom far too loudly. From one point of view the

post-mortem revelations of great men's friends, which kindle her ire,

perform a public good, even if at the expense of a private wrong. The

attempt to apotheosise human nature, to invest our kindred clay with

theatrical glamour and to drape it from the property-room, this mythical

creation of "a magnified non-natural man," what is it all but the

perpetuation of the false psychology of the past? There is no durable

good in this childish "make-believe." It is time for humanity to outgrow

this puerile self-deception about its powers and characteristics and

limitations. A great man is a man as well as great, and he may be all the

wonderful things that Carlyle claimed without ceasing to be human and

therefore erring. And if he would go about simply and naturally, without

developing a self-consciousness as vast and unhealthy as the liver of a

goose intended for _pâté_, he would be happier and wiser, and secure the

inattention he yearns for. Moreover, while Ouida is rightly intolerant of

the abuse of genius by the bourgeois, the dictionary scarcely affords her

own genius sufficient vituperation for the bourgeois. I am at a loss to

understand by what logic genius gains the right to hate the bourgeois. It

has not the excuse of the bourgeois--stupidity. That the crowd hates

superiority and is venomously anxious to degrade it to its own level, is

one of Ouida's many delusions about life. Discounting vulgar curiosity, a

good deal of the crowd's interest in genius, however annoying and

ridiculous the shapes it takes, springs at bottom from a sense of

reverence and admiration; and surely it is sheer priggishness, if it be

not rank midsummer madness, on the part of genius to regard itself as

persecuted by foolish and malicious persons. Methinks the lady doth

protest too much. Still it would be unjust to deny her perfect seclusion

from the world, if she feels she needs it.

Perhaps the mildest form of persecution is that of the autographomaniacs.

"They send me my own books," one of the most popular authors in England

complained to me pathetically the other day, "and they ask me to write in

them. But to write in them is all that you can do for the books of your

friends. If you do this for strangers, what is there left for your

friends?" Although far less beloved of the book-buyer than the

illustrious novelist, I could yet offer him the sympathy of a minor

fellow-sufferer. It is the American reader who is the main persecutor. He

is not "gentle," forsooth--a very bully, rather. But why do I say "he,"

when it is generally "she"? "You have eluded all my wiles hitherto," she

wrote me the other day: "now I ask you straight out for your autograph."

This honesty would have softened me had I not just had to pay fivepence

on the letter--and for the second time that day! Of course her request

was not accompanied by a stamped envelope either, though, if it had been,

the stamp would have been an American; invalid, a pictorial irony. She

has a trick, moreover, of addressing you--most economically--care of your

American publishers, who expedite the letter with vengeful

_empressement_, so that you pay double at your end of the Atlantic. And

when everything else is in order, her epistle is insufficiently stamped,

and your income is frittered away in futile fivepences. It is too much.

The cup is full. We must no longer bow our necks beneath the oppressor's

yoke, no longer tremble at the postman's knock. _We_ must strike,

instead--we other men of letters. For authors, too, are human: manual

labourers, overworked and underpaid, with no hope of an eight hours' day.

Their pay must not be still further reduced by this monstrous stamp-tax.

Will not some Burns--more poetical than John--raise the banner of revolt?

Perhaps William Morris may reconcile his hitherto contradictory _rôles_

by placing himself at the head of the movement. Henceforward no author is

to despatch his autograph to an admirer, charm she never so cunningly.

Beshrew these admirers! a man's personality is in his books, not in his

scrawl. Whosoever violates this prescription shall be accounted a

blackleg. On one condition only shall autographs be sent--to wit, that

they be paid for.

I do not, indeed, propose that the author shall pocket the money, though

I see no shame in the deed: everything is worth what it can fetch, and if

an adventitious value comes to attach to a signature, the author were

amply justified in pocketing this legitimate supplement to the scanty

rewards of his travail of soul and body--just as he were justified,

should locks of his hair come into demand, in alternating the scissors

and the hair-restorer. But as a suspicion still prevails that authors

live on ambrosia and nectar (carriage paid), that the butcher, the baker,

and the candlestick maker tumble over one another in their eagerness to

offer their goods at the shrine of genius, it may be unwise to shock

one's admirers too much by pocketing their oboli; and I would suggest--in

all seriousness--that a charge be made in the future for all autographs:

each celebrity could fix it according to the special demand, and the

returns should go for charitable purposes. An "Autograph Fund" should be

founded in every profession admitting of notoriety. Among actors the fund

could be devoted to that excellent charity the Dramatic and Musical

Benevolent Fund; among writers, to the support of decayed critics and

neglected novelists. Why not? In days when men cannot bear to see even

Niagara wasting its energies in misdirected roars, why should so prolific

a source of profit as autographomania be neglected? The authors' strike

must be initiated at once: the Autograph Fund demands an instant

Treasurer. I don't mind contributing ten signatures to start it, if

twelve other writers, of equal eminence and illegibility, will guarantee

a like amount.

What profits it to woo the thankless Muse, or to appeal to the

autograph-huntress? In a foolish moment of unpardonable sentimentality, I

suggested that she should pay for her treasure by a charity contribution;

at the very least let her refrain, I prayed, from American stamps. But

she does not read me, alas! though my writings are the sole solace of her

days and nights; there is no way of attracting her attention. Still,

still her stamps flow in. I cry _Oyez, Oyez_, but she is bent over

"Trilby," and I am but the shadow of a name--of a name that is

interesting enough tacked on to my favourite motto or a brief

autobiography, and may serve to round off her autographic alphabet. Will

not Mr. Du Maurier cry aloud to her on behalf of his brother-authors, he

whose housetop is the sun, whose voice reaches from the summits of the

Rockies to the pampas of La Plata, and echoes from the ice-floes of

Labrador to the cliffs of Cape Horn? Will he not tell her that even as

"the crimes of Clapham" are "chaste in Martaban," so the stamps of the

States are the waste-paper of the London mails. Mr. Kipling, whom I have

just quoted, is more fortunate. Breathing the air of Brattleboro',

Vermont, he is supplied with native stamps to carry on his correspondence

withal. For Mr. Kipling--so he has confided to me in an amusing narrative

of his autograph experiences, designed for the warning of

fellow-craftsmen to whom my project may have sounded seductive--had

actually anticipated my plan: he had sent out two hundred circulars to

the admiring crew who ranked him before Shakespeare, proposing that they

should send him a donation for a charity in return for his signature.

Then the flood-gates--not of heaven--were opened. For weeks abuse rained

in upon him, and "thief" seems to have been the mildest rebuke he

received. To be asked for an autograph was an honour (even with the

stamps omitted). He bowed his head beneath the deluge, praying perhaps--

Of the two hundred grant but two

To take a charitable view.

But no, as one man and one woman they cast him out of grace.

And yet he seems to persevere--for 't is indeed an excellent way of

circumventing the wily. In the Chicago _Record_ I read that he wrote to

an autograph-beggar that he would send his autograph on receiving proof

that the autograph-hunter had deposited two and a half dollars in a

certain New York fresh air fund. This is an ingenious variation of the

original scheme, for it puts aside the possibility of personal

peculation; but I doubt whether it answers. Each celebrity must solve for

himself this harassing problem: there be those who simply stick to the

stamps ... great free spirits, these, the Napoleons of the pen, _Jenseits

von Gut und Böse_, whose names it is not for me to bewray. Others, like

myself, stricken with the paralysis of a Puritan conscience, waver and

vex themselves. One ought not to encourage this craze for the external

accidents of greatness--the appeal may be fraudulent--and yet what right

have you to the stamps?--and after all 't is flattering to be adored from

Terra del Fuego; it argues taste--and taste should not go unrecognized in

a Philistine world. _Eureka!_ I have found the solution. Don't stick to

the stamps, but send _them_ to the funds of a charity.

These views of mine on autographs have greatly distressed the unfair sex.

The ladies--God bless them--resent a severely logical view of anything,

and to disturb their small sentimentalities is to be cold-blooded and

cynical. Once, when I wasj imprudent enough to wonder if the "young

person" with the well-known cheek, to which blushes were brought, existed

any longer in this age of neurotic novels written by ladies for

gentlemen, I received a delicious communication from an Australian damsel

informing me that she had been in love with me up till the fatal day on

which she read my cynical conception of her sex,--which reminds me of

another well-meaning young lady who wrote me the other day from America

that her epistle was prompted "neither by love nor admiration." If I hint

that popular lady novelists do not invariably produce masterpieces of

style and syntax, I am accused of inflicting the "tarantulous bites of

envious detractors." I am driven--most reluctantly--to a suspicion that

has long been faintly glimmering in my bosom, a suspicion that ladies

have no sense of humour. It is gravely pointed out to me by incensed

writers of incense-laden letters that the demand for a writer's autograph

is a mark of veneration; that his letter is reverentially handed about on

special occasions quite without a thought of its possible commercial

value and that often--though here the argument itself becomes cunningly

commercial--it becomes the focus of a local hero-worship that expresses

itself outwardly in increased purchases of the author's books. Now, of

course every author is only too aware that requests for his autographs

are manifestations of reverence, and is only too apt to disregard the

supposition of crude curiosity. He knows that it is only natural that

people, forewarned by the scarcity of autographs of Shakespeare, should

be anxious to safeguard posterity against a similar calamity. But that

any author should have humour enough to see the absurdity of the

autograph mania, this is what his fair _clientèle_ has not humour enough

to understand. Anthony Hope--who, by the way, told me he had received a

letter from an unknown lady, the object of which was to abuse _me_ for my

heresy on this heart-burning question--says that if to write his name on

slips of paper adds to the sum of the world's pleasure, he is ready to do

it. This is a noble attitude; but the good people do not always do the

most good. Ought one to pamper this interest in mere externals? Here are

the man's books, pictures, symphonies: if these have profited you, be

content--you have had enough. He has shown you his soul,--why should he

show you his hand? One knows into what this sort of thing

degenerates--into the exploitation of celebrities by smart American

journalists, to whom genius and notoriety are equally alike mere

possibilities of sensational copy with screaming head-lines. A. Z. has

written the opera of the century: the public is dying to know the cut of

his trousers and the proportion of milk in his _café au lait_. X. Y. has

murdered his uncle and vivisected his grandmother: how interesting to

ascertain his favourite novel, and whether he approves of the bicycle for

ladies! For one person who knows anything of the artistic output of the

day there are ten who know all about the producers and how much money

they are making. Even when our interest in artistic work is intellectual,

we are more likely to read criticisms of it than to place ourselves

_vis-à-vis_ with the work. Not the truest criticism, not the subtlest

misinterpretation, can give us anything like the sensation or the

stimulus that results from direct contact with the work itself. As well

enjoy the "Moonlight Sonata" through a technical analysis of its form.

But this is a venial vice compared with taking your Sonata through the

medium of a paragraph about Beethoven's shoe-buckles.

The autograph craze is, I maintain, only another aspect of this modern

mania for irrelevant gossip; just as the tit-bits breed of papers is but

the outer manifestation of an inner disgrace. We no longer tackle great

works and ordered trains of thought: everything must be snappy and spicy;

and we open our books and papers, awaiting, like the criminal in "The

Mikado," "the sensation of a short sharp shock." To possess a man's

autograph may as easily become a substitute for studying his work as an

incentive to purchasing it. The critique displaces the book itself: the

autograph may displace even the critique. All this without reference to

the trouble and expense entailed by an aggregation of the trivial

taskwork of signing one's name, addressing envelopes, sticking on stamps,

and occasionally paying for them, and not infrequently defraying the

extra postage on insufficiently stamped admiration. Henry James, in his

latest story in "The Yellow Book," says deliciously: "Lambert's novels

appeared to have brought him no money: they had only brought him, so far

as I could make out, tributes that took up his time." The earnings of the

most popular authors are, I fear me, sadly exaggerated, and their own

anticipations seldom realised. As the other American novelist--Mr.

Howells--humourously puts it: "I never get a cheque from my publisher

without feeling distinctly poorer." The average author is indeed very

much in the position of a cabman surveying a shilling. And the even less

substantial "tributes," be it noted, are not limited to aspirations after

autographs. That would be little to grumble at. But everybody knows that

the demands made upon a celebrity--and especially upon an author--are

"peculiar and extensive." He is expected to be not only an author--and

even, according to the more high-minded among the unsuccessful critics,

to be that without fee or reward--but also to officiate gratuitously as

publisher's reader to the universe at large--unprinted; as author's

agent, hawking unknown MSS. about among his friends the publishers, and

placing unknown young men on the staff of the leading journals; as

dramatic agent, introducing plays and players to his friends the

managers--who will not produce his own works; and, in fine, to act as

general adviser to aspirants of every species. Nay, was not Hall Caine

recently asked by a lady admirer in poor health, about to visit the Isle

of Man, to find lodgings for her? Heavens! who knows what scandal might

have arisen had the author of "The Manxman" inconsiderately turned

himself into a house-agent! The famous tale of the Nova Scotian sheep in

"The School for Scandal" might have been eclipsed by the sequel. Now, the

poor lady meant well enough: she may even have thought to show how deep

her faith in the novelist's domestic genius and financial impeccability!

It simply did not occur to her that she was not the only call upon Mr.

Caine's time; and she may have felt as resentful at his reluctance as the

beggar who stigmatises Rothschild as niggard because he cannot wheedle a

share in his bounty. It may be that I am incapable of envisaging this

whole matter fairly, because--to make a clean breast of it--I am one of

those Philistine persons who shock Americans by never having been to

Stratford-on-Avon. It is true that I have read Shakespeare--and even his

commentators, which gives me the pull over Shakespeare himself; it is

true that I agree with the persons who haven't read him that he is the

greatest poet the world has ever seen or is likely to see; it is true

that Shakespeare is part of my life and thought; but somehow my interest

in him does not extend to his second-best bed, and I do not greatly yearn

to see the room in which Bacon was not born. I do not even care whether

Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare or "by another man of the same

name." Do you remember that poem of Amy Levy's, telling of how she sat

listening to people chattering about a dead, poet they had known, his

looks and ways, and thinking to herself--

I, who had never seen your face,

Perhaps I knew you best.

It is this flaw in an otherwise well regulated mind, this "blind spot" in

my spiritual eye, that perhaps makes me attach undue unimportance to the

attraction of autographs. There is an eminent actress who invariably

refuses to send her autograph; but the eminent actor who is her husband

invariably sends a letter of apology to the disappointed correspondent.

Since I am in the mood for confessions, let me candidly admit that my own

attitude has a somewhat similar duality. Though I curse in these pages, I

bless like Balaam when it comes to the point. Never have I omitted to

return a sufficiently stamped, envelope with the coveted

sign-manual--never twice alike. Never have I failed to put my name in a

birthday book under a specific date--never twice alike. And though I hate

to answer applications for autographs, I should be still more annoyed not

to receive them. And as for sneering at the ladies, they have, I vow, no

more constant admirer. I could, indeed, desire that when they are next

angry with me they would read me before they criticise me; that they

would base their denunciations on my text, and my whole text, rather than

on some paper's mistaken comment upon another paper's inaccurate extract.

But nothing that they can say of me, however harsh, shall, I protest,

abate a jot of my respect for them or myself.

XXVII

ON FINISHING A BOOK

Between three and four of the morning the last words of the book were

written, and, putting down my pen--without falling asleep, as I should

have done had my task been to read the book, instead of to write it--I

began to muse on the emotions I ought to have felt, and on the emotions

other and greater authors had felt. There was a time, "in the days that

were earlier," when the writing of a book was a rare and solemn task, to

be approached--like the writing of "Paradise Lost"--after years of devout

and arduous preparation, under the "great Taskmaster's eye." Now it is

all a rush and a fever and a fret, and the mad breathlessness of the New

York newspaper office has spread from journalism to literature, and

novelists cheerfully contract to write books in the next century, quite

unregardful of whether there will be any books in them by then. That was

a very leisurely prescription in the Old Testament: "When a man taketh a

new wife he shall not go out in the host, neither shall he be charged

with any business; he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer his

wife which he hath taken." Delightful honeymoon of those pastoral days!

Now the honeymoon has dwindled to a week, or in the case of actors and

actresses to a matinee (for they appear at night as usual), and few of us

possess sufficient oxen and sheep and manservants and maidservants to

strike work for a year. If only our authors would produce but one book a

year, instead of yielding two or three harvests to make hay withal while

the sun shines! Nor do they do these things much better in France. From

the patient parturition of a Flaubert--the father of the Realists--we

have come down to the mechanical annual crop of his degenerate

descendant, Zola. Perhaps the age of great works--like the age of great

folios--is over, so that none will ever have again those fine sensations

that made Gibbon chronicle how he finished his monumental history between

the hours of eleven and twelve at night in the summer-house at Lausanne,

or that dictated the stately sentiment of Hallam's wind-up of his

"Introduction to the Literature of Europe": "I hereby terminate a work

which has furnished, the occupation of not very few years.... I cannot

affect to doubt that I have contributed something to the general

literature of my country, something to the honourable estimation of my

own name and to the inheritance of those, if it is for me still to

cherish that hope, to whom I have to bequeath it."

Thackeray must have felt something of this fine glow when he finished

"Vanity Fair," despite his genial simulation of "Come, children, let us

shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out." Dickens,

who had not humour enough for such self-mockery, took his endings very

seriously indeed, and even in the middle of his books had all the

emotions of parting when some favourite character had to quit the stage,

some poor Dombey or Little Nell. You remember what he wrote in the

preface to "David Copperfield" of "how sorrowfully the pen is laid down

at the close of a two-years' imaginative task, or how an author feels as

if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world,

when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever."

And contrast his superfluously solemn asseveration, "No one can ever

believe this narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the

writing," with the whimsical melancholy of the "Vanity Fair" preface, the

references to the Becky doll and the Amelia puppet. One feels that

Thackeray was the greater Master, in that he took himself less seriously,

and had the finer sense of proportion. But that he lived with his

characters quite as much as his great contemporary may be seen from that

charming Roundabout Paper "De Finibus," where he describes the loneliness

of his study after all those people had gone who had been boarding and

lodging with him for twenty months. They had plagued him and bored him at

all sorts of uncomfortable hours, and yet now he would be almost glad if

one of them would walk in and chat with him as of yore--"an odd,

pleasant, humourous, melancholy feeling." In how much more solemn a mood

Dickens finishes "Our Mutual Friend," congratulating himself on having

been saved--with Mr. and Mrs. Boffin and the Lammles, with Bella Wilfer

and Rogue Riderhood--from a destructive railway accident, so that he

cannot help thinking of the time when the words with which he closes the

book will be written against his life--"The End." Thackeray needed no

railway accident to remind him of "The End," and two lines before the

close of "Vanity Fair" we find him writing--in the prime of his life,

"Ah, _vanitas vanitatum_! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us

has his desire, or, having it, is satisfied?" That thought occurred to

Gibbon, too, for he had not taken many turns under the silver moon in

that coveted walk of acacias, enjoying the spectacle of the lake and the

mountains, and the recovery of his freedom and the establishment of his

fame, before a sober melancholy was spread over his mind by the idea that

he "had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and

that whatsoever might be the future fate of his history, the life of the

historian must be short and precarious." When George Eliot put the last

stroke to "Romola," the book which "ploughed into her more than any of

her books," which she "began as a young woman and finished as an old

woman," she exclaimed in her diary--"_Ebenezer!_" O unpredictable

ejaculation! _Ebenezer!_ 'T is true the erudite Miss Evans had Hebrew an

knew that it meant "a stone of help." And in the evening she went to her

"La Gazza Ladra." Let us hope that some false persuasion of the

immortality of "Romola" counteracted that bodily malaise and suffering of

which she complained to Sara Hennell. Such pleasant persuasion buoyed up

Fielding, as he wrote the beginning of the end of "Tom Jones,"--that

almost endless epic,--for with a last fling at the critics he cries: "All

these works, however, I am well convinced, will be dead long before this

page shall offer itself to thy perusal; for however short the period may

be of my own performances, they will most probably outlive their own

infirm author, and the weakly productions of his abusive cotemporaries."

But it is rather the tradition of Trollope that rules to-day--Trollope,

that canny craftsman who wrote every day for a stated number of hours,

and who, if he finished a novel twenty minutes before the end of his

term, would take up a clean sheet of paper and commence another. Did I

say the canny Trollope? Nay, this is rather uncanny, unearthly, unhuman.

What! You have lived with your characters day and night for months and

months, have thought their thoughts and been racked by their passions,

and you can calmly wind up their affairs and turn instanter to a new

circle of acquaintances? 'T is the very coquetry of composition, the

heartless flirtation of fiction-mongering. Thackeray, indeed, confesses

to liking to begin another piece of work after one piece is out of hand,

were it only to write half a dozen lines; but "that is something towards

Number the Next," not towards Book the Next, for these old giants wrote

from hand to mouth. I have always figured to myself Trollope's novels as

all written on a long endless scroll of paper rolled on an iron axis,

nailed up in his study. The publishers approach to buy so many yards of

fiction, and shopman Anthony, scissors in hand, unrolls the scroll and

snips it off at the desired point. This counter-jumping conception of the

Muses prevails with the customers to-day, with the editors who buy

fiction at so much a thousand words. Carlyle--Heaven preserve me from

finishing a book as he did his "French Revolution," to lose it and write

it all over again!--had the truer idea when he suggested that authors

should be paid by what they do _not_ write. But it was reserved for the

libraries to reach the lowest conception of literature. Their clients

enjoy the privilege of having so many books at a time, a book being a

book just as an orange is an orange. If the book the reader wants is not

there, why, there is another book for him to take; by which beautiful

system the good writer reaps very little advantage over the mediocre, for

indifferent books are forced upon the public as the conjuror forces cards

on people who think they are choosing them. It is a wonder the libraries

do not purvey their literature by the pound.