PART II.

HERE, THERE, AND SOMEWHERE ELSE: PHILOSOPHIC EXCURSIONS.

[The following pages are not intended as a substitute for Baedeker or

Murray. Nor can I solicit your interest on the ground of new places and

strange discoveries. To the philosophic tourist all places are equally

good to soliloquise in; and in inviting you to accompany my excursions I

need scarcely explain that the route is not according to Bradshaw but to

the A. B. C., and that you may break the journey at any point.]

ABERDEEN

Critics of London allow too little for the charm of irregularity and

historical association--for odd bits and queer views coming unexpectedly

round the corner to meet one, for strange ancient gardens and fragments

of field in the backways of Holborn, for quaint waterside alleys and

old-world churches in out-of-the-way turnings--for everything, in fact,

that has the charm of natural growth. If I had my way, I would not give

up Booksellers' Row for a thousand improvements in the Strand. Where

shall you find a more piquant peace than in the shady quadrangles that

branch out of the bustle of Fleet Street, and flash a memory of Oxford

spires or Cambridge gardens on the inner eye? What spot in the world has

inspired a nobler sonnet than Wordsworth's on Westminster Bridge? Who

would exchange our happy incongruity for the mechanical regularity of the

mushroom cities of the States? Paris has, no doubt, made herself

beautiful; but she could have afforded not to be, much better than she

can afford to be. The theorist holds up Glasgow as a model city--a

pioneer--and the splendour of its municipal buildings is as the justice

of Aristides. But if an ugly woman does not dress well, who should? With

all its civic spirit, Glasgow remains grey, prosaic, intolerable--the

champion platitude of commercial civilisation. Aberdeen would have been a

far finer example of the schematic city of which theorists dream. There

is something heroic about the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness

of the buildings, and the omnipresence of granite--a Tyrtaean spirit,

which finds its supreme embodiment in the noble statue of Wallace poised

on rough craglets of unpolished granite, and of General Gordon with his

martial cloak around him. If Edinburgh be the Athens of Scotland,

Aberdeen is its Sparta. And yet after a while Aberdeen becomes a

weariness and an abomination. For you discover that it is one endless

series of geometrical diagrams. The pavements run in parallel lines, the

houses are rectilineal, the gardens are squares or oblongs; if by chance

the land sprawls in billocks and hollows, nevertheless is it partitioned

in rigid lines. The architecture is equally austere. The very curves

demonstrate the theorem that a curve is made up of little straight lines,

the arches are stiff and unbending, and wherever a public building

demands an ornament, a fir-shaped cone of straight lines rises in stoic

severity. In vain one seeks for a refuge from Euclid--for an odd turning

or a crooked by-way. To match the straight-ness of their streets and the

granite of their structures the Aberdonians are hard-headed,

close-fisted, and logical (there is a proverb that no Jew can settle

among them), and when they die they are laid out neatly in a rectangular

cemetery with parallel rows of graves. Even when they stand about

gossiping they fall naturally into geometric figures: if two disconnected

men are smoking silently in the roadway, they trisect it; and if another

man arrives he converts the company into an equilateral triangle. I am

convinced the moon shrinks from appearing in Union Street except it is in

perfect quarters, and hides timidly behind a cloud unless its arcs are

presentable. Professor Bain was born in Aberdeen. This accounts for much

in our British metaphysics. Aberdeen produced the man who vivisected

Shelley's "Skylark," and explained away the human mind and all that is

therein; Aberdeen educated him, graduated him, married him, gave him the

chair of Logic in her University, and finally made him Lord Rector. Bain

thinks entirely in straight lines. He is the apotheosis of the

Aberdonian. Which is a warning against regular cities.

According to the Rev. W. A. Cornaby in "The Contemporary Review," the

straight line is an abomination to the Chinese; they avoid it by curves

and zigzags, and they think in curves and zigzags. Hence it seems the

Chinese suffer from a spurious idealism, just as my Aberdonians suffer

from a spurious materialism. If only the maidens of Aberdeen would marry

the mandarins of the too Flowery Land, what a perfect race we might

expect!

ANTWERP

This is the era of Exhibitions. An epidemic of Exhibitions traverses the

world, breaking out now at Paris, now at Chicago, now at Antwerp. To

visit them is our modern Pilgrimage; they force us to make the Grand

Tour, as our little wars teach us geography. They are supposed to give a

fillip to the prosperity of their town, and to nourish the pride and

pocket of the citizens. What other function they fulfil is dubious. Time

was when "the long laborious miles" of the Crystal Palace were acclaimed

as the dawn of the Golden Age, when swords should be turned into the most

improved substitute for pruning-hooks, and each man

find his own in all men's good,

And all men work in noble brotherhood.

Unhappily, that millennial vision is still far away,--

Far, how far, no tongue can say,

as the canny Tennyson did not forget, even in his rapt prophetic strain.

And we have grown chiller. We no longer raise the song of praise because

manufacturers of all nations send specimens of their work to a common

centre in quest of medals. The world is already federated by the chains

of commerce; international barter is an inseparable part of the movement

of life, and infinite intertangled threads of union stretch across the

seas from shipping office to shipping office. Wherefore the millennium is

as likely to arrive _viâ_ Bayreuth or Lourdes, or any other centre of

Pilgrimage, as by way of an International Exhibition. No, we must take

our Exhibitions more humbly: they are amusing and instructive; they earn

dividends or lose capital; they stimulate orders for the goods on view,

and they end in a shower of medals. In France, according to Mark Twain,

few men escape the Legion of Honor. Is there any artificial product that

has escaped a medal at some Exhibition or the other? I cannot recall

eating or drinking anything undecorated. They grow on every bush, those

medals, copious as the Queen's Arms over the shop-windows of the High

Street. No store, however lowly, but the Queen deals there; no article,

however poor, but has earned golden opinions, or at least silver and

bronze. For the industrial or Gradgrind mind an Exhibition is doubtless a

riot, an orgy; for the exhibitors it is a sensational battle-field; for

the average spectator it is as exciting as a walk through Whiteley's, or

a stroll down Oxford Street. From the Antwerp Exhibition proper I bear

away nothing but an impression of a wonderful paper-making machine, at

one end of which the paper enters as liquid pulp, to issue at the other

as a solid sheet. A pity the process was not carried one step farther, to

the printed newspaper stage--so that what went in as rags should come out

as mendacity. Such success as the Antwerp Exhibition has won is a success

of side-shows; a panorama of camels and dancing-girls defiles before my

eyes, my ears are yet ringing with the barbarous music and incantations

of the Orient. Old Antwerp rises picturesque, with its burghers and

warriors; the glorious picture galleries stretch away, overladen with

artistic treasure; the mimic elephant mounts, mammoth-like, to the skies;

the grounds and the façades of the buildings gleam fairy-like in the soft

night air, with a million illuminations; and lo! there in the German

restaurant the beautiful daughters of the Fatherland smile, in coifs and

tuckers and short skirts, Katti and Luisa and Nina, dulciferous names

that trip off the tongue as the gentle creatures trip from table to table

with flasks of Rhenish wine; the mellifluous voice of Sarah cries

cigarettes at her booth in the Rue du Caire--Sarah, the Egyptian Jewess,

whose ancestors went back to the land of Pharaoh in defiance of Rabbinic

decree--Sarah, with the charm of her eighteen summers and her graceful

virginal figure and her sweet unconscious coquetry, as different from the

barmaid's as Rosalind's from Audrey's; and Sarah's brother, briskest of

business boys, resurges with his polyglot solicitations to buy nougat: a

mannish swashbuckler without, a cherubic infant within: I see the Congo

negroes, mere frauds from the States, in your opinion, daintiest of

American friends, who came all the way from Paris to meet me. But soft!

what has all this to do with the Industrial Exhibition?

_Rien, absolument rien._ Give us these things anywhere, give us lights

and gardens and music, give us dances and damsels, give us Congo

encampments and "_ballons dirigeables_," and thither will we troop to

make us merry. Ah! but the incurable conscientiousness of the human race

insists on pills with its jam. Or is it that it has never yet dawned upon

humanity that jam may be taken without pills? There was a time--it lasted

seventy thousand ages according to the Chinese manuscript which Elia

saw--when mankind ate their meat raw. Then, one day, as every schoolboy

knows, Bo-bo carelessly set his father's cottage on fire, and, burning

the litter of new-farrowed pigs it held, accidentally invented

_crackling_. So delicious was burnt pig discovered to be that everybody

fell to setting his house on fire to obtain it. "Thus this custom of

firing houses continued, till in process of time a sage arose, like our

Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any

other animal, might be cooked (_burnt_, as they called it) without the

necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it.... By such slow degrees

do the most useful and seemingly the most obvious arts make their way

among mankind." For seventy thousand ages mankind did without _al fresco_

entertainments. Then some one invented Exhibitions, and mankind found it

delicious to promenade the grounds amid twinkling lights and joyous

music. But no Locke has yet discovered that musical promenades may be had

without elevating a whole Exhibition in the background. At Earl's Court

they still keep up a pretence of Industrial Exhibition, though we have

long since lost interest in the pretext, and no longer inquire whether

the painted scenery that walls in the grounds is called the Alps or the

Apennines or the Champs-Elysées. And yet methinks mankind did discover

the open-air entertainment, as perchance roast pig was known and

forgotten again long centuries before Bo-bo. For what was Ranelagh, what

Vauxhall? Were not the gardens of Vauxhall "made illustrious by a

thousand lights finely disposed," or, as Thackeray puts it, by a "hundred

thousand _extra_ lamps, which were always lighted"? Were not "concerts of

musick" given nightly by fiddlers in cocked hats, ensconced in a "gilded

cockleshell," and was not the price of admission a shilling? "Vauxhall

must ever be an estate to its proprietor," wrote Boswell, "as it is

peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a

mixture of curious show--gay exhibition--music, vocal and instrumental,

not too refined for the general ear; and, though last not least, good

eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale." But

Boswell prophesied ill. Public gardens were always distasteful to English

Puritanism, because they lent themselves to rendezvous; and though

Boswell, in protesting against the rise of price to two shillings,

certifies to the elegance and innocence of the entertainment, and though

Mr. Osborne and Miss Amelia walked unharmed in its groves and glades, and

it was not Rebecca Sharp's fault that Jos. Sedley got drunk on the bowl

of rack punch, still Vauxhall, like Ranelagh and Cremorne, has come down

to us with tainted reputation. It died in the odour of brimstone, and

only in the magical ink-pool of literature can we still behold the

heralded gallants in the boxes junketing with low-bodiced ladies of

quality whose patches show piquantly on their damask cheeks. Rosherville

remains in ignoble respectability, the place to spend an h-less day, our

one uninstructive institution, for even "Constantinople" and "Venice"

have a specious background of geographical and even of industrial

information: Rosherville, which only once flowered into poetry, and then

under another name,--when Mr. Anstey's barber wedded the Tinted Venus

with a ring.

And in the magical ink-pool I see you and me still sitting, O

Transatlantic Parisienne, as we sat that sunny afternoon--three hundred

years ago--in ancient Antwerp, in _oud Antwerpen_, niched in the

windowseat of that quaint hostelry which gives on the great market-place,

and watching the festive procession. Do you remember the gorgeous

costumes of our fellow-burghers, and the trappings of their prancing

chargers in those days when life was not plain, but coloured, and

existence was one vast fancy-dress ball? How glad we were to welcome the

Archduke Martinias of Austria, our sovereign elect, or was it François

Sonnius, our first Bishop, coming to be installed in our glorious

Cathedral, amid the joyous carillons of its bells! Can you not still see

the Angels hovering over the Virgin, and the Golden Calf,

flower-wreathed, and the Flight into Egypt, on that naïve donkey, and

"the Flying Dutchman," tugged by a horse, and the gilded galley rowed in

make-believe by little children in their Sunday clothes, catching crabs

in air, and the incongruous camels bestridden by Arab sheikhs with

African pages, and the Persians on ponies, and the Crusaders in their

fine foolish coats-of-mail, and the gay courtiers, with clanking swords,

and the halberdiers, and the particoloured arquebusiers, and the archers

in green and red, and the spearsmen in sugarloaf hats, and the cherubs

riding on dolphins? Can you not hear the beating of the drum, and the Ave

Maria of the white-robed chorus-boys, and the irrelevant strains of the

Danish national anthem, and the japes of the jester with his cap and

bells? What happy times for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers

when, instead of working, they could go in processions, bearing aloft the

insignia of their guilds, and when middle-class girls, ignorant of the

New Womanhood, could loll on triumphal cars with roses in their hair! Do

you remember how the topmost divinity smiled to me from her perilous

perch, too high to rouse your jealousy, and how the little cherub that

sat up aloft besprinkled us mischievously with eau de cologne? Ah, shall

we ever again be as happy as we were three hundred years ago? will the

wine be ever as red, the potato salad as appetising, or the cheese (did

they really enjoy Gorgonzola and Camembert in the sixteenth century?) as

delicious as in that ancient Flemish hostelry with its Lutheran motto:

Wie nikt mint Wijn, Wijf en Sangh,

Blijft een Geck sijn Leven langh!

Was it from its inscribed beams that Shelley borrowed his famous lyric

"Love's Philosophy"? for did we not read:

Den Hemel drinckt, en d'Aerde drinckt:

Waerom souden wij niët drinckt?

("Heaven drinks, and earth drinks: why shouldn't we drink?") At any rate

it pleased us to recall the delectable lines:

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

And the moonbeams kiss the sea;

What are all these kissings worth

If thou kiss not me?

But what does it matter what one did three hundred years ago?

Or, what does it matter what one did that dim Arabian night when we set

out with the cavalcade of camels in the marriage procession, and the

bride cowered veiled in her corner of the coach, and the plump mother

smiled archly at us, and the brother and the bridegroom, mounted on Arab

steeds, smacked each other's faces in ceremonial solemnity, exactly like

"the two Macs" in the music-hall? Was it then, or in the nineteenth

century, that we rode the camel together, I on the hindmost peak? "Oh,

the oont, oh, the oont, oh, the gawdforsaken oont!" as the poet of the

barrack-room sings. He seems to double up like a garden-chair to receive

one; then his knees unfold and the rider shoots up; then the camel rises

to his full height, and one ducks instinctively for fear of striking the

stars. "_Salaam Aleikhoom_," I cried to the drivers, airing my Arabic,

which I make by mispronouncing Hebrew; and they answered effusively,

"Yankee Doodle! Chicago!" Alas for the glamour of the Orient! They had

all come from the greater fair, perhaps spent their lives in traveling

from fair to fair, mercenaries of some latter-day Barnum.

There was a fine stalwart Egyptian, who stood beating a gong to summon

the faithful to improper dances. I gave him a cup of coffee, and he held

it on high, and with gratitude effusing from every pore of his dusky

face, cried, "Columbus!" Then he mounted a flight of stairs and shouted

beamingly, "1492!"

He took a sip, and then his wife called him chidingly, and he fled to

her. But he returned to drain the cup in my presence, crying between each

sip "Columbus" or "1492." Never before have I bought so much gratitude

for ten centimes. Henceforward I found "Columbus" a watchword, and "1492"

a magic talisman, causing dusky eyes to kindle and turbaned heads to nod

beamingly.

The town-barber of _Alt Antwerpen_, who was wont to shave me in the

sixteenth century, had a beautiful motto:--

I am Hair-dresser, Barber, and Surgeon,

I shave with, soap and much delight,

Although there are barbers who do it

As though they were in a fright.

But it is surpassed by a hundred delightful things in "The Visitor's

Handybook," which the touts in New Antwerp, ignorant of its treasures,

press upon the traveller gratis. It opens auspiciously: "The opening

pages of our little guide we have devoted to a short review of the city

of Antwerp, the streets of which still contain elegant specimens of those

quaint and handsome edifices of the Netherlands are truly famous, and

which in Antwerp, perhaps more than in any other city, seem to abound."

Here are some more gems: "Visitors will be naturally anxious to secure a

comfortable apartment, in selecting which the following list will be

found of service:--see advertisements, all of which can be strongly

recommended." "Facing you is the King's Palace; not a very attractive

one; however, as a rule, not open to the public, but admission may

sometimes be obtained although at great trouble during the absence of the

King." "It was formally inaugurated by the presence of the Queen,

Princess Beatrice, and a numerous compagny representing the European

Benches and Pairs." "A wonderfully painted ceiling, in which the

attendant can point out some marvellous effects." "The Visitor's

Handybook" is in its thirteenth free edition, and is worth double the

price. Antwerp is very strong linguistically. The _quatre

langues_--Flemish, French, English, and German--make a universal

confusion of tongues, and the whole town is nothing but a huge open

Flemish--French dictionary, every shop-sign or street-name being

translated. A few sturdy burghers stick to the old tongue, and sometimes

English rules the roast. "The Welsh Harp" (which is Antwerp way) is a

sailor's cabaret near the quay. There is even a trace of Irish influence

in the etymology of Antwerp as given in the official handbook; for

Antigon, the giant who used to cut off the hand of any shipman that

refused him tribute, and whose throwing it (_Handwerpen_) into the river

gave the name to the city, is stated beforehand to have lived in the

castle of Antwerp. They are not destitute of wit, the Belgians, if I may

judge by some specimens I heard. It is a local joke to refer to the

famous "_dirigeable_" balloon, which burst in the latter days of the

Exhibition, as the "_déchirable_" balloon. "They pooh-pooh the past

nowadays," said a tram-conductor to me, "but when I look at the Cathedral

and Rubens' 'Descent from the Cross' I think our forefathers were _assez

malins_." A seedy vendor of lottery-tickets declared that every one of

them would draw a prize. "Wherefore, then, my friend," quoth I, "do you

not keep them?" "_Je ne suis pas égoïste_," he said, with a shrug. To

defend myself against his masterful solicitousness, I stated solemnly

that lotteries were illegal in England, and that if I returned thither

with a lottery-ticket the British Government would throw me into prison.

But he was not daunted: "_Appuyez-vous sur moi_," he replied

reassuringly.

BROADSTAIRS AND RAMSGATE

A story is current in the Clubs that Mr. Henry James innocently went to

Ramsgate, in order to possess his soul in peace. 'T was the height of the

rougher Ramsgate season, and there is something irresistibly incongruous

in the juxtaposition of the rarefied American novelist and the roaring

sands of Albion. In the which juxtaposition the story leaves him; and we

are ignorant of whether he turned tail and fled back to quieter London,

or whether he stayed on to collect unexpected material. Our analytical

cousin's stippling methods are, it is to be feared, but poorly adapted

for the painting of holiday crowds, which require the scene-painter's

brush, and lend themselves reluctantly to nuances. The colours have not

that dubiety so dear to the artist of the penumbra; the sands are as

yellow as the benches are red; and the niggers are quite as black as they

are burnt-corked. The love-making, too, is devoid of subtlety. When you

see--as I saw last Bank Holiday on Ramsgate beach--Edwin and Angelina

asleep in each other's arms, the situation strikes you as too simple for

analysis. It is like the loves of the elements, or the propensity of

carbon to combine with oxygen. An even more idyllic couple I came upon

prone amid the poppies on the cliff hard by, absorbing the peace and the

sunshine, steeping themselves in the calm of Nature after the finest

Wordsworthian manner. But presently there is the roll of a drum, and the

scream of a fife in distress rises from below, and Angelina pricks up her

ears. "I wish they'd come up 'ere," she murmurs wistfully; "I'd jump up

like steam; I could just do a dance."

Yet all the same their seclusion among the wild flowers on the edge of

the cliff showed a glimmering of soul. Not theirs the hankering for that

strip of sand near the stone pier, which a worthy dame of my acquaintance

once compared to a successful fly-paper. Scientific investigation shows

the congestion at this particular spot to be due to the file of

bathing-machines which blocks the view of the sea from half the beach. To

the bulk of the visitors this yellow patch _is_ Ramsgate, just as a

small, cocoanut-bearing area of Hampstead woodland is the Heath, most of

whose glorious acres have never felt the tread of a donkey or a cheap

tripper. Not that there are many other attractions in Ramsgate, which is

administered by councillors more sleepy than sage. Having literally

defaced their town by a railway-station, built a harbour which will not

hold water, constructed a promenade pier in the least accessible quarter,

and provided a band which plays mainly "intervals," they naturally refuse

to venture on further improvements, such as refuges on the parade, or

trees in the shadeless streets, and, in the excess of their zeal, have

even, so I hear, declined the railway company's offer to give them a lift

(from sands to cliff), and Mr. Sebag Montefiore's offer to allow the

public gardens to be continued right through his estate on towards

Dumpton. Even so, these worthy burghers have more of my regard than their

brethren of Margate, who have sacrificed their trust to the Moloch of

advertisement. Stand on Margate Parade and look seaward, and the main

impression is Pills. Sail towards Margate Pier and look landward, and the

main impression is Disinfectant Powder.

Baby Broadstairs has known better how to guard its dignity and its

beauty; so that Dickens might still look from Bleak House on as dainty a

scene as in the days when he lounged on the dear old, black,

weather-beaten pier. I spent a week at Broadstairs in the height of a

Dynamite Mystery. We were very proud of the Mystery, we of Broadstairs,

and of the space we filled in the papers. Ramsgate, with its

contemporaneous murder sensation, we turned up our noses at, till

Ramsgate had a wreck and redressed the balance. For the rest, we made

sand-pies, and bathed and sailed, and listened to a band that went wheezy

on Bank Holiday. Broadstairs boasts of one drunkard, who does odd jobs as

well. He is tall, venerable, and melancholy, and has the air of a

temperance orator. "Joe's one of the best chaps on the pier when he's

sober," said his mate to me sorrowfully; "but when he's drunk he makes a

fool of himself." This was not quite true; for Joe was not always

foolish. Why, when two gentlemen came down from London in a gipsy caravan

to teach us Theosophy, and all Broadstairs fluttered towards their

oil-lamp, leaving the band to tootle to the sad sea waves, I could not

get him to mount the Cheap Jack rostrum in opposition! The most I could

spur him to was an indignant defence of London against the lecturer's

denunciation of it as an immoral city, a pit of unrighteousness. "'T

ain't true!" he thundered raucously. "Many's the gent from Lunnon as has

behaved most liberal to me." One day there was an attempt to disturb

Joe's monopoly as drunkard, and I am afraid I had a hand in it. A human

caricature in broken boots addressed me as I lay on the beach (writing

with a stylographic pen and blotting the sheets with the sand), and

besought me to buy sprigs of lavender. He proved to me by ocular

demonstration that he had no money in his pockets; whereupon I proved to

him by parity of reasoning that I had none in mine either. However, I

remembered me of a penny postage-stamp (unlicked), and tendered it

diffidently, and he received it with disproportionate benedictions. Later

in the day he reappeared under my window, hurling up maudlin abuse. He

had got drunk on my postage-stamp!

I told him to get along with him, which he did. For some time he

staggered about Broadstairs in search of its policeman. He came across

him at last, and was straightway clapped into an open victoria and driven

across the sunny fields to Ramsgate. Meantime, Broadstairs was left

unprotected--perhaps Joe kept an eye on it.

Broadstairs has also a jolly old waterman, who paddles about apparently

to pick up exhausted bathers. One morning as I was swimming past his boat

he warned me back. "Any danger?" I asked. "Ladies," he replied,

ambiguously enough. It thus transpired that his function is to preserve a

scientific frontier between the sexes. Considering that the ladies one

meets at sea are much more clothed than the ladies whose diaphanous

drapery one engirdles in ball-rooms, this prudery is amusing. It is

consoling to remember that the Continental practice prevails in many a

quaint nook along our coasts, and that the ladies are sensible enough to

walk to and from their bathing tents, clothed and unashamed. Strange to

say, Broadstairs has placed its ladies' machines nearest the pier, for

the benefit of loungers armed with glasses; and I must not forget to

mention that the boatman himself holds a daily _levée_ of mermaidens, who

make direct for his boat and gambol around the prow. If anything needs

reforming in our marine manners, it is rather the male costume. Why we

men are allowed to go about like savages, clothed only in skins (and

those our own), is to me one of the puzzles of popular ethics. What is

sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. At Folkestone, where the

machine-people are dreadfully set against ladies and gentlemen using the

same water, promiscuous bathing flourishes more nakedly than anywhere on

the Continent; and the gentlemen have neither tents nor costumes. In

Margate and Deal the machines are of either sex, and the gentlemen are

clad in coloured pocket-handkerchiefs. At Birchington I bathed from a

boat which was besieged by a bevy of wandering water-nymphs, begging me

to let them dive from it. And they dived divinely!

Though the _profanum vulgus_ takes possession of our strands, and Edwin

and Angelina are common objects of the sea-shore, yet I cannot help

thinking that there is many a vulgar British beach that would ravish us

did we light upon it in other lands. Oh, how picturesque! What a gay

grouping of colour! What an enchanting medley of pink parasols and golden

sand and chintz tents and white bathing-machines, and blue skies and

black minstrels and green waters, and creamy flannels and gauzy dresses!

And--_ciel!_ what cherubic children! and--_corpo di Bacco!_--what pretty

women! What frank _abandon_ to the airy influences of the scene! What

unconventionality! What unrestraint! See how that staid old _signor_

allows himself to be buried and excavated by the _bambino_. Watch that

charming _maman_ unblushingly bathing _bébé_. Note that portly _matrona_

careering upon the _asino_! What cares she for her dignity? Listen to the

babel--"[Greek: hokae pokae, hokae pokae]" "Drei shies a pfennig!" "Your

photograph, _señorita?_" Look! the coquettish _contadina_ is slapping the

face of the roguish _vetturino_! How the good-natured crowd, easily

pleased, gathers round the Ethiopian troubadour, trolling in unison his

amorous catches!--

_Daisy, Daisy, donne-moi ta réponse._

And hark! Do you not hear in the distance the squeak of _Puncinello_? Ah!

why have we none of this happy carelessness in England?--we who take our

pleasures _moult tristement_--why have we not this lightheartedness, this

_camaraderie_ of enjoyment? Why cannot we throw aside our insular

stiffness, our British hauteur, and be natural?

I journeyed to Broadstairs, late at night, riding in a three-horsed brake

with many a jocund passenger. And then something happened. Something

ineffably trivial, and yet a matter of life and death. We were bowling

merrily along the country lanes in the fragrant air. It was a dark,

starless night, but so warm that the easterly sea-breeze fanned us like a

zephyr. And through the gloom a flash-light leaped and waned, flickered

and died and gleamed again with electric brilliance--"the Winnaker(?)

light from France," a garrulous inhabitant assured us; a rare phenomenon

to be seen only once in a decade, when an east wind clarifies the

atmosphere, and allows the rays to pierce through two dozen miles of

strait. It seemed like La Belle France winking amicably to us across the

waters. And a little to the left twinkled "The Green Man"--no friendly

public-house, but a danger-signal from behind the Goodwin Sands, likewise

visible but by miracle.

And as we marvelled at these jewels of the night, that shamed the

absentee stars, the brake stood still with a jolt and a shock that threw

our gay company into momentary alarm. But it was nothing. Only a horse

fallen down dead! One of our overworked wheelers had suddenly sunk upon

the earth, a carcase. Dust to dust! Who shall tell of the daylong agony

of the dumb beast as he plodded pertinaciously through the heat,

ministering to the pleasures of his masters? Had he been a man, how we

should have praised him, belauded the beauty of his end, telling one

another sanctimoniously that he had died in harness. As it was we merely

stripped him of his harness and deposited it in the brake! We unhitched

the leader and put him between the shafts, side by side with the other

horse, both incurious and indifferent, wasting nor glance nor nasal rub

upon their defunct comrade. We men feign better. And then we drew him to

the edge of the track, a rigid, lumbering mass; and the garrulous

inhabitant discussed the value of the carcase, and the driver cracked his

whip, and the living horses stirred their haunches, and in a moment we

were spanking along, leaving our fellow-creature to darkness and

solitude. Only the flash-light from France glimmered upon the poor dead

beast, coming all the way to cheer him; only the green eye from beyond

the Goodwins blinked upon his unheaving flanks.

And from far ahead came back to his deaf ears with ever-diminishing

intensity our noisy madrigal--most music-hall, most melancholy--his only

dirge:

Mary Jane was a farmer's daughter,

Mary Jane did what she oughter.

She fell in love but all in vain.

O poor Mary! O poor Jane!

BUDAPEST

The Millennial Exhibition of Budapest--for which the Directors gave me a

season ticket as soon as they heard I was leaving--professes to celebrate

the foundation of Hungary; but 896 is a very long time ago, and the event

does not seem to have been reported in the newspapers of the period.

However, as a Hungarian explained to me, when you are counting by

thousands you are not particular to a year or two, so perhaps it was not

precisely ten centuries ago that the foundation of Hungary was

inaugurated by a national assembly that created "the Constitution of

Pusztaszer." After all, have not those irrepressible German savants

discovered that Christ was born in the year 6 B.C.? At any rate, there is

no doubt that the Magyars did steal a country some time or other in the

remote past, or in more political language, did obtain a footing in

Europe by ousting the Slav tribes that peopled the great plain bounded by

the Carpathians and the Danube and the Tisza. They came from Central

Asia, on a late wave of that big "Westward ho!" movement of the Eastern

peoples, a race of shepherds changed into an army of mounted archers, and

pitched their tents first in Galieia, uniting their seven tribes under

the great chief Arpád; but, harassed continually by local tribes with

unpronounceable names, they moved farther westwards to their present

quarters, where, after a vain but spirited attempt to annex Europe

generally, they settled down to comfort and civilisation, ceased to offer

white horses to idols, and embraced Christianity.

It seems that land-thieves are called conquerors; and after a thousand

years of possession of their stolen goods, the glamour of a divine

sanctity gets over the past, and high-minded natives live and die for the

country which seems to have been theirs from time immemorial, and in

which their holiest feelings are enrooted. What makes national robberies

moral is the fact that there is honour among the thieves. The morality of

crowds is, in fact, as different from that of individuals as "the

psychology of crowds" which has just engaged the attention of an

ingenious scientist. Into the original conquerors of a country a

miscellaneous assortment of other races always gets absorbed, as the

Franks by the Gauls, the Turkish Bulgarians by the Slavs. The Hungarians

absorbed into themselves Italians, Germans, and Czechs, and the modern

Hungarian is, according to Arminius Vambery, a typical product of the

fusion of Europe and Asia, Turanian and Aryan. And that is the sort of

way in which after a few centuries we get the chauvinistic cries:

"Germany for the Germans," "Poland for the Polish," "Hungary for the

Hungarians." In truth, no nation has a right to anything it cannot hold

by might. And who shall determine what a nation is? Who are the

Americans? Who are the English? "Norman and Saxon and Dane are we." And

once upon a time some of us threw up our country and sailed away in the

_Mayflower_. For patriotism is not the only bond of brotherhood. Men may

be the sons of an idea as well as of a soil. There was a Hungarian girl

selling silver at a stall, who had spent four years in Chicago. Never

have I heard better American, except it be from a Budapest man who had

come back to revisit his native town, and was disgusted with its

smallness and slowness. _Per contra_, I met an American girl in

Switzerland who had lived much in Germany, and whose English had such a

Teutonic intonation that it was difficult to realise she was not speaking

German. And language is but typical of the rest. All other national

characteristics are imbibed as subtly. What makes a nation is a certain

common spirit,--_Volksgeist_, as the German psychologists have christened

it,--and this spirit exercises a hypnotic effect over all that comes

within its range, moulding and transforming. There is action and

reaction. The nation makes the national spirit, and the national spirit

makes the nation. The flag, the constitution, the national anthems, the

national prejudices, the language, the proverbs--these are the product of

the people they produce.

I am inclined to allow more importance to education and environment than

to actual birth in a country, and to believe that for a "native," birth

is only an etymological necessity. Natives are made as well as born. The

"born" native has merely the advantage of prior arrival, and if the

"foreign" immigrant is only of a plastic age he may come to love the

step-mother-country more than one of her own sons, educated abroad. This

consideration would solve every _Uitlander_ question: is the national

spirit strong enough to suck in the foreigners? Can the nation digest

them, to vary the metaphor--assimilate them to its own substance? I once

proposed to a biologist--who flouted it--that a definition of Life might

be "the power of converting foreign elements, taken in as food, to one's

own substance." Thus, a plant sucks up chemical elements and makes

flowers; a man turns them to flesh. Here is a piece of meat: eaten by a

dog it runs to tail and teeth, for a cat it makes fur and whiskers, for a

bird feathers, for a woman a lovable face. And so the test of life in a

nation would be its power of transforming its immigrants into patriots.

Only a dead nation is afraid of foreigners.

The figure has its limits, however: one cannot gulp down too large a

piece of meat. And there are things inedible--substances which no stomach

can digest. The Americans will never make Yankees of their Chinese. On

the other hand, nowhere have I found more ardent patriots than among the

Jews. Englishmen in England, Americans in America, Italians in Italy,

Frenchmen in France, and only not Russians in Russia because they are not

allowed to be, they are rabid Hungarians in Hungary; and if I have caught

any enthusiasm for Hungary it is from the lips of a young and brilliant

Jew, Vidor Emil, who piloted me about Budapest, and who, under Marmorek

Oszkár, another young Jew, built "Old Buda," perhaps the most interesting

feature of the Millennial Exhibition. This Jewish patriotism, which loves

at once Israel and some other nation, may appear curious and

contradictory; but human nature is nothing if not curious and

contradictory, and this dual affection has been aptly compared to that of

a mother for her different children. And besides, in a contest the love

of Israel goes down before the more local patriotism. French and German

Jews fought each other in the Franco-German war, and probably it is only

persecution that accentuates the consciousness of Jewish brotherhood.

Wherever the Jews have perfect equality and have been tempted out of the

Ghetto, there the beginnings of disintegration are manifest. And who

shall say how much Jewish blood dilutes the nations of the Occident, for

all their chauvinistic talk!

Mr. Du Maurier, in his unmentionable novel, suspects, like Lowell, that a

drop of it has lurked in every artistic temperament. And, in sober truth,

the drain from Israel throughout the centuries has been immense. In every

age, in every country, Jews have been sucked up into the more brilliant

life around them, exchanging contempt and danger for consideration and

peace. I know an English gentleman who goes about in fear and trembling

lest it transpire that he is of the race of the apostles, and he be

driven out of decent Christian society. _Cherchez le Juif_ is, indeed,

no empty cry, whenever a new artistic or journalistic planet swims into

our ken. That the Jew rules over the Continental press is not quite so

untrue as most anti-Semitic cries. "Have you any Christians on your

staff?" I said to the editor of the great Budapest newspaper, "Pesther

Lloyd," a fine figure of a man, long-bearded and benevolent, like an

ancient sage. He pondered. "I think we have one," he said. On the other

hand, there are many German and Austrian papers on which there is only

one Jew. And in any case the real meaning of the cry is ludicrously

untrue.

For the Jew by no means uses his power to help Jews indiscriminately:

there is no secret brotherhood of the synagogue. The Jewish journalists

have probably never been in a synagogue, except perhaps as children; they

are divorced in thought and temper from the body proper. And the only

sense in which their pen can be said to have a Jewish bias is in that

complimentary sense which makes the Jew synonymous with the champion of

sweetness and light, of liberty and reason. In this sense it is true that

the Jew is wielding an insidious influence throughout Europe, like the

old apostles among the heathen.

"Oh yes, the Jews are very well off in Hungary," said one of the staff of

the "Pesther Lloyd." "There are 150,000 Jews in Budapest; they enter all

the professions, and supply two members to the House of Magnates, and

nine to the Chamber of Deputies, and there are two State Councillors; and

you know with us every member of Parliament 'thous' every other in

private as an equal. For the laws, liberal as they are, are not so

liberal as the spirit of society. I, mere journalist as I am, have the

most friendly talks with the Prime Minister, and am a member of the

swellest political clubs. We are a good deal like England, by the way:

our middle-classes produce our leaders, our aristocracy lacks eloquence

and talent, and has only a court influence. Our House of Commons is the

most fashionable club. We have no censor, whereas Austria has an

oppressive censorship as well as anti-Semitism. In fact, the influence of

Vienna has caused a decline in our own tolerant spirit, and at the best

of times a Jew needed to have three times the talent of a Christian to

make equal progress in any career." A consideration which sufficiently

accounts for the superiority of the Jewish remnant. Intolerance and

persecution are furnaces which, when they do not destroy, temper and

anneal and strengthen. It is as with the bare-footed, half-clad, underfed

children of the slums: those that do survive are strong indeed. Let my

patriotic cicerone, the Jewish architect, testify. First in all his

examinations, a violinist, a bicyclist, a gymnast, he was to be gazetted

a premier lieutenant as soon as he had completed his military service. He

was a linguist, too (as every travelled Hungarian must be, for Hungarian

will carry him nowhere), speaking excellent English and reading our

magazines regularly. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_ might have been his

motto. Kossuth himself is said to have had a Jewish grandmother. The Jews

are largely responsible for the prosperity of Budapest, as they were for

that of Vienna, which now turns round upon them. Fancy a country

quarrelling with its coal and iron! And the true wealth of a country is

even more in its population than in its dead products. I found the

Viennese comic papers full of the old anti-Semitic jokes, hashed up, I

have little doubt, by the same journalists who are supposed to judaize

the press of Europe. Even so in America, are not the Jewish caricatures

in _Puck_ often done by a brother of M. de Blowitz? In something of the

same spirit, when the notorious Lueger, whose platform was the extinction

of the Jews of Vienna, was up for election as Burgomaster of that town, a

poor Jew took a bribe of a couple of florins to vote for him. "God will

frustrate him," said the pious Jew. "Meantime I have his money."

The chief surprise of Hungary is its language. Though one knows that

Jokaï writes in the strange tongue which sticks its verb into the middle

of its noun, yet one vaguely thinks of it as of Gaelic or

Welsh--something archaic, kept for Eisteddfods and Renaissances--and it

is not till one arrives in Hungary that one realises that it is a living,

disconcerting reality. The great European languages have affinities with

one another: Latin puts one on bowing terms with French and Spanish,

Italian and Portuguese; English is not entirely unrelated to German,

Dutch, and even Norwegian; old Greek is the key to modern. But in Hungary

one comes face to face with an absolutely new language, in which even

guesswork is impossible. When "Levelezö-Lap" means a postcard, and "ára

egy napra" means price per day, you feel that it is all up. The nearest

relatives of Hungarian are Turkish and Finnish, the Asiatic ancestors of

the race having lived between Finns and Turks; and it bears traces of

their migrations, and of the great Mongol invasion of Europe by Djingis

Khan.

With a language thus handicapped, it was a mistake to have scarcely a

word of any other tongue in an Exhibition designed to attract Europe. The

only scrap of English I saw was in the "French Theatre," in the show of

"Living Pictures," the (London) director of which had forgotten to alter

the titles printed beneath the frames. Even in giving the names of

foreign authors the Hungarians preserve their habit of placing the

Christian name second; so that I saw in the booksellers' windows works by

Eliot George, Kock Paul, and Black William.

Hungary is still in the flush of youth, high-spirited, brilliant,

enthusiastic, and a little out of perspective in its national

consciousness. But who would ever do anything if he saw his true place in

the cosmos? The rapid rise of Budapest--unprecedented save in the gold

countries--into a capital of European importance, has shed a buoyant

optimism, refreshing enough in this jaded century, over the inhabitants

of that beautiful city. "We are the Vienna of the future," cried my

cicerone, "and already Vienna is feeling our rivalry. The retired Jewish

merchants who went there to spend their fortunes are now coming to us;

the anti-Semitism of Vienna is at once the cause and the effect of bad

business. And Vienna is on the downward grade; we are on the upward.

Vienna has never been the capital of Austria,--which is a mere federation

of races,--as Budapest is the capital of Hungary. The German is proud of

Vienna, yes; but the Czech looks to Prague, the Pole to Cracow, the

Austro-Italian swears by Trieste."

He also complained that there is rather a tendency to think of Hungary as

subject to Austria, instead of an associated state; and that this

tendency is fomented by the Austrian papers, whose references to Hungary

insinuate this conception. The Hungarian papers, whose tone would

counteract it, not being in German, are not read by the rest of Europe.

Hungary had always beaten Austria. She had never been defeated save by

allies of Austria. But Hungary, which is so mettlesome and restive in her

patriotism, whose great son, Kossuth, would never even accept the

compromise with the House of Hapsburg, has yet no compunction in

dominating inferior races, in grinding Serbs, Croats and Roumanians into

her own pattern. The Hungarians, who are in the minority, are yet

moulding these alien nationalities to their own will. But _que

voulez-vous?_ The inhabitants of many nations have adopted Christianity,

the nations themselves never. Perhaps the next step for the Christian

missionaries is to found international Christianity.

Still the Hungarians have the qualities of their defects. Unlike the

Turks, their neighbours, they are a race with a future, and Budapest is

from one point of view one of the sightliest capitals of Europe. What

town has a fairer situation? With Parisian Pesth sitting stately on one

bank of the Danube, and Turkish Buda climbing up the hills in a series of

hanging gardens crowned by gilt domes and cupolas on the other, the two

joined by wonderful bridges, she exhibits an unsurpassed contrast; and at

night, when the long stretch of the river is a-twinkle with lights

reflected as shining spears, she may even vie with Venice or the Thames

Embankment. From the Andrassy Avenue, a beautiful Boulevard, with its

cafés and book-shops, and pleasant interludes of flower-beds and

fountains, you may get, in a few minutes--crossing the Danube on a great

steamer, and ascending the heights of Buda by a funicular railway--to a

spot where, seated in an avenue of chestnut trees and looking on the

villa-strewn slopes of sleeping hills, or watching the sun set in

splendour behind them, you may forget that you are living in a bustling

modern town, and one with an Exhibition to boot.

You may dream of the picturesque days when, as shown in Ujváry's great

panorama of the sister towns in 1680, Buda was by far "the better half,"

and Pesth was a tiny spot. You may visit the tomb of Gul Baba, father of

the roses, a shrine of pilgrimage to all good Turks. You may find a good

quarter of an hour in the Church of St. Matthias, whose spire comes up

white amid the green as you turn a corner; a curious monument, that was

three centuries a-building; its interior suffused, like St. Mark's, by a

golden glow, its coloured windows original in shape, and no two pillars

or capitals alike in design, yet all contributing to a quaint unity and

harmony. And it is at Buda that the chief national buildings stand,

usually flanked by chestnut trees, and the statues in memory of the wars.

Here is the War-Office of the Territorial Army (which is distinct from

the joint Austro-Hungarian army); here are the Premier's Palace, the

Houses of Parliament, and the King's Palace of many windows set on a

breezy hill, and now being enlarged at a cost of thirty million florins.

Fortunate Francis Joseph, to command such a panorama from his bedroom

window: his hanging gardens, that slope towards the Danube, flowing with

molten sparkle, spanned by the great suspension bridge and the railway

bridges; and broken by the beautiful Margaret Island; the spires and

chimneys and cupolas of Pesth, and the mountains of Buda.

Margaret Island is the "Pearl of the Danube," a charming retreat in

spring and autumn, when the heat does not force Fashion to the mountains,

and famous for its mineral springs, hot and cold. It belongs to the

King's cousin, Prince Joseph, and is a white elephant. The cost of

gardening this beautiful island is colossal, and though the Prince has

just drained a portion which used to be a swamp, the Danube is a standing

danger. It is scarcely surprising that he cannot find a purchaser at

three million florins. One of the walls of his private garden (which

produces celebrated roses) is the remnant of an old cloister. A tramcar

runs through the island, giving one tantalising vistas of glorious

stretches of woodland. Altogether Budapest would be an ideal place for a

honeymoon but for the beauty of the women, which might make the

bridegroom dissatisfied.

But the Pesth part of Budapest is a disappointment. One expects to feel

the first breath of the East, and one gets a modern, a Western, almost an

American town, with an electric underground railway and a telephonic

newspaper which reads itself out all day long to whosoever will clap the

cups to his ears--the old town crier in terms of modern science. But it

rounds off the day, poetically enough, with music, so that when I sought

to hear the latest news, I was treated to Handel's "Hallelujah." How much

more soothing than our own "extra special," with its final crop of

horrors! Music, indeed, is ever resounding: the gipsy bands are

everywhere playing--Hungarian, not gipsy music, as Liszt imagined, for

they never play to "the white men." The splendid "Rákóczi" March, which

Berlioz introduced into his "Faust," is, however, of gipsy origin, having

been invented, says tradition, by Cinka Panna, the faithful gipsy girl of

Rákóczi II., after his defeat. There are also Betjár melodies, the songs

of the brigand cavaliers, the romantic robbers who took from the rich to

give to the poor, like our Robin Hood.

The Exhibition, which I fear will be a financial failure, is only one of

the many celebrations of the Millennium, which include the erection of

statues and an Arc de Triomphe, the opening of a canal, the construction

of two new bridges, of three or four great public buildings, the

inauguration of the splendid new Houses of Parliament--situated like our

own on the river-side,--international congresses, historical cortèges,

and the opening of five hundred new primary schools! This programme is a

sufficient guarantee that the Exhibition itself is similarly

thorough-going, that it represents every side and department of the

national life; and if much of it does not differ from other Exhibitions,

or even from Whiteley's Stores, this can only be the more gratifying to

the Hungarians, inasmuch as it proves that they have indeed come into

step with the general march of European civilisation. For my part I am

not sure that I do not prefer Arpád's Hungarians, who believed in one God

and one wife, and roved about Europe in the four-wheeled waggons they had

invented. And I am certain that in the Exhibition I preferred the

beautiful aquarium in the cool dim grotto, which has nothing to do with

Hungary, to all the splendours of the Historical Group of Buildings, to

the great model steamer, the naval and military pavilions, the very new

and very glaring native pictures, and even the wonderful models of the

town and the steamer-laden Danube. One great lack in the Exhibition is

lavatories. Even at my hotel--a place of gilded saloons--they charged two

florins (about 3_s_. 4_d_.) for a plain bath, as if in sheer surprise. In

"Old Buda" I could only get a bucket from an old woman in which to wash.

And the next day, when I repaired confidently in search of this bucket,

there was nothing but a tiny saucepan, the contents of which she poured

over my hands, watering a garden-plot at the same time. After the first

jet I moved my hands away and said that would do. "No, no," she cried:

"if you wash, you must wash properly." And I had to stand still and be

poured upon till she was satisfied.

Perhaps the most interesting exhibit is the "ethnographic village,"

designed to represent the life of the Hungarian provinces, though made

rather ridiculous by the rigidity of the waxwork figures, arranged about

the quaint and impossibly clean houses in their various occupations, but

having the air of "tableaux morts" rather than of "tableaux vivants." The

best group was _al fresco_, representing half-naked gipsy-like creatures

with coal-black hair squatting outside tents and mud-houses, the women

smoking pipes. And this exhibition of unrealities brings me on to the

most original feature of the Exhibition, which seems to have escaped all

the reporters--to wit, the exhibition of realities. For the committee

have hit on a most ingenious notion. The peasants of Hungary marry, and

they marry picturesquely. Why should this picturesqueness be wasted, or

only be reproduced artificially in comic operas? When a marriage is to be

celebrated in any village, let the scene be shifted to the capital: let

the wedding-party come up to the Exhibition. Free transit is provided on

the railway for the happy couple, the wedding-guests, and all the

stage-properties. And so they come up to Budapest,--from Toroczkó,

Szabolcs, Krassó-Szörény, and who knows what outlandish places, glad of

the opportunity of seeing the great capital,--and they gather in the

Exhibition grounds, the lads with flower-wreathed hats and streamers of

many-coloured ribbons, the lasses with gay skirts and tall black combs,

the old women with lace head-shawls, carrying bundles of house-linen and

stockings for the bride; and the sheepish pair are made one, and the

peasants dance and then go in procession to the strains of the Rákóczi

March, and are photographed with odd spectators (like myself) tacked on,

and they sit down to the wedding-dinner under the trees, and the viands

are heaped high on the white table-cloths, sun-dappled with the shadows

of the moving leaves. And then they visit themselves in waxwork, and go

into ecstacies over the stolid representations of their life and their

furniture, and they walk about the town--a sort of grown-up

school-procession--and go home to thrill the wide-eyed village with tales

of the wonderful city.

But the other instance of converting realities into spectacles is not so

commendable. In the supplementary exhibition of "Old Buda" stands a

reproduction of an Old Buda mosque, built of stone, majolica and wood, in

a mixture of Turkish and European architecture, with minaret and cupolas,

and a small kiosk in the Indian style for a sleeping fakir. Here Moslems

and Dervishes assemble to say or dance their prayers; and for a florin

you may ascend the gallery and watch them below. The mosque opened on the

holy night of Bairam, the most solemn feast of the Mohammedan year, and

quite a crowd planked down their silver to listen to the pious

worshippers. Is it not shameful? I am happy to say I did not pay for my

seat. Even in Budapest I was a _persona gratis_. 'T was certainly a

remarkable scene, its solemnity emphasized by the thunder without, that

drowned the voice of the muëddin calling to prayer, and by the lightning

and rain-torrents that sent the pretty little _al fresco_ waitresses

scudding about with their serviettes on their heads to tend the few

parties in the leafy square that dined on regardless of diluted wine or

under the protection of umbrellas. How the Turks further wetted

themselves by complex ablutions in the tank (meydiäh) in the courtyard

without, how they removed their shoes and, entering the mosque, knelt on

their carpets facing towards Mecca, and turning their backs on me, a

serried array of long-robed figures swaying and falling forward with

automatic regularity, and showing pairs of heels not always clean, while

the Imam chanted heart-breaking dirges overhead, I shall not detail, for

everybody has read of Moslem services. But I do not remember to have come

across any accurate description of a service of Dancing Dervishes such as

followed the more orthodox ceremonial.

All the mere Mussulmans having retired, the Dervishes sat around

cross-legged, forming an oval. Presently they began to say some phrase,

presumably Turkish (it sounded like _es "klabbam vivurah"_), which they

repeated and repeated and repeated with the same endless, uniform,

monotonous intonation, swaying from right to left and from left to right,

till I felt the whole universe was this phrase, and nothing else would

happen till the end of the world, and the world would never end. At last,

when I had reconciled myself to living for ever and ever with this sound

in my ears, they broke into a pleasant melody with rhyming stanzas and a

refrain of _Hazlee_. Then they started on another word with endless

iteration, and then they repeated _Allah, Allah, Allah_, swaying and

swaying till the universe began to reel. I became aware that their chief,

who was seated on a special red carpet, was counting on a rosary, and I

drew relief from the deduction that an end would come. It did, but worse

remained behind; for the Dervishes got up and formed a ring round their

chief, and began swaying right and left and backwards and forwards,

unrestingly, remorselessly, getting quicker and quicker, till there was

nothing in the world but swayings this way and that way, back and forth.

At last the movements began to slow down and to sweep over larger curves,

and suddenly they stopped altogether, only to recommence as the fanatics

started singing a joyous hymn. Alas! thought I, one half the world is a

laughing-stock to the other half, if indeed not rather a source of tears.

For now the chief, whose fine gloomy Eastern face still haunts me, was

bowing to his men, and they were responding with strange raucous cries

compounded of the roars of wild beasts and the pants of locomotives. _Hu!

Hu!_ they roared in savage unison, _Hu! Hu!_ monotonously, endlessly,

making strange motions. Hoarser and more bestial grew the frightful

roars, wilder and wilder grew the movements, the head-gear falling off,

faces growing black, the chief standing silent with his hand on his

breast, but in his pale face a tense look of ever-gathering excitement.

And then two of the Dervishes held out a curved sword, and the roars

redoubled and the chests heaved with wilder breaths; and suddenly the

Chief, throwing off his stocking-wraps, jumped on the blade with his

naked feet and balanced himself upon it, the muscles of his face rigid,

his teeth clenched. Four times he stood upon the bare sword-edge amid

this hellish howling and this mad swaying, the perspiration running down

the foreheads of the devotees, some of them foaming at the mouth. And

then they moved round in a circle to the right, howling _He! He!_ an

Armenian Dervish in a tall brown hat varying it by _Ho! Ho!_ and another

worshipper singing in a high voice.

The chief bared his breast, and twirling a heavy-hafted dagger, plunged

it into his side. When this had been repeated three or four times,

pandemonium ceased. The Holy Man, with an air of supreme exhaustion and

supreme ecstasy, reclad himself in his white mantle, and the faithful

ones wiped their brows, and re-squatting on the ground exultantly

vociferated _Allah_ about a hundred times, nodding their heads, and

finally changing their cry into _Bou! Bou!_ After a little singing and a

shouting of _Din! Din!_ they pressed their foreheads to the ground with a

shout of _Bou!_ and suddenly rose and decamped. Other nights other

services, and the hysterical worship sometimes embraces a sort of

serpentine skirt-dancing with frenzied twirling. There was no blood from

the chief's wounds, but the performance does not seem to me to be

jugglery. It seems rather akin to hypnotism. The wild cries and gyrations

induce a state of anesthesia, just as by the excitement of battle the

soldier is so wrought up that he does not feel his wounds. Even in a sham

fight a soldier told me he got to such a pitch that he could have done or

suffered anything. As for the blood not running from the wounds, I

conjecture that the places had become insensitive by frequent stabbing in

the same spot. And this is the miracle that testifies to the saintliness

of the Dervish and to the truth of his doctrines! I suspect that much of

"the wisdom of the East" is of this character: ancient discoveries of the

shady side of human psychology, the grotesque aberrations, trances,

hypnotic impressionability, double personalities, ghosts, second-sight,

what not. And these being misunderstood have always been supposed to

trench on the divine. For what is not normal is not human, and what is

not human is superhuman. So runs the simple logic. But hysteria can never

be a foundation for a creed, and a true religion must always appeal to

the common central facts of human experience.

There was another Exhibition going on, as it always goes on, in the town,

for the People's Park has very little verdure and consists almost

entirely of side-shows and open-air restaurants. I saw swings and

merry-go-rounds, a circus, and a marionette theatre, and heard Punch and

Judy discussing their domestic differences in Hungarian, and Toby barking

in the same uncouth tongue. The joy with which the public greeted each

crack on the head administered by Herr Punch's stick showed me how

hopeless it was to write literary plays. For the primitive emotions will

always be the most captivating. A fight must ever beat the most subtle

psychology; and indeed those writers for whom the drama is the art of

manufacturing excitement and suspense must find it difficult to compete

with a lottery drawing, a prize-fight, or a horse-race, where the issue

is known not even to the organiser of the excitement. And this

consideration will show why some books are very successful, the art of

which is very little. Nothing is harder in real life than to put your

back against the wall on a dark staircase and keep three armed men at bay

with your whirling sword. But nothing is easier than for the romantic

writer to dip his pen in ink and say that his hero did that. And nothing

is more stimulating and exciting for the reader than to imagine the hero

doing it; and in his gratitude to the giver of all this beautiful

breathlessness he is likely, unless he is an analytical person, to

mistake a cheap effect for precious art. But the bulk of humanity must

always remain at the Punch-and-Judy stage of art. If only the critics

would outgrow it! The clowns in the circus who came on with red noses

were a further proof of the sempiternal simplicity of our race; and I

could have wished for the heart of that urchin whom I saw trying to peer

in under the canvas, and whom, with a reminiscence of the young

Gradgrinds, I was about to pay for, when he suddenly produced a florin

and many coppers and went in like a man. Sitting in the front row, I had

a curious presentiment that the daring bare-backed rider would be thrown

at my feet; and sure enough he was, and, as I picked him up, I saw by the

perspiration what toil his graceful feats concealed. Poor cavalier! I am

sure his pride was more hurt than his person, and he excelled himself in

galloping round poised on one toe. When he was recalled after his exit,

he tumbled his thanks, giving us complex somersaults in lieu of bows. I

sometimes fancy he was a holier person than the Chief of the Dancing

Dervishes.

CHICAGO

The function and value of literature are curiously illustrated by the

passing away of the Great White Elephant. The criticisms by spectators of

the World's Fair have not been so comprehensive as the Fair itself, and I

feel that I ought to supplement them by the impressions it made upon one

who did not see it. For, despite the assurance of the official programme,

that I delivered an address in the Parliament of Religions, I was in

England, so far as I know, the whole time. The first impression the Fair

made upon me was one of sublimity--but of what Sir William Hamilton calls

"the material sublime," scarcely at all of "the moral sublime," which was

supposed to be its _raison d'être_. I was, of course, aware that great

spiritual facts underlay the physical grandeurs; but spiritual emotion is

difficult to get at a distance. One requires the actual objects to

impinge on the soul, the architectural glories and industrial splendours

to touch through bodily vision. One realises it so vaguely, and fails to

get the half-aesthetic, half-religious, uplifting that concrete

visualisation should supply. It is, perhaps, a pity that Whitman did not

live to see the spectacle, he whose inspiration came so often from

synthesis, from a vision of the ALL. The cosmopolitan cataloguer, the man

who made inventories almost epical, is the one man to whom the Fair would

have been a magnificent inspiration. Judging from the Fair, Whitman would

seem justified in claiming to be the voice of America. The Fair was like

him both in its moral broadness and its material all-inclusiveness. In

his absence no poet has risen "to the height of this great argument," so

that now the insubstantial pageant is faded, now that "the cloud-capp'd

towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples," have dissolved, "like

the baseless fabric of a vision," they have left not a rack of real

literature behind. And to what but literature can one look for a

permanent conservator of the eternal lesson of an ephemeral exhibition?

Truly, as the Latin poet said, literature is more durable than monuments

and dynasties. Except as an object-lesson in the unity and federation of

mankind, the Fair had no valuable _raison d'être_, and, unfortunately,

the school-term was short and the number of pupils comparatively limited.

America is a long way from everywhere, even from itself, and the moral

heat dissipates in crossing the ocean to the Old World. The Congress of

Religions in whose voluminous report the Fair has still a chance of

surviving itself, was the most patently spiritual side of the Exposition,

and was, undoubtedly, a most valuable index of the progress of human

catholicism. That the sects are as narrow as they are numerous, is still

largely true, and half the world is still ignorant of how the other half

prays, though by a happy accident of birth all the world inherits the one

true religion. The greatest force in the universe is the "_vis

inertiae_," and the forces already at work must "dree their weird." To

those who are outside all the sects without even circumscribing them, the

World's Fair must bring home at once the greatness and vanity of man's

life--man who lives like the angels and dies like the brutes--the mortal

paradox that has puzzled all thinkers from the Psalmist to Pascal. For

the unbeliever this must ever be the ugly reverse of all glories that are

merely material, though the sensuous optimist need not allow the skeleton

at the feast to spoil his appetite.

The last impression made by the World's Fair upon me was one of

sadness--sadness at not having seen it.

EDINBURGH

Till I went to Edinburgh I did not know what "The Evergreen" was.

Newspaper criticisms had given me vague misrepresentations of a Scottish

"Yellow Book" calling itself a "Northern Seasonal." But even had I seen a

copy myself I doubt if I should have understood it without going to

Edinburgh and even had I gone to Edinburgh I should still have been in

twilight had? I not met Patrick Geddes, Professor of Botany at the

University of Dundee. For Patrick Geddes is the key to the Northern

position in life and letters. "The Evergreen" was not established as an

antidote to the "Yellow Book," though it might well seem a colour

counter-symbol--the green of spring set against the yellow of decadent

leaves. It is, indeed, an antidote but undesigned; else had not yellow

figured so profusely upon the cover. "The Evergreen" of to-day professes

to be inspired by "The Evergreen" which Allan Ramsay published in 1724,

to stimulate a return to local and national tradition and living nature.

Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, who publish it and other books--on a new

system of giving the author all the profits, as certified by a chartered

accountant--inherit Ramsay's old home. That is to say, they are located

in a sort of "University Settlement," known as Ramsay Garden, a charming

collection of flats, overlooking from its eastled hill the picturesque

city, and built by the many-sided Professor of Botany, and they aspire

also to follow in "the gentle shepherd's" footsteps as workers and

writers, publishers and builders. In fact, their aim is synthesis,

construction, after our long epoch of analysis, destruction. They would

organise life as a whole, expressing themselves through educational and

civic activities, through art and architecture, and make of Edinburgh the

"Cité du Bon Accord" dreamed of by Elisée Reclus. They feel acutely the

"need of fresh readings in life, of fresh groupings in science, both now

mainly from the humanist's side, as lately from the naturalist's side."

In this University Settlement the publishing and writing department is to

represent the scriptorium of the ancient monasteries. Of the local and

national traditions this new Scottish school is particularly concerned to

foster the so-called "Celtic renascence," and--what is more interesting

to outsiders--the revival and development of the old Continental

sympathies of Scotland. The ancient league with France has deeply marked

Scotch history, and even moulded Scotch architecture. As Disraeli said in

his inaugural address on his institution as Lord Rector of the University

of Glasgow, "it is not in Scotland that the name of France will ever be

mentioned without affection." So, among the endless projects of the

effervescent Professor, is one for reviving the Scotch college in

Paris--the original building happening still to survive--and for making

it a centre for Scottish students and Scottish culture in the gay city.

Thus, while the men of "The Evergreen" would renew local feeling and

local colour, they "would also express the larger view of Edinburgh as

not only a National and Imperial but a European city--the larger view of

Scotland, again as in recent, in mediaeval, most of all in ancient times,

one of the European Powers of Culture--as of course far smaller countries

like Norway are to-day." An aspiration with which all intelligent men

must sympathise. The quest at once of local colour and cosmopolitanism is

not at all self-contradictory. The truest cosmopolitanism goes with the

intensest local colour, for otherwise you contribute nothing to the human

treasury and make mankind one vast featureless monotony. Harmonious

diversity is the true cosmopolitan concept, and who will not applaud this

desire of Edinburgh to range itself again amongst the capitals of

culture? Why should it take its tone from London? That centripetal force

which draws villages to towns and towns to capitals everywhere tends to

concentrate in one city a country's culture, and to brand as provincial

that which is not of the centre. But the centre is corrosive of

originality, and if now and then a great man does abide therein, it is

because he has the gift of solitude amid crowds, and is not obnoxious to

the contagion of the common thought. The Scotch School, though its effort

to emancipate itself from the intellectual thraldom of London is to be

commended, does not escape the dangers that lie in wait for all schools,

which upset one convention by another. Still, a school of thought which

is also a school of action has in itself the germs of perpetual

self-recuperation.

Yes, there can be little danger of sinking into barren formulae, into

glib aesthetic prattle about Renascence, in a movement of which one

expression is the purification of those plaguy, if picturesque, Closes,

which are the foul blot upon the beautiful Athens of the North. Those

sunless courts, entered by needles' eyes of apertures, congested with

hellish, heaven-scaling barracks, reeking with refuse and evil odours,

inhabited promiscuously by poverty and prostitution, worse than the worst

slums of London itself--how could they have been left so long to pollute

the fairest and well-nigh the wealthiest city in the kingdom? "Do you

wonder Edinburgh is renowned for its medical schools?" asked the

Professor grimly, as he darted in and out among those foul alleys,

explaining how he was demolishing this and reconstructing that--at once a

Destroying Angel and a Redeemer. Veritable ghettoes they seemed, these

blind alleys of gigantic habitations, branching out from the High Street,

hidden away from the superficial passer-by faring to Holyrood. They were

the pioneers of the trans-Atlantic sky-builders, were those old burghers,

who, shut in about their castled hill by the two lochs, one of which is

now the enchanting Princes Street, were fain to build heavenwards as

population grew. It was a stormy morning when the mercurial Professor of

Botany, recking naught of the rain that saturated his brown cloak, itself

reluctantly donned, led me hither and thither, through the highways and

byways of old Edinburgh. Everywhere a litter of building operations, and

we trod gingerly many a decadent staircase. Sometimes a double row of

houses had already been knocked away, revealing a Close within a Close,

eyeless house behind blind alley, and even so the diameter of the court

still but a few yards. What human ant-heaps, what histories, farces,

tragedies played out in airless tenebrosity!

The native writers seem to have strangely neglected the artistic wealth

of all this poverty: pathos and humour reside, then, only in villages!

Thrums and Drum-tochty and Galloway exhaust the human tragi-comedy. Ah!

my friends, go to the ant-hill and be wise! The Professor of Botany

(seeming now rather of entomology) explained the principle upon which he

was destroying and rebuilding. One had to be cautious. He pointed out the

head of a boy carved over one of the archways, the one survivor of a

fatal subsidence many years ago, when the ground floor of one of the

gigantic houses was converted into a shop, with plate-glass windows in

lieu of the solid stonework. "Heave awa'!" cried a piping voice amid the

_débris_: "I'm no dead yet."

The Professor's own destruction was conservative in character: it was his

aim to preserve the ancient note in the architecture, and to make a clean

Old Edinburgh of a dirty. Air and light were to be no longer excluded;

outside every house, as flats or storeys are called, a balcony was to

run, giving on sky and open ground. Eminent personages like Lord

Rosebery, ancestrally connected with ancient demesnes, long perverted

into pigsties, had been induced to repurchase them, thus restoring an

archaic flavour of aristocratic prestige to these despised quarters. The

moral effect of grappling with an evil that had seemed so hopeless could

not fail to be inspiring; and, as we plodded through the pouring:

streets, "I will remove this, I will reconstruct that," cried the

enthusiastic Professor, till I almost felt I was walking with the Emperor

of Edinburgh. But whence come the sinews of war? Evidently no professor's

privy purse would suffice. I gathered that the apostle of the sanitary

picturesque had inspired sundry local capitalists with his own patriotic

enthusiasm. What a miracle, this trust in a man over-brimming with ideas,

the brilliant biological theoriser of "The Evolution of Sex" in the

Contemporary Science Series, the patron of fantastic artists like John

Duncan! Obviously it is his architectural faculty that has saved him.

There stand the houses he has built--visible, tangible, delectable;

concrete proofs that he is no mere visionary.

And yet we may be sure the more frigid society of Edina still looks

askance on this dreamer in stone and fresco; for after all Edinburgh, as

Professor Blaekie said, is an "East-windy, west-endy city." Cold and

stately, it sits on its height with something of the austere mournfulness

of a ruined capital. But we did not concern ourselves about the legal and

scholastic quarters, the Professor and I. We penetrated into inhabited

interiors in the Closes, meeting strange female ruins on staircases, or

bonny housewives in bed-sitting-rooms, in one of which a sick husband lay

apologetically abed. And when even the Professor was forced at last to

take refuge from the driving rain, it was in John Knox's house that we

ensconced ourselves--the grim, unlovely house of the great Calvinist, the

doorway of which fanatically baptised me in a positive waterfall, and in

whose dark rooms, as the buxom care-taker declared in explaining the

presence of an empty cage, no bird could live. It is not only in its

Closes, methought, that Scotland needs regen eration. Many a spiritual

blind-alley has still to receive sunshine and air, "sweetness and light."

So let us welcome "The Evergreen" and the planters thereof, stunted and

mean though its growth be as yet; for not only in Scotland may they bring

refreshment, but in that larger world where analysis and criticism have

ended in degeneration and despair.

FIESOLE AND FLORENCE

At Fiesole I just missed a sensation. Two friends of mine were climbing

at midnight the steep hill to the village, when from beneath a dark arch

there dashed down towards them two breathless _carabinieri_, their cloaks

flapping in the moonlight like the wings of the demon-bats of pantomime.

"Is it your way that the murdered man lies?" they panted. "Murdered man!"

At once a hundred shadowy reminiscences stirred in my friends' minds:

Prosper Mérimée's novels, stories of vendettas, plots of plays, _morceaux

d'opéras_, even of comic operas; and it was with a feeling in which the

latter element predominated that they answered that they had come across

no corpse. The police-officers thanked them and hurried off, so my

friends soon understood, as far as possible from the scene of the event;

for, passing through the arch, the _Inglesi_ came upon a track of blood,

black and clotted in the moonlight. But it did not seem real to

them--they still had a consciousness of comic opera, a consciousness

which was intensified rather than lessened when they emerged upon a group

of excited villagers discussing the crime, and learnt its cause. Two

rival bands, one from a neighbouring village, had been performing at a

local _concerto_, and the two rival trumpeters had continued to blow

their own trumpets after business hours. "Fancy blowing with that little

mouth!" said one. "I'm glad I haven't your maw (_boccone_)!" retorted the

other.

From words it came to knives, and ere you could say Jacopo Robinson a

trumpeter lay weltering in his blood, or rather in his gore, and the

murderer was flying into the arms of the police, who incontinently turned

and fled the other way. When my friends passed by the house of the

victim, the midnight air was ringing with the horrible curses of his

bereaved sister, whose spasmodic face was visible at a window. But the

cold-blooded artistic English felt no answering throb of sympathy--it was

still a scene in a play to them, still a _coup de théâtre_--they had lost

the primary human instincts, corrupted by a long course of melodrama and

comic opera. To-day I myself saw a carnival procession in the village

piazza--a veritable survival of the Middle Ages; a triumphal car wreathed

in flowers, driven by masquerading mummers and surrounded by Pierrots and

peasant buffoons, a thoroughly naïve and primitive bit of religion. But

it needed a perceptible effort to shake off the sense of the operatic, to

accept the thing as genuine. Ruskin contended (in that _olla podrida_

called "Modern Painters") that the Swiss peasants do not really dance and

sing happily in the market-place; and hence he argued--comically

enough--that the money spent on the stage reproduction of their happiness

should be spent in really promoting their happiness. With my Italian

peasants I feel the opposite: that such excellent picturesque effects

should not be wasted on mere reality, but should be turned to real use

upon the stage. So, too, it is difficult to take a roadside beggar

seriously; he seems to ask, not for alms, but for a frame. Happy the

unlettered and the inartistic, to whom even the picturesque person is a

person, who can think of olive oil when he sees the olive-trees weaving

their graceful patterns above the stone walls, and can watch the sun set

in lurid splendour behind the purple mountains with never a thought of

Turner or Childe Harold!

For modern civilised beings, in incessant relations with the reflections

of life through literature and art, it is difficult to receive any

impressions which do not re-reflect what lies in the mirror of art. And

here is an amusing side-issue. We are presented in plays and books, with

numerous situations in which the ignorance of one of the parties is a

necessary factor in the particular dramatic situation which it is sought

to evolve. But as this person, _ex hypothesi_, belongs to the class of

society which is familiar with this particular plot _ad nauseam_, is it

possible that he or she should go on betraying the same ignorance on

which the plot originally was based? Even Marguerite has seen "Faust"

nowadays!

This suggests an objection to old plots quite apart from their oldness,

for that which started by being probable becomes improbable by age. Even

if it were ever possible for a man to be jealous of a woman because he

saw her kissing a man whom, after long and weary years of superfluous

separation, he discovered to be her brother, it should surely be

impossible to-day. If I saw any man kissing my _fiancée_ I should know at

once it was my future brother-in-law--or at any rate I should

inquire--which the old hero never seemed to do. And yet I will wager that

in the course of this year at least a dozen novels and plays will be

built up upon this theme. It is, by the way, a noticeable characteristic

of people in plays never to have read nor to be interested in any but the

petty dramatic matter which is interesting them--and let us hope the

audience--at the moment. It may be replied that the economy of the stage

demands that everything that is not strictly essential should be

eliminated; but yet it ought to be possible, by a few words, to give the

idea that the figures upon the boards are doing more than moving to the

strings of the playwright. Just so the painter of the gulf should suggest

the ocean beyond; the painter of the landscape, the infinity of space and

atmosphere in which it is enisled. What the _plein air_ school contended

for in painting is no less requisite in literature.

This consideration seems to account for the uneasy sense of unreality

which we feel in the modern machine-made Sardou play, in which the

characters have the air of existing entirely to themselves, and for the

sake of the particular play, and do not give that large sense of being

part of the civilised humanity we know that reads and thinks. The men

make love or profess hate, repudiate their wives, or cut off their sons

with shillings, all with the air of its happening for the first time, and

wholly devoid of that sense of the ridiculous which they could not help

feeling if they had been accustomed themselves to read novels and sit in

stalls.

It is, in fact, impossible for us moderns, educated in a long literary

tradition, to live our lives as naturally and naïvely as the unlettered

of to-day, or the people of the preliterary geological epoch. This is

brought out "ostensively," as Bacon would say, in "Don Quixote," or in

the Russian novel "A Simple Story"--apparently so called because it is so

complex--in which Gontcharov's hero lives in what Alice might call

"behind the looking-glass" of literature. He is a country boy who comes

up to St. Petersburg, and after a course of Russian novels is transformed

into a series of imitations of their heroes. He does nothing, feels

nothing, thinks nothing except after the pattern of these creatures of

the quill.

Well! we are all like that, more or less. Though we may not be as

chivalrously inspired as the Knight of La Mancha, nor run to the extremes

of the simple Russian, we are all to some extent remoulded in imitation

of the Booklanders, and this is the truth in the "decadent" paradox that

nature copies art. There is a drop of ink in the blood of the most

natural of us; we are all hybrids, crossed with literature, and

Shakespeare is as much the author of our being as either of our parents.

The effect of the stage in regulating the poses and costumes of

susceptible souls has not escaped notice; but the effect of novels and

poetry is more insidious. Who ever shuddered with bitter alliterative

kisses before Swinburne, and who has failed to do so since? What poor

little cockney clerk in his first spasms of poetry but has felt, sitting

by his girl in the music hall, that if she walked over the grave in which

he was planted, his "dust would hear her and beat, had he lain for a

century dead" (though how Maud could survive her lover for a century,

Tennyson failed to explain)? _Per contra_, the ingenuous spinster taking

her notions of love from Maupassant's "Bel-Ami," or Gabriele d'Annunzio's

"Trionfo della Morte," becomes a man-hater. Yes, I fear that the artistic

treatment of life has a good deal to answer for. People do not yet

understand that the mirror of art does not reflect life unrefracted. The

great eternal theme of art is love-making; but even artists have to give

up some time to art-making.

But to wind up anent our murderer. He is still at large. The police have

given up the chase in despair. But he has never left the village, and we

villagers all wink at one another as we discuss his whereabouts; and when

we meet him driving his cart or come across him cutting wood in the

forest and he genially gives us _Buon' giorno_ we salute him with

answering politeness. Only in the village band there is a temporary

trumpeter, for even the police might hear of him if he performed in

public loudly enough. But Italian justice, though it does really savour

of comic opera, is not so farcical as it appears on the surface. It is an

unwritten law that the police shall not _pigliare_ him till the sessions

are nigh. He is on parole, so to speak, to come up when called upon; if

he were really to take flight, he would be declared an outlaw, and the

only reason the police cannot find him is that they know where he is. How

sensible! Why board and lodge him gratis for weeks? He has outraged the

community: shall the community reward him with free meals? Even when he

is caught he will be treated with the same economy. Capital punishment

there is none in Italy. Why waste a citizen and a tax-payer? Especially

when one has already been destroyed! No, he will be sentenced to a term

of imprisonment. But he will not serve it. He will escape, or it will be

commuted. And while he is in gaol he will have a good time. He will smoke

and play cards, or, leaning out of his dungeon casement, hold a levee of

his friends. Recently the soldiers at Bergamo mutinied because they were

supplied with worse bread than the denizens of the gaol. I trust the

ringleaders were sent to prison so as to remedy this dietary injustice.