Please do _me_ the justice to remark that I have been in Italy for

several paragraphs without once referring to the Old Masters. But the

fact is that I have not been much at the Masked Balls. Does this saying

seem cryptic? All it means is that the confusion into which our

scientific century has thrown us is worse confounded than usual in the

universe of pictures; that the Galleries appear to be made up of pictures

masquerading under wrong names. Time was when one might go about

comfortably with a Baedeker and a stock of admiration and distribute it

as per instructions. But these good old times are over. The Old Masters

of yesterday are the young apprentices of to-day. It is pitiable to think

how many well-meaning enthusiasts have fallen victims to the careless or

crafty curator. Sometimes it scarcely needs a connoisseur to suspect the

good faith of catalogues. I, myself, a mere babe and suckling, came to

the conclusion, after a visit to the Velasquez Exhibition in London, that

Velasquez must have been very versatile. It is too bad that artists

should be hanged for crimes they never committed. 'T is to be hoped their

ghosts carefully avoid the Galleries. But beshrew your paintings! My eyes

make pictures--not like Coleridge's when they're shut, but when they 're

open. Who would not rather lie with me in the _podere_ in the shade of

the cypress trees, under the blue, blue sky, and behold through a tangle

of olive-boughs the marvellous Dome of Florence, as satisfying as the

sea, or under a starry heaven the loveliest of cities glittering like a

rival firmament with answering constellations? And yet I recant. For if

there is one piece of art which is better than nature, 't is Botticelli's

so-called "Spring," which, long misprised and now worm-riddled, adds the

last magic to the wonderful flower-city. To her that hath shall be given.

GLASGOW

"And what do you think of Glasgow?" said the pretty lady interviewer--I

have the right to say she was pretty because she said in print that I

wasn't. I replied that of course Glasgow wasn't pretty but--and here

would have followed an amiable dissertation upon the municipal

superiority of Glasgow. "But," hastily interrupted the lady interviewer,

"have you seen the fine vista of St. Vincent Street, the Great Western

Road, the finest thoroughfare in Europe, the charming residential

districts of Pollokshields West and Dowanhill, the wide view from the

South Side Park or picturesque Camphill?" I tried to edge in an abashed

"No," for a monosyllable is the most one can hope to secure of the

conversation in an interview; but the pretty lady interviewer went on

reproachfully: "Have you seen that stately hill of the dead, the

Necropolis, from Cathedral Square? It is itself a quaint and beautiful

medley of architecture past and present. Have you seen beautiful

Kelvingrove, through which flows the classic Kelvin? In many world-famous

cities have I been and yet seen nothing more beautiful than the view on

one side of Partick Bridge." I apologised to Glasgow, inwardly

confounding the eminent Scotch _littérateur_ who had assured me that

Glasgow was the most loathsome den north of Tweed, almost the only such

den,--his malison upon Glasgow! But although I feel personally nothing

but gratitude to Glasgow and its noisy University students, I cannot

honestly award it the apple for beauty. After all it is the centre of the

town that one naturally gravitates to, and no charm of suburbs can remove

the general impression of commercial dinginess.

No, Glasgow must be content with its wealth and its public spirit. If it

does not stir the imagination like Edinburgh, it satisfies the brain and

the heart, for it is grappling manfully with many social problems, with

the opening of parks and hospitals, and especially with the housing of

the poor, and is developing an artistic conscience to boot. It owns its

gas and water, and I had the felicity of meeting the Lord Provost at the

very moment when, his glittering insignia heaving with emotion on his

joyous breast, he had to announce to the Town Council that the

fiercely-canvassed step of taking over the tramways had resulted in a

balance to the good. When the Lord Provost had returned to his chair, I

was shown the Councillors themselves at their mahogany tables, in their

beautiful Council-chamber, and I made notes--not of the debate, as the

lynx-eyed reporter, who counted the number of times I sucked my pencil,

imagined--but of the improved appearance of George Square under snow.

Seen through the windows the square stretched away pure and beautiful the

gloomy statues blanched and Prince Albert's horse gleaming proudly with

white trappings. The Municipal Buildings deserve all the praise they have

received. The special staircase, which is used only on state occasions,

presents from point to point a marvellously proportioned medley of arches

and pillars and arcades, with a dominant Corinthian note. It is really

"frozen music." And when adorned with tropical plants and lit up with

electric lights and pretty faces, it must indeed be a superb sight. Very

imposing, too, is the vast Banqueting Hall, from whose platform, to test

the acoustic effect of the rows of wires stretched six inches apart under

the ceiling to break the sound, I addressed vacancy. The panels of this

hall still await their artists. 'T is a rare opportunity for Glasgow to

emulate the Parisian Pantheon; and, indeed, there is so much art-work to

be done in Glasgow that one begins to understand why it is threatening to

become the capital of British Art. The best road in Scotland is no longer

that which leads to England. It was curious for a humble author to walk

these stately halls, convoyed by courteous officers in red swallow-tails,

and to rub shoulders with civic millionaires. An awesome air of wealth

hung over the men and the place, a crushing suggestion of vast

enterprises, of engineering and railway building and the running of

steamers, a subtle aroma of colossal fortunes, wrested from the world by

the leverage of an initial half-crown. I have often gone to places with

only half a crown in my pocket, but it never seemed to lead to anything.

So I surveyed these men with blended reverence and bewilderment,

wondering why they bothered themselves to make all that money, and

whether they ever suspected they were but tools in the hands of destiny,

by whose marvellous alchemy the self-centred ambition of the individual

is transmuted to the service of the world. The genial Bailie Simons, who

was my host--fancy living in daily contact with a Bailie!--informed me

that the grave city fathers are sadly degenerating. Thirty years ago they

did not smoke in public: now there is a smoking-room in the sacred

building itself; and at least one of them has been seen to leave it in a

white hat.

Like the king's daughter, Glasgow is all glorious within, and its inner

artistic aspirations make up for and are perhaps inversely inspired by

its outer unloveliness. The world must not judge Glasgow's taste by the

recent Puritanic rumpus over the nude. The worthy Bailies and the Chief

Constable who drew the line at Leighton and Solomon have overlooked the

interesting nudities in their own Galleries. The affinity of the Scotch

and the French, which has often been noted in history, and which accounts

for their swamping the English in literature, has made Style the

watchword of the Glasgow School of Art. Whistler's "Carlyle" hangs in the

Corporation Galleries, and it was the stylist, Lavery, who secured the

tedious commission to commemorate Her Majesty's opening of the Glasgow

Exhibition by the usual plethora of portraits. It would have made a more

interesting picture had Mr. Lavery perpetuated the fact--so pregnant a

contribution to the philosophy of Exhibitions--that a profit of £10,000

was derived from the switchbacks. The picture would then have made a nice

supplement to Mr. Lavery's famous studies of "Croquet" and "Tennis." The

very slabs of the Corporation staircase are infected with Impressionism,

and their natural veinings body forth, here a charge of cavalry, there a

march of infantry, and yonder a portrait of Sir William Vernon Harcourt

with a prophetic coronet. The stones of Glasgow await their Ruskin. The

Exhibition which I saw at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts was far more

interesting than the last Academy, though it contained some of the same

pictures. I was able to tell the Scotch artists an anecdote which no one

had heard before, for the simple reason that it was true, and that it

happened to me. It was in Perth that, puzzling over a grimy statue, I was

accosted by a bare-footed newsboy with his raucous cry of "Hair-r-ald,

Glasgow Hair-r-ald!"

"I'll take one," quoth I, "if you'll tell me whose statue that is."

"'T is Rabbie Burns" replied he, on the nail.

"Thank you," said I, taking the paper. "And what did he do, to deserve

the statue?"

My newsboy scratched his head. Perceiving his embarrassment, a party of

his friends down the street called out in stentorian chorus: "Ay, 't is

Babbie Burns."

"But what did he do to deserve the statue?" I thundered back. They hung

their heads. At last my newsboy recovered himself; his face brightened.

"Well?" said I again, "what did he do to deserve this statue?"

"He _deed_!" answered the intelligent little man.

Another newsboy, whom I asked if he had ever read Sir Walter Scott,

replied, "No, he is _ower dreich_ (over dry)."

Talking of statues, I see that Paisley is going to erect a full-sized

figure of the late Thomas Coats, with a bronze high hat under his bronze

arm. The history of the Corporation Art Galleries is curious. The nucleus

of the collection is the bequest of a coach-builder, who seems to have

had a Glaswegian Renaissance all to himself, for it was years after his

death before his legacy was routed out from the lumber-rooms to which it

had been consigned, and ere its many genuine treasures were catalogued by

Mr. James Paton, the learned curator, whose magic-lantern exhibit the

other day of the coach-building connoisseur's face was the first display

of his lineaments to an ungrateful posterity. The Galleries now claim to

contain so many Old Masters that no connoisseur is complete without a

knowledge of them. Except Velasquez, there is scarcely one of the great

painters who is not represented here, even including Giorgione, of whom,

parodying Hegel's remark about the one disciple who understood him ("and

he doesn't understand me!"), it may be said that there are only two

genuine specimens of him in the world, and that both of these are by his

pupils. What Mary Logan would say to these Rembrandts and Rubenses I know

not; but there is much of indisputable value in this collection, to say

nothing of Flaxman's masterpiece--the statue of Pitt,--or the recent

accessions, such as the Whistler, or David Murray's "Fir Faggots," or the

bust of Victor Hugo by Rodin.

Pictorially the hill of the dead was the most interesting part of Glasgow

I saw--a scene which, especially in its simple severe Protestant draping

of snow, might well tempt the artist. At its summit John Knox looks down

upon the Cathedral, whose altars and images were broken during the

Reformation, and whose new stained windows (made in Germany) testify by

their preference for Old Testament subjects to the latent Puritanism of

Caledonia. Especially interesting is the crypt, with its sepulchral

church, whose subterranean service is recorded in "Rob Roy." One of the

pillars of the crypt proper is called the Rob Roy pillar, for behind it

the great outlaw is supposed to have hidden. Near it is the shrine of St.

Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow, who has presumably risen in the hierarchy

now that Glasgow has been made a county. Facing the shrine is a window

decorated with a portrait of Edward Irving, clothed as St. John the

Baptist. The cicerone said it was greatly admired because the eyes

followed you about wherever you walked. This is not the first time I have

been asked to admire as supreme art what is really one of the commonest

of optical delusions. After the Cathedral had closed, it had to be

reopened because I had lost a glove within. After a careful search the

glove was found in the gloomy crypt, pointing its finger at this

miraculous picture, unable to tear itself away. But perhaps the most

characteristic thing I came across in Glasgow was an inscription at the

end of the bridge leading to the picturesque cemetery. "The adjoining

bridge was erected by the Merchants' House of Glasgow to afford a proper

entrance to their new cemetery, combining convenient access to the

grounds with suitable decoration to the venerable Cathedral and

surrounding scenery, to unite the tombs of many generations who have gone

before with the resting-places destined for generations yet unborn, where

the ashes of all shall repose until the rising of the just, when that

which is born a natural body shall be raised a spiritual body, when this

corruptible must put on incorruption, when this mortal must put on

immortality, when death is swallowed up in victory." There you have

Glasgow! An auctioneer's advertisement blent with an edifying sermon, a

happy combination of commerce and Christianity, making the best of this

world and the next.

I left Glasgow in a choking yellow fog. Five minutes from the city the

train steamed into bright sunshine, which continued till five minutes

from London, where a sisterly yellow fog was waiting. As Tennyson sings,

I had gone "from the night to the night."

HASLEMERE

I am up a "Bô tree." Every schoolboy knows (that is, of course, every

Buddhistic schoolboy) that when the Buddha made "the great renunciation,"

he attained Nirvana by sitting under a "Bô tree." My "Bô tree" is a great

oak in the heart of the woods, mounted by a dizzy spiral staircase, at

the summit of which you enter Nirvana by means of the "House on the

Garden," a glass-house floored with boards and furnished with rustic

chairs, a lounge and a writing-table; and here, amid the tree-tops, I

write to the music of thrush and blackbird, with restful glances at the

sailing clouds or at the sunny weald, that circles for miles around and

ends to the south in the "downs" that hide the English Channel. Perhaps

it is because my landscape takes in Tennyson's happy Haslemere home that

my thought runs so much on him to-day, and then runs back to a cold stone

staircase up which I toiled in pitchy blackness to see a great French

poet. Taine, who preferred Alfred de Musset to Tennyson, made of a

contrast between the two men the most telling pages in his history of our

literature, setting in graphic antithesis the dust and flare and fever of

the Boulevards against the

English home, gray twilight poured

On dewy pastures, dewy trees,

Softer than sleep,--all things in order stored,

A haunt of ancient peace,

where the English Laureate brooded over his chiselled verses. How much

more piquant a contrast might be drawn between the jealously-guarded

castle in which Tennyson entrenched himself and the accessible garret in

the Rue St. Jacques where Verlaine held his court in absolute bonhomie

and déshabille.

But, alas! there is no Nirvana on my "Bô Tree"--at least, not to-day. The

blatancy of a brass band bursts forth on the breeze. A popular waltz

silences the cuckoos. I climb down my spiral staircase and hasten across

the wood to discover what these strange sounds portend. In front of the

creeper-clad house I come upon a scene of comic opera. This is the

village fête day, and here are the festive villagers come to pay

allegiance to the lord of the manor. The majority are Foresters,

and wear green sashes, and carry banners like to the pictorial

pocket-handkerchiefs of Brobdingnag. The music gives over, and my host

addresses them from between the roses of his porch, and they laugh at his

genial jokes with the unanimity of the footlights. There are tiny tots

and old women in the background, and yonder is the Village Beauty--a ripe

maid, i' faith, and a comely. There are other girls in her train; but,

oddsbobs! what have they done with their tights? and why do they delay to

announce her approaching marriage in merry melodic chorus? But I conceal

my surprise and, as the cynical Man from Town (gadzooks!), ogle the Pride

of the Village, to the disgust of her rural swain, who has started

blowing the trombone and dare not desist, though his cheeks get redder

and more explosive each instant. In the next Act we all go down to the

annual dinner, in a long rose-wreathed tent, and the Parson says grace

and the Parson's Clerk "Amen," and the Squire (in corduroy knickerbockers

and leggings) bestows his benediction on all the village, while without,

the happy peasants project sticks at cocoanuts or try their strength with

mallets, and all is virtuous and feudal. In the third Act we are in the

Vicarage Garden--a beautiful set, with real rhododendrons. Sir Roger de

Coverley takes tea i'fackins with the Parson, and the Stalwart Farmer

passes the sugar to the Man from Town, who is gazing out wistfully

towards the Village Green, where the Village Beauty foots it featly with

the Village Idiot. The last Act passes in the Drawing-Boom of "Bô tree"

House, where the Archdeacon's Daughter touches her tinkling guitar and

warbles a plaintive ballad:--

O give my love to Nancy,

The girl that I adore--

Tell her that she'll never see

Her soldier any more--

Tell her I died in battle

Fighting with the black,

Every inch a soldier,

Beneath the Union Jack.

Dear naïve old song, fitting climax of a feudal day, sweet with the

freshness of those simple times, when art for art's sake was a shibboleth

uninvented, and every other man was not diabolically clever! How many

mothers and sisters wept over thy primitive pathos, as they knitted the

Berlin wool-work! how many masculine hearts throbbed more manfully at the

appeal of thy crude patriotism! To-day we analyse ruthlessly thy metre,

proclaiming it the butterwoman's rank to market, and thy sentiment, which

we dub pinchbeck, and we remember that the Union Jack is used only in the

Navy; we are deaf to thy inspiration and dumb at thy chorus; we are

sceptical as to thy soldier's love: Nancy, we know from realistic poets

of the Barrack Room, took up with another young man before her month was

out; and as for the black, he is the object of our devoutest solicitude.

Go to! thou art surely a Gilbertian travesty, a deliciously droll

compound of vulgar patriotism and maudlin pathos. And yet somehow there

are tears on the smiling cheeks of the Man from Town. Let us go out and

hear the nightingales and be sentimental under the moon. Hark how they

precipitate their notes in a fine lyric rapture. This is the same "Jug,

Jug, Jug," that called forth Keats' immortal ode. We cannot hear the

birds' music for itself; it comes to us through melodious chimes of

poetry. Nature has been so filtered through human emotion, so passed and

repassed through the alembic of poetic passion, that she has ceased to be

natural. Little children and fools, on whom, according to the Talmud, the

gift of prophecy devolved when the Temples fell, may still see her naked,

but for the lettered man she is draped in lyric conventions. There is

anthropomorphism in literature as well as in theology: for George Eliot

Nature is steeped in humanity; she cannot see anything for itself. "Our

delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more

than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the

sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us and

transform our perception into love." I wonder if she ever wrote a pure

description of scenery without psychological or mythological allusions.

To a soul saturated with literary prepossessions, nightingales, like love

and most things human, are apt to disappoint and disenchant.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter.

The cultured American, who has no nightingales at home--not even big

ones--and who arranges to hear an English nightingale between a

performance at Ober-Ammergau and an exploration of the Catacombs of

Paris, often wants his money back after the songster "on yon bloomy

spray" has "warbled at eve when all the woods are still." He has been

expecting something like a song of Patti accompanied on the piano by

Paderewski. It was an American poetess--Mrs. Piatt--who informed the

skylark:

The song thou sang'st to Shelley was not half

So sweet as that which Shelley sang to thee!

After all, birds repeat themselves sadly--they strike one note, like a

minor poet, and live on the reputation of their first success. It is

amusing for a few minutes to hear a clever bird giving imitations of the

cuckoo clock, but the joke palls. The Archdeacon's Daughter has a wider

repertoire. And so? though the nightingales are still singing,

conversation springs up in the copse as if it were a drawing-room and the

singers human. My host discourses of the litter of pigs just arrived from

the Great Nowhere, and dilates upon the fact that of the 3,423,807 pigs

in England no two tails are curled alike. Perhaps even so no two

nightingales curl their phrase identically, and one roulade differeth

from another in glory.

PARIS

Decidedly the Parisian atmosphere is charged with artistic electricity.

The play, the novel and the picture flourish on the same stem, and the

very advertisement posters tell their lies artistically. Paris is the

metropolis of ideas. You may catch them there and set up as a prophet on

the strength of a fortnight's holiday. Maeterlinck says he learnt all he

knows from a man he met in a _brasserie_. Fancy picking up ideas in a

pothouse! In London you could only pick up "h's." The reverse of the

medal is the morbidity that ideas and _brasseries_ engender. In the cafés

of the Boule Miehe, where the decadent movements are hatched and the

fledgling Verlaines come to drown theusorrows in vermouth, you may see

the lacklustre visages and tumbled hair of "diabolical" poets and the

world-weary figures of end-of-the-century youngsters pledging their

mistresses in American grog.

But the great heart of the People, that beats still to the homely old

music, and you shall find no trace of morbidity in the melodramas of the

Porte-St.-Martin or the music-halls of the people's quarter. To-day is

the Gingerbread Fair--_La Foire au Pain d'Épices_; and _Tout Paris_--that

is to say, everybody who isn't anybody--is elbowing its way towards the

centre of gaiety. Tramcars deposit their packed freights near the

Bastile[*], and where the women of the Revolution knitted, feeding their

eyes on blood, bonnetless old crones sit drinking red wine in the sun.

The sky is radiantly blue, and there is a music of merry-go-rounds. They

are far more elegant than our English merry-go-rounds, these

_carrousels_, hung with tapestry, and offering you circumambient

palanquins or even elephants. Before a toy stage, on which a mechanical

skirt-dancer disports herself with a tireless smile, an automatic

_chef-d'orchestre_ conducts the revolutionary march (none other than

"Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay") while grotesque figures strike stiffly at bells.

On the pavement an old man has spread for sale a litter of broken dolls,

blind, halt and lame, when not decapitated; and in the roadway the

festive crowd splits to allow the passage of a child's coffin covered

with white flowers. The air thrills with the "ping" of unsuccessful

shots: I take a gun, and by aiming at a ball dancing on a fountain jet,

hit a bull's-eye two yards to the left. I throw flat rings at a sort of

ninepins, five shots for a halfpenny: the first four leave the pins

stolid and the public derisive. I throw the last at random, bring down

half the pins, and stalk off: nonchalantly, the pet of the fickle French

populace. I buy pancakes fried on the stall while you wait--they are

selling like hot cakes--and but for the difficulty of finding one with my

name picked out in pink on the gingerbread, I would buy a pig and hang it

on my breast. Some of the pigs have mottoes instead of names:

De toute la création

C'est moi le plus cochon.

[* Transcriber's note: So in original.]

Another asserts:

De la tête à la queue

Je suis délicieux.

I ignore the pigs, but I pacify local prejudice by buying two gingerbread

sailors--a Russian and a French--shaking hands in symbolisation of the

Russo-French alliance, and I further prove myself a patriot by throwing

bright wooden balls into the mouth of a great-faced German, for which I

receive the guerdon of a paper rose and a Berlin wool monkey. I purchase

a ticket from a clown standing on a platform begirt by noisy cages, and

partake in a raffle for a live turkey; but fortunately I am spared the

task of carrying it through the Fair, and not wishing to tempt Providence

again, I content myself with trying for soap. A pack of cards is spread

round a wheel with an index: round goes the wheel, and whoever has the

card at which the index stops gets an orange, or if he likes to save up

his oranges exchanges them for a box of soap. You get four cards for two

sous, but I take all the pack. Round goes the wheel imperturbably. It

stops. Amid the breathless anxiety of the crowd I examine my cards, and

invariably find myself the fortunate possessor of the winning one. But,

by some mysterious arithmetic, which amuses the crowd, every time I win I

have to pay several sous. By such roundabout methods I ultimately arrive

at the soap. I have my portrait taken, allured by the "only a franc." My

image has a degenerate air; the photographer informs me it will not stay

unless he fixes it with enamel--which will be another franc. By the time

it is framed it has come up to six francs, and then, as I leave, the

attendant begs I will remember him! I give him the photograph, and

depart, hoping he will remember me. At the Place de la Nation the fun

grows thicker: there is a rain of confetti, and everybody comes out in

coloured spots; the switchback is busy, chairs mount and descend on

ropes, and there is a bunch of balloons; on a platform outside a booth a

showman beats a drum, the riding-master cracks his whip, and ladies of

uncertain ages and exuberant busts smile all day in evening dress; in the

neighbouring Cirque the Ball of the City of Paris is whirling noisily.

Yes, life goes on in the old, old way in the land of equality and

brotherhood; and the "red fool-fury of the Seine" is but a froth on the

surface. The "Twilight of the Peoples" is the morbid vision of a myopic

seer. With which reflection we will leave Sanity Fair.

As I write there is an appalling, long-drawn crash, which brings the

whole Quarter to its doors and windows. "Bombs" are in everybody's mouth,

and I find myself automatically repeating a sentence out of the Latin

exercise-book of my boyhood: "How comes it that thunder is sometimes

heard when the sky is clear?" I irrelevantly remember that "sometimes"

must be translated "not never." In the streets little groups are

gathered, gesticulating and surmising. Some say "The Panthéon," others

"The Luxembourg"; others trust it is only a gas explosion. I shock my

group by hoping it is a bomb, so that I may say I have heard it go off.

But I know nothing till I read "Paris Day by Day" next evening in "The

Daily Telegraph," and find that my ambition has been gratified, and that

the chief victim of the explosion is a Decadent Poet. Has any one been

taking seriously Nordau's cry for the extinction of the Degenerates?

The dead have their day in France, but it was not _le jour des morts_

when I bethought myself of visiting the grave of Maupassant. I do not

care for these crowded "at homes,"--I prefer to pay my respects in

solitude. You will not think this remark flippant if you are familiar

with French cemeteries, if you know those great family sepulchres, fitted

up as little chapels, through whose doors, crowned with the black cross,

you may see the great wax tapers in the candelabra at the altar, the

stained-glass windows with the figure of the Madonna and Child, the

eikons of Christ, the praying-stools, the vases, the busts or photographs

of the deceased--worthy people who not only thought life worth living but

death worth dying, and did the one and the other respectably and

becomingly. Maupassant lies in one art-quarter of Paris, just as Heinrich

Heine lies in the other. The cemetery is off the Boulevard Raspail,

within bow-shot of the _ateliers_ of Whistler and Bouguereau, overlooked

by an imposing statue of M. Raspail which sets forth that scientific

citizen's many virtues and services. He proclaimed Universal Franchise in

1830, he proclaimed the Republic in 1848, and his pedestal now proclaims

with equal cocksureness that science is the only religion of the future.

"Give me a cell and I will build you up all organised life," cries the

statue, and its stony hand seems to wave theatrically as in emulation of

the bas-reliefs on its base representing Raspail animating his

_camarades_ to victory. But alas! _tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse_,

and not all the residents of the Boulevard are aware of the origin of

their address. Chateaubriand survives as a steak and Raspail as a

Boulevard.

The cemetery Montparnasse is densely populated, and I wandered long

without finding the author of "Boule de Suif." It was a wilderness of

artificial flowers, great wreaths made of beads. Beads, beads, beads,

black or lavender, and even white and yellow, blooming garishly in all

sizes on every grave and stone, in strange theatrical sentimentality;

complex products of civilisation, making death as unnatural as the

feverish life of the Boulevards. Sometimes the beaded flowers were

protected by glass shades, sometimes they were supplemented by leaden or

marble images. Over one grave I found a little porcelain angel, his wings

blue as with the cold; and under him last year's angel in melancholy

supersession. Elsewhere, most terrible sight of all in this ghastly

place, was a white porcelain urn on which were painted a woman's and a

man's hand clasped, the graceful feminine fingers in artistic contrast

with the scrupulously-cuffed male wrist with the motto, "_À mon mari,

Regrets éternels._" Wondering how soon she remarried, I roved gloomily

among these arcades of bourgeois beads, these fadeless flowers, these

monstrous ever-blacks, relieved to find a touch of humour, as in a

colossal wreath ostentatiously inscribed "_À ma belle-mère._" I peeped

into the great family tombs, irresistibly reminded of "Lo, the poor

Indian," and the tribes who provision their dead; I wondered if the old

ghosts ever turn in their graves (as there is plenty of room for them to

do) when some daughter of their house makes an imprudent alliance. Do

they hold family councils in the chapel, I thought, and lament the

growing scepticism of their grandchildren? Do they sigh to see themselves

so changed from the photographs in the family album that confronts their

hollow orbits? Do they take themselves as seriously in death as they did

in life? But they were all scornfully incommunicative. And at last,

despairing of discovering the goal of my journeyings, I inquired of a

guardian in a peaked blue cap and a blue cloak, who informed me that it

was in the twenty-sixth section of the other cemetery. Wonderfully

precise, red-tape, bureaucratic, symmetrical people, the French, for all

their superficial curvetings! I repaired to the other portion of the

cemetery, to lose myself again among boundless black beads and endless

chapels and funereal urns; and at last I besought another blue-cloaked

guardian to show me the grave of Maupassant. "_Par içi,_" he said

nonchalantly: and eschewing the gravel walks he took a short cut through

a lane of dead maidens--

What's become of all the gold

Used to hang and brush their bosoms?--

and, descending an avenue of estimable _pères de famille_, turned the

corner of an elegant sepulchre, to which only the most fashionable ghosts

could possibly have the entry. Dear, dear, what heart-burnings there must

be among the more snobbish shadows of Montparnasse! My guide made me

pause and admire, and he likewise insisted on the tribute of my tear

before an obelisk to slaughtered soldiers and a handsome memorial to

burnt firemen.

But perceiving my impatience to arrive at the grave of Maupassant,

"_Mais, monsieur_," he protested, "_il n'y a rien d'extraordinaire._"

"_Vraiment!_" said I, "_c'est là l'extraordinaire._" "_Rien du tout

d'extraordinaire_," he repeated doggedly. "_Sauf le cadavre_," I

retorted. He shook his head, "_Très pauvre la tombe_," he muttered: "_pas

du tout riche._" Another guardian, wall-eyed, here joined him, and

catching the subject of conversation, "_Très pauvre_," he corroborated

compassionately. But he went with us, accompanied by a very lean young

Frenchman with a soft felt hat, an over-long frock-coat, tweed trowsers,

and a black alpaca umbrella. He looked like a French translation of some

character of Dickens. At last we arrived at the grave. "_C'est là!_" and

both guardians shook their heads dolefully. "_Très pauvre!_" sighed one.

"_Rien du tout--rien_," sighed the other. And, thank Heaven, they were

right. Nothing but green turf and real flowers, and a name and a date on

a black cross--the first real grave I had come across. No beads, no

tawdry images, nothing but the dignity of death, nothing but "Guy de

Maupassant, 6 Juillet, '93," on the cross, and "Guy de Maupassant,

1850-93," at the foot. The shrubs were few, and the flowers were common

and frost-bitten; but in that desert of bourgeois beads, the simple green

grave stood out in touching sublimity. The great novelist seemed to be as

close to the reality of death as he had been to that of life. Those other

dead seemed so falsely romanticist. It was a beautiful sunny winter

afternoon. There was a feel of spring in the air, of the Resurrection and

the Life. Beyond the bare slim branches of the trees of the other

cemetery, gracefully etched against the sky, the sun was setting in a

beautiful bank of dusky clouds. Life was so alive that day, and death so

dead. Outside the tomb the poem of light and air, and inside the

tomb--what? I thought of the last words of "Une Vie," that fine novel,

which even Tolstoï considers great, of the old servant's summing up: "_La

vie, voyez-vous, ça n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit_."

"Perhaps," thought I, "'t is the same with death." "The _Société des Gens

de Lettres_ had to buy the ground for him," interrupted the wall-eyed

guardian compassionately. The Dickensy Frenchman heaved a great sigh.

"_Vous croyez!_" he said. "Yes," asseverated the other guardian--"he has

it in perpetuity." Ignorant of the customs of death, I wondered if one's

corpse were liable to eviction, and whether the statute of limitations

ought not to apply. "_Je pensais qu'il avait une certaine position_,"

observed the Frenchman dubiously. "_Non_," replied the wall-eyed

guardian, shaking his head, "_Non, il est mort sans le sou_." At the

mention of coin I distributed _pourboire_. The first guardian went away.

I lingered at the tomb, alive now to its more sordid side. Only one row

of bourgeois graves, some occupied, some still _á louer_, separated it

from an unlovely waste piece of ground, bounded by the gaunt brick wall

of the fast-filling cemetery. As I began to muse thereon, I heard a cry,

and perceived my guardian peeping from round the corner of a distant

tomb, and beckoning me with imperative forefinger. I wanted to stay; I

wanted to have "Meditations at the grave of Maupassant," to ponder on the

irony of death, to think of the brilliant novelist, the lover of life,

cut off in his pride, to lie amid perspectives of black and lavender

beads. But my guardian would not let me. "_Il n'y a rien à voir_," he

cried almost angrily, and haled me off to see the real treasures of his

cemetery. In vain I persisted that I must not give him trouble, that I

could discover the beauties for myself. "_O monsieur!_" he said

reproachfully. Fearing he might return my _pourboire_, I followed him

helplessly to inspect the pompous bead-covered tombs of the well-to-do,

shocking him by stopping to muse at the rude mound of an anonymous

corpse, remembered only by a little bunch of _immortelles_. One of the

fashionable sepulchres stood open, and was being dusted by a man and a

woman (on a dust _from_ dust principle, apparently). Most of the dust

seemed to be little beads. My keeper exchanged a word with the cleaners,

and I profited by the occasion to escape. I sneaked back to the grave of

Maupassant, but I had barely achieved a single Reflection, when "_Holà,

holà!_" resounded in loud tones from afar. I started guiltily, but in a

moment I realised that it was the cry of expulsion. The sunset was

fading, and the gates were to be locked. I hastened across the cemetery,

evading my guardian's face of reproach, and in another few moments the

paths were deserted, the twilight had fallen, and the dead were left

alone with their beads.

SLAPTON SANDS

After all the world is a large place. At the moment of writing I have

never heard of Home Rule, nor do I care two straws whether the House of

Lords is to be blown up on the fifth of November. What moves my interest,

what stirs my soul, what arouses the politician that lurks in the best of

us, is this question of the crab-pots. Shall the trawlers of Brixham be

allowed to slash at our cords and to send our wicker baskets adrift,

spoiling our marine harvests and making our larders barren against the

winter? They hover about our beautiful bay--these fiends in human shape,

with brown wings outspread--and wantonly lay waste our fishing-pots in

their reckless course, so that our crabs walk backwards into the sea. We

have had gentlefolks down from London about it, men who argue and

palaver, and wear high hats and are said to have long bills, and there is

talk of a Government cutter to protect us, towed by red tape, and the

trawlers are to cast their nets farther asea. But beware of believing

what you read in the Brixham papers,--we have no voice to represent us in

the press, and so these Brixham organs spread falsehoods about us in

every corner of the globe. A pretty pretence, forsooth, that it is the

steamers who plough up our crab-pots. Why, from Michaelmas to Christmas,

when the trawlers are away, not a single pot is disturbed from its

station, though the funnels smoke as usual in the eye of heaven. No, no,

ye hirelings of the press. Turn your mercenary quills elsewhere, beslaver

Mr. Gladstone or belabour him, arbitrate on the affairs of nations, and

throw your weighty influence into the scale of European politics. But do

not confuse the mind of the country on the question of crab-pots.

We do not get the Brixham papers here, but friends in London tell us that

is what they say. It is the same with the crabs--we have to order them

from London. All local products come _viâ_ London nowadays: London is

like a central ganglion, through which all sensations must travel before

being felt at the outside points where they were really incurred. This is

the case even with Irish patriots: they are made in Ireland, but if you

want them you have to go to London clubs for them. We have only had one

funeral here since I came, and then we got our material from London. He

had gone up to a London hospital--poor fellow!--and that was the end of

him. The village butcher it was, who thus went the way of all flesh, and

all of us went to his funeral and wept, for want of something else to do.

One cannot always be flippant, even on a holiday. Fortunately the butcher

left an aged father, who announced his intention of carrying on the

business, so we dried our eyes and dined, sure of the future. We thought

of the many creatures the deceased had killed--the Juno-eyed oxen, the

tender lambs, the peaceful pigs--and we did not see why we should be so

sentimental over the human species. We are all murderers, and yet we are

ready to gush over the first corpse that comes along. How I envy the

death-bed of a vegetarian!

We are not vegetarians here, but at least we eschew the six-course dinner

which so few travellers ever succeed in shaking off, even in _Ultima

Thule_. The most of modern travelling is a sort of Cook's Tour.

Everywhere the _menu_ is before you, everywhere waves the napkin, like

the flag of civilisation. Nowhere do we eat ourselves into the real life

of the people; everywhere the same monotonous variety of fare in

kitchen-French. In the remotest Orkneys, in the caves of Iona, in the

fjords of Norway, amid the crevasses of the Alps,--'t is the same tale of

_entrées_ and _entremets_. When Dr. Johnson made his tour in the

Highlands, he was allowed to forget he was not taking a walk down Fleet

Street. He interviewed the chiefs in their fastnesses, the cottagers in

their crofts. He broke rye-bread with the shepherd, ate haggis and

porridge with the peasant, and drank a gill of whisky to see "what makes

a Scotchman happy." Behind him he left his dish of tea, and the pet pork

that made the veins of his forehead swell with ecstasy. But to-day the

dinner-gong resounds where Rob Boy's bugle blared, and you may sit behind

your serviette

Where the sun his beacon red

Kindles on Ben Voirlich's head,

or where the monument of a Gaelic poet broods above the heather. The

tyranny of the _table-d'hôte_ ceases not even at sea. Every ship bears

these monster meals in its belly--from salami to pineapple--whether it

walk the Boreal waters, or touch the Happy Isles of Mid-Pacific, or

swelter in the Red Sea. Not all the majesties and terrors of naked nature

can dock one _hors d'oeuvre_ from the _menu_. Our stomachs we have always

with us--the traveller's only real _vade mecum_. We change our sky but

not our stomach. When Nansen reaches the North Pole, he will, I am sure,

be able to put up at the local hotel, and have every luxury of the

cosmopolitan cuisine except the ices, which will probably have been all

sent up to the London market. It is this sort of thing that makes foreign

travel merely an expensive delusion. Your common traveller never gets

away from England, fare he never so far. His church, his kitchen and his

company are those he left behind him. To get away from England one must

go to Devonshire or Cornwall. But even here, amid the combes and the

leys, the crags and the quarries, the modern hotel, with its perfect

sanitation and imperfect French, is springing up with the rapidity of

Badraoulbadour's palace. It spoils the primitiveness of the people, and

gives them ideas below their station. They lose their simple manliness

and take tips. They corrupt their autochthonic customs, and drink

champagne cider. The modern hotel is a upas-tree, under whose boughs

poetry withers. One looks to see the ancient ballads lose their blood and

brawn. In time we may expect to find Cornwall producing _vers de

société_. As thus:--

And shall Trelawney dine?

And shall Trelawney dine?

Then thrice ten thousand Cornish men

Will order in the wine.

In the absence of six-course dinners and newspapers about Home Rule, we

have had to fall back upon literature. We borrowed Zola's latest--from

the rector,--and read it simultaneously, stealing it from one another.

Even the dogs have devoured bits of it. The poodle has taken in most,

being French. She is an elegant, tricksy creature, Miss Plachecki by

name, but called--for short--"Wopsy." Wopsy's back is arranged in beds

like a Dutch garden; she has rosettes of black hair symmetrically

disposed about her hind quarters, and her tail is exactly like a mutton

cutlet in its frill. She belongs to the Woman of the party. Chum belongs

to the Girl. He is a bull-pup, with a frightfully ferocious face, but he

never bites unless he wants to hurt you. Girl says she took him to a

fashionable photographer's, but the artist refused to pose him. In vain

she pointed out that Chum was more paralysed than he; that Chum was

trembling all over (I opine 't was at the sight of the actresses'

portraits--the young dog!). The photographer steadfastly kept the

apparatus between him and the animal, telling Girl a story about a man

who owned a bull-dog with a bad memory. The man, coming home late, and

entering his sitting-room, was met by an ominous growl in the darkness.

Bull-dogs have little smell, and so the man was not recognized. He made a

movement towards the mantelpiece, where the matches were, to strike a

light and convince the dog of its mistake. But unfortunately the dog

guarded the mantelpiece, and every move was answered by a ghastly growl.

More unfortunately still, the man's bedroom was only approached through

the sitting-room, and its door was only approached through the dog. So,

for want of a match, the man passed the night like a Peri at the gates of

Paradise. At last Girl posed Chum, herself, her draperies constituting a

nebulous background; and the artist, walking warily, adjusted his

instrument, and the sun which shines alike on saints and bull-pups,

painted the squatter's portrait. But, alas! a woeful disappointment was

in store. When the proofs arrived, it was found that all that delightful

uncouthness of visage which is Chum's chief charm, all that fascinating

ferocity which makes him a thing of ugliness and a joy for ever, had

vanished--refined away, idealised into a demureness as of domestic tabby,

a platitudinarian peacefulness--nay, a sort of beauty! The camera had

been so accustomed to actresses that it could no longer work naturally.

VENICE

I am reading Nietzsche and Tolstoï. Each tells me that the morality of

the day is all wrong, and that he has discovered the one true way of

salvation. Life, cries Nietzsche, strength, sunshine, beauty. Death,

cries Tolstoï, abnegation, pity, holiness. 'T is all as old as the hills,

and withal so simple that one wonders why Nietzsche should have needed

eleven volumes to say it in and Tolstoï endless pamphlets. I never can

understand the lengths to which some authors go in self-repetition. Half

the books are written to prove that water is dry, and the other half that

it's wet. If you would only stop and think just for one moment, cries

Tolstoï, you would at once see what a ridiculous life you are leading and

you would refuse to lead it any longer. Stop and think! Ay, but 't is

difficult thinking to-day.

It will be all over and done with so long--by the time you read

this--that the Triple Alliance may be in three pieces; but for the moment

the complications of European politics alternately startle and depress my

day with furious cannonades of honour from an Italian gunboat and brazen

dronings of national anthems from a German band. For the young man whom

Tolstoï has described as the most comic figure in Europe, coming to meet

Umberto I. in Venice, inconsiderately stationed his yacht just outside my

window; and though he is gone at last, _Gott sei Dank_, the echoes of him

still linger in irrelevant cannon-shots that send the pigeons scurrying

in mad swoops; while, as if removed from the oppression of his presence,

the band of the _Hohenzollern_ plays London music-hall tunes all day

long, commencing, significantly enough, with "Oh, Mr. Porter, what a

funny man you are!" I never realised how international is our music-hall

till I heard Italians staggering home at midnight, singing "Two lovely

black eyes" in choice Venetian. A beautiful yacht this _Hohenzollern_, as

large as an Atlantic liner: I suppose an Imperial yacht is like an

Imperial pint. 'T was a great moment when it sailed in round a bend,

slow and serene--a glorious white vessel, radiant with flags, stately and

majestic in its movement as a sonnet of Milton, and about it a black

swarm of gondolas, those of the noble families equipped with half a dozen

gondoliers in green, yellow, or blue liveries, and at the stern of each

boat a trail of silk. And the dense crowds huzzahed, and the band played

"God Save the Queen," only in German, so that it meant, _Heil dir im

Siegeskranz_. And after that came the Italian national air, which isn't

an anthem, but a quick march, and so lacks dignity. The "Wacht am Rhein"

made a half-hearted effort to be present, but in the night we had the

Emperor's own "Sang an Aegir," stuck in the middle of a Wagner programme.

Beyond this, compliment could scarcely go.

This brazen air was the one jar on the poetry of a spectacle possible

only in Venice. Imagine it! Wagner played on a floating fairy-pagoda,

built as of gold flame, and shot with green and red, on the broad bosom

of St. Mark's basin, in the divine night, the stars seen hanging

diversely in free space, not stuck like gold-headed nails in a dark

ceiling; and in the mystery of the darkness, the domes and spires and

palaces of Venice, and the dim creeping boats, and the quivering

reflections of the illuminated Imperial vessel; and across the narrow

track of luminous water made by the Pagoda--that glittered with a

fantastic splendour as of Aladdin and Arabian nights--sudden gondolas

gliding from darkness to darkness, the beautiful curve of the prow

sharply revealed, the gondolier growing semi-transparent and quivering

with light, a strange half-demoniac figure bestriding his black bark.

And, mingled with the music, the hum of multitudes and the tramp of feet

and the silence of the vast night. All as Nietzsche's poem on Venice hath

it--"Gondeln, Lichter, Musik." Yes, they play politics prettily on the

Grand Canal--the finest street in Europe. Does it matter much what is the

game? Cannons and colour, bands and decorations, bread and circuses,

emperors uncovering to us, beautiful queens waving dainty

handkerchiefs--this is what lies behind the dry Treaties of the history

books. A few short weeks back we had been very angry with our King, and

had talked of Republics and what not. But the dead men in Abyssinia are

dead, and we are alive, and the Bengal fire on the palaces is really very

picturesque. If we would only stop and think--just for one moment! But

there's the rub.

It's no use stopping and thinking, unless everybody else will stop and

think at the same time. For you cannot refuse to lead a life that

everybody is leading, unless you are willing to be crushed by the

revolutions of the social machinery. Socialists, for instance, are often

twitted with not "behaving as sich." But socialists say that socialism

should be the law of the land: they do not say that it is practicable for

an odd man here and there to be a socialist in a world of individualists.

Tolstoï, to be of effect, would have to move all mankind at once to

renounce its ways, to abjure the lust of the eye and the pride of life.

And he would have to keep on moving it, or back it would roll. Mazzini

and the unification of Italy--what words to conjure with! But Mazzini is

dead, and how much of Italy is alive! 'T is more like a great show-place,

supported by its visitors, than a real, live country. Stop and think! 'T

is perhaps better not to think, for fear we should stop. William II., at

any rate--he is not likely to stop and think. This young man--from all I

have observed since he became my neighbour--lives a highly coloured

dramatic existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour and

sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have pleased

Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a lover of the strong

and the splendid, this German gentleman who is just off to Vienna to

prance at the head of fifteen hundred horsemen. While he lived opposite

me, it was all excursions and alarums. As a neighbour an emperor is

distinctly noisy. The local comic papers suggested that, as a universal

genius, Guglielmo II. would at once set about rowing a two-oared sandolo.

But this difficult feat Guglielmo did not essay, being convoyed more

comfortably in a long-boat by a brawny crew. Curious, by the way, that

transformation of William! They announce plays here by G. Shakespeare,

the divine Guglielmo.

'T is all very well for Guglielmo, the gondola of Avon, to invite us to

sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings; and in a

city of departed Doges and lost glories't is easy to moralise over

earthly greatness. But kings are not always dead, and I daresay as

William II. in his cocked hat gazed from the quarter-deck of the

_Hohenzollern_ at the marvellous but untenanted Palace of the ancient

Bridegrooms of the Sea, he felt that a living lion is better than a dead

Doge. And yet it is a strange life, a king's. What an unreal universe of

flags and cannons and phrases must monarchs inhabit! Do they think that

the streets are always gay with streamers and bunting and triumphal

arches, always thunderous with throats of men or guns, always impassable?

Do they imagine their subjects spend their whole lives in packed black

masses, waving hats? Poor kings! I always class them with novelists for

ignorance of real life. And to think that they can only get to know life

from novels! If they would only stop, and think! But even when they do

stop, they never seem to think. Napoleon on St. Helena never faced

realities, aggressively pompous to the end. Then there is Don Carlos,

whom I miss in my afternoon stroll. He who might have dazzled us with

divinity is visibly a feather-less biped. The poor, mock king had to

leave Venice because his brother-sovereigns would not have called upon

him. For Don Carlos still keeps up the form and style of a crowned head,

and remains the last of the Bourbons, a picturesque ruin, reproach to a

blasphemous generation, heedless of the divine right of kings.

And the "divinity that doth hedge a king" can be kept up nowhere so

cheaply as in Venice. Venice is the dress-coat of cities, making all men

equal. Well might Wordsworth dub her "the eldest child of liberty"! For

in the streets of Venice you cannot drive or ride--walk you must. No

gleaming broughams, no spanking steeds: nothing--be you monarch or

mendicant--but your two legs. 'T is strange, in a land of no horses, to

find Venetians styled "Cavalier" for title of honour. They should surely

be called "Gondoliers." For the gondola is your only chance of display.

Rich Americans may flaunt it with four gondoliers and print "Palazzo" on

their visiting-cards. But doctors and lawyers live in Palaces, and even a

moderate purse can keep a horseless carriage. And your St. Mark's Square,

which is the largest drawing-room in the world, is also the most

democratic. Ladies of quality jostle shawled street-walkers, a German

sailor galls the kibe of a beautiful Browning duchess, officers with

showy epaulettes glitter among respectable shopkeepers; helmeted

cuirassiers, Austrian admirals, policemen with coloured tufts like

lamp-cleaners, German baronesses, bouncing bonnes with babies,

garlic-scented workingmen, American schoolgirls, and kings in exile, are

mixed pell-mell, all in perfect freedom and equality, and, though in the

shadow of St. Mark's Church, quite Christian. And an Italian crowd is

also Christian in its freedom from crush. It does not turn a fete into a

fight and a concourse into a competition. Thus, as the Prince Consort was

amused to find we English said of our pleasure-parties, all "passes off

well." Except when there is rain. And the heavens threw unmistakable cold

water on the Triple Alliance. The day of the Emperor's stay was the one

wet day Venice had known for months--so dank and chill, with so sooty a

sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London

paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice,

that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him,

chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At

Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long

and heavily, though the London meteorologists registered sunshine,

Cadeva dal cielo la neve

Con tutta la sua quiete.

(Down from heaven fell the snow

With all its quietness.)

This perfect description of snowfall--which I found rudely chalked on the

wall of a Venetian alley--could never have been conceived in the Italy of

popular imagination. The superstition about Italian sunshine is like that

about Italian beauty. If the country about Florence is the loveliest in

Europe, surely the plain of Lombardy around Padua is the ugliest--a land

of symmetrical tree-stumps and stony villas flaunting themselves on the

roadway in pompous publicity.

In Venice the Emperor seemed specially to irritate the elements. The

illuminations were extinguished by a terrific torrent that sent the

people pattering away into the black, starless night, gleaming with rain

and fire; and to-night when the imperial band attempted to play "Sang an

Aegir" again, the heavens fell, and audience and orchestra vanished in

the twinkling of a gas-lamp, while the pavement of the Piazza glittered

golden as the facade of St. Mark's with dancing reflections, and the

lights burnt blue in the wind. Yes, though the papers next day said the

Emperor's Song was applauded enthusiastically, Jupiter Pluvius at least

never plays the courtier, and Boreas must be a rude reminder to monarchs

of their essential humanity. Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell

sad stories of the colds of kings. In the daylight I chanced upon a rough

wooden platform, bordered with plush and surrounded by tawdry terraces of

coloured, glass cups. This was the fairy, Aladdin-like Pagoda. And such,

methinks, are kings, on closer acquaintance. How majestic seemed William

II., and Humbert, the Kaiserin and Queen Margherita, when, massed in our

thousands on the Piazza, we clamoured for a glimpse of them: how

inaccessible and star-like when, after much exciting but irrelevant

shadow pantomime, they actually appeared on the balcony of the Palace, as

if to feed us like the pigeons we had displaced! With what tumultuous

rapture did we behold their faces! Stop and think! You cannot stop and

think. Enthusiasm is a microbe, and is independent of its object: even so

we could yawn over Punch and Judy, if the crowd assembled to yawn.

Republicans who came to sneer remained to cheer.

'T is comic this,

And comic that,

And clown on royal pay,

But 't is "Long live _unser Kaiser!_"

When the band begins to play.

And humanity has need of leaders, heroes--'t is a primal instinct. The

Jews had Jehovah himself for sovereign, but nothing would content them

but a real man-king, who should rule them and judge them and go out

before them in war. Kings were leaders once, but in modern days they are

only symbols, just as flags are: the whole force of the nation is behind

them, and they stand for home and country. This it is that gives them

majesty and divinity. 'T is a case of transformation of function, an old

institution adapted to new uses, and valuable partly as giving colour to

life, partly for preventing the evils which Gibbon so pregnantly showed

to be inseparable from any system of primacy not based on an immutable

heredity. The trouble is when the flag wishes to order the march.

An unbroken tradition has kept up the old phrases of loyalty, and so what

wonder if a king sometimes takes them seriously! "_Le roi le veult_" not

unnaturally leads sometimes to a king willing. And also we are not quite

conscious of the transformation; it has come about so gradually that no

one knows when kings ceased to be leaders, and when they became flags,

and so with the new feeling blend confusedly strands of the old. We

English have abolished the sovereign, but we are too loyal to say so. In

Germany the sovereign has refused to be a symbol, and in a country

over-civilised in thought and under-civilised in action, he has had a

pretty good innings. I must confess I do not find this attitude of his

merely ridiculous. It forces clearly upon the modern world the question

of kingship, whether it is to be a sham or a reality. Unpopular as

William II. has made himself by his martinet methods--ridiculous, if you

will--yet there is only one step from the ridiculous to the sublime. In a

flippant age he takes himself seriously, has a sense of a responsible

relation to his people. Have you seen the cartoon he designed to inspire

the nations of the West to league together for the protection of their

ideals against the races of the East? The thought may be trite, the

philosophy leagues behind the doctrines of the Berlin _Aufgeklärter_, but

it shows a soul above card-playing or court-gossip. What a noble chance

there would be for a modern sovereign who should really be the head of

his people, on a par with the culture of his age, in harmony with its

highest ideals, fostering all that is finest in life and character, in

art and thought! Snobbishness would be converted to useful ends, and

courtiers would become philosophers out of sheer flattery. But such a

Platonic king is scarcely to be looked for: the training is so bad.

The presence of kings makes places abnormal and out of character, but in

Venice it rather gives one a sense of the true Venice, she that once held

the gorgeous East in fee. For the Venice of every day only escapes

vulgarity by force of beauty: she lives up to the English and German

tripper, borders her great Piazza with photograph shops, and counts on

the sentimental traveller to feed her pigeons. Oh, that trail of the

tourist over Europe, falsifying the very things he went out for to see!

"Coelum non animum mutant," said the Roman poet long ago of travellers,

but the modern traveller carries his sky with him. Instead of "Venice in

London" 't is London in Venice. Carefully fenced off from the local life

by his _table d'hôte_, it is rarely that the Briton comes to understand

that he and not the native is the foreigner, the _forestiere_. Cities on

show are never real; they are like people posturing before a camera,

instead of being taken _au naturel_. And "the season" is the time in

which they are least real. Too many Cooks' tourists spoil the broth.

Cities _en fête_ are masked and prankt, and the spring in Italy is like

one long _Forestieri_ day. At the church of Eremitani in Padua I was

taken to see some Mantegnas at a side-altar while a very devout

congregation was celebrating Eastertide, and the verger unlocked a gate

and pocketed his tip with undiminished piety. How apt an image of life,

these Italian churches--some of us praying and some of us sightseeing! It

must be confusing to the celestial bookkeepers to distinguish the Bibles

from the Baedekers. And while the real Venice is as unreal as the real

Florence or the real Rome, Venice welcoming her king gives one a truer

impression of the Venice of our dreams, the Queen of the seas in the

brave days of old. Let us forget the steamboats and the iron bridges, let

us make believe that the _Hohenzollern_ is the great Bucentaur, in which

the Doge went out to wed the Adriatic and which that arch-Philistine

Napoleon broke up. For the Venice of every day is a dead city, with

nothing left of its ancient glories but wealth. Though the millions be

reckoned in lire, there are over a hundred millionaires in Venice. But of

that mighty artistic and religious impulse which produced countless

churches and palaces, pictures and frescoes, which strewed the very

street walls with spirited sculpture, and warmed even parochial offices

with priceless paintings, there is as little trace as of the indomitable

energy that founded a great Republic on wooden piles and guarded it from

the sea by dykes and from its enemies by the sea. The escutcheons of its

great families are fast becoming archaeological, and Americans and Jews

inhabit their palaces. How great a power Venice was I never realised till

I was permitted to see the Archives. It takes three-quarters of an hour

to walk through these galleries of town records. Miles of memorandums,

wildernesses of reports, acres of ambassadors' letters from every court

in Europe, written in cipher with inter-bound Italian translations. I

tried to find the report of the ambassador at the Court of St. James

anent the execution of Charles I., but gave up hopeless, oppressed by the

musty myriads of volumes, and found comfort in the signature of Queen

Elizabeth, surely the most regal autograph in the world, like some ship

going out against the Armada with swelling canvas and pennants streaming.

There's a woman after Nietzsche's heart--strong, splendid, and

unscrupulous. If Nietzsche had married her, he might have changed his

philosophy. What a diplomatist, this Englishwoman! To this day the

Direttore of the Archives of Venice swears by her. Those awesome

Archives! The reports of the Council of Ten alone stretch away through

vasty halls of death. And then people talk of writing history! How

fortunate that the exact details of royal, political and military events

are as unessential as they are unattainable! Real history consists mainly

of the things that haven't happened--the millions of everyday lives,

sunrise and sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the

bargains in the market-place. The reading of Clio's blood-stained scroll

would be unbearable, were it not for the reflection that all the

important things have been left out--the myriads of sunny mornings that

dawned on the "Dark Ages," and filled creation with the joy of life; the

hopes and loves throbbing in the great obscure mass of humanity; the

individual virtues and victories that co-existed with the decadence of

great empires; the vast ocean of consciousness of which History just

skims the surface. And now all that great Venetian life is over, the

dreaded Council of Ten is as the dust that covers its reports, and the

Doge's Palace is a spectacle for tourists at a franc a head. Great Caesar

dead and turned to show. And those who pay the franc scarcely seem to

reflect that princes and artists did not live and die in Italy to help

young British or German couples over their honeymoon; that Dandolo and

Foscari, Sansovino and Tintoretto, passed away with no suspicion of that

latter-day trinity--Bride, Bridegroom, and Baedeker. Strange that that

which was so real to themselves is so romantic to us! Such is the

transmutation of time, which can colour with poetry things much more

prosaic than life in ancient Venice. Nothing of us that doth fade

But doth, suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Poets and seers feel the richness and strangeness of the life that is

passing under their very eyes. With Maeterlinck it is the mystery, with

Stevenson the colour, with Wordsworth the divinity. To see the glamour of

the contemporary is the note of your modern. Whitman spent his life

trying to see it in the most unpromising materials. The wondering

perception of steamships and electric-cables has already grown dulled to

us: it requires a Kipling to revivify it. The new photographic process

which enables one to carry out Sydney Smith's desire on a hot day, to

take off one's flesh and sit in one's bones, alone seems wonderful to us;

though to see through a window is just as marvellous as to see through a

brick wall. For if _nil admirari_ be the motto of the sage, _omne

admirari_ is that of the poet, and the poetry which wafts from the past

to the soul of the most commonplace person is seen in the present by him

who hath eyes. The pathos of that which _must_ pass away is no less great

than the pathos of that which _has_ passed away. And what produces the

art-feeling in both cases is the same--the fresh, intense perception of

things for themselves alone: only the ordinary man finds it easier to

detach his own interests from the past than from the present of which he

is part. Romance is not in things, but in the souls that observe. Every

place, however enchanted, is inhabited by prosaic persons who earn their

living there. My chambermaid was born in Padua--Padua, outside which

Donatello could not achieve perfection; Padua, ever dear to us because

Portia feigned to have studied law at its University. Alas! alas! the two

gentlemen of Verona go down to business in tram-cars, and the

Magic casements opening on the foam

Of faëry lands in perilous seas forlorn

are cleaned and repaired by some one who sends in the bill. Yet, since

believing is seeing, let us behold, not the chambermaid and the

window-cleaner, but the magic casement and the moonrise. And if to the

commonplace our own age is commonplace, yet our age, like youth, is a

fault that will mend with time. Our politics, and philosophies too, will

crumble and decay, the dust will gather on our books and newspapers,

archaeologists will prize our coins, the fashion of our ugly garments

will grow picturesque, and samples of our streets will be rebuilt in

exhibitions. What is then left to console us for the eternal flux? Only

that posterity shall grow old-fashioned too, while we, like antiquity,

shall have enjoyed that which never grows old--the sunshine and the

stars, love and friendship, the smiles of little children, and the

freshness of flowers, aspiration and achievement, thought and worship,

struggle and self-sacrifice.

These, these are the eternal things--that persist in every age, in every

environment, in old Etruscan villages as in the Paris of to-day: these

are the realities to which "the latest scientific conveniences" are but

padding, and in which we have had no superiority over our ancestors, even

as we shall have no inferiority to our successors, though they riot in

"Vril" and balloons, and go on Cooks' Tours to the constellations. The

network of nerves in which we live and move and have our being is only

capable of a certain quota of sensations, and no invention will really

enlarge our enjoyments except it be of a new set of nerves. Persons whose

lives have known strange vicissitudes have been astonished to find

pleasure and pain about equally distributed in all; and I am optimist

enough to think that no age will be really less unhappy than the present.

Reformers who imagine they improve on the past age do but alter old

institutions to fit new feelings. Reformers are necessary because

otherwise the new feelings would be cramped by the old institutions. But

there is no addition to the sum of pleasure. Progress really means not

lagging behind; and however far we march, the same sunshine will throw

the same shadow of pain across our path. The notion of progress, said

Spinoza, is a futility, because God, of whom the universe is a

manifestation, is always perfect. Later philosophers have found this

doctrine a barren blind-alley, and craved for the notion of a more

energising God. But both notions seem perfectly compatible. Progress may

be just the way perfection manifests itself. The universe moves--and at

each point is perfect. It is as good as it could be--at the moment: it

could not be any better. For if it could have been, it would have been:

it has no interest in being otherwise. That it is not perfect in our

sense of the word matters little to the metaphysician. We have such

limited experiences of universes that we cannot judge what a really good

one should be like; and to say that ours is bad is to foul our own nest.

He had no doubt of the perfection of the universe, that gentle old

Franciscan who lives with his twenty-nine brethren on the islet of St.

Francesco del Deserto, a rarely visited spot off Venice, that somehow

reminded me of the island in Mr. H. A. Jones' "Michael and his Lost

Angel." He had never been to Assisi, where his tutelary saint was born.

"Have you no wish to see it?" I asked. "My only wish is to obey." Dear

old man! He had stopped all his life; but thinking--ah! that is another

matter. It was in this island that St. Francis preached to the birds. He

was saying the Office when all the birds stopped to listen, and St.

Francis took advantage of the opportunity. It was his disciple St. Antony

who preached to the fishes, and there is a delicious picture in Padua

showing all the fishes perking their heads out of the water and listening

in devout dumbness, the very oysters open to conviction. Poor dear

fishes! What a delightful change to receive from the upper world

something else than hooks! What a sweet simple cloister hath this lonely

monastery--a plain stone walk under a red-tiled arcade supported by rough

brick pillars, the walls lined by quaint black-and-white engravings of

saints engaged in miracles. There is a well in the centre which used to

be of sea-water, but St. Bernard of Siena blessed it and it turned sweet.

I have drunk of the water, so I can vouch the story is true. And there is

a beautiful cypress walk. What a tranquil retreat!

O Beata Solitudo!

O Sola Beatitudo!

as the inscription over the lintel hath it. I do not wonder that St.

Francis came here when he was greatly fatigued, "after converting the

Sultan of Egypt," as the old Franciscan naïvely explained. 'T is the sort

of sanatorium Tolstoï would need, after converting the German Emperor!

And despite St. Francis, and his doctrine of brotherhood with birds and

fishes, we go on with our cannibal cookery, and even his own Church still

teaches that animals have no souls, though that is perhaps because they

have no _soldi_. And despite Tolstoï and his tracts, the people who stop

will not think and the people who think will not stop. For to convert the

world is the one miracle that the saints have never compassed. Yet is the

sunshine of these sweet souls never lost, and the gentle mien of the old

Franciscan made me feel at peace even with my sandolier when I found him

sound asleep in his boat, wrapped up in my cloak.

And these are the types of character Nietzsche would destroy. They are

degenerative, forsooth! They make against life and the joy thereof. Ah,

but the joy of life is not only the joy of self-assertion: there is the

joy of self-effacement, which is only another form of self-expression,

the assertion of a higher self. That was the secret of Jesus, of Buddha.

Whereas the doctrine of Nietzsche--_c'est le secret de Polichinelle_. The

man in the street needs no encouragement to enjoyment. It is only by the

travail of the centuries that he has been taught to prefer to his own

pleasure somebody else's absence of pain. Human nature is like Venice or

Holland--a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams and

dykes. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls! And yet Nietzsche

is to be read, though 't is a pity he is to be translated into English

for the seduction of unripe minds. The desuetude of Latin as a common

language for scholars is to be regretted; it kept the thinkers of Europe

in touch, and kept out the _profanum vulgus_. As I have often pointed

out, a truth grows so stale that it is almost a lie, and to invert any

conventionality is to produce what is almost a truth. Truth is convex as

well as concave.

This method of inversion is Nietzsche's main weapon: as earnest as any of

our pulpiteering Puritans, he wears his morality inside out. He denies

the copy-book, as Luther denied the infallibility of the Pope. He

transposes all moral values, finds virtue often weakness and vice often

strength, girds at all the cloud-spinning philosophers, and is one of the

most brilliant and suggestive of modern writers, full of epigram and

whimsy, and wielding the clumsy German tongue with rare grace and

dexterity. But, as might be expected of the son of a parson, he pursues

his reaction against conventional cant beyond the bounds of legitimate

paradox, replacing the narrow by the narrower. Nietzsche was necessary;

some one had to call a spade a spade. The great forces of modern thought,

which have been gathering for centuries, had to find shameless

expression; and Nietzsche's scorn for those who have tried to patch up

hollow truces with bygone beliefs, and dress up new heresies in old

Sunday clothes, is amply justified. But what is not justified is his

admiration of himself--an admiration so pronounced that it has landed him

in a lunatic asylum. Our systems of chronology ought to be recast, cries

he; and even as men have dated from A.D., so are they to date from A.N.,

the year of Nietzsche. Not that he expects immediate recognition: "Erst

das Uebermorgen gehört mir. Einige werden posthum geboren." But the bulk

of what he tells us is really involved in all modern conceptions of the

cosmus--it could have been found long ago in Herbert Spencer.

Anti-Christ he calls himself, and beats the drum and invites you to

inspect the greatest philosophy on earth. "Now hold your breath with

awe," he has the air of saying, "or if you are not strong enough to hear

this fearsome truth, go home to the nursery and read Hegel." And after

this fanfaronade, lo! some commonplace that you shall find in a hundred

modern poets or philosophers. 'T is like the clown in the circus who

works himself up with a mighty pother to mount the bare-backed steed, and

then hangs on to the tail. No, no, good Herr Nietzsche, we want our

Saints Francis as well as our Napoleons. The one kind is as much in the

"order of nature" as the other; and pity and humility, if they are the

virtues of "nations in their decline," are preferable to the vices of

nations at their zenith. And, good Count Tolstoï, a universe of Saints

Francis would be an intolerable bore. The cowl does not cover all the

virtues, nor the dress-coat all the sins. 'T is a world we live in, not

a monastery; and it is amid the clash of mighty opposites that the music

of the spheres is beaten out.

"Everything in Venice is delivered up to the Evil One now," writes John

Buskin to Father Jacopo of the Armenian monastery; and such has been the

immemorial language of prophets. I sometimes suspect the Evil One

deserves more gratitude than he gets. Where would be the play without the

villain of the piece? No, the devil is not so black as he is painted, nor

the angel so white. And hence these incessant swings of the philosophical

pendulum as one truth or the other is perceived. The true ethics of the

future will give the devil his due, and deduct a discount from the angel.

The Armenian monastery which has posted up Ruskin's letter is

paradoxically proud of its association with Lord Byron, who studied

Armenian there; and visitors come there in consequence, and buy books

that the monks print. So that Satan has his uses, and Scripture can quote

the devil for its own purposes. The book I bought was a charming

collection of Armenian folk-songs, and it contains one delicious poem

whose refrain has haunted me ever since:

ON THE PARTRIDGE.

The sun boats from the mountain's top,

Pretty, pretty.

The partridge comes from her nest:

She was saluted by the flowers,

She flew and came from the mountain's top,

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

Only the highest genius--and what is higher than the folk-genius?--would

dare to be so naïve:

Ah! pretty, pretty,

Ah! dear little partridge!

VENTNOR

I did not get to Ventnor without a struggle. Everybody that I met held up

hands of horror. "What! Going to Ventnor? You will be roasted before your

time." My friends grieved, my very publishers wrung their hands, my

newsvendor took me aside and besought me to live on a high hill. Yet

through the whole of August I sat coolly writing on a low terrace. There

is a superstition about Ventnor, and none of the people who talk glibly

about its temperature have ever been there. But I think I have discovered

the origin of the great Ventnor myth. The place is a winter resort of

consumptives; and Mr. Frederick Greenwood, who was the chief charm of

Ventnor, told me that you may take coffee on your lawn in November. The

town, then, is warm in winter. The popular mind, with its hasty logic,

thinks that this is tantamount to saying it is broiling hot in summer. I

fancy there is a similar fiction about Bournemouth. But as a rule the

British climate pays no heed to guide-books. By the natives, Ventnor,

though as beautiful as a little Italian town, seems to be regarded as a

good place to go away from, for every other man keeps a coaching

establishment (I don't mean a school), and you cannot walk two yards

without being accosted by a tout, who resents your walking the next two.

Its regatta is a puerile affair, its own boating crews going off by

preference to rival regattas. But in illuminations it comes out far

better than Cowes, whose loyal inhabitants throw all the burden of

fireworks upon the royal and other yachts anchored in the bay. And

besides, Ventnor has a carnival, which I saw in the shop-windows in the

shape of comic masks.

Bonchurch, the suburb of Ventnor, which plumes itself upon a very

artificial pond, furnished in the best style with sycamores, Scotch firs,

elms and swans, is more interesting for containing the old churchyard by

the sea which received the bones of John Sterling and inspired the best

poem of Philip Bourke Marston:--

Do they hear, through the glad April weather,

The green grasses waving above them?

Do they think there are none left to love them,

They have lain for so long there together?

Do they hear the note of the cuckoo,

The cry of gulls on the wing,

The laughter of winds and waters,

The feet of the dancing Spring?

I was married in Ventnor. At least so I gather from the local newspapers,

in whose visitors' lists there figures the entry, "Mr. and Mrs.

Zangwill." I do not care to correct it, because, the lady being my

mother, it is perfectly accurate and leads to charming misconceptions.

"There, that's he," loudly whispered a young man, nudging his sweetheart,

"and there's his wife with him." "That! why, she looks old enough to be

his mother," replied the young lady. "Ah!" said her lover, with an air of

conscious virtue and a better bargain, "they're awfully mercenary, these

literary chaps." The reverse of this happened to a young friend of mine.

He married an old lady who possessed a very large fortune. During the

honeymoon his solicitous attentions to her excited the admiration of

another old lady, who passed her life in a Bath-chair. "Dear me!" she

thought: "how delightful in these degenerate days to see a young man so

attentive to his mother!" and, dying soon after, left him another large

fortune.

SOMEWHERE ELSE

Before I chanced on the great discovery which has made all my holidays

real boons, and pleasure trips quite a pleasure, I used to go through all

the horrors of preliminary indecision, which are still, alas! the lot of

the vast majority. I would travel for weeks in Bradshaw, and end by

sticking a pin at random between the leaves as if it were a Bible, vowing

to go where destiny pointed. Once the pin stuck at London, and so I had

to stick there too, and was defrauded of my holiday. But even when the

pin sent me to Putney, or Coventry, I was invariably disappointed. Like

the inquisitive and precocious infant of the poem, I was always asking

for the address of Peace, but whenever I called I was told that she was

not in, while the mocking refrain seemed to ring in my ears: "Not there,

not there, my child." And at last I asked angrily of the rocks and caves:

"Will no one tell me where Peace may be found? Wherever I go I find she

is somewhere else." Then, at last, one nymph's soft heart grew tender and

pitiful towards me, and Echo, hardly waiting till I had completed my

sentence, answered: "Somewhere Else."

A wild thrill of joy ran through me. At last I had found the solution of

the haunting puzzle. Somewhere Else. That was it. Not Scotland, nor

Switzerland, nor Japan. None of the common places of travel. But

Somewhere Else. Wherever I went, I wished I had gone Somewhere Else.

Then, why not go there at first? What was the good of repining when it

was too late? In future, I would make a bee-line for the abode of

Peace--not hesitate and shilly-shally, and then go to Bournemouth, or

Norway, or Ceylon, only to be sorry I had not gone to Somewhere Else

direct. In a flash, all the glories of the discovery crowded upon me--the

gain of time, temper, money, everything. "A thousand thanks, sweet Echo,"

I cried. "My obedience to thy advice shall prove that I am not

ungrateful." Echo, with cynical candour, shouted "Great fool," but I

cannot follow her in her end-of-the-century philosophy. And I have taken

her advice. I went Somewhere Else immediately, and since then I have gone

there every year regularly. My relatives do not care for it, and suggest

all sorts of conventional places, such as Monte Carlo and Southend, but

wherever they go, be it the most beautiful spot on earth, I remain

faithful to my discovery, and go to Somewhere Else, where Peace never

fails to greet me with the special welcome accorded to an annual visitor.

The place grows upon me with every season. Sometimes, I think I should

like to stay on and die there. No other spot in the wide universe has

half such charm for me, and even when I do die, I don't think I shall go

to where all the other happy idlers go. I shall go to Somewhere Else.

For Cromer may be the garden of sleep, but you shall find sleepier

gardens and more papaverous poppies--Somewhere Else. The mountain-pines

of Switzerland may be tall, and the skies of Italy blue, but there are

taller pines and bluer skies--Somewhere Else. The bay of San Francisco

may be beautiful, and the landscapes of Provence lovely, and the crags of

Norway sublime, but Somewhere Else there are fairer visions and scenes

more majestical--

An ampler setter, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams.

It never palls upon you--Somewhere Else. Every loved landmark grows

dearer to you year by year, and year by year apartments are

cheaper--Somewhere Else. The facilities for getting to it are enormous.

All roads lead to it, far more truly than to Rome. There can be no

accidents on the journey. How often do we read of people setting forth on

their holidays full of life and hope--yea, sometimes even on their

honeymoon--and lo! a signalman nods, or a bridge breaks, and they are

left mangled on the rails or washed into the river. And to think that

they would have escaped if they had only gone to Somewhere Else! Too late

the weeping relatives wring their hands and moan the remark. Henceforth,

among the ten million pleasure-pilgrims, who will be guided by me, there

will be no more tragedies by flood or field. Railway assurance will

become a thing of the past, and a fatal blow will be struck at modern

hebdomadal journalism. To turn to minor matters, your friends can never

utter the irritating "I told you not to go there!" if you have been to

Somewhere Else. And you need not label your luggage; that always goes to

Somewhere Else of itself. Last advantage of Somewhere Else, you may show

your face in it, though you departed last year without paying your bill.

There are no creditors in this blessed haven. Earth's load drops off your

shoulders when you go to Somewhere Else.

I give this counsel in a disinterested spirit. I have not made

speculative purchases of land, I am not booming a generous jerry-builder.

And yet I cannot help reflecting apprehensively on the consequences of my

recommendation. Already I see my sweet retreat the prey of the howling

mob; I hear the German band playing on the stone parade, and catch the

sad strains of the comic singer. Sacrilegious feet tramp the solitudes,

and sandwich papers become common objects of the sea-shore. Shilling

yachts will ply where I watched the skimming curlew, and new villas will

totter on the edge of the ocean and beguile the innocent billows to be

house-breakers. Nay, the place will become the Alsatia of humanity, the

refuge for all those men and women people would rather see Somewhere

Else, and whose travelling expenses they will perchance defray.

Imagination reels before the horror of such an agglomeration of the

unamiable. And the terrible thing about my terrestrial paradise is that

there is no escaping from it. Everything has the defects of its

qualities, and this is the reverse of the dazzling medal--the drawback

which annuls all the advantages of Somewhere Else in the event of its

becoming popular. In vain shall I then endeavour to flee from it. Though

I projected myself from the giant cannon that sent Jules Verne's hero to

the moon, I should inevitably arrive--boomerang-like--at Somewhere Else.